“Kurt, can’t you just take my French final for me?”

Kurt and Blaine lay sprawled out on top of Kurt’s bed, heaps of papers, notebooks, and textbooks arranged in front of them. Kurt’s too absorbed in his history notes that if it weren’t for Blaine sliding his foot up where their ankles connected on top of the comforter and rubbing the bare skin underneath the hem of Kurt’s jeans, he may not have heard him at all. Kurt wriggles his foot away and turns to Blaine, who meets him with puppy dog eyes and pouting lips.

“Maybe you would be better at French if you actually studied instead of trying to play footsy with me,” Kurt teases, nudging his shoulder against Blaine’s. Kurt turns back to concentrating on the papers in front of him and Blaine sighs. He knows it’s Kurt’s senior finals and that they should both study, but being tasked with remembering old French vocab while being inches away from his beautiful boyfriend didn’t prove to be the best motivator. He scans the page in front of him again, not remembering what he had been trying to read the past five minutes.

“Can I look at your notes from last year? Yours are probably way better than mine.” Kurt rolls his eyes and smiles at Blaine’s adorable lack of focus.

“Sure – it’s a black notebook that should be on top of my desk,” he points without looking away from his notes. Blaine leans over and plants a quick peck on Kurt’s cheek. “Merci!”

Blaine hops up from Kurt’s bed and examines the notebooks piled vertically on Kurt’s desk from the past several years of high school. He finds a smaller black notebook and opens it to see “French – Junior Year” written on the inside cover. He flips through several pages of Kurt’s perfectly printed notes on French pronouns and vocabulary and feels thankful for once that Kurt’s a year older than him.

Blaine tries to find the notes that correspond to the material on his final, rifling through the pages until he reaches second semester where he figures he’ll find the more pertinent information. He’s at February when he turns a page over to find a large, red heart in place of Kurt’s usual notes. A heart that says “Blaine + Kurt” with an arrow drawn through it. Blaine smiles and rubs his thumb along the edges of the heart, feeling the deep indentations of pen into the paper. “Kurt, what’s this?”

“What’s what?” Kurt asks, spinning his head around to see Blaine beaming and holding open his notebook to the heart Kurt had drawn last Valentine’s Day, prior to the Great Gap Attack Disaster and Kurt’s confession at the Lima Bean. His cheeks flush hot and his face falls into the open crevice of his textbook. “Oh my God, that is so embarrassing.”

Blaine sets the notebook down on Kurt’s desk with the heart still facing up, smiling despite Kurt’s reaction and warmed that Kurt loves him enough to doodle their names together in his notebooks. He crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed next to him and rubs his hand on Kurt’s back softly.

“Oh come on, I don’t think it’s embarrassing. It’s adorable.” When Kurt doesn’t immediately resurface from his textbook, Blaine squeezes both of his side and Kurt jolts upwards, playfully hitting Blaine’s shoulder as he laughs.

“It’s not what you think,” Kurt mutters, smoothing down the crumpled sides of his sweater.

“Kurt, I’m not going to judge you if you write our names together – unless there’s some other Blaine I don’t know about,” Blaine teases.

“But I didn’t draw it recently or anything…I drew it over a year ago. Before we were together.” Kurt remembers his anticipation before last Valentine’s Day, drawing the heart while waiting for Blaine before Warbler practice, and his disappointment after discovering Blaine was “in love” with somebody else. He had long forgiven him, of course, and basically all but forgotten about the entire thing, but the thought of Blaine discovering just how much he had fawned over him before Blaine had admitted that his feelings were mutual still made him reel from humiliation.

Blaine’s mouth opens to respond, but doesn’t speak. Instead, he walks back over to the desk and picks up the notebook again, looking it over carefully. He felt guilty, remembering how Kurt witnessed Blaine’s laughable failures in his own love life without even thinking about how Kurt felt. But the affection clearly inked onto the page only made Blaine love him more. “Can I keep it?”

Kurt straightens his back and cocks his head to the side, furrowing his eyes. “Why?”

“Because as usual,” Blaine begins, carefully tearing out the page from the notebook, “you’ve shown me how I was an idiot for not realizing how much you meant to me sooner.”

Kurt laughs and rolls his eyes, the weight in his stomach lifting as he watches Blaine cross the room and sit next to him, sliding his hand into his own.

“You came around eventually,” Kurt says, looking into Blaine’s gleaming honey eyes with his own and realizing once again that the daydreams of his younger self weren’t so unbelievable after all.