Knock-knock-knock.

“Hey, hun?” Kurt peeks his head through the bathroom door, interrupting his husband's shower and, unfortunately, his morning serenade.

“Hey, baby,” Blaine gurgles, washing his face, then spits into the tub, which makes Kurt stare incredulously at the shower curtain. “What's up?”

“Are you still playing at that gallery opening this afternoon?” Kurt asks, carefully avoiding the steam since he just finished his morning skin care regimen. After applying $30 worth of pore minimizing serum, he doesn't need them to spring back open again.

“Uh…today's Wednesday, right?”

“Yup.”

“Then, yes.” Blaine blows water out his nose. Kurt rolls his eyes, but he can't help smiling. His husband's such a boy sometimes. “Why do you ask?”

“Because my three o'clock appointment's about fifteen minutes from there,” Kurt says. “We can ride the subway home together. Maybe catch a late lunch/early dinner.”

“Yeah,” Blaine says. “That sounds great.”

“So, I'll just meet you at the gallery, okay?” Kurt asks, shrinking away from the humid air hovering around the door.

“Well, wait. I'll probably be done before you are. Why don't you leave me the address where you're going to be? I'll meet you.”

“Alright,” Kurt agrees, taking a step back. “I'll write it down in your planner. It's the auburn-ish one, right? With the word journal on the front?”

Blaine usually has two – his planner, which Kurt thought was kind of reddish, and his music journal, filled with staff paper, that Kurt knows has a black leather cover. But a third one popped up overnight, and now Kurt gets confused which reddish book is which.

“Right,” Blaine says with his head completely under the spray. Not until he hears the door click closed does he realize his mistake. “Wait, no!” He yells after his husband, turning off the water. “No, no, don't open that one. Kurt…”

Kurt doesn't invade Blaine's privacy on purpose. Blaine, throwing on a towel and slipping on the tile floor, doesn't get to him in time. Kurt opens the planner and flips past old calendars and a few odd notes, looking for a clear space to write the address, so focused on that one task that he doesn't notice what he's looking at right away. But Blaine's yelling causes him to stop and momentarily pay a bit more attention.

Tuesday

8:00 a.m. DMV

9:00 a.m. Call gas and electric

10:00 a.m. Meeting with Dr. Spiegleman

Goals:

Visualize the future

Make steps to get there.

Write three things to aim for –

1 - Sing at Carnegie Hall.

2 - Audition for a show I think I have no chance of getting into.

3 - Lay a rose on the birthplace of Noël Coward.

Kurt's eyebrow kinks up.  Lay a rose on the birthplace of Noël Coward? That's an entry from Kurt's old bucket list. Why would Blaine write that in his planner?

“Blaine?” Kurt holds out the planner to Blaine, and Blaine takes it. “What…what is this?”

Blaine holds the book in his hands, open to the spot Kurt had read, and goes over the schedule, his notes, smiling a sad smile at the memories that rush back when he looks at his own handwriting, remembering that day.

“When you broke our engagement,” he says, flipping through the pages, “and I was seeing my therapist, I told him that it was hard for me to focus…without you.” Blaine runs his fingers lightly down the page. “You were my anchor. That first time, after…” Blaine bounces his eyes up, trying not to let his voice crack. “After I cheated, and you broke up with me, even when we weren't together, wanting you and needing you made it easier to keep my life in order. You were a goal that I was working toward, winning you back and marrying you. But the next time, without the possibility of you in my future, everything else sort of fell apart.” Blaine turns another page, scans another set of notes, which look more like a list to Kurt than the ones before, each item numbered. “So he gave me this journal, told me to write my schedule in it, make it as specific as I needed it to be – when I needed to wake up, when I needed to eat, what I wanted to eat, when I needed to take a shower, and so on. Then, when I had that set, he told me to put my goals down, things that I wanted to do in the future.” Blaine shrugs, handing the book back to Kurt. “It kind of became my bucket list. Like the one you had on your phone.”

Kurt refuses to look at the book in his hands until Blaine nods, then he starts to read.

“Visit Morocco, that's a good one. Dive the Great Barrier Reef, another good one. Send a message in a bottle, ooo, that's sweet.”

Blaine smiles when Kurt smiles, watching his husband closely as he thumbs through entries that were so personal, Blaine never showed them to anyone, not even to Dave while they were dating. Some of them, he didn't even re-read himself. They broke his heart.

“Backpack Europe, make a baumkuchen, swim in an infinity pool, visit the Harry Potter locations, Blaine…this is amazing.” Kurt grabs the edge of the pages and flips through them in bulk, looking for ones Blaine's already done. A lot of them are complicated, but some of them look pretty simple – learn to make sushi, fly a homemade kite, print Christmas cards on homemade paper, go rollerblading at the new skate park – but there's not a single checkmark on any of the pages, not one strikethrough. “None of these are marked off.” Kurt looks up from the book. “There's so many of these you could have done. Why didn't you do any of these, Blaine?”

“Because I realized that, as much as I wanted to do all those things, and I could have done them, by myself or with…with Dave, most of them wouldn't mean anything unless I got the chance to do them with you. I mean, I was so sure that you and I would never get back together and yet, hoping that we would…I just couldn't.” Blaine takes the journal back and holds it against his damp chest. “I don't know,” he says with lowered eyes. “I should have just done them. I'm sure that sounds needy and unhealthy.”

“No, Blaine. You were working through things,” Kurt says with a smile, chancing having to change into a brand new suit and being fifteen minutes late by taking his freshly showered husband into his embrace. “It sounds like you. It sounds like us.”