“Faster, Mr. Smythe! Faster!” Beth laughed, splitting the air with a delighted screech. “I want to go faster!”

“No, Miss,” the patient groundskeeper chuckled, reigning in the auburn pony his young charge was perched on. “Any faster, and the two of you might fly away. Then what would I tell your fathers?”

Kurt thought that Beth would be wary of horses, considering what had happened to them on their last one. But Beth – strong, beautiful, headstrong Beth – was fearless, just like her father, Cooper. Just like her uncle and adopted father, Blaine. And when she found out that Kurt had arranged to have Sebastian teach her, Beth could not be more eager to begin.

Beth did not want to ride side saddle the way most young ladies in the country did. If she had her way, she would not ride with a saddle at all. She told her papa that she wanted to ride bareback, arms spread wide, head thrown back to feel the wind scatter her curls. Upon hearing that, Kurt joked with Blaine in private about how Beth Fabray Anderson weighed little more than a sparrow, and any cross breeze that hit her while she rode would carry her off to the adjoining county, and the next one, and the next.

“They would not blame you, Mr. Smythe,” Beth swore, begging Sebastian, with hands clasped beneath her chin, to change his mind. “They are both awfully fond of you.”

“That may be, milady,” Sebastian said, pinching the petite girl's sharp chin, “but they love you. More than the sun, the moon, and the stars. If I allowed you to come to any harm, the Earl and the Count would both have my head mounted on a pike.”

“Ewww!” Beth grimaced.

“Exactly,” Sebastian said. “So for my sake, I must insist that we go no faster than a walk while we train Misty here to become accustomed to your weight.”

“Oh, okay,” Beth relented, grumbling under her breath. “We will go on a dumb, boring old walk, and you may keep your head.”

“That is most generous of you, milady,” Sebastian chuckled. “And my fiancé thanks you as well.”

“I am still rather surprised that you allowed Sebastian to give her riding lessons,” Blaine said, sitting beside his husband, occupying an empty companion chair on the lawn. Blaine had heard the joyful commotion from his office, and looked out his window to locate its source. He saw his husband sitting alone on the lawn, watching their daughter take her first ever seat atop her brand new pony. Kurt had a misty, forlorn expression on his face, and Blaine knew his presence was long overdue.

“I am afraid that Beth has been suffering from a terrible case of cabin fever,” Kurt explained, watching his daughter learn to ride her pony without him. “She has been running wild all over the property, and none of the staff but Sebastian can keep up with her.” A breeze blew through, compelling Kurt to wrap himself tighter in his coat, but with his fingers not able yet to competently grab hold, he could not complete the task.

“Allow me,” Blaine said, standing from his chair to pull the lapels of his husband's coat better closed.

“Thank you, my love,” Kurt said, eyes drifting from Blaine's hands back to the pony and its little rider. “Sebastian has such a good heart. He cannot seem to say no to her.”

“Can anyone?” Blaine teased.

“No,” Kurt agreed. “But I do not mean to make him a babysitter, so I felt this was a good compromise.” Kurt sighed. “But I wish one of us could teach her to ride.”

“I think that I am less suited to the task than you, my love,” Blaine said, bringing Kurt's hand to his lips.

“Not at all,” Kurt said, smiling at his husband's kisses along his knuckles, the brush of soft and warm against his skin. “Why should you be any less capable of teaching our daughter to ride?”

Blaine did not answer, but gave his husband a pointed look, one that was not received in the manner Blaine had intended, for Kurt was stubborn on the subject and would not be contradicted.

“You were a fabulous horseman as a child,” Kurt insisted, “and I cannot believe that is something that has ever left you.”

“You realize,” Blaine began, as a way to change the subject, “you have never told me what you thought of me when we were younger.”

“Have I not?” Kurt asked, a haze of nostalgia and melancholy passing over his eyes.

“No, you have not,” Blaine said.

“Well, we have known one another forever,” Kurt remarked. “You must know by now how I felt about you?”

Blaine frowned at his husband's evasiveness.

“Does it bother you to talk about, my love?” Blaine asked sadly, never dreaming that such a conversation would be something his husband would not be willing to have with him.

Kurt turned to his husband, handsome in his storm grey coat, carefully tended curls pulling free in the breeze, eyes shining at him the way they did in their youth, when nothing even close to the tragedies and responsibilities they have faced in recent years was even a possibility for them. He saw his husband's sadness, and he could not bear it.

“I remember you,” Kurt said, “on your horse Talon. When you used to ride into town on his back, without a saddle. You were fearless, ridiculous, so incredibly handsome.” Kurt laughed. “You and your stallion had a bond. You were like kindred spirits.” Kurt leaned in. “I was so jealous.” Blaine smiled. “I almost believed you two could fly.” Kurt felt his husband's hands tighten around his. Kurt loved the warmth it brought to his body, how that one hand hold could make his heart leap. “You were so dashing on your steed, my love. Like a reckless dream. Sometimes, I could not believe you truly existed.”

“Ah, but my days of being dashing are over,” Blaine said, a blush rising to his cheeks, an affliction easily blamed on the nip in the air.

“Never, my love,” Kurt said. “As it is, I dare say you are an even more fearsome sight to behold, horse or no.”

“Am I?” Blaine laughed, turning suddenly at the sound of a high-pitched squeal, watching Sebastian lead Beth and her pony over a tiny jump, no more than a step.

“Why, yes,” Kurt said, pulling his hand from his husband's grasp to applaud their daughter's feat. “Brava!” he called to the giggling girl, waving at her when she waved first, before slipping his hand back into his husband's grasp. “If you do not already know that you strike fear into the hearts of men,” Kurt continued, “then you are positively insane, and there is nothing I can do to help you.”

“That is very kind of you to say…I think,” Blaine said, and Kurt chuckled, but his laughter fled too swiftly away. “But that is not all, I feel,” Blaine pressed. “I think there is more that you are not telling me.”

“I…” Kurt turned toward the trees stretching out along the meadow, the buds of sturdy blossoms blooming despite the cold. It was easier to gaze at their beauty than at the beauty of his husband's eyes, which Kurt knew would darken at his next revelation. “I always knew you would be my first,” Kurt said. “But I thought…I wish I could have been that for you, too.”

Kurt looked from the trees, to the sky, to a flock of ducks soaring overhead – anywhere but the face looking on his, with love, with pain, with guilt.

“Oh,” Blaine said, swallowing down the start of three arguments in his defense, each of which sounded like a betrayal. “I see.”

“You told me you loved me, my lord,” Kurt said. “Even as a child, you loved me.”

“Tis true,” Blaine admitted. “I did.”

“Then how? How could you be with so many, and still claim love for me?”

“Because sex is not love, my darling,” Blaine said, curling his hands over Kurt's even when his husband's fingers became rigid in his grasp. “The boy that I was and the man that I became spent every day completely and utterly in love with you. Every moment since my eyes first beheld you.”

Kurt nodded, bitter resolve steeped within the thin lines of his lips.

“Forgive me, my love, if I find that difficult to believe,” Kurt replied, his gaze darting left and right, unable to come to rest. “At least, on a few occasions.”

“No,” Blaine said with vehemence. “No, that is not in the least bit true, my love. Every minute of every day, I swear it. It mattered not where I was or…or who I was with. I was always with you in my heart.” Blaine breathed in deep as another breeze passed by, hoping he might find some strength in the cold. “I did those things, Kurt, because I thought I would never have you. I thought that you and I would never be together, and it was my way of” – Blaine dropped his head to his husband's hand, bending to him, asking for forgiveness – “being rid of you.”

Blaine heard his husband gasp, felt his hand grow heavy in his grip, and suddenly the air around him became too thick to breathe.

“But,” Blaine continued, “all of that is far behind me. And believe me when I tell you, my love, that I would cut out the tongue of any man or woman who came to this house, into our lives, and lay some sort of claim to my past. I swear that I never gave anyone any promise, no reason to hope, even when I thought my own hope was gone.”

Kurt sighed. He had no reason not to believe his husband. He tried not to be a jealous man. But in his time of convalescence, when he thought, for a short time, that he might not pull through, his mind concocted foolish things, inconceivable things. Nightmares plagued him where there were only silly doubts before. It was not fair to Blaine for Kurt to feel this way, and had he all his strength and wits about him, he would not have even entertained the thoughts that popped unwarranted into his brain.

“And you never loved anyone else, my lord?” Kurt asked.

Kurt expected a pause, a moment for Blaine to compose himself, posed with such a bold inquiry, but his husband did Kurt one better. He answered without need for contemplation.

“No, my dear husband,” Blaine answered, a wistful smile adding to his expression of regret. “I am afraid that there you have me beat. For you may have had your baker, but for me, there was no one else.”

Kurt felt a wash of shame heat his cheeks. Adam. How had he forgotten? It was simple, really. Because Adam Crawford did not matter to Kurt, had never mattered as much as Blaine. Kurt saw that clearly. He knew it without consideration, the same as he knew no other who had ever lain in his husband's bachelor bed held any significance in Blaine's heart.

“So I suppose we have both cut one another to the quick just as deeply,” Kurt said.

“I believe we have,” Blaine replied. “But never again, my love.” Blaine moved his chair closer, sitting beside his husband in a way that allowed him to rest his head lightly against Kurt's shoulder. “Never again.”