You’re in a car with a beautiful boy

Blaine drives with his right hand loose and comfortable on the gearstick even though the station wagon is an automatic. It’s a habit, Kurt’s noticed – a tic – like the pocket watch Blaine checks instead of his phone. Or the way he subtly glances around a wall or doorway and grips the strap of his messenger bag a little tighter before he turns the corner or enters an empty classroom.

"Oh, yeah," Blaine says, utterly unselfconscious about it when Kurt finally works up the courage to ask him why. It feels like an invasive, personal question even though it's really not. He’s still stumbling to get to know Blaine beyond homework and Warbler practice and scarves and coffee. And Kurt can’t help the flutter in his chest when Blaine doesn’t ask him how he knows anything at all about cars. They don’t yet know each other that well at all, but at least Blaine understands that much.

"It's because I learned to drive on a manual." Blaine’s hand flexes around the knob as though in memory of shifting down into third.

Kurt tries not to stare at the way Blaine's broad, tanned hand folds over the gearstick, all long fingers and broad knuckles and careless ease. He tries not to think about the way his palm molds to the knob so perfectly while his fingers rest lightly against the shaft. It’s absurdly, stupidly arousing, and even though Kurt knows why, it embarrasses him to the tips of his ears. He can't be caught staring. Blaine is not - he's not for Kurt to objectify so blatantly. And Kurt can’t screw this up, whatever this is between them.

This isn’t a date. It’s never a date. It’s just two friends spending a Friday evening after classes together - getting dinner and catching a show. That’s all. That’s all it is. It’s Blaine paying for two tickets to the local production of Rent (which wasn’t very good at all but it’s all they’ve got) and Kurt trying to pay for dinner even when Blaine takes the bill away from him.

“You can get it next time, ok?” Blaine says with a wink that makes Kurt’s gut clench and his cheeks pink up. It’s the same thing he said after lunch when Kurt thought everything was crashing down around him, right before the rushing water completely took him under. It’s the same thing he always says. But it’s not a date, so matter how much it feels like one when Blaine gestures for him to order first or opens the car door for him after.

There are lines in the sand - deep trenches etched down to the bedrock that cannot be washed invisible by the confusing swell of need and want and desire constantly surging inside Kurt. Blaine is boy and he is friend but he is not both. And that has to be enough.

But there's a shifting of parts and pieces deep down under his skin and muscle and sinew that scares Kurt. He wishes he could say he doesn't know where it comes from; that would make it so much easier to ignore. But he knows.

It's the sight of the thin, delicate looking skin at the hollow of Blaine's throat, exposed by the loosening of his tie and the two undone buttons of his rumpled uniform shirt. It's the tight stretch of his slacks across his muscular thighs as he sits in the driver's seat with his legs parted just enough to be unnervingly enticing. It's the veins in the backs of his hands and the smooth bones of his wrists and the flex of his forearms as he drives.

It's Blaine after lacrosse or fencing practice when he's freshly showered and smells of expensive shampoo and soap as he moves around his room and Kurt is watching from the chair. It's Blaine with his hair still wet, still un-styled, and drops of water sliding down his strong neck and over his collarbone before catching in the thin v-neck t-shirt he wears under his uniform. It's the smattering of dark hair across his chest that Kurt very pointedly does not look at because it's so intimately male and he can't. He can't.

Kurt is so used to boys smelling of stale sweat and Doritos dust and day-old socks that it’s a shock to his system how Blaine smells of Blaine. His throat goes dry and his stomach clenches around the want of it all and Blaine’s cologne is so subtle and yet so there that Kurt can taste it on his tongue when he’s finally back in his own room and trying to concentrate on world history and not the aching between his thighs.

But it's down in his bones, now, where he can't shake it loose or hide it behind flashy clothes and an acerbic attitude. He hates the word awakening but it is. His body feels like it's opening up, shifting over and stretching out, for something he's not ready for, something he doesn't even know if he wants. His hands tremble to touch and grip and hold and his lips want for something he's never really had. Not really. Sometimes Kurt shoves his hands between his thighs and squeezes his knees together so tightly the bones bruise against each other, as though he can force himself back into the small, contained shape he was comfortable with for so long.

and he won’t tell you that he loves you

The Jeremiah debacle is a bigger disaster than Kurt cares to ever think about again. When it’s over and Blaine looks so small, and, for the first time, so confused, Kurt only wishes he could rewind the day, the week, and keep the Warbler council from agreeing to Blaine’s plan in the first place. It was a stupid plan, and Kurt knows he only helped because it thought the outcome would be completely, utterly different.

It’s not even about Blaine revealing his interest in someone who isn’t Kurt. Well, it’s about that too. How can it not be? That part hurts, of course it does. It’s a fist to Kurt’s gut and skeletal fingers around his spine the moment Blaine says his crush is some unknown assistant manager of a GAP. A fucking GAP in Ohio. It’s his heart on the hard wooden floor and ground to pulp under Blaine’s heel as his heart’s blood seeps into the cracks when Blaine tells everyone that his love isn’t Kurt. That it never was.

But beyond that, more than that (as if that’s not enough) it’s the way the abject failure of it all smashes the pedestal Kurt had built under Blaine’s feet and sends him crashing to the polished, marble floors of Dalton’s grand hallways.

Blaine, who Kurt thought was a confident, self-assured senior, or at the very least a junior with too much charisma for his own good. But he really isn’t any of those things at all. Blaine is just a sophomore with more power over a club than he realizes and no understanding at all of what that means. Blaine has no idea of the way people are drawn to him – the way the set of his shoulders beneath the stiff fabric of his blazer and the calmness in eyes names him leader the moment he walks into a room. He doesn’t understand that Kurt – who follows no one – followed him down an empty hallway and into a new life full of hope and promise.

Blaine was supposed to be this grand mentor for him. He was supposed to know everything already; he was supposed to have all the answers ready and waiting. He was supposed take Kurt by the hand and show him everything he’d been missing while he was being shoulder-checked into lockers and thrown into dumpsters and assaulted in locker rooms. He wasn’t supposed to be fallible, imperfect, human.

But Blaine – beautiful, complicated, flawed Blaine – doesn’t know anything at all, in the end.

Kurt feels foolish and childish and pathetic. He feels tricked, and then ashamed he feels that way. It’s Blaine who had his heart broken and his ego bruised (even though, Kurt thinks, he should have kind of seen it coming). It’s Blaine who put himself out there for the censure and derision of an entire store. It’s Blaine who has to carry the burden that he got someone he liked fired from his job. It’s Blaine who should be moping, who should be dragging his heels and not shaving or changing his clothes because he’s too depressed. But it’s not.

It’s Kurt who cancels two of their study dates even though they have a big exam coming up and who doesn’t drink the cup of coffee Blaine brings him on the third study session he finally runs out of excuses to avoid. It’s Kurt who finds he doesn’t have anything to say to Blaine for a week until he can’t take the confused, wounded darkness in Blaine’s eyes another moment. He’s a horrible friend, and maybe a terrible person, but for their fourth scheduled study date, he brings Blaine a cup of coffee and a box of biscotti he baked himself in one of Dalton’s student kitchens and that’s that.

But the fallout over Rachel hurts even worse than Jeremiah precisely because it is about what the GAP Attack wasn’t.

The edges of Kurt’s world crumble when he watches the distance between Blaine and Rachel’s lips close and then disappear entirely. He knows the kiss isn’t Blaine’s direct decision – they all agreed to play this stupid game knowing what will likely happen. He knows Blaine is on the vague ledge of drunk and Rachel is all the way over it when the kiss happens, but that doesn’t change anything at all. Kurt sees how long the kiss lasts, how Blaine’s hand comes up for purchase in Rachel’s hair and his lips came back for more. Kurt is there. He is right there and the chasm that opens up beneath him isn’t deep enough for him to bury everything that surges up inside of him in that horrible moment.

It’s not about Blaine not being gay, or being bi, or any variance along the limitless spectrum of sexuality. Blaine can be whatever he is and Kurt will never judge him for that. It’s that he wanted someone else. It’s that he thought he could want someone like Rachel.

Kurt has never been anyone’s first choice. And he still isn’t. He’s never going to be anyone’s choice at all. But he never thought he’d lose out to Rachel of all people. Rachel with her grating egocentrism and her boobs and the fact she is never, ever going to let go of Finn. Kurt never thought, never imagined, that he’d have to compete with her for romantic attention. Of everything that isn’t his (and there is so much) he thought that maybe, just once, this could be his and his alone. But that too was taken from him.

And he doesn’t know how he’s going to get it back.

but he loves you

Kurt still doesn’t know why Blaine asked the Warblers – told the Warbler council – that he’d be singing the duet with Kurt. It doesn’t make any sense. There are boys who have been there longer, who have struggled through audition after audition and gotten nothing. But Kurt will take it, especially if it means getting to spend time with Blaine – more time than he already does. It means long hours in one of Dalton’s practice rooms, just the two of them and sheet music and the mingling of their voices echoing off the ceilings and walls.

It means later nights that usual sprawled across Blaine’s bed, hips and feet not quite touching, as they flip through songbooks and iPod playlists in search of the perfect duet for the show. It means Blaine’s long eyelashes and pink lips just scant inches away from his own. It’s Blaine’s cologne in Kurt’s clothes and the heat of his skin when his arm brushes against Kurt’s and it’s everything that wasn’t during their not-dates, but still isn’t quite what it could be. But almost. It’s almost what it should be.

The hope of it all, the too-close-not-close-enough of it, takes his breath away. And sometimes he needs to take a moment away from Blaine, to gather back together the pieces of him that keep sliding apart, making room for what he thinks he’s finally ready for.

Kurt is never going to be able to explain to himself why exactly the death of Pavarotti affected him the way it did. Sometimes he thinks it’s because of his mother and the way death is intricately woven into the veins of his heart. Although, if he’s perfectly honest with himself, he hardly remembers his mother at all anymore.

But bedazzling a casket for his departed feathered friend gives him the opportunity to clear his head for a few minutes. Here, in the safety of the empty Dalton caf�, he can focus on glitter and little fake jewels and not on the way Blaine’s throat had moved the other night when he’d laughed at something Kurt had said.

“What’s that?”

Blaine’s voice, seemingly from nowhere, startles him. Kurt almost drops the glue in surprise, which would have been awful if only because he’s spent far, far too long on this tiny little casket when he has other things he’s probably supposed to be doing – like practicing with Blaine, or doing his homework. Sometimes he forgets he’s at an actual school with classes and assignment and tests.

Sometimes he forgets a lot of things. And then sometimes Blaine reminds him.

“Oh, there you are,” Blaine says, as if Kurt’s ever been anywhere else.

And it’s everything Blaine should have said months ago. It’s what Kurt heard before, in the undercurrent of every gesture of Blaine’s hands and every syllable that passed his lips, but when Blaine hadn’t actually said anything. Not yet.

He’s said it now.