In the last few dragging days of August, a bead of sweat runs in a slippery streak down the column of Blaine’s throat and Kurt drags his thumb slowly down the same path, then rests it at Blaine’s sternum. The sun is stifling and the air conditioning in Kurt’s bedroom is spotty and tomorrow is the day Kurt leaves.

The day Kurt leaves.

It’s something that’s truly happening now, not a far-off idea he can push to the back of his mind by chanting litanies to himself like prayers—“it’s not happening for a long, long time. A long, long time”. But now Kurt’s leaving tomorrow, and Blaine’s heart has dropped to the bottom of his stomach. Everything he has avoided for months and months has dropped to the bottom of his stomach, and Blaine feels sick. And now they’re sitting cross-legged together on Kurt’s bedroom floor, Blaine with wet eyes and anxious teeth marks dug into his lip.

“Please don’t cry. You’re going to make me cry.” Kurt says, burying his face into Blaine’s hands, open on his lap.

“I can’t not cry, Kurt.” Blaine says quietly through a trembling lip. He bends to press a kiss to the top of Kurt’s head and breathes in the scent of his hair product. It smells like the pillows on Kurt’s bed and the worn-out t-shirts that Kurt gives Blaine to wear sometimes. Like his one constant, like his first love. It smells like home.

Blaine can feel Kurt’s body shiver with suppressed sobs and it makes Blaine’s chest shudder too. He squeezes his eyes closed—don’t cry, don’t cry—but the effort is futile and the tears start to fall on Kurt’s hair. Kurt’s pressing little kisses to Blaine’s bare knee and Blaine’s carding weak fingers through Kurt’s hair. Then they’re just sitting there in a pile of crying boy.

“I want to show you something.” Kurt says after a long, shaking breath.

“Okay.” It sounds weak even to Blaine’s own ears.

Kurt lifts his head out of Blaine’s lap and wipes his eyes with the heel of his hand. He looks Blaine straight in the eye and drags his thumb across Blaine’s bottom lip before rummaging under his bed to pull out a shoebox.

“What’s that?” Blaine says, voice still quiet and fragile.

“Essentially, it’s me being a twelve year old girl. It’s just…everything that reminds me of you, basically. Everything having to do with you that I want to keep. I just…thought it would be good to look at.”

There’s no way in hell that this is going to help things, Blaine thinks. On the top of the heaping pile of things in the box is a photo strip of him and Kurt in the county fair’s photo booth, and it makes his chest tighten up and more tears swell up in his eyes. Blaine picks it up, runs his fingers along the edges.

“We were so young.” Blaine says.

“It was last year, Blaine.” Kurt replies with a laugh.

“We had just started dating here, though. I don’t know, we… we look young, don’t we?” Blaine says, handing the photo to Kurt.

“I think we forget how long we’ve actually been together.” Kurt says softly.

“Been a long time.” Blaine says, interlocking their fingers.

Kurt nods then, smiles with still-wet eyes—and Blaine sees Kurt’s face on that first day in November, when his cheekbones weren’t as defined and his hair wasn’t as high and his lips had never been kissed. Never been kissed by Blaine, and wasn’t that a tragedy? Blaine wonders where the time went, because it could have been yesterday that he was sitting across from Kurt in stiff navy polyester and it could have been yesterday that he pulled out a journal he had never before used, simply to write, “I met a boy today and I don’t know what he means to me yet, but I think he’s going to mean something.” and it could have been yesterday that they exchanged numbers and Blaine sent frequent and ridiculous motivational texts.

“Look at this.” Kurt says, smiling a little wider as he pulls out a movie ticket stub.

“First date.” says Blaine, reading the ticket. “I was so damn nervous that night.”

“God, me too. I think I changed my outfit nine times.”

“I didn’t know whether to kiss you hello.”

“I didn’t know whether to kiss you at all.”

“Good thing you did, then.”

“I did. Even after you spilled that marinara sauce all over the front of your shirt during dinner.”

“I told you I was nervous.”

When it came to dating, neither of them had known what they were doing, of course, didn’t quite know how to distinguish what it was they were doing before from what they were doing now. Blaine had said, “Well, I think it’s all the same, except we can kiss each other now.” And Kurt had kissed the silly little grin right off of his face.

Soon afterwards, Blaine finds a purple-stained wine bottle cork.

“Is this the—”

“—of course it is, dear.” Kurt drawls.

At the beginning of summer, Blaine had cooked them dinner in his backyard when his parents were away. The fireflies were out and lit-up and Blaine had swiped a bottle of merlot from his parents’ liquor cabinet. One glass of wine turned into two, because it made them feel loose and silly and smiling, and two turned into three, and then they had drank the entire bottle of wine themselves. They had left the picnic table in favor of sitting in the damp grass. In the grass, they could flail their arms and roll around and kiss and kiss and kiss. Blaine had perched himself in Kurt’s lap and left his mouth breathing hot on his neck. When they kissed, it tasted drunken and dangerous and grown-up. They had swiped the picnic blanket from the table and curled up underneath it and fell asleep wrapped around each other. Blaine awoke first at 2:30 in the morning, and his shifting to ease his cramped back woke Kurt too. They had looked at each other and laughed until their guts ached before moving to Blaine’s bed and sleeping until noon.

“That was a really good night.” Blaine says, crawling forward to sit in Kurt’s lap like he had that night. Kurt laughs.

“The best.” Kurt replies, resting his chin on Blaine’s shoulder and bending to kiss his jaw. Blaine turns his head and meets his lips. The angle is off but those are sometimes the best kinds of kisses. Blaine sinks into it, raising his hand to cup Kurt’s cheek. He’s really trying not to think about the amount of time he’ll have to wait to kiss Kurt again after tomorrow.

“What’s that?” Blaine asks when they pull apart, plucking from the box a napkin scrawled on in hastily-written black ink. It’s dated May of last year.

Blaine just told me he loved me. I was a little stunned and I almost spit my coffee out but I said it back, because of course I do. I’m writing this on a napkin while he’s getting another biscotti because it happened ten minutes ago and I’m still sort of reeling. But I love him I love him I love him.

This one makes Blaine start to cry again. He remembers that day so well, how neither of them could stop smiling the whole day and once Kurt initiated the next “I love you”, how neither of them could stop saying it. He remembers saying it into Kurt’s neck, deliberately and punctuated with presses of lips so that maybe it could tattoo itself there in hot whispers. He remembers Kurt murmuring it against his mouth with his arms around Blaine’s neck, when they were both held so tightly by the other and “I love you” was the only thing they could say.

“I still do.”

“Love me?” Blaine asks. Kurt nods. “I know.”

“I know you know. But I love you the same as I did then. Probably more, actually. I’ve never gone a day loving you less.” Kurt says, holding Blaine’s hand.

“Me neither. Love you so much it scares me sometimes. Like now. I don’t…I don’t know how I’m going to handle you being gone. Because nearly every day for almost two years, you’ve been with me in some way. And now you’re going to be gone and I’m so scared, Kurt.”

“Me too.” And Kurt’s voice sounds hoarse and broken.

There’s silence as the both file through the shoebox together, filtering through notes and gifts and photos. They grab each other’s hands whenever their fingers brush.

“You kept this?” Blaine says when he finds a note he wrote to Kurt one night last November, when his hair was messy and his chest and his cheeks were flushed red and his palms were clammy.

“Blaine, I kept an old wine bottle cork. Of course I kept that.”

Dear Kurt,
You’re asleep right now. Asleep next to me. In my bed. You’re so beautiful. God, you’re so beautiful. You know what we just did, so I’m not going to go through the dirty details in my romantic note, but I’m so very happy we did them. I’m so happy you were my first. You’re my first everything, you know? And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I know we’re kids. I know we’re young. And I hate that some people don’t believe me when I tell them I’ve found the love of my life at the age of seventeen. But I have. I love you more than I’ll probably ever be able to let you know, so I’ll just keep saying it as often as I can. I love you, Kurt Hummel. I love you, I love you, I love you. Thank you for everything.

B

Kurt’s kissing him then, kissing him madly like he did that night, kissing him while the moon pours in molten silver from his bedroom window and kissing him like it was the first one and kissing him until they both collapse onto the bedroom floor. Blaine wraps his legs around Kurt, pulling him closer, even closer. And it’s like everything comes crashing forward at the same time—Blaine singing top 40 to a boy he just met, pushing him a latte from across a table, the starry eyes and the schoolboy smiles, the first kiss with his shaking hand on Kurt’s pale cheek and their nervous, giddy laughter, the sweaty summer and the crisp fall and the first time. And Blaine wonders what it was that he did to deserve this boy leaving him.

At the bottom of the box is Marion Cotillard’s 2010 Vogue cover, and once they start laughing, they can’t really stop. They bring the magazine up to Kurt’s bed and read it on top of the blankets, curled up together tight. When they’re pressed against each other and wrapped in each other’s arms, it stills their trembling chests but thickens the lumps in their throats. Kurt’s wearing his gum-wrapper ring on his right hand, and Blaine fiddles with it when Kurt’s arms are around him, turning it around and around on his long, elegant finger. Blaine pulls it off then, switching it onto the ring finger on his left hand. Kurt looks at him, watery beautiful eyes and a bitten lip, nods, and Blaine knows it means “someday”.