Tangerine sunlight sizzles the Ohio summer, makes it almost crackle with heat as it bathes towns in yellows and oranges. It turns everything sticky, sweaty, summery. Kurt doesn’t particularly love sticky, sweaty, summery. He certainly loves Blaine like that, when his hair grows longer and curlier, when he has that sweaty sheen on that’s kind of gross and kind of really hot, when the sun brings his freckles out of hiding. Summer is very good to Blaine, but summer has a not-so-secret mission to turn Kurt the color of the red Cheerio uniform that was still hung neatly in the back of his closet. So Kurt generally keeps inside, and Blaine has come to enjoy the hours of Kurt-cuddles that yield from Kurt’s mild phobia of the sun.

So, like a few days prior, Kurt’s nestling his head into Blaine’s chest- breathing in the worn gray t-shirt that’s beginning to smell more and more like Kurt’s house (but still so inherently Blaine)- and letting his Edith Piaf playlist trickle lazily out of the speaker system.

“I like this one.” Blaine murmurs into Kurt’s hair with the beginning notes of “La vie en rose”.

“Wouldn’t peg you as the type.” Kurt says softly, running his fingers along Blaine’s stomach muscles.

“I mean, I don’t know what a word of it means, but my grandma always played it…wait, you’re good at French. What the hell is the girl singing- albeit very beautifully- about?”

“Des yeux qui font baisser les miens. ” Kurt sings along quietly. “That’s…‘eyes that gaze into mine’.” Blaine scoots down, lies sideways so he’s directly facing Kurt, and captures Kurt’s eyes with his own.

“Kinda like that…” Kurt almost-whispers, lifting a hand to cup Blaine’s jaw, kissing him lazy and relaxed. The sharp scrape of Blaine’s teeth slowly drags across Kurt’s bottom lip. Kurt kisses feathery-light along Blaine’s jaw, trails his lips across the slightly sunburned planes of Blaine’s cheeks. When Kurt pulls away, a good three lines of the song has passed.

“Keep translating.” Blaine whispers, quietly laughing while ghosting kisses on Kurt’s forehead.

“Quand il me prend dans ses bras,” Kurt sings, coyly raising his eyebrows in the way he only did when singing to Blaine. “And that would be…’when he takes me in his arms’…” Kurt says, giving a bashful smile as Blaine wraps his arms around Kurt, pulling him tighter, closer, and pressing a kiss to the top of his head. Edith Piaf sings, “Il me parle tout bas” and Kurt breathes out, “He speaks to me softly.”

“I’m pretty good at this, no?” Blaine bends down to Kurt’s ear and whispers, sending shivers.

Il me dit des mots d’amour.

“He tells me…words of love.”

“Hate to be so obvious with this one, but…I love you.” Blaine has on that dumbfounded, love-struck expression that he wore the first time he said “I love you” and meant it. “And not just because the song told me to.”

“Good. Because it just so happens I love you too, and the song didn’t tell me to do anything.”

C’est lui pour moi, moi pour lui dans la vie.

“What’s that one?” Blaine asks, his hand rubbing at the exposed skin of Kurt’s hipbone, caused by the fortunate riding-up of Kurt’s button-down shirt.

“It’s he for me and I for him, throughout life.”Kurt says, looking up at Blaine (hopefully not-too-expectantly).

“I’d say that’s accurate.” says Blaine, moving his lips to Kurt’s achingly slowly- kissing him with everything in him as the song trills to a close and the tangerine sky melts into blueberry.