At two o’ clock in the morning, after they’ve finally stumbled out of the prom and made their way back to the hotel room, they find themselves naked and tucked haphazardly in between white hotel-room sheets. Blaine rests his head on Kurt’s chest while Kurt traces his fingers over Blaine’s bare stomach, and Blaine watches Kurt’s hand slowly rise and fall with Blaine’s languorous breathing.

He really tries not to cry.

“You have fun tonight?” comes Kurt’s voice, quiet and silky, from underneath him.

“’Course I did. Was with you.” he murmurs into Kurt’s chest. God, he can feel his throat tightening up, he can’t say too much more without bursting, because that was just Kurt’s senior prom. And he’s going to be graduating in two weeks. And…then what?

“You’re just…quiet. I wanna hear your voice.” Kurt rubs his stomach affectionately. And Blaine lets a tear drop, and it falls on Kurt’s bare skin, and Kurt immediately shakes Blaine to get him to sit up.

“Why are you crying?”

“It’s just…it’s everything. I’m happy about tonight—I’m happy that you had some well-deserved fun at your prom this year, I’m happy I got to dance with you, really dance with you, I’m happy I got to…be with you, but…I’m sad. ‘Cause that was it, you know? That was your senior prom. And I just…I just wish we had more time.” Blaine presses the heel of his hand to his eye to stop the tears, but Kurt takes it in his.

And then Kurt’s looking at him in that way he does—like he has a thousand different things to say to make Blaine’s tears dry, to make his hands stop shaking, to make him fall even more desperately in love—and he’s just deciding which one to use. It’s dark in the room but for the golden glow of the bedside lamp—it reminds Blaine of how his skin looks when he and Kurt sit under the streetlamps by Kurt’s house late at night to talk and kiss and stay in each other’s arms.

“We have the rest of our lives.”

Blaine thinks of it every day—thinks of a black tuxedo on himself and an only-Kurt-knows-what on his husband and a wedding cake and bands on their ring fingers. But it makes his heart go so sweetly heavy when Kurt says it. He ducks his head and smiles, but there are still tears clinging to his eyelashes.

“Come here.” Kurt says, pulling Blaine onto his lap.

“You’re it, Blaine. You know that. You’re just…it. And people are going to call us silly because we’re young and nobody’s going to take us seriously when we say this, but I plan on being on another hotel room bed like this one, albeit one a thousand times more elegant, with you on our wedding night. One day.”

Blaine cracks then, laughing and tearing up a little more, and traces Kurt’s jawline with his thumb. He’s never seen a person so beautiful—the pale, supple porcelain of his skin and the gold glints in his eyes and the bitten-pink of his lips when they’re quirked up and kissed—and this boy is with Blaine. He wants to be with Blaine, he loves Blaine…he’s proud of Blaine.

Blaine slides his palms to cup Kurt’s face and kisses him, open-mouthed and marvelous—kisses him so it feels like a thank you, like an I love you. He trails down Kurt’s neck and leaves his lips breathing there for a few seconds, inhaling the faded scent of his cologne and hair product. And when he can’t fight it anymore, he goes back to his lips, capturing them because he’s the only one who’ll ever truly get to know what they taste like (spearmint gum at around 12:45 pm after lunch, his fancy vanilla-mint toothpaste every morning after 6:15 and every night after 9:30, chocolate-chip cookies on Friday afternoons when Blaine begs for him to make them).

Skimming his hands up Blaine’s bare back to wrap his arms around Blaine’s neck, Kurt whispers words against his mouth and they taste electric, like their own glimmering, confidential promise.

“The rest of our lives.”