Jacobellis v. Ohio Part 6/6: Crown of Myrtle
Title: Jacobellis v. Ohio Part 6/6: Crown of Myrtle
Rating: R
Warnings: None for this one my friends.
Spoilers: None
Summary: He’d very deliberately not planned this out, because Kurt’s plans almost always go to hell.
Author’s Note: This is it folks, this is all there is.
Ah! what else had I to do but love you?
God's own mother was less dear to me,
And less dear the Cytheraean rising like an
argent lily from the sea.
I have made my choice, have lived my
poems, and, though youth is gone in wasted days,
I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better
than the poet's crown of bays.
from “Flower of Love” -- Oscar Wilde
“He said what?”
Mercedes is lounging on her bed holding a pint of Cherry Garcia, Kurt is on the floor against the wall with his own carton of Chunky Monkey. He’d called her almost the second he got home and begged an emergency sleepover.
“He said he loves me,” Kurt shakes his head because the thought is kind of ridiculous, “and then he apologized like eight times. Mercedes, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
She laughs and flashes that bright grin he loves so much. “What do you mean you don’t know what to do?” she takes another bite of ice cream and points her spoon at him, “Boy, you hit that.”
“I can’t do that Mercedes,” Kurt can’t pretend that he hasn’t considered it, he has, but he knows it would be a terrible idea, “he’s my best friend -- present company excluded -- I can’t ruin that, and I can’t hurt him by starting something that means nothing to me when I know it would mean something to him.”
Mercedes gives him a look he’s only ever seen her direct at Rachel. “You’re kidding right?”
Kurt tries not to be angry, but he’s a little surprised by how callous she’s being. If nothing else he thought she’d see the parallels to her own misguided crush on him, using Blaine now to get some experience would be just as bad as using her as a beard two years ago would have been.
“Of course I’m not kidding Mercedes,” he tries for that gentle chiding tone she uses on him, but it doesn’t suit his voice nearly as well, “I can’t use him just to put a notch on my bedpost or whatever, I’m not Puck.”
“Oh my god,” Mercedes sits up and sets her ice cream aside, her expression is serious, “you really don’t know.”
“Don’t know what Mercedes?”
She comes and sits in front of him, grabbing the ice cream out of his hands and setting it on the desk.
“I want you to tell me about Blaine,” she says softly, taking his hands in hers, “pretend I don’t know him, or I don’t like him or something.”
Kurt wonders what the hell this is supposed to accomplish, but Mercedes has that ‘bitch please’ look that you just don’t mess with, so he closes his eyes and thinks about Blaine.
“Well, he’s a year older than me, he goes to Dalton, sings with the Warblers.”
“Alright,” Mercedes cuts in, “but tell me things I wouldn’t already know if I’d spent any time stalking him on Facebook. Who is he really?”
Kurt scowls because that question doesn’t mean anything, but Mercedes gives his hands a sharp squeeze so he sighs and tries again.
“He’s smart,” Kurt says finally, “like really smart, except not with science. He can memorize the formulas, but ask him to explain them and he’s completely useless. He’s got more manners than the rest of Ohio combined and maybe I find that a little annoying some times, but he’s so charming and so sincere that it’s hard to be mad at him for long. He’s almost unbearably goodhearted, he spent a week last year trying to convince the Warblers to sing at the Children’s Hospital and when it didn’t work out, he just went himself. He wants people to believe he’s brave and confident, and he is, but when he lets you in enough to see where he’s vulnerable you can’t help feeling a little honored and you kind of want to wrap him up so that nothing hurts him. He loves his grandmother to bits, which is adorable. He’s an idiot sometimes, and he gets so deep in his own head that he’s oblivious to the way things look from the outside, or he gets too caught up in looking confident that he comes off as maybe a little smarmy, but it’s all based in good intentions, and when you know that it’s easier to forgive him.”
“Alright” Mercedes says when he pauses, “so tell me about spending time with him, what’s that like?”
“He laughs at my jokes,” Kurt says with a smile, “he was probably the only person at Dalton who understood my sense of humor, and he’s funny when he lets himself be. His humor is dark and dry and surprising, but it only comes out when he’s really comfortable. He goes out of his way to be kind, which is nice all by itself, but he makes me want to try to be better, nicer. He’s probably the biggest reason I’m finally able to get along with Rachel. He makes me feel -- I don’t know -- maybe safe is the word? Even when we were fighting I just wanted to talk to him because even just telling him makes things seem more bearable, and --” Kurt stops and his breath rushes out in a huff, “oh my god.”
“Now do you see?” Mercedes looks unbearably smug, but Kurt can’t fault her for that.
“I’m in love with him?” the words barely make it past his lips, but Mercedes hears them anyway.
“Duh.”
“No, that’s not,” he pulls his hands free of Mercedes’ grip and buries them both in his hair, for once heedless of the damage he’s causing, “I can’t be, I would have known.”
“Apparently you didn’t,” she’s laughing at him now and Kurt wants to be angry, but he’s still stuck on shock.
“How could I not have known?”
“Beats me,” she shrugs, “everyone else knew.”
Kurt wants to ask if by everyone she means everyone, but he can’t bear to know that Puck knew Kurt was in love before he realized it himself, so he doesn’t.
“But it isn’t anything like what it was with Finn,” he feels like he’s begging her to say it’s not true, which doesn’t seem like the right reaction, but he can’t help it, “it doesn’t feel anything like that.”
“That’s because you weren’t in love with Finn,” she says it like it’s obvious, maybe it should have been.
Kurt wonders how that’s possible. He’s measured everything, every crush he’d had in the last two years, based on how it compared to the way he’d felt for Finn, to hear that he’d been using the wrong measure leaves him at loose ends.
“Oh my god,” he grabs Mercedes hands in a desperate hold because along with realizing that he was completely in love with Blaine, Kurt remembers something else, “Mercedes, I just walked out. He said he loved me and I told him I had to go and practically ran out of there. Oh my god. I have to go to Dalton, I have to go right now.”
He’s already starting to stand, but Mercedes pulls him back down again. “No you don’t,” she insists firmly, “or, you do, but not right now. It’s two in the morning Kurt, there’s no way they’re going to let you in the dorms this late, or early, or whatever, plus I don’t think your dad would be too happy if you just went and drove to Westerville in the middle of the night.”
Kurt is reminded rather suddenly that he’s wearing a piece of horrible poly-cotton blend trash because he’d kept his promise to Blaine and talked to his dad the second he got home that morning. His father, being a soft touch, had only restricted him to Walmart-chic for a week for breaking the agreement they’d made when he’d decided to return to McKinley. The fact that he’d forgotten that he wasn’t wearing McQueen, or Kors, or Cavali, cashmere, merino, or even just plain cotton, even for a second, was shocking.
“Come on,” Mercedes is pulling him up and pushing him toward the bed, “we’ll both get our beauty sleep tonight and you can run off to Dalton in the morning, ok?”
“Ok,” he acquiesces, settling into the bed next to her, although he’s certain he won’t manage to sleep at all.
~~
Kurt pulls into the Dalton parking lot at 9:00 the next morning. He’d laid in bed next to Mercedes the whole night just staring at the clock. Around 4:00 he had decided that 7:00 was just the right mix of sane and desperate. People totally got up at 7:00 in the morning, no matter what Mercedes’ half-asleep mumbling implied.
He takes a deep breath as he pulls his car into one of the visitor’s spots. He’d very deliberately not planned this out, because Kurt’s plans almost always go to hell, so he’d spent the whole drive singing Broadway classics so loudly he was almost shouting just to drown out the racing thoughts in his head.
Kurt checks himself in the mirror, but there’s really nothing to be done. His face bears all the wear of not sleeping the night before, it’s tight and worn and a little dry, he’s still stuck in Walmart’s best, though he’d begged a scarf off of Mercedes at least. For a brief second he considers starting the car and driving back to Lima, waiting until a day when he’s slept and completed a full skin care ritual the night before and is back in comfortable, beautiful clothes. He considers it for a full second before he remembers Blaine’s face the morning before as Kurt stood up to leave, he remembers I love you, I’m so sorry and he knows he can’t leave it another day.
As he steps from his car he takes out his phone and pulls up a number from his contacts. He isn’t sure why he has Kyle’s number, they were never really close, but it’s one of the ones he’d gathered in that first giddy week of all boys school and he’s never deleted it.
“Hello?” Kyle picks up on the third ring and it’s clear that he had deleted Kurt’s number because he sounds confused, if Kurt hadn’t been so distracted he might have been a little hurt.
“Kyle,” he says brightly, “I need you to sign me into the dorms.”
Kyle is silent for a moment and Kurt wonders if they have a bad connection.
“No,” the other boy answers eventually.
Clearly, Kurt should never plan anything, because this is the one plan he’d allowed himself this morning, the one thing he thought bore advanced planning -- getting past Dalton’s strict security without calling Blaine -- because even though he hasn’t planned what he is going to say (he hasn’t, idle fantasies do not count) he has a vague idea of what might happen and he’s fairly certain he’ll have to launch directly into it the moment he sees Blaine for fear of losing his nerve and he very much does not want to have that conversation in the lobby. So he’d planned this part, calling Kyle because Kyle would know where to find Blaine and of course this plan shattered to bits before it even began, of course it did.
“Kyle, please --” he tries.
“No Kurt,” Kyle’s voice is firm, “I don’t know what happened yesterday, or last week, but I’m not letting you in to see him.”
“I’m here to fix it,” Kurt really hopes that he is and that he’s not going to destroy things further, “I swear.”
Kyle is quiet for a moment, but he’s never been very good at being stern, so after a moment he sighs. “Fine,” his voice is a little muffled, like he’d tucked his phone into his shoulder, “but if he spends another second moping I’m going to find those boots you like so much and toss them in a lake.”
Kurt doesn’t bother asking which boots Kyle means, he doesn’t honestly expect Kyle to be able to tell one pair of Kurt’s boots from another. He barely holds himself back from pumping his fist in the parking lot with a whoop and settles instead for thanking Kyle twelve times.
“I’m in the library” Kyle cuts into Kurt’s seventh profusion of thanks, “it’ll take me a minute to get there.”
“I’ll be waiting at the front door,” Kurt promises and they hang up.
Kurt tries not to check his reflection in the window of the door as he walks up, he’s fairly certain he’ll find it depressing, instead he pulls it open and smiles at the woman sitting at the desk. She only raises an eyebrow at him.
“I can’t let you by without someone to sign you in,” she says stiffly.
Kurt smiles and waives her warning away, “Kyle Petersen is on his way to vouch for me.”
It’s another few minutes before Kyle turns up looking stony faced. “I meant what I said about the boots, Kurt,” he says as he signs his name to the visitor’s log and hands Kurt a badge.
“I know,” Kurt tries to match Kyle’s serious tone, but his grin gets in the way, “if I screw this up I’ll drive you to the lake myself.”
Kyle seems satisfied with that and he gives a nod. “I’m going back to the library,” he says once they’re out of ear shot of the front desk, “Blaine’s in our room.”
“Thank you Kyle,” Kurt says, grabbing Kyle’s elbow and squeezing it a little, it’s amazing that it just takes two minutes back in Dalton for Kurt to feel once more like he could touch someone -- a straight boy someone -- without ending up black and blue, “really, thank you.”
Kyle just nods and heads down the corridor that leads to the library. Kurt takes a breath and, even though a plain t-shirt doesn’t really bear straightening, he tries anyway before he turns down the hallway he knows holds Blaine’s room.
When he reaches the door he doesn’t let himself pause or think, he just reaches up and raps firmly before he can back out. Blaine answers wearing sweatpants, looking rumpled and confused and Kurt discards everything he thought he might possibly say when he wasn’t planning this moment and instead grips the other boy by the shoulders and kisses him.
It isn’t anything like perfect. Their teeth scrape together and from the taste at least one of them has cut their lip, Blaine has the barest hint of stubble that rasps against Kurt’s skin and Kurt never quite works out what to do with his right hand after he manages to get it trapped beneath Blaine’s arm. It isn’t at all perfect, but it’s Blaine.
Kurt can’t tell how long it lasts, but when they pull away Blaine looks mussed and flushed and happy. “Hi,” he says quietly.
Kurt laughs and kisses him again.
Somehow they manage to make it all the way into the room and close the door behind them.
“That was ‘I love you too’” Kurt says when they pull away again, “in case that wasn’t clear.”
Blaine’s smile is slow-building, but it just keeps going, stretching bright across his face. He looks happier than Kurt has ever seen him and the warm knowledge of I did that flutters through him.
Blaine fiddles with the short sleeve of Kurt’s t-shirt, his other hand absently stroking Kurt’s forearm. Kurt stills for a moment because oh god, he’s wearing Levis and how could he possibly have forgotten that again? He waits for the itch of discomfort to settle between his shoulder blades the way it does when Finn walks in while he’s in the middle of his skin care routine or when the ensemble he’s had to piece together on the fly after one too many slushies to the face doesn’t quite match, the way it used to when he would take off his jacket and hand it to Finn before Puck and his friends threw him in the dumpster, but for some reason it never comes.
“You told your father,” Blaine’s voice is soft and Kurt kind of loves that Blaine knows that just because of his shirt.
“He called Principal Figgins at home” Blaine is standing close enough that Kurt can feel a bit of his body heat, he’s dropped his hand to encircle Kurt’s wrist and for some reason Kurt’s stomach feels more settled that it has for weeks, “I don’t even know how he got that number, but anyway he demanded that Figgins meet with him immediately. He got Mr. Schue there too, and Coach Sylvester. If I didn’t already know that she was incapable of feeling shame I would be certain that he had some sort of blackmail material on her to make that happen. Anyway, I guess they’re tracing the number or something. Coach Sylvester has demanded that she be allowed to discipline whomever has been sending the messages because she feels that the administration’s efforts so far have been inadequate. Apparently she got that clause worked into her contract over the summer.”
“Are you alright?” Blaine’s eyes search his face, “I’m sorry I should have asked you that before. I should have asked weeks ago”
Kurt is prepared to say no. That’s the answer he would have given if Blaine had asked weeks ago, if he’d answered honestly at least, but he realizes it isn’t true anymore.
“I will be,” he says instead and kisses Blaine again.
Rating: R
Warnings: None for this one my friends.
Spoilers: None
Summary: He’d very deliberately not planned this out, because Kurt’s plans almost always go to hell.
Author’s Note: This is it folks, this is all there is.
Ah! what else had I to do but love you?
God's own mother was less dear to me,
And less dear the Cytheraean rising like an
argent lily from the sea.
I have made my choice, have lived my
poems, and, though youth is gone in wasted days,
I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better
than the poet's crown of bays.
from “Flower of Love” -- Oscar Wilde
“He said what?”
Mercedes is lounging on her bed holding a pint of Cherry Garcia, Kurt is on the floor against the wall with his own carton of Chunky Monkey. He’d called her almost the second he got home and begged an emergency sleepover.
“He said he loves me,” Kurt shakes his head because the thought is kind of ridiculous, “and then he apologized like eight times. Mercedes, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
She laughs and flashes that bright grin he loves so much. “What do you mean you don’t know what to do?” she takes another bite of ice cream and points her spoon at him, “Boy, you hit that.”
“I can’t do that Mercedes,” Kurt can’t pretend that he hasn’t considered it, he has, but he knows it would be a terrible idea, “he’s my best friend -- present company excluded -- I can’t ruin that, and I can’t hurt him by starting something that means nothing to me when I know it would mean something to him.”
Mercedes gives him a look he’s only ever seen her direct at Rachel. “You’re kidding right?”
Kurt tries not to be angry, but he’s a little surprised by how callous she’s being. If nothing else he thought she’d see the parallels to her own misguided crush on him, using Blaine now to get some experience would be just as bad as using her as a beard two years ago would have been.
“Of course I’m not kidding Mercedes,” he tries for that gentle chiding tone she uses on him, but it doesn’t suit his voice nearly as well, “I can’t use him just to put a notch on my bedpost or whatever, I’m not Puck.”
“Oh my god,” Mercedes sits up and sets her ice cream aside, her expression is serious, “you really don’t know.”
“Don’t know what Mercedes?”
She comes and sits in front of him, grabbing the ice cream out of his hands and setting it on the desk.
“I want you to tell me about Blaine,” she says softly, taking his hands in hers, “pretend I don’t know him, or I don’t like him or something.”
Kurt wonders what the hell this is supposed to accomplish, but Mercedes has that ‘bitch please’ look that you just don’t mess with, so he closes his eyes and thinks about Blaine.
“Well, he’s a year older than me, he goes to Dalton, sings with the Warblers.”
“Alright,” Mercedes cuts in, “but tell me things I wouldn’t already know if I’d spent any time stalking him on Facebook. Who is he really?”
Kurt scowls because that question doesn’t mean anything, but Mercedes gives his hands a sharp squeeze so he sighs and tries again.
“He’s smart,” Kurt says finally, “like really smart, except not with science. He can memorize the formulas, but ask him to explain them and he’s completely useless. He’s got more manners than the rest of Ohio combined and maybe I find that a little annoying some times, but he’s so charming and so sincere that it’s hard to be mad at him for long. He’s almost unbearably goodhearted, he spent a week last year trying to convince the Warblers to sing at the Children’s Hospital and when it didn’t work out, he just went himself. He wants people to believe he’s brave and confident, and he is, but when he lets you in enough to see where he’s vulnerable you can’t help feeling a little honored and you kind of want to wrap him up so that nothing hurts him. He loves his grandmother to bits, which is adorable. He’s an idiot sometimes, and he gets so deep in his own head that he’s oblivious to the way things look from the outside, or he gets too caught up in looking confident that he comes off as maybe a little smarmy, but it’s all based in good intentions, and when you know that it’s easier to forgive him.”
“Alright” Mercedes says when he pauses, “so tell me about spending time with him, what’s that like?”
“He laughs at my jokes,” Kurt says with a smile, “he was probably the only person at Dalton who understood my sense of humor, and he’s funny when he lets himself be. His humor is dark and dry and surprising, but it only comes out when he’s really comfortable. He goes out of his way to be kind, which is nice all by itself, but he makes me want to try to be better, nicer. He’s probably the biggest reason I’m finally able to get along with Rachel. He makes me feel -- I don’t know -- maybe safe is the word? Even when we were fighting I just wanted to talk to him because even just telling him makes things seem more bearable, and --” Kurt stops and his breath rushes out in a huff, “oh my god.”
“Now do you see?” Mercedes looks unbearably smug, but Kurt can’t fault her for that.
“I’m in love with him?” the words barely make it past his lips, but Mercedes hears them anyway.
“Duh.”
“No, that’s not,” he pulls his hands free of Mercedes’ grip and buries them both in his hair, for once heedless of the damage he’s causing, “I can’t be, I would have known.”
“Apparently you didn’t,” she’s laughing at him now and Kurt wants to be angry, but he’s still stuck on shock.
“How could I not have known?”
“Beats me,” she shrugs, “everyone else knew.”
Kurt wants to ask if by everyone she means everyone, but he can’t bear to know that Puck knew Kurt was in love before he realized it himself, so he doesn’t.
“But it isn’t anything like what it was with Finn,” he feels like he’s begging her to say it’s not true, which doesn’t seem like the right reaction, but he can’t help it, “it doesn’t feel anything like that.”
“That’s because you weren’t in love with Finn,” she says it like it’s obvious, maybe it should have been.
Kurt wonders how that’s possible. He’s measured everything, every crush he’d had in the last two years, based on how it compared to the way he’d felt for Finn, to hear that he’d been using the wrong measure leaves him at loose ends.
“Oh my god,” he grabs Mercedes hands in a desperate hold because along with realizing that he was completely in love with Blaine, Kurt remembers something else, “Mercedes, I just walked out. He said he loved me and I told him I had to go and practically ran out of there. Oh my god. I have to go to Dalton, I have to go right now.”
He’s already starting to stand, but Mercedes pulls him back down again. “No you don’t,” she insists firmly, “or, you do, but not right now. It’s two in the morning Kurt, there’s no way they’re going to let you in the dorms this late, or early, or whatever, plus I don’t think your dad would be too happy if you just went and drove to Westerville in the middle of the night.”
Kurt is reminded rather suddenly that he’s wearing a piece of horrible poly-cotton blend trash because he’d kept his promise to Blaine and talked to his dad the second he got home that morning. His father, being a soft touch, had only restricted him to Walmart-chic for a week for breaking the agreement they’d made when he’d decided to return to McKinley. The fact that he’d forgotten that he wasn’t wearing McQueen, or Kors, or Cavali, cashmere, merino, or even just plain cotton, even for a second, was shocking.
“Come on,” Mercedes is pulling him up and pushing him toward the bed, “we’ll both get our beauty sleep tonight and you can run off to Dalton in the morning, ok?”
“Ok,” he acquiesces, settling into the bed next to her, although he’s certain he won’t manage to sleep at all.
~~
Kurt pulls into the Dalton parking lot at 9:00 the next morning. He’d laid in bed next to Mercedes the whole night just staring at the clock. Around 4:00 he had decided that 7:00 was just the right mix of sane and desperate. People totally got up at 7:00 in the morning, no matter what Mercedes’ half-asleep mumbling implied.
He takes a deep breath as he pulls his car into one of the visitor’s spots. He’d very deliberately not planned this out, because Kurt’s plans almost always go to hell, so he’d spent the whole drive singing Broadway classics so loudly he was almost shouting just to drown out the racing thoughts in his head.
Kurt checks himself in the mirror, but there’s really nothing to be done. His face bears all the wear of not sleeping the night before, it’s tight and worn and a little dry, he’s still stuck in Walmart’s best, though he’d begged a scarf off of Mercedes at least. For a brief second he considers starting the car and driving back to Lima, waiting until a day when he’s slept and completed a full skin care ritual the night before and is back in comfortable, beautiful clothes. He considers it for a full second before he remembers Blaine’s face the morning before as Kurt stood up to leave, he remembers I love you, I’m so sorry and he knows he can’t leave it another day.
As he steps from his car he takes out his phone and pulls up a number from his contacts. He isn’t sure why he has Kyle’s number, they were never really close, but it’s one of the ones he’d gathered in that first giddy week of all boys school and he’s never deleted it.
“Hello?” Kyle picks up on the third ring and it’s clear that he had deleted Kurt’s number because he sounds confused, if Kurt hadn’t been so distracted he might have been a little hurt.
“Kyle,” he says brightly, “I need you to sign me into the dorms.”
Kyle is silent for a moment and Kurt wonders if they have a bad connection.
“No,” the other boy answers eventually.
Clearly, Kurt should never plan anything, because this is the one plan he’d allowed himself this morning, the one thing he thought bore advanced planning -- getting past Dalton’s strict security without calling Blaine -- because even though he hasn’t planned what he is going to say (he hasn’t, idle fantasies do not count) he has a vague idea of what might happen and he’s fairly certain he’ll have to launch directly into it the moment he sees Blaine for fear of losing his nerve and he very much does not want to have that conversation in the lobby. So he’d planned this part, calling Kyle because Kyle would know where to find Blaine and of course this plan shattered to bits before it even began, of course it did.
“Kyle, please --” he tries.
“No Kurt,” Kyle’s voice is firm, “I don’t know what happened yesterday, or last week, but I’m not letting you in to see him.”
“I’m here to fix it,” Kurt really hopes that he is and that he’s not going to destroy things further, “I swear.”
Kyle is quiet for a moment, but he’s never been very good at being stern, so after a moment he sighs. “Fine,” his voice is a little muffled, like he’d tucked his phone into his shoulder, “but if he spends another second moping I’m going to find those boots you like so much and toss them in a lake.”
Kurt doesn’t bother asking which boots Kyle means, he doesn’t honestly expect Kyle to be able to tell one pair of Kurt’s boots from another. He barely holds himself back from pumping his fist in the parking lot with a whoop and settles instead for thanking Kyle twelve times.
“I’m in the library” Kyle cuts into Kurt’s seventh profusion of thanks, “it’ll take me a minute to get there.”
“I’ll be waiting at the front door,” Kurt promises and they hang up.
Kurt tries not to check his reflection in the window of the door as he walks up, he’s fairly certain he’ll find it depressing, instead he pulls it open and smiles at the woman sitting at the desk. She only raises an eyebrow at him.
“I can’t let you by without someone to sign you in,” she says stiffly.
Kurt smiles and waives her warning away, “Kyle Petersen is on his way to vouch for me.”
It’s another few minutes before Kyle turns up looking stony faced. “I meant what I said about the boots, Kurt,” he says as he signs his name to the visitor’s log and hands Kurt a badge.
“I know,” Kurt tries to match Kyle’s serious tone, but his grin gets in the way, “if I screw this up I’ll drive you to the lake myself.”
Kyle seems satisfied with that and he gives a nod. “I’m going back to the library,” he says once they’re out of ear shot of the front desk, “Blaine’s in our room.”
“Thank you Kyle,” Kurt says, grabbing Kyle’s elbow and squeezing it a little, it’s amazing that it just takes two minutes back in Dalton for Kurt to feel once more like he could touch someone -- a straight boy someone -- without ending up black and blue, “really, thank you.”
Kyle just nods and heads down the corridor that leads to the library. Kurt takes a breath and, even though a plain t-shirt doesn’t really bear straightening, he tries anyway before he turns down the hallway he knows holds Blaine’s room.
When he reaches the door he doesn’t let himself pause or think, he just reaches up and raps firmly before he can back out. Blaine answers wearing sweatpants, looking rumpled and confused and Kurt discards everything he thought he might possibly say when he wasn’t planning this moment and instead grips the other boy by the shoulders and kisses him.
It isn’t anything like perfect. Their teeth scrape together and from the taste at least one of them has cut their lip, Blaine has the barest hint of stubble that rasps against Kurt’s skin and Kurt never quite works out what to do with his right hand after he manages to get it trapped beneath Blaine’s arm. It isn’t at all perfect, but it’s Blaine.
Kurt can’t tell how long it lasts, but when they pull away Blaine looks mussed and flushed and happy. “Hi,” he says quietly.
Kurt laughs and kisses him again.
Somehow they manage to make it all the way into the room and close the door behind them.
“That was ‘I love you too’” Kurt says when they pull away again, “in case that wasn’t clear.”
Blaine’s smile is slow-building, but it just keeps going, stretching bright across his face. He looks happier than Kurt has ever seen him and the warm knowledge of I did that flutters through him.
Blaine fiddles with the short sleeve of Kurt’s t-shirt, his other hand absently stroking Kurt’s forearm. Kurt stills for a moment because oh god, he’s wearing Levis and how could he possibly have forgotten that again? He waits for the itch of discomfort to settle between his shoulder blades the way it does when Finn walks in while he’s in the middle of his skin care routine or when the ensemble he’s had to piece together on the fly after one too many slushies to the face doesn’t quite match, the way it used to when he would take off his jacket and hand it to Finn before Puck and his friends threw him in the dumpster, but for some reason it never comes.
“You told your father,” Blaine’s voice is soft and Kurt kind of loves that Blaine knows that just because of his shirt.
“He called Principal Figgins at home” Blaine is standing close enough that Kurt can feel a bit of his body heat, he’s dropped his hand to encircle Kurt’s wrist and for some reason Kurt’s stomach feels more settled that it has for weeks, “I don’t even know how he got that number, but anyway he demanded that Figgins meet with him immediately. He got Mr. Schue there too, and Coach Sylvester. If I didn’t already know that she was incapable of feeling shame I would be certain that he had some sort of blackmail material on her to make that happen. Anyway, I guess they’re tracing the number or something. Coach Sylvester has demanded that she be allowed to discipline whomever has been sending the messages because she feels that the administration’s efforts so far have been inadequate. Apparently she got that clause worked into her contract over the summer.”
“Are you alright?” Blaine’s eyes search his face, “I’m sorry I should have asked you that before. I should have asked weeks ago”
Kurt is prepared to say no. That’s the answer he would have given if Blaine had asked weeks ago, if he’d answered honestly at least, but he realizes it isn’t true anymore.
“I will be,” he says instead and kisses Blaine again.