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Tina has apparently been lying in wait like some kind of blue-haired goth-chic lioness, because the second that Kurt comes back from the bathroom, she is brandishing his iPhone at him. "Who," she says, "is this."
Kurt nearly trips over his Doc Martens. He stands frozen in the doorway. Tina just keeps looking at him, sitting cross-legged on her bed with her arm extended and the phone in her hand. Kurt can see the screen -- cracked, after Karofsky swatted it out of his hands, but still readable -- from the doorway. It says BLAINE, who has apparently texted him three times in the last two minutes. Kurt is momentarily distracted by knowing that it's 4:30 and Blaine should still be in Warblers rehearsal -- but Tina is steadily watching him.
Kurt takes refuge in as much hauteur as he can muster up. "Do you regularly snoop through your friends' text messages, or am I a special case?" he asks, taking three quick steps across the room to grab his iPhone out of her hand. His fingers itch to open up the texts and see what Blaine said, but he keeps his phone clutched low by his side.
"Your texts automatically pop up," Tina points out, giving him a friendly-but-unimpressed look from her perch on the bed. "If you didn't want me to read them, you probably shouldn't have said I could use your phone while you were in the bathroom."
She's right, of course. But it's hard; no one knows about Blaine, and Kurt actually likes it that way. He doesn't have to explain anything, or listen to faux concern for Kurt's happiness/personal safety or the inevitable -- insulting -- comparisons to Jesse St. James. And he doesn't have to deal with the knowledge that no one has asked about the texts he's been constantly sending and receiving, the picture in his locker, or how distracted he has been. Nobody in the New Directions seems to have noticed that anything is different; that Kurt is distracted by something that's making him happy or that he's taking more abuse in the hallways and at lunch than normal. No one in the student body seems to have even said a word about the day when Karofsky drove a stranger in a prep school uniform up against a chain link fence and Kurt shoved him off. That, Kurt thinks, is how little anyone cares.
"Kurt, seriously, come on," says Tina, and then she leans in and her whole face lights with the force of her mischievous smile. "Is it a boy?"
"We're supposed to be doing French homework," he protests.
Tina rolls her eyes. "Fine. Est-il garçon?"
Kurt ignores her dreadful syntax and accent. He admits, "...Oui," and Tina laughs with surprised delight.
"Come on," she says, patting the bed beside her. She laughs again, impatient, when he hangs back. "Come on! Kurt! Who is he??"
Blaine is Kurt's secret, both because he doesn't think that everyone in New Directions will understand and because he just wants to keep Blaine his, close to his chest. The thrill that runs through Kurt when he feels the buzz of a new text; the way Blaine's smiles make his heart beat like it's trying to escape from his body, the fact that he has someone now who really understands where he's coming from -- Kurt doesn't want to share that. But Tina is smiling and insisting and she seems excited, and she has seen the texts (whatever they are), so he can't exactly deny Blaine's existence.
With as much dignity as possible, he walks over and perches on the edge of Tina's bed, crossing one leg over the other. They look at each other for a long minute. "Can I read my texts first?" Kurt asks, finally.
Tina recites promptly: "He got out of practice early, he sent you a YouTube link that I didn't look at, and then he linked some song lyrics."
Kurt is grateful that the texts were all innocuous, silly things; that there was nothing about courage or closeted jerks or being shoved into lockers or how many players on the hockey team called him a fag today. More importantly: Blaine sent him song lyrics. Kurt lifts up his phone and opens the last text; it says: "I'm sending you this at the risk of typecasting myself forever as That Guy, just so you know," and then there is a link to a song lyrics website.
Kurt clicks it and reads as far as:
Do you ever feel like a plastic bag
Drifting through the wind
Wanting to start again
before he realizes what the song is, and he quietly smiles to himself.
When Kurt glances up, Tina is watching him with a hand pressed over her knowing smile. She looks like she might explode a little with impatience but she's trying to rein it in. "Kurt, who is this guy? What did he send you?"
"The lyrics to 'Firework,' " says Kurt, knowing that he has a fellow Katy Perry appreciator in Tina, and he knows that she immediately gets it; her smile tempers into something softer -- and a little worried. Kurt keeps going before she can ask. "You cannot tell anyone about this," he tells Tina.
His seriousness apparently comes across; Tina nods vigorously -- then she pauses. "Not even Mercedes?" she asks, cautious.
Kurt hesitates. Mercedes is the one exception he has considered making to his Non-Blaine-Disclosure policy. She may be a gossip (Kurt loves that about her), but she has faithfully kept each and every one of his secrets that she has been entrusted with, and they're best friends, and she's going to be hurt when she finds out that he avoided telling her something this big. But he has a half-formed suspicion that Mercedes would be one of the most skeptical of Blaine and his motives, and Kurt can't deal with that. Not right now. "No one," he says. "Not Mike, either."
"I won't tell anyone," Tina promises.
Kurt eyes her for several seconds and then he finally sighs. "As you probably know, when Mr. Schuester added the twist to the boys vs. girls competition, I was excited to bring my ideas to the table. As you probably also gathered, they weren't particularly interested in anything that I had to say," (Tina's slightly guilty face speaks volumes about what Mike has told her about that meeting), "and they suggested that I do something more useful with my time, like spy on the Dalton Warblers." Tina's eyebrows have started to furrow. Kurt finishes: "So I did."
"--Really?" she asks, half-smiling and incredulous. "Kurt, that's, like, two hours away."
He shrugs in one sharp movement, hearing his voice go brittle. "I do have access to a car, and I clearly wasn't needed at the boys' team meeting."
Tina hesitates for a second -- then she impulsively leans over and rests her hand on his, on top of his knee. "For what it's worth," she says, "Mike thought the other guys were jerks, talking to you like that. He felt really bad about it."
"I know," Kurt admits, allowing a tiny smile. "He apologized when we were rehearsing the final number later." Kurt's relationship with Finn varies by the day, Artie can be a jackass, and Puck is now literally a juvenile delinquent (and proud of it), but Mike has actually been civil and reasonably friendly to Kurt. When he talks, anyway.
Tina squeezes Kurt's hand -- her fingernails are blue with black tips today -- and then pulls back into her own space, sitting in a cloud of petticoats with her feet tucked beneath her. She's looking at him expectantly.
He sighs. "I met Blaine at Dalton. He's the co-captain of their glee club."
Tina's eyebrows slowly rise, like she's surprised and waiting for more information. When Kurt doesn't add anything else, she says, "He's -- our competition?"
That is exactly, exactly how Kurt knew everyone was going to take it. He doesn't realize how hard he's gripping his phone in his lap until he hears the plastic case creak under his hand. "He's my friend," he corrects tightly.
"And ... he knows you go to McKinley," Tina says. Kurt inclines his head in a yes. "And that you were spying." He nods again, once, economical of motion. "And he doesn't care?"
"Apparently," says Kurt, "my musical and sartorial skills don't extend to show choir espionage."
Tina looks at him blankly.
He sighs sharply. "I was a terrible spy and they thought it was funny."
She smiles a little bit, clearly unsure. "Kurt," she says. "Do you really think--"
"If you say the name 'Jesse St. James,' I'm going to tell Brad to play the accompaniment up a half step the next time you perform a solo," Kurt interrupts, words clipped. "It's not the same. I am not Rachel Berry. Blaine is not some -- Machiavellian tool who's seducing me in order to ruin us at Sectionals. He is funny and he's," he casts a glance at the ceiling, looking for the right words for what Blaine is, "implausibly nice and concerned and perfect, and he gets things in ways that none of the rest of you will, and he's done more for me in three weeks than anyone at McKinley has in two years."
"Okay," Tina says quietly, after several long seconds. Kurt refuses to feel bad about snapping at her. (He feels a little bad. Tina never draws in on herself like that anymore; she hasn't since last year, when she finally started coming out of her shell.) She stares at her knees, and then she eventually glances at him, her mouth tilted up, and she asks, "Is he seducing you?"
Kurt determinedly doesn't flush. "No," he says firmly.
"But he is gay," Tina questions.
"Yes," he says. Her questions are obvious peace offerings, and Kurt takes them in the spirit that they were intended. "I thought the whole club might be gay, at first," he admits, and Tina laughs.
"Why would you think that?" she asks.
"They performed 'Teenage Dream' in front of a huge portion of the student body," he says. "They didn't change any of the lyrics."
"Skintight jeans?" Tina asks, and apparently his expression is answer enough, because she somehow manages to suck in her breath and laugh at the same time. "Come on, Kurt. Spill it." She flops down onto her stomach, sending the mattress bouncing, and she settles her chin in her hands. "Tell me everything." Her smile fades; she adds, looking up at him more seriously: "I won't say anything about the competition. I promise. I know you're not Rachel."
Kurt's smile is close-lipped and contained, but grateful. He shifts until he's sitting with his back pressed up against the wall and the soles of his boots just barely hanging off the edge of Tina's bed. "They were very good," he says to her. "And I'm saying that objectively, not just because Blaine was singing the lead."
"So you think they're a threat?"
"Their choreography was tight and the harmonies were flawless. The entire effect was both highly competent and charming," Kurt says matter-of-factly. "We're going to have a lot of work to do to beat them."
Tina nods thoughtfully, her hands moving with her chin, and then she suddenly smiles. Kurt has learned to be moderately wary of that smile. "Is he cute?"
Whatever his expression is in response to that comment, judging by Tina's reaction, it's very funny. Kurt colors; he can feel the heat in his face, and he covers it by picking up his phone and opening Facebook in a browser window. He types 'BLAI' on the touch screen and the option for Blaine's profile pops up. Kurt taps it, and then he hands the phone to Tina.
"Oh my God," says Tina.
Kurt has opened that page often enough to know exactly what she's seeing. Blaine's profile picture is a close-up shot of him from the neck up, his chin lowered, his head at an angle, and his hand just visible at the knot of his own uniform tie. One eyebrow is low and the other is raised. It's a moderately silly face, but also a decent take on a mock-debonair Mad Men sixties sort of a pose.
It's very, very attractive.
"Kurt," Tina says, without looking away from the phone, "you need to get on this. Immediately."
He resists the urge to roll his eyes, and he holds his hand out. "It's not that easy."
"It should be." Tina is ignoring him so that she can page through Blaine's other profile pictures. Kurt knows what those are, too -- Blaine laughing with a bunch of the Warblers, their arms all around each other's shoulders; Blaine with longer curly hair, bent over the guitar that Kurt hasn't heard him play yet; Blaine and David facing off in mock combat, their fists raised; Blaine smiling directly at the camera with the specials board of a coffee shop up behind him. She glances up at Kurt and says somberly, "He's a serious hottie. Respect."
Kurt snorts lightly. "It doesn't--"
"Wait." Tina's head tilts to one side as she stares at the phone, and Kurt suddenly realizes what picture she's looking at. "Is that -- ? That's the coffee place behind the school. Behind our school." She glances up at Kurt. "He's been here?"
"Once," Kurt says. Tina looks uncertain and he can feel the anger bubbling up again. "He wasn't here to twirl his mustache and record our rehearsal," he says. "He drove 90 miles in the middle of an afternoon for me; we were nowhere near Glee. We went to lunch and before that, Karofsky pushed him up against a fence and he still wanted to be my fr--"
"Kurt," says Tina, and instead of shrinking back this time, she reaches out and grabs his wrist. She must be able to feel his pulse jumping crazily. Kurt's shoulder still hurts from the last shove into the lockers he took this afternoon. "It's okay. He sounds amazing. I'm really sorry if it sounded like I was saying anything different."
"--No," Kurt says, and he doesn't realize just how tense he was until he exhales and lets his shoulders droop. "You didn't say anything wrong. I--" And then his phone chimes with the sound of an incoming text, and he lunges for it. That puts him into an awkward sprawl across Tina's bed, but it gets him his phone back. Worth it.
"What'd he say?" Tina asks, and he doesn't have to look away from the screen to know that she's smiling.
"He wants to know what I think of the YouTube clip," Kurt says absently, and he's already going back to the old text message to get the URL.
"What do we think of the YouTube clip?"
"I don't--" says Kurt, and then the page loads and he realizes what he's looking at. "--Oh my God."
"What?" Tina impatiently cranes her neck so that she can see the screen. Kurt wordlessly tilts it toward her and turns up the volume. He is staring.
"--ng to be singing 'Part of Your World' from The Little Mermaid," says Blaine in the video. His webcam is of horrible quality, but it's obvious that he's in a bedroom, he's wearing something other than a uniform (jeans and a T-shirt, and Kurt should be disappointed by how pedestrian that is, except that he is distracted by the fact that Blaine is actually following up on that stupid joke he had made. and also by Blaine's pixelated arms). "This is for the guy who said it couldn't be done," Blaine finishes and then he actually winks at the camera.
"Are you the guy who said it couldn't be done?" Tina asks breathlessly, grabbing at Kurt's elbow.
"Possibly," Kurt admits, strained.
Then Blaine begins to strum the guitar.
Nineteen seconds into the video, when Blaine has opened his mouth and begun to sing, Tina says fervently, "Keep. Him," and a wide-eyed Kurt can't help but agree with the sentiment.