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By the third week of November, Kurt has to make a decision.
He’s been so distracted. He tells himself all the reasons why he hasn’t already made this decision as he burrows his face into his scarf, hurrying back to the warmth of his dorm after his last class of the day. For one thing, he hadn’t realized that it was coming up so fast. His first year seminar teacher had been harping on about the grant due-dates for weeks, but he didn’t need to worry about that — either way, the expenses will be fine. And schoolwork had really taken off, making itself felt in a way it never had back in high school, when it was only something to hurry through before he could get to his real business. And the weather had been abysmal, really, and he had been leaning so hard into Thanksgiving that it’s really no surprise that he hasn’t….
He looks up when he realizes that he’s come straight to Blaine’s room instead of taking to the stairs to head to his own, and Blaine’s opening the door and smiling at him.
So yes. There is also that.
Blaine laughs at him, grabbing at his scarf and pulling him forward, batting at his shoulders as he comes. “Oh no! It’s snowing again?”
Kurt frowns at him while he fusses. Blaine is still in the soft sleep pants and t-shirt Kurt had left him in this morning. There’s music playing soft and low, something light and driven by the synthesizer, but the curtains are still pulled tight, and the only light in the room are the twin lamps glowing over his desk and his bed. The room smells like morning, like dark roast and those cinnamon-apple oatmeal packets that Blaine likes, and Kurt is torn between bitter envy that Blaine doesn’t have class on Thursdays and a ragged relief that he’s still here, just like this. It had been hard to get up and out this morning.
There are a lot of reasons to be distracted, really.
Blaine unwinds Kurt’s scarf from his neck and peels away his coat, stepping a few steps away to take them both over to the coatrack that Kurt had brought down from his own room earlier this week. It’s been nice, having it here. There’s been less jockeying for closet space in the last few days, especially when it’s easier not to go back to his room in the morning to shower and change; Blaine’s room is only four doors down from the men’s bathroom on his floor, while Kurt has to cross almost the whole building to get to his.
Kurt kicks out of his boots and crawls onto the still-mussed bed, jeans and all, and pulls the blankets up until they pool over his lap. The bed’s not warm — Blaine must have been up for a while, but his pillow is still shoved against the wall and he tucks it behind his back so he can lean against it.
Blaine comes back to bed too, curling up and lying down in Kurt’s lap, slanting a smile up at him when Kurt’s hands automatically end up in his hair. The roots are still damp, even though it’s mostly dry to the touch, because Blaine has showered and gone right back into his sleep clothes.
"Mmm," he hums, while Kurt scratches at his scalp. "How was class?"
"Not as nice as this. I should have skipped."
"Told you."
Kurt tugs at his hair a little. “Please.” What Blaine had said was, ‘mkay, great, come back after?’ half asleep while Kurt had clambered over him to remove himself from the twin bed they can’t bring themselves to stop sharing so he could grab his phone from Blaine’s desk and stop its blaring. When Kurt had showered and come back to the room to drop off his toiletries, grab his school bag, and pull his travel mug off his Keurig, Blaine had already sprawled over the bed, taking back over the tiny bit of space that Kurt had vacated, and had his face pressed into Kurt’s pillow. He hadn’t even moved.
Blaine doesn’t blink, just beams up at him looking very self-satisfied. “9 am classes every day were not your best idea, admit it.”
It’s an argument they’ve had before, and he ends it the same way he always does. “I like having a schedule and getting them done early. Besides, it seems to have worked out fine for me, thank you,” and he scratches a little harder at Blaine’s scalp. He’s pretty sure at least one 9 am class has worked out well for both of them.
"It’s the exception that proves the rule." Blaine says this with his voice slurring, grinning ear-to-ear with his eyes closed, and Kurt is officially under no obligation to take him seriously.
"Do you want to go get lunch?"
"Mmm. Not quite ready to leave the building. Wanna take a nap?"
Kurt thinks about the deadline that’s bearing down on him; they need to talk, and “take a nap” usually doesn’t involve either talking or sleeping. “Taking a nap” means stripping down to their underwear and t-shirts and climbing back into Blaine’s bed, where Blaine’s mouth is warm and wet and sweet, and their legs scratch and slide against each other while their hands trace over each other, hidden under blankets. It’s still not sex — nobody has been naked, nobody has come (well, together, anyway), and Kurt knows what sex isn’t, at least — but it might as well be. It’s as close as he’s ever come, anyway, and it does what he wants sex to do, eventually, when it’s time.
But he tips his head back against the wall and sighs. He wiggles his toes where they’re still warming, and he knows what the bed will feel like, how close they’ll have to be, and how Blaine will breathe against his neck. So cautiously he says, “Yes, but we need to have a talking nap.”
Blaine’s eyes flutter open while his brow furrows. “Bad talk?”
"I don’t think so. We… I need to talk, you can listen."
Blaine nods, pushing himself up on his elbows so that he can stand up. Kurt throws back the blankets and starts by pulling off his socks.
"And you have to actually listen.”
"I listen!" Kurt thinks that nobody should look that indignant when they’re untying fleece pants.
"You get distracted very easily," he says, but he softens it with a grin. He doesn’t mind, not at all — it’s its own pleasure to be somebody’s distraction, especially Blaine’s.
"You know why," Blaine says, standing by the bed and watching while Kurt finishes with his pants and his sweater, until he’s down to his underwear and his t-shirt, too.
He slips into the bed and scoots until his back is flush against the wall. The t-shirts are necessary for modesty, yes, but the bed is small and he’s pretty sure that unless he wants the pattern of brick pressed into his skin of his back for the rest of his life, it’s valuable protection, too. Blaine slips in right beside him, curling into him until their feet are tucked together, Blaine’s ankle between his. His breath is sweet, apples and coffee and cinnamon toothpaste, and Kurt falls into the kiss like they’re picking right up where they left off.
Which they are, really. And this is part of what he needs to talk about — it’s been three weeks since the first time they kissed in this bed, and it’s been two weeks since the first time Kurt spent the night, and it’s been a week since his Keurig migrated down and four days since his coatrack followed it. His laptop hasn’t been plugged in in his room since early November, when he’d run upstairs to get it and the charger and then never taken it back. Every single step of it has felt right, natural, so perfect and easy that even though part of him couldn’t believe he was doing it, he just… did. Because doing it felt like a celebration, every time, and a little like something he was getting away with, and it’s been…. Well really it’s been intoxicating.
But it’s time to make some sober choices, because he has Thanksgiving and then a deadline less than a week later, and it’s not in his nature to leave himself this vulnerable. Not anymore, not if it ever was.
So he breaks the kiss, gently, eases Blaine out of it by kissing his nose, his cheeks, his eyelids. “Hey. I mean it, really.”
"I know. I just like it." Blaine’s eyes are bright and his smile is sweet.
He smiles back at him. “Yes. But.”
Blaine pulls away the scant inch that he can without falling off the bed, and settles onto his own pillow, facing him. “Okay. Talking.
"Yes." Kurt reaches between them, finds the hand of Blaine’s that isn’t pinned under his body and takes it between his own. "So. It finally occurred to me this morning that we have to register for winter term in just over a week."
Blaine’s eyes light up instantly. “And? Are we going to do it?” He pauses, watching him, his brows up. “Come on, say you will. Kurt, it will be perfect. And you know she’s into it — she wants us to!” She does; their Media and Memory professor has been so into their project from the first time they presented their preliminary findings to the class, and she’s written a few emails encouraging them to take it further, to use winter term to throw off their self-imposed rules about moving out of the 1980s and expand the scope of their study.
"I’m thinking about it. I was so sure, what I was going to do. I mean, my dad is already there, it’s so perfect, and it would be easy. But….”
Blaine doesn’t let him hang for even a moment. “But this would be amazing, Kurt, and it’s so much closer to what you really want to do. DC will always be there and your dad has at least another term, but we’ve got some traction on this project, and I think we should run with it.”
Blaine’s right, of course. Oberlin requires its students to complete three winter terms, some kind of internship or expanded research paper or personal development project, and he’s always expected to spend his first mandated January helping his dad in DC. He doesn’t use his dad’s new position for much — neither of them are used to it, even now — but they’d always planned it as a chance for Kurt to knock out a requirement and get his dad’s filing back on track after the holidays. There is nothing special about what Kurt has planned, nothing except that it would give him a chance to spend more time with his dad. And then Kurt met Blaine, and now he has an exciting new set of choices about how to spend his time.
And this is as good an opportunity as he’s going to get to ask, so Kurt takes a deep breath and says, “And how much of that is about this?” Kurt pulls Blaine’s hand to his mouth, kissing at the tips of his fingers while he gazes up at him.
Blaine stares at him for a second, flutters his fingers against Kurt’s mouth until he smiles, and then he laughs. “Kurt! Is that what’s bothering you?”
Kurt looks at him, presses his head further into the pillow, and waits for the answer to his question.
Blaine blows out a breath and rolls onto his back as much as he can, pulling his hand away, and stares at the ceiling as he says, “I don’t know. Probably a lot of it – 75, 80 percent, maybe? Why?” He turns his head, looking at Kurt, watching him for an answer.
Kurt gets stuck there for a second, watching him right back and waiting for some kind of signal until he reaches for him, pulling him back so that they’re almost nose to nose, knees knocking up against each other and Blaine’s breath washing across his mouth. “I have no idea. But it’s been three weeks, and I haven’t slept by myself in almost that long. I have no idea where it’s going, and committing to this project means we’re stuck together until at least February, and that’s two months from now.”
"It’s been six weeks.” Kurt smiles at the argument that’s already become old and comfortable, because Blaine insists on counting that night at The Feve, even though Kurt has already presented his arguments for why that is cheating. “And you don’t think we’ll last that long?
He finally lets himself think about it then, and he already doesn’t know how to imagine it — going to meals, seeing Blaine around, seeing him with somebody else. Dating anybody else. It’s only been three weeks since he’s had this and already he can’t imagine losing it — it feels like so much longer. His voice is quiet, so careful, when he says, “I want us to. I think we will. But dating seems like a circus, and that was only the view from the outside. How am I supposed to know?”
Blaine’s eyes soften, and he lifts his hand to rest it against Kurt’s side, his fingers curling into his t-shirt. “I think we will too. But you’re right. We haven’t talked about it.”
Kurt shakes his head a little and smiles at him — he’s so earnest. He likes that about him best of all, the way he always tries.
Blaine’s smile wavers at the edges, not quite making it to his eyes, before he blows out a heavy breath. Kurt slides one foot back and forth across Blaine’s ankle. “So let’s do that,” Blaine says. “Let’s… define the relationship.”
It’s the sigh and the tone of Blaine’s voice that makes him freeze his foot mid-sweep — he hasn’t heard him so detached in weeks. “Is that so bad?”
Blaine’s hand flexes once against his side, a random flex or an aborted grab maybe, before his face relaxes into a sweetly sad smile and he closes his eyes for a split second. “No, Kurt. No. It’s not. I think it’s probably a good idea, you’re right. It’s just that the last time I did this, it didn’t go well.”
"Sebastian."
"Of course."
He kisses him again then, breaks his own rule and can’t quite help it, because now he’s been conditioned: Blaine mentions Sebastian, and Kurt kisses him. They’ve talked about him a lot, maybe too much, late at night when they should have been sleeping. They have these conversations while they’re in bed that go everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Kurt talks about his dad, his family, his friends; he talks about the despair of not getting into NYADA, the way it felt like his life was ending before it ever even had a chance to really begin, and about what he hopes to find at Oberlin — work, community, friends. And even though he’s never said it, he thinks now that part of what he was hoping to find at Oberlin, all along, was this: somebody he could talk to and hold in the dark, and somebody he could be quiet and fervent with, too.
Blaine talks about his parents, about his brother, who Kurt was very impressed to learn about, although the more he hears about Cooper the more he wishes Blaine would talk about him less; he’s already disillusioned enough. Blaine talks about why he went to Dalton, the things that drove him there, and Kurt tells him about Karofsky and wishes over and over that they could have known each other earlier. And Blaine wishes for the same thing, and that always brings up Sebastian, so that they’re talking in circles, working tirelessly at the same knots that have always tied each of them up, and learning how they fit together.
So he knows, of course, about how Blaine offered his heart to Sebastian; it’s one of the first things he ever really knew about Blaine. All he wants is for Blaine to make an offer of his heart one more time, to somebody more worthy.
Blaine’s face is serious when the kiss breaks this time, and he stares at him, silent and still until Kurt whispers, “So what do you want?”
Blaine’s eyes drop to Kurt’s chin, and his face is guarded as he says, “I want as much of you as you’re going to let me have.”
He tips his head forward, nudges Blaine with his chin to get him to raise his eyes. “Blaine.”
He has such pretty eyes, Kurt thinks, especially now when they’re wide and shining. “I mean it. I’m not going anywhere unless you make me. I mean it, Kurt.”
And one more time, Kurt steels himself for a moment before he takes the leap, but just like when he first reached out for Blaine’s hand the very first time, he’s whisper-soft when he lands. “I’m falling in love with you.”
He doesn’t even need to hear the reply, not really. He’s been some kind of sure of Blaine from the very beginning — from that very first email exchange, Kurt has felt like he knows him, at least a little, and it’s only been three weeks but that’s 21 days of almost constant contact, cocooned away in Blaine’s very tiny single dorm room. He still watches with fascination and a rising sense of giddiness when Blaine says, “Me too.”
"Okay," Kurt says, trying to hold his voice steady. "So however we define the relationship, it’s… serious."
Blaine’s smile is weak only because his mouth is a little wobbly, but it stretches to his eyes, and Kurt can’t help smiling back at him when he whispers, “Yes, definitely.”
Kurt breathes out a huge sigh, and makes the choice he always really wanted. “Okay. Okay then. I’ll tell my dad at Thanksgiving. I’m not going to DC for winter break. I’m going to stay here, and we’re going to do our project.”
Blaine moves forward and buries his face against Kurt’s neck. “Yeah. We are.”
Later, Kurt will struggle to explain to his dad what it is about this project that makes it valuable without overusing the word “Blaine”. Much later still, he’ll realize how risky that was, how essentially wasteful and irresponsible, to define one of his three winter projects solely by whether his work partner was actually his boyfriend.
For now, though, Kurt feels light and loved and so warm, and like there’s nothing they can’t do together. It’s snowing outside, and a feast is coming but for now they have coffee and oatmeal. Kurt is almost 20 years old and falling in love for the very first time, and there is no room to think about anything else.