Chapter Text
The first person Kurt tells is Elliott. He shows up at his door, bouncing on his toes as he waits for his friend to answer his noisy, quick-paced knocks. His phone is clutched in his hand like it has been since he told Blaine his name on Sunday.
When the door opens, revealing Elliott, sleep-mused and blinking against the light, a waterfall of words tumbles out of Kurt.
"Oh my god, you will not believe what my week has been like, it has been the most incredible thing you could ever imagine, I have to tell you-"
Elliott grabs his arm and pulls his inside to sit down and Kurt still doesn’t pause. He has to repeat himself several times, which is fine. It’s been five days and bottling all of this up has only left him giddy for the opportunity to talk about it. And though Elliott still seems to be in the process of waking up, Kurt can’t find it in him to feel bad; it’s two in the afternoon and Elliott should be awake for this gorgeous, glorious day.
“So- wait. He found your number in that library book?”
Kurt nods, squirming with eagerness to continue. It puts him even closer on the edge of the couch cushion where he’s perched, his hands clasped in his lap, fingers tangling and untangling together.
“But I thought the last guy who texted you scribbled it out.”
“Nope. Turns out he lied about it.” Kurt shrugs. “It’s gone now, though. I made Blaine prove it. And anyway, I’m kind of lucky that it was still there for Blaine to see.”
Kurt isn’t sure if he believes in fate — at least, not like he did in high school, when any of his expectations for romance were solely based on musicals and daydreams — but he does believe that, one way or another, they were meant to find each other. The sequence of events leading up to the moment their paths crossed feels too precarious to be a coincidence.
Kurt told Blaine as much last night during one of their whispered conversations, when he was sure Rachel and Santana were distracted and unlikely to eavesdrop.
“It’s like, ‘There you are. I’ve been looking for you forever,’” Blaine had said, awe woven into his words.
It stole Kurt’s breath, to know that Blaine feels the same way.
Elliott blinks, then sighs. He rubs a hand over the dark stubble along his jaw. Everything about him is heavy and lengthened with sleep. Kurt’s heart patters with energy, so ready to continue that he feels like he could run in circles around the coffee table while Elliott kickstarts his own brain into comprehension.
“You seem- really excited about it.”
Kurt smiles. “Of course I’m excited! Have you not been paying attention?”
“I- kind of left my brain back in my bed.” Elliott yawns into the back of his hand, stretches his other arm over his head with a groan. “When did this happen now?”
“Well, it started on Sunday when Blaine texted me for the first time-”
“How have you kept this going on for this long?”
Heat blooms along Kurt’s face as he shrugs up his shoulders, rolling his eyes to the ceiling.
“After we resolved our initial little tiff, we started talking and now we-” Kurt sighs, absently rubs his palm over his knee. “We talk all the time.”
If Kurt wanted to be technical about it, they’ve been wrapped in one long conversation, cut with necessary intervals of sleep and showers and such. From simple, shallow, getting-to-know-you chats to hearty debates to knee-deep talks about their pasts and their private thoughts. Taking place over several mediums — text and phone calls, but also Skype and Snapchat and Facebook messages and FaceTime — the formats like puzzle pieces, fitting to form the story of their on-going correspondence.
Kurt defines how close they are by a story he told the night before last. It was after he’d gotten home from a grueling shift — Wednesday afternoons are the worst at the diner for some reason — and he only wanted to talk about comforting things. He spoke quietly over the phone about a church play he was in at age six, the smallest little angel in the choir, wearing a wrinkled white cloak and a gold tinsel halo bouncing overhead. Kurt remembered hating how the headband his halo was attached to cut into the space behind his ears, but he sang through it when he saw how happy his mom was as she filmed him from the front row. Blaine has called him ‘angel’ ever since.
He hears Elliott snort a laugh and looks up, eyebrows furrowing as Kurt watches him shake his head, an amused smile growing on his face as he looks up toward the ceiling. He says, voice quiet like he’s mouthing it rather than speaking, “Oh my god, you are the weirdest guy I’ve ever met.”
Kurt’s heart drops in his chest, but only a fraction. His eyes flicker to his iPhone where he placed it on the coffee table; he almost reaches for it, every cell in him insisting that he will feel better with that phone in his hand.
“All you did was complain about the people texting you,” Elliott says. “It was like the end of your life every time you got a new text from some random.”
Kurt’s eyelids sink a little, his face angling away from Elliott. He straightens his spine, shrugs a shoulder. “I do recall being a bit upset.”
“Your life was worse than anyone who’s had the number eight-six-seven-five-three-oh-nine.”
Kurt exhales, loud and long, through his nose.
“You remember saying that-?”
“Yeah, yeah, I remember,” Kurt snaps, crossing his arms. He scoots back, slumping against the back of the couch. “What’s your point?”
“I just don’t understand how you went from hating every single person who bothered you to falling over this guy like a love-struck puppy.” Kurt’s eyes snap over to Elliott, who’s already staring back, the expression on his face knowing in a way Kurt wants to punch. With a scrunch of his nose, Elliott adds, “If you want me to be honest, I find it adorable.”
Kurt’s face and ears are hot, his heart all over the place with the mention of love.
He is so not in love.
(Just two hours ago, Blaine’s wide eyes shining in a snap Kurt had to screencap, a small smile on his pretty lips and his bowtie in soothing pink and blue checkered plaid, the caption reading Off on the job hunt I go!, but the focus is always brought back to those eyes, brighter than the sunlight illuminating his face, a collision of earthy colors that reflect warmth and goodness, such a breathtaking picture-)
Not in love.
“All I mean is that this is really unlike you.”
“Is that such a bad thing?” Kurt asks, feels his throat clench and wonders if his voice sounded like it wavered.
Elliott’s mouth twitches out a thin line, his eyebrows furrowing in thought. He shrugs, then pauses, then shrugs again with a shake of his head. “Not- necessarily.”
“Because-” Kurt cuts off to think, wanting to be very concise about the way he words his thoughts. “Because I get how it might not be the smartest thing I’ve ever done, or the safest.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean-”
Kurt laughs, his shoulders slumping with the empty jog of his chest. “After I bitched him out, he just- apologized like he did. And he seemed nice. And he made me laugh.”
Kurt smiles, his eyes finding a comfortable stop staring at the corner of the vintage rug underneath the coffee table. Even through his initial confusion, instantly corrected by memories of his other pranksters, Kurt could feel how witty he was trying to be — a backward sort of nerdy joke that could’ve gotten a laugh if Kurt weren’t absolutely furious that his number didn’t seem to be blocked out like he believed it had been. That sense of humor kept shining through, and once it was coupled with the sincerity of his apologies, it made Blaine the sweetest guy Kurt has ever spoken to.
To be honest, Kurt wanted to keep him talking. Not texting him even now, when he knows Blaine is busy filling out job applications, is making him anxious. Without any sort of contact, it’s like Blaine disappears. Like he had never existed at all.
“I guess I want to keep all of that for myself.”
“And there’s nothing wrong with that.” There’s a tense pause before Elliott speaks again, a humored apprehension in his voice. “How have Rachel and Santana reacted to this little thing you’ve got going on?”
Kurt winces, feels the answer write itself all over his face. “I haven’t- really- told them.”
Elliott’s jaw drops. “Oh my god, are you serious? How have you been able to fawn over your phone and keep those girls off your back?”
“It’s been a challenge, but I like to think of it as an exercise for my acting skills,” Kurt says. “A strict and necessary exercise.”
Minding the way he grabs for his phone, how often he lets himself be absorbed in it when he’s in their company. Rachel hasn’t noticed his notifications on Facebook or his new top best friend on Snapchat yet, and Santana may know how to hack his social media accounts but without any suspicion lurking in her mind, she’s wholly uninterested in the construct and intricacy of it — surprisingly, creeping without warrant isn’t her style.
Keeping his smile in check is always the hardest part of maintaining this secret. He’s had to download some apps dedicated to cute animal memes so he can have an excuse for cooing down at his phone.
“You’re not going to tell them, are you? Because I can only imagine what sort of drama it would cause.”
Kurt grimaces. “I think I’ll have to at some point, though. I don’t like hiding this from them, it feels like too big of a secret to keep.”
Elliott’s eyebrows pop up. “Ohh, is it getting that serious?”
Kurt scoffs, waving a hand at his friend as he turns his head away.
The way it keeps coming back around to the nature of his relationship with Blaine makes him nervous. He hasn’t dated seriously since Trevor, the self-righteous shining knight that put his number in the book, a guy he meet through a friend of Elliott’s at a Halloween party last year. Trevor has been his only experience with actual dating life and it shattered a lot of Kurt’s preconceived notions about relationships, even if they’d already been watered down since arriving to New York and discovering how romance takes place in ‘the real world.’
He doesn’t like putting those experiences next to what he has with Blaine, even if- technically? Yes, it is getting serious. As serious as a few days can get.
Blaine is incredible. He is amazing. He has brought so much life into Kurt’s days since Sunday.
But Kurt isn’t in love.
(Even though he is a little in love.
Not seriously, though.
But a little.)
*
The next day, Kurt tells Santana. That conversation is the verbal equivalent of popping a balloon. Or, more specifically, strangling it until it pops.
Her first react after his big reveal is to cackle.
The only thing she has to say when he shows her the snap he saved of Blaine is, “He dresses like Easter. What a dweeb.”
And all she can ask once he’s done is if Blaine’s a sex offender, or if he sends random dick pics, or if he talks about dreaming of the way Kurt’s skin smells.
“This isn’t funny to me, Santana!” Kurt shouts. “If you’re going to keep making fun of us, then you can just forget I ever told you anything. And you can forget ever calling me a friend again.”
A frown touches Santana’s lips, and though he’s not sure he would totally drop Santana over this, he’s satisfied to see that she is affected by his threat.
Until a puff of a cry pushes out of her mouth, now pouty and pinched, her shoulders shaking with her put-on sobs.
“Oh, oh no? Kurtie won’t be my friend anymore? How will I ever make it through the rest of first grade?”
His chair screeches across the floor as he scoots back from the table, storming to his room to the sound of her witch laughter.
*
The following day officially turns it into a week since he 'met' Blaine, and after consideration more carefully executed than he’s processed so far, Kurt decides to tell Rachel.
He’d hoped for something less cruel than Santana, maybe something that didn’t make him think so much like Elliott had.
Somehow, though, it turns out both better and worse.
“I don’t think I would trust some random person who thought it would be funny to prank me.”
Kurt slumps back against his chair, the spring squealing underneath it. His eyes bore into the high ceiling as he says, “For the last time, Rachel, it wasn’t personal. And even so, he at least apologized.”
“So? I know I don’t go around texting people I don’t know when I’m bored. Honestly, he doesn’t seem to know how to use his time constructively.” She tucks her blanket closer around her body, burrowing deeper into her corner of the couch. “I think you could do better.”
Kurt breathes deeply through his nose, squeezing his phone in his hand.
“You wanna see the picture again?”
Rachel rolls her eyes as she gives a laugh. “He’s handsome, I know, I saw that. That doesn’t mean you should trust him. You’ve never actually met him face to face, so how can you, you know, get a feel for who he really is without that personal element?”
“We’ve talked about plenty of personal things. He probably knows more about me than anyone, including you.”
She frowns at him, but he doesn’t let himself feel guilty. It’s not a lie – he’s been more confessional with Blaine than he has been with Rachel or his father or even his diary when he tried keeping up with one. Embarrassing thoughts and memories lose their irksome auras when he has Blaine to draw them out of him.
There’s no way he could express that to Rachel, though, if she only sees Blaine as a strange little stranger.
“I’m just worried about how safe you’re being,” she says. “It’s always the charming ones you have to watch out for.”
Her voice is gentle as she speaks, and no matter how much Kurt wants to rage against it, he can’t. She just- doesn’t understand, and Kurt doesn’t feel like arguing anymore.
His phone vibrates in his hand. He’s sure it’s from Blaine. And yet, for the first time all week, Kurt doesn’t want to look at it.
*
“You seem quiet tonight.”
Kurt chuckles, yanking the blankets over his head and getting comfortable with the pillows. He doesn’t have to hide or mind his voice anymore since he’s told Santana and Rachel, but it still feels necessary. Rather than taking measures to keep from being found out, he wants to take them so he can save this from being tarnished any further.
It seems like keeping Blaine to himself had been the right idea, after all.
“Sorry,” Kurt says. He sighs, already starting to feel the stuffy air trapped under the blanket with him. “Some things have happened over the past couple of days and- it’s been some pretty tough stuff to hear.”
He hasn’t told Blaine about the talks he’s had with his friends about them. Bringing that negativity into their conversation feels like too much of a shame. He’d rather stay happy for as long as he can make this last.
Because, really, how long can this last?
Blaine has mentioned his own friends giving him flak about chatting up a guy he found in a library book, but he’s never dived much deeper beyond a nonchalant, eye-roll of a comment. Kurt knows, though, that the world will press in on them. Blaine will find a job and get busy and forget about Kurt, or Kurt will land that internship at vogue.com and get busier and forget about Blaine.
They are words on a screen, voices over a line, pictures that disintegrate in seconds if you don’t save them fast enough.
They are not substantial. They are wholly temporary.
The thought of losing this temporary thing hurts Kurt’s heart. He hasn’t been this happy in months, hasn’t smiled this much in months. Endings have always been terrible things to Kurt, and it will kill him to see this one come to pass.
Blaine’s voice is a gentle, coaxing note in his ear saying, “Hey,” to recapture his attention.
“Sorry. Again.”
“It’s fine, angel, don’t worry. I just wanted to see if I could possibly cheer you up?”
A smile blooms on Kurt’s face before he can stop it. In the back of his mind, a voice like Santana’s tells him that it’ll be some inappropriate picture, an offering that says, How can you be sad when my hot bod exists? But Kurt knows beyond a doubt that Blaine isn’t anything less than a gentleman. Polite and modest even when Kurt would maybe enjoy a picture of him shirtless. Earnest and good like he’s being now.
“You can certainly try,” Kurt says, gliding his fingers along the soft underside of his comforter in front of his face.
“Okay, well- And stop me if I’m going completely off course here.”
“Of course,” Kurt says. He hears the stilted suspicion of his voice and bites the inside of his cheek, hoping that Blaine didn’t pick up on it.
Blaine seems distracted, though. Nervous, his sigh loud enough for the speaker to pick up, a very faint “okay” audible but clearly not meant for Kurt. It serves to pique Kurt’s curiosity even further, tension lining his muscles.
“Alright, so. I know that it's only been a week today, but I’ve- I’ve enjoyed talking to you so much, Kurt.”
Kurt’s smile ignites on his face again, growing wide, making his cheeks ache. “I’m- happy to hear that. I’ve enjoyed talk to you, too.”
“I- I wish you could see how much I’m smiling right now.” Blaine laughs, quiet and giddy, and it bubbles up in Kurt’s chest, makes him feel like giggling, too. “You’ve become- so important to me over the past few days, and I would- I would really like to meet you.”
His breath catches in his throat, heart hammering in his chest. The warm air under the blanket pushes down on him, crowds him until he has to sit up, light and cool air gliding over his skin and raising goosebumps.
His mouth is open, but he’s not sure what to say.
No? The thought of denying Blaine makes everything in him recoil, his body rejecting the thought of losing such an amazing opportunity.
Yes? Even if he hadn’t wanted to hear it, Rachel’s caution has planted seeds of doubt in him. The safety Blaine lulls him into with his words, how accustomed Kurt’s grown to his voice, could very well be an illusion, if all the internet-wary adults are right.
…A thousand times yes? That just sounds desperate, no matter how you spin it.
Blaine’s voice clamors over the speaker to say, “I mean, if you’re comfortable with it, but if you aren’t then of course we don’t have to. I just thought that it would be nice to see each other in- Well, I don’t want to say ‘in real life,’ but-”
“In person?” Kurt says, breathless.
At the same time, Blaine sounds as if he can finally breathe, his voice a grateful sigh.
“Yeah. In person. If you’d want to.”
Kurt wants to. He wants to see Blaine all in one three-dimensional, completely solid, warm and real piece. He wants those eyes on him, wants to see how they shine without filters or grainy photo quality. He wants to hear his voice in person, make him laugh and hear it and see it in real time. Wants to feel the way he hugs, and not only because of how nice his arms look in pictures – though that’s another thing he’s eager to encounter in the flesh.
And yet.
His friends have added new dimensions to it. Ramifications, implications, boundaries and potential dangers.
Is it getting that serious?
Yes.
But-
It’s always the charming ones…
“Kurt?”
“Sorry, sorry. I’m just- trying to process it.” He scoots backward to the pillows until his back is against the headboard. “When would we do this?”
“I was thinking, maybe, tomorrow evening, if you’re free?”
Kurt’s eyes blink wide. “That’s so soon.”
“I know, I know, I just- really want to see you. And I know that that might seem a little- intense, all things considered. I meant it, though, if I’ve made you uncomfortable, all you need to do is tell me and I promise I’ll stop.”
Kurt isn’t sure what to tell him. The thing is, he can picture the worried pinch between Blaine’s eyebrows, the tense line of his mouth, his pajama-sleeved arm wrapped around a pillow like he does when it’s late and they’re talking. He collected these images through video chat and pictures, but that doesn’t change what the body language means.
And his voice is just so nice; he knows that that’s the weakest argument he has, but he’s never heard Blaine sound anything other than well-intentioned.
Kurt doesn’t believe Blaine would hurt him. He could be just as correct in that instinct as he might be mistaken in it.
All he can really trust in this moment is himself and his gut.
He pulls the blanket over his legs, asks, “And what exactly would this meeting entail?”
“Well, what I would really like to do is take you to dinner, if you would like that.”
Heat floods Kurt’s face, his heart pattering. He’d been expecting something more secluded – and Rachel would probably slap him across the face for even contemplating being okay with that – but going to dinner has a whole different atmosphere around it.
Kurt clears his throat quietly, resists voicing the thoughts bouncing around his mind (Date? Is this a date? Are you asking me on a date right now, are we going on a date? A date?) as he says, "I think I could be okay with that. Where would we go?”
“Gosh, I’m not sure. Somewhere nice.”
“I thought you were a broke college student.”
“I’m also a spoiled kid with a credit card my parents gave me.”
Kurt giggles, covering his mouth when he feels like he might be loud enough to draw attention from outside of his room.
“So?” Blaine says. Kurt can hear the smile in his voice. “What’s the verdict?”
Kurt sighs, stares at the clothing rack in the corner of his room. Already, he starts to plan out what he will wear.
“You really want to take me to dinner?”
“Indeed, I do.”
Warmth, radiating through the speaker, simmering under his skin.
“Okay.”