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When Kurt had smirked in response to his suggestion that maybe they could go to Breadstix and then take a walk after the semester was over, Sam hadn't quite understood why. The snow had started right after Thanksgiving, and he'd had a bit more of an idea then. But running to his car to get to school and back home and to pick up and drop off Stevie at his piano lessons is, it turns out, not the same thing as attempting to take a romantic walk through the smaller of Lima's two parks at night. In December.
Now, in night air so cold it's turned into pain, Kurt laughs at him—not unkindly, Kurt's too cracked and chipped to ever turn away from genuine affection—and tucks his arm through Sam's. "Do you not get snow in Kentucky?" he asks, his words turning white as they pass his lips. Sam takes a moment too long to answer, transfixed by the sight, Kurt's beautiful voice turned visible, like if Sam tried he could reach out and maybe trap a song sung in that high, clear countertenor between his fingers.
"We do," he says after a moment, "but like. An inch." The snow they're crunching through now has been packed and scuffed by many shoes, but where the path ends the snow rises six or seven inches deep. "I didn't realize it would be—" He shivers. He has a winter coat, but it's threadbare—they haven't been able to get new clothes since the move—and tries to shift the arm Kurt is holding so that he can stuff that hand under his armpit.
"I did tell you we could just stay in and watch a movie," Kurt says, amused.
Sam sets his jaw. He'd said dinner and a walk, and they were going to do dinner and a walk, Yes, he'd underestimated how different the -50° nights of Ohio would feel from the 20° nights of Kentucky. No, he is not going to admit defeat.
Kurt has been hurt so much, and he has to show him… to show that he is trustworthy. Reliable. That even if Kurt hadn't given him the choice to keep his word way back in September, way back with the duets, he would have.
Kurt, a lifelong Lima resident, seems barely bothered by the cold. He's wearing a long duster with matching gloves, padded in a deep warm orange on the inside but cut along sharp geometric lines, and his cheeks are flushed, and the tip of his nose is amazingly red. He catches Sam looking and his gaze ducks down, shy, before he tilts his head back up and meets his eyes, smiling. Kurt is the bravest person he knows.
"Tell me what you're thinking," Kurt says. It's a game they've been playing with each other since—this all started. Tell me what you're thinking, one of them will say, and the other will oblige. It's how an awkward chance meeting between two ex-classmates at the park had turned into something truer and more intimate, sharing secrets about Kurt's new school and Sam's whole family… thing. It's how Sam had gotten the courage to ask him out. It's why he'd wanted to come here, to this park, after their first date. It fits that Kurt would ask him in the place where they met again, not as glee club members, not as classmates. As people who could be friends—maybe more—even in the absence of all of that.
"I'm thinking," Sam says, "that you're beautiful."
Kurt just looks at him with those pale, astonishing eyes, and he doesn't smile again, though Sam can feel the joy radiating from him as palpably as the warmth of his breath. Kurt sways forward, leans up. Sam closes his eyes—
Kurt's lips brush against his cheek, cold and sweet, warm breath curling around Sam's ear and making the returning cold air sting even harder. He leans back, and Sam, eyes still closed, feels something wrap around his bare neck, tuck inside his coat. It's warm. It smells like Kurt. His scarf.
He opens his eyes when he feels Kurt step away, a hand going up to the scarf. It's so soft—what had Kurt said it was made of? Mino wool?—and so warm. He can't stop petting the nap of it, running his fingers over and over the gold-and-orange design worked into the fabric. Sun colors. Warm colors. "Why'd you do that?" he asks.
"You looked cold," Kurt says, and Sam isn't sure if he's explaining why the kiss or why the scarf or why he'd even looked twice at a dorky jock two years younger than him. Then Kurt pulls his glove off and takes Sam's own bare hand and tucks them both into the pocket of his duster—and Sam forgets to ask.
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