(AN: I wrote this over Thanksgiving as a gift for JerichoGurl2037 on deviantART for the Kurt/Blaine group's Secret Santa. She just said she wanted fic, and this was an idea I was kind of kicking around, so yay! In addition to the modified italicized quote at the end, inspiration from this fic comes from the fact that at one point, a couple of the StarKids had a Princess Bride poster in their apartment. Enjoy.)

Kissing Book

Kurt's first day at Dalton is the Monday after Thanksgiving. The Friday after Thanksgiving, Blaine invites him to spend the night.

"I'm sorry – what?" The words sort of tumble from Kurt's mouth, because there is no way Blaine has actually said what Kurt just heard.

"Spend the night," says Blaine, still grinning like there is nothing wrong with this picture.

"What, are we gonna tell scary stories and paint each other's nails?" Kurt smirks at Blaine through his computer screen even as he is kicking himself on the inside, don't ruin this, you imbecile, when will you ever get this chance again?

Blaine, because he is perfect, just laughs back. "If you want. I was thinking more like we'd play video games and then you'd crash after all your post-Thanksgiving shopping."

"And your roommate – "

"Won't be there, he's not coming back till Sunday."

"Well then why aren't you – "

"Thanskgiving's never really been that big a deal at my place." He's still smiling, and it's shifted from cute-perfect to charming-smoldering-perfect and Kurt is absolutely done for. "It'll be your first real taste of the boarder life, man, come on. I'm not taking no for an answer."

His brows crook mischievously, and no has totally left Kurt's vocabulary.

"You're going to be the death of me someday, you know," Kurt tells him, which is probably true.

"You seem a decent fellow," quips Blaine. "I hate to kill you."

Kurt's dad shouts down with a light's out, it's late!, and Kurt, praying for permission, complies before he can say too many goodbyes, or work out exactly what Blaine means.

-xxx-

Kurt spends Thanksgiving with his amazing newly-assembled family and the day after with Mercedes, shopping until they almost literally drop. As luck has it (okay, it is so not luck, Kurt specifically waits to ask until his father is sacked out in a turkey-coma on the easy chair in front of some football game or other) Kurt gets full permission to crash at Dalton that night, and Mercedes drives him there mid-evening once their shopping's over, since he doesn't have his overnight parking pass yet and technically Dalton's not supposed to have overnight guests on the holiday anyway.

"You owe me all the deets later, y'know," she says.

"Okay, A: of course," says Kurt, rolling his eyes, "and B: there are not going to be any deets. This is and forever will remain one-sided. Blaine thinks I'm like his retarded homo protege, I'm not even a blip on his screen."

They pull through the gate and around to the junior-senior boarders' parking lot, and Mercedes gives him a face. "Sure, sure," she says as she throws the brake. "Because uninterested guys totally send you texts that are like, Been thinking about you all day, I wanna – oh,what was it, gimme your phone – "

"Mercedes," Kurt whines, but she's already pulled it out of his hand and is scrolling through his backlogs trying to find it. She's going to have to scroll through about eight hundred of the same seven-letter messages to find anything else, though, and she quickly figures this out for herself.

"Damn, Kurt, do you really get like six of these every day?"

"Ch, no," he huffs, even though it's pretty much true. "Some days he just has to send more than usual. Like..." He turns away from her, and presses his lips thin. "Like when I had to tell you guys I was transferring. I needed – I needed an awful lot of courage, that day."

She frowns at him, because he's totally killed the mood, but he isn't all that sorry for it. It's still hurting him, to leave, almost as much as it would hurt him to stay. "Take your silly text messages and get outta my car, boy. Your dad's coming to get you tomorrow?"

"Yeah, either that or Blaine'll drive me."

"All the way to Lima, hmm? Not interested, he says."

He takes his phone back out of her grasp, and smiles at her, half in earnest and half in a desperate plea for her to shut up. "No matter what happens, you are my bestest of best friends, you know that, right?"

"Yes – "

"And it has to be true because it's brought me to use bad enough grammar that I would actually say bestest!"

"Kurt," she says, grinning and rolling her eyes, "I have to get back some time tonight, okay?"

He keeps smiling, spirits boosted about the whole thing, and grabs his (new and quite stylish) overnight tote from the back seat before heading up toward the Dalton dorms, waving back at her as she drives off.

And then feeling his stomach lurch down to his feet as he remembers what he's about to do, which is spend the night in the room of someone who texts him about six times a day and with whom, Kurt is afraid, he might be slightly in love.

No pressure.

The halls are oddly silent as Kurt climbs the stairs to Blaine's room, with nearly everyone else gone for the holiday. Kurt finally makes it there and knocks twice but gets no answer, so the third time he nudges lightly against the door and is pleasantly surprised to find it unlocked. "Blaine?" he calls out, and takes a few tentative steps in, and then.

Then.

Kurt freezes and – as miserable as it is, the poor thing is brand new but there is just no other possible reaction – drops his new bag straight onto the floor. Because there, jamming out a little to a small clunky radio, and clad in nothing but a thick navy-blue towel wrapped low around his hips, stands Blaine, and Kurt, who may be an honorary girl with too much fierce for one high school to hold, is not above moments of normal teenage boyhood, and literally cannot. Look. Away. He feels two spots of color bloom high in his cheeks. And then Blaine notices he's there.

"Kurt!" he – yelps? Did Blaine Walgreen just yelp? – and he spazzes and fumbles, knocking the radio to the floor and scrambling to clutch the towel tighter around himself. "I wasn't expec – I thought – later – " He flushes, too, and Kurt can watch the path of the red trace down, starting hot in his neck and creeping to his - oh, distractingly well-defined, Kurt has a couple inches on Blaine but with Blaine every inch most definitely counts – exposed chest.

"I knocked," Kurt says, as if that excuses this.

"The radio," says Blaine.

"Yeah."

"I was – I'm about to go take a shower," he explains, scratching the hand that isn't clinging to the towel like it's a lifeline into the back of his thick hair. "Just...hang tight here for a bit I guess, I'll be back. In a bit. So just chill."

"Yeah," says Kurt again, because he has just noticed the thin dark trail of hair that starts at Blaine's navel and follows down to below the line of the towel, and he's pretty much at a loss for any other words. Blaine hovers a little awkwardly until Kurt realizes that he needs to get around him and out the door to get down the hall to the showers, and then Kurt springs violently to one side to let him through, making sure not to touch him in the slightest as he maneuvers past. If Kurt were to come in contact with Blaine's bare skin he would not be responsible for what happened next.

The instant Blaine is gone from the room, the door shutting lightly behind him, Kurt lets out a breath he didn't realize he was holding. Maybe, he thinks, he should have expected this kind of ridiculousness. They were already suspending reality and logic enough for Blaine, the most gorgeous homosexual Kurt had ever laid eyes on, to have asked him, Kurt Hummel, of all people, to spend the night in his room. The weirdness can only escalate from there, and it most definitely has. Kurt is just proud of himself for not fainting.

Without the beautiful distraction in the room, Kurt is able to kind of look around at things. He's never been in Blaine's room before - the most he's ever seen of it is the sliver of wall and bookshelf directly across from his computer, which is always behind Blaine when they're Skyping. He stands kind of in the center and does a slow turn, taking it all in. Blaine's roommate is clearly kind of a slob, Kurt decides – he's left his bed unmade over the break and there are traces of dirty laundry threatening to escape from underneath it. Blaine, meanwhile, is tidier, but is also...

Well, kind of a giant nerd.

The books with the most prominence on his shelf are a thick stack of Broadway songbooks and the bright, colorful spread of all seven Harry Potters in pristine-looking hardback. Along the hutch above his desk are a string of action figures from some video game or other, and spread across his closet door and the wall beside his bed, side by side, are two large movie posters, one for the second Lord of the Rings and one, older, kind of catching at Kurt's heart, for The Princess Bride.

Kurt remembers that movie. Kurt remembers watching it with his mother, on days when he was home sick from school, and feeling a lot like stupid Fred Savage, but then never wanting it to end, and wondering if someday he would have a kiss so glorious. Kurt remembers, suddenly, that this is the film Blaine was quoting to him Tuesday night right before they signed off Skype, even without any knowledge of its significance to Kurt, and wonders how this stupid, beautiful, nerdy boy is possibly so perfect.

Speaking of perfect, perfection walks back in from the shower in a loose tee with the Dalton crest on it and an even looser pair of charcoal-grey sweatpants, hanging just about as low as the towel had earlier. His hair is damp and shaggy and he's taken out his contact lenses and Kurt, who at some point in his movie-poster-induced reminiscing had sunk to sitting on the edge of Blaine's bed, can only look up at him and kind of gawk. He really needs to get better about this.

Blaine flops down on the bed on his stomach, propping up on one elbow next to Kurt. "So I was thinking."

"Yeah?" says Kurt, and oh great we're back to this.

"In the shower. I do some of my best thinking in there, you know." He grins around his glasses. "But I kind of thought about...about your incident, with that Karofsky closet-case guy."

"Oh," says Kurt. "Oh."

"And I was thinking – I don't think that has to count," says Blaine. "As your first kiss, I mean. Especially since you didn't want it and you obviously weren't participating in it. It just kind of...happened to you. He skipped all the important parts."

The warmth Blaine still retains from his shower is radiating into Kurt, and Kurt, unable to control himself, slides down onto the bed next to Blaine, till they're both lying on their backs side by side. Between them, Blaine kind of threads their fingers together, and Kurt finally has to give in.

Blaine goes out of his way for Kurt, a lot, and it's not necessary at all but Kurt would never try to put a stop to it.

Blaine flirts with Kurt, a lot, and Kurt tries to tell himself that he's just misinterpreting everything, because there's no way anyone this wonderful could feel for him that way, but the denial is kind of stacking up.

Blaine likes Kurt, a lot. Possibly as much as Kurt likes him, if thinking about him in the shower is any indication.

His eye catches on the Princess Bride poster again and he remembers the part, near the end, with Buttercup's forced wedding, and what Westley said to her afterward. "I never said I do," he murmurs. "I didn't say it, we didn't do it."

A grin spreads across Blaine's face and he squeezes their hands together tighter. "Exactly."

Then Blaine rolls toward him, and they kind of move as one, until Kurt's lying just sort of under Blaine and Blaine's hovering over him, smiling smoldering perfect, and then he kisses him, the perfect kiss that Kurt has always dreamed of. The perfect kiss that was still sort of happening an hour later, Blaine tasting like soap and sweetness above him, when Mercedes started buzzing angry in Kurt's pocket and Kurt just sort of let the phone go.

-xxx-

(That day, he was amazed to discover that when Blaine was saying "Courage," what he meant was, "I love you.")