Not Right

Blaine tossed his notebooks aside, threw down his pen with satisfaction, and looked over at Kurt, who was seated cross-legged on the bed with his phone in his hand. "I'm done with my homework. Ready for our movie night?"

Kurt's eyebrows furrowed slightly in concentration and he held up a finger as his mouth silently spelled out the words his free thumb typed onto the tiny touch screen of his phone. Kurt looked up as he finished with a vague smile and said, "Let's do it! Are you hungry? I can get us something from the kitchen, I think Finn left some fruit and cheese behind."

Blaine crossed the room and knelt on the bed, about to reach for Kurt's hand and say that he'd love that, when the phone lying on the bed buzzed and Kurt's hand flashed out of reach as Kurt looked at the screen and grinned to himself at whatever was on it, his lips pressing together and turning up. "Okay," Kurt said, tearing his eyes away and looking distractedly back up at Blaine. "I'll be right back."

He disappeared down the stairs and Blaine heard a refrigerator door open in the kitchen below. At the same time, the screen of Kurt's phone lit up. Blaine ignored it and picked up the television remote from the bedside table, turning on the DVD player and getting the movie ready. When he returned to sit on the edge of the bed and wait, the phone buzzed yet again with an incoming text message.

Blaine frowned and cocked his head to listen downstairs… Kurt could still be heard in the kitchen. Who would need to contact Kurt that badly? He remembered Kurt's small, secretive smile in the choir room earlier that day as he checked his phone and for some inexplicable reason, this troubled Blaine. The phone, as if reading Blaine's thoughts, vibrated another time, and now he leaned over to read the ID showing up against the backlit screen. "Chandler," he read, and his brow furrowed at the unfamiliar name.

Without really thinking about it, Blaine's finger reached out, almost unbidden, and pressed the little "Open" button. One text after another, the conversation stretched on and on, over the entire day and into yesterday, Kurt answering each obviously seductive message from Chandler with something equally unashamedly flirty.

As Blaine scanned through the dozens of texts, he felt the nagging, troublesome insecurity that had been there all day bubbling up inside him, leaving an unsettling swirling sensation in the pit of his stomach and squeezing in on his chest and around his throat. He tried to shake it off, wondering when he'd become so paranoid. They were just texts. So why did they feel so wrong? The phone was still in his hand and Blaine was still wrestling with this when Kurt's voice broke into Blaine's thoughts, "Hey, I got the cheese plate… our Being Bobby Brown marathon can officially begin."

Blaine looked up, fully intending to brush the worrisome feeling aside and say something about the movie, but what came out instead was, "Who's Chandler?"

The moment he met his boyfriend's gaze and saw the defensiveness settle there, Blaine knew that something was wrong, from the tightening of Kurt's eyes and the stiffening of his mouth. "Why are you going through my phone?" Kurt's voice was eerily flat and measured.

"I'm not going through your phone," Blaine said quietly, looking back down quickly at the phone in his hands because suddenly looking directly at Kurt made him feel bare and exposed. "It's just that it keeps buzzing." He blinked down at the green and blue blurbs of text, the state of numb disbelief he'd been in fading too quickly and leaving behind an uncomfortable stirring in his chest. "Because Chandler won't stop texting you," Blaine heard himself continuing. "'When we go to New York, let's go to the front of the Plaza and reenact the end of The Way We Were,'" he read off the phone, rising from the bed and moving away as Kurt reached out for the phone and commanded tonelessly, "Give me that."

"Can you sing into my voicemail, I want to make your voice my ringtone?" Blaine kept reading incredulously, backing up against the wall as Kurt circled him, the words seeming even worse when he was reading them out loud and when Kurt was being so desperate to hide them instead of assuring Blaine that it was nothing.

"Give me my phone," Kurt demanded more persistently, his voice hardening.

"There are literally dozens of texts between the two of you," Blaine said, pulling further away. "You know how many times you've texted me in the past two days? Four. And three of them were about finding peach-colored shoe polish."

"Why are you getting so upset?" Kurt asked almost angrily, holding his hands out as if that would just push the problem away. "This is all innocent."

"This is cheating, Kurt," Blaine said, and as soon as the words were out, he wished he'd kept them trapped under that pressure bearing down on his chest, because letting them escape into the air like that made them awful and real and true, and suddenly the backs of his eyes were prickling uncomfortably, and no, because this wasn't what he did. He didn't lose it because of something stupid like this. What he did was pummel a punching bag until everything disappeared into a cloud of sweat and rage and ferocity.

Kurt was saying something, giving some sort of defensive dismissal, and Blaine caught the last few words of his sentence, "You used to text Sebastian all the time, you would call him, even."

"But I didn't like him!" Blaine protested, unable to believe that he was the one having to defend himself, and about this again. "And all of those texts were… family friendly."

"You like this guy," Blaine said, holding up the phone. The words were meant to come out sounding strong and stern and angry, but his throat tightened without his volition and his voice trembled and caught and ended up just sounding pathetic and hurt.

Kurt looked away, obviously trying not to roll his eyes, and didn't deny it. "I like the way he makes me feel," he said, as if that justified all of it. "I mean, when was the last time you complemented me, or told me how special I was?"

"I transferred schools to be with you!" Blaine said, raising his hands helplessly and remembering bitterly how only months ago Kurt had breathlessly insisted that transferring for him would just lead to resentment. "I… I changed my whole life!" He laughed hollowly, choking on his own breath. "That doesn't make you feel loved?"

And now there were definitely tears in his eyes, but Blaine couldn't bring himself to care, because Kurt was continuing, "You don't know what it's like being your boyfriend, okay?" Blaine could only freeze in place and stare speechlessly, because Kurt had never before said anything to make Blaine think that he was a problem, something to be tolerated and dealt with. This was what Kurt really thought of him. Underneath it all, when he was angry enough to be honest, Kurt thought of Blaine as a burden. And it was no wonder. He was the anchor weighing Kurt down, holding him back, the single lasting complication that was tethering all of Kurt's big New York dreams to stupid Lima, Ohio.

The rest of what Kurt said was lost to Blaine as he fought the tightening in his chest and pushed his tongue against the inside of his cheek in an effort to choke back the sob rising in his throat and force his twisted mouth back into a normal shape. "Then talk to me," he begged. "Tell me that you're unhappy. But don't" - Blaine forced himself to say the words - "cheat on me."

"I feel like I have taken crazy pills," Kurt snapped, and Blaine tried not to flinch away, because Kurt was yelling at him, and his trust in Kurt had been the only absolute thing he'd had left. Now that it was vanished, there was nothing between him and the rest of the world to protect him. "I didn't cheat on you!" Kurt snatched the phone from Blaine's now-limp hand. "I'm really sorry if- if this made you upset," Kurt said, sounding anything but sorry, "but it's… it- it's okay."

How could Kurt not see that of course he was upset? Blaine raised his eyebrows slightly at Kurt's preposterous conclusion and insisted quietly, "It's not right." He laughed bitterly under his breath and then said in a stronger tone, "But it's 'okay.'" Blaine's voice formed imaginary quotation marks around the words Kurt had used.

Kurt's face was unforgiving and unyielding, as if made of stone, and suddenly it was too much, and Blaine turned around, quick, and walked towards the door, his hand pressed against his mouth.

"Where are you going now?" Kurt asked impatiently, and Blaine could just feel the condescending eye-roll that accompanied the question, even though his back was to Kurt.

"I'm going home," he said thickly, pausing in the doorway, but not turning around.

"Blaine, you're blowing this completely out of proportion! It was just a few texts, it's really not a big deal."

Of course it wasn't a big deal to Kurt; Kurt wasn't the one who was going to be left behind. And just to make everything topple over the verge of what Blaine could bear, it finally fully struck him that he'd already lost Kurt, lost him the moment a boy named Chandler asked for his number.

Blaine left without another word, not sure that he could speak if he wanted to, grateful that Finn was holed up in his room playing video games and Burt was in D.C., because it meant that there was no one to see him as he fled to his car and drove away, one arm clutched across his chest as if that could keep it from ripping itself apart.

Cooper jumped up from the couch the moment Blaine slammed the door shut behind him and was calling "What's wrong?" before he could even make it up the stairs.

Blaine ignored him anyway and almost ran to his room, kneeling on the bed and biting his lip hard and clenching his fists so tightly that his nails dug into the flesh of his palms and left purple crescent-shaped bruises there.

"Squirt," Cooper's voice issued from the doorway, and Blaine growled under his breath, because, honestly, the only other person he'd hate more to see him in this state was Kurt, and it was already too late for that.

"Go away," he snarled, and then winced, because his voice was rough and croaky and sounded God awful.

"I know we haven't been close, but you can tell -"

"I'm telling you to leave me alone."

Blaine heard Cooper's weight shift and knew he'd left, and he was just scrolling through the play lists on his iPod because music was the only thing he knew that could encompass something so unspeakably awful, when he felt Cooper's presence return.

"I found a pair of Dad's old boxing gloves," Cooper said almost hesitantly, as if he would have been unsure of himself if uncertainty wasn't an emotion that Cooper was entirely unfamiliar with. "Do you want to spar with me? See if I'm any better at it than I was that time you tried to teach me and I got frustrated and stormed out?"

Blaine looked up over his shoulder at Cooper's hopeful smile, and found himself grinning weakly back in return. "You know you're going down, right?" he teased halfheartedly.

"Don't underestimate me. I'm not going to go easy on you just because you're upset."

Blaine smirked and hopped off the bed, grapping the tape to wrap his hands with as he went. "Have you ever gone easy on me for any reason?"

"That's the kid brother I know," Cooper said proudly, slinging his arm loosely around Blaine's shoulder's as they left the room together.

It had been torture to sit next to Kurt through their shared classes and pretend that everything was normal. Blaine couldn't look at him. He thought that he'd want to make Kurt feel as rejected as he had, but every time he glanced over at the boy next to him, Blaine's stomach turned over and remembrance of the previous night's argument tore through him. Blaine was furious that he couldn't even piece himself back together enough to prove to Kurt that he didn't need anybody's love to be perfectly fine.

It was a relief to stand up and announce firmly that he was ready when Mr. Schue called for anyone who'd finished their song for the week. "This is for anyone who's ever been cheated on," he said, setting his teeth angrily as, finally, the song gave him something to hide behind so that he could say what he really wanted to.

"This is insane," Kurt interjected coldly as the drummer began playing. "I didn't cheat on you."

Blaine ignored him, because this was his moment, his song, his feelings, and he didn't care if it meant Kurt had to sit back on a stool and take it and listen. He began singing, and was vaguely aware that the members of the Glee Club were staring back and forth between himself and Kurt with wide, shocked, expressions, but he hardly saw them. In an awful, twisted way, the only thing that he could look at now was Kurt, just when he'd so wanted to be cold and detached. This had been supposed to show Kurt that he didn't care, but even he could hear that his voice was raw with pain and betrayal.

Kurt, however, narrowed his eyes and glared at him, his entire demeanor exuding irritation and disbelief and hostility, and it made Blaine angry enough to keep going… Until he snapped that he'd rather be alone than unhappy with just a bit more venom than he had intended, and Kurt's entire expression crumbled. Kurt brought his hand up to his face as if to hide it and his eyes lost their cold glare and became human again. Blaine was left feeling remorseful, which was unbelievably irritating, because hadn't this been what Blaine had wanted in the first place, to make Kurt feel as hurt as he did?

Now that he had to face everything he'd felt since yesterday, cruelly reflected back at him on Kurt's face, Blaine began to crack. He wished he'd bitten his tongue and held back the comment about cheating, because now he'd put Kurt's pain and his on display for everybody to see.

Just when his voice was about to falter, because suddenly he was uncertain about all of this, the song, their relationship, everything, Santana's voice chimed in and filled the tiny gap. In an instant, the whole Glee club was in support of him, singing along with him, meeting his eyes instead of merely casting the covert, nosey glances he'd been getting before.

"Was it really worth you going out like that?" Blaine sang, and he found himself hesitating as if for an answer before he moved on to the next line, because he really did want to know, to understand what he'd done wrong that made him so inadequate to everybody he'd ever tried to love. But he wasn't going to get an answer now, or probably ever, because even if there was one, Kurt was probably saying it to Chandler instead of to him. With that thought, Blaine gave up and let himself release his tenuous grip on self-control, because really, what was the point in holding anything back when there was nothing left to lose?

He screamed out the last lines of the song, almost sobbing them, and then stood for a moment, breathing heavily, oblivious to the fact that everyone was clapping as loudly as they ever had and many were whooping enthusiastically. He was finally fully meeting Kurt's eyes, and everything that had happened in the past twenty four hours came crashing down on Blaine. It was over. He'd ruined it. Why couldn't he have just swallowed his stupid pride and put the phone back down and acted normal and let Chandler fulfill everything that he wasn't good enough for?

He whirled around while he was still able to, hardly containing the rage thrashing in his chest, and nearly ran to the locker room, wrestling with the lock on his locker until it finally yielded with a click and yanking the door open, allowing it to crash loudly against the lockers behind it. Blaine tore off the vest he wore and then fought with the suffocating buttons at the top of his collar, infuriatingly small under his trembling fingers. Finally he got that off, too, and then ripped off his undershirt, letting his nails scratch along the sides of his torso as it came off over his head because that, at least, was a pain he could control. He finished changing and shoved on his boxing gloves and then tore into the bag in a fury, focusing all his energy into keeping his shoulders low and even and putting as much power as he possibly could into each punch. As long as he was fighting, his first instinct would be to protect himself, and he would be able to keep the broken bits of himself in one piece.

It took Blaine several minutes to realize that tears were running down his cheeks, mingling with the sweat that coated his face and dripped off his jaw, but once he did, he gave up and sank onto the concrete floor of the locker room, shaking with the exertion it took not to scream. He pressed his forehead against his fists, not caring that his boxing gloves were disgusting and grimy and smelled awful. His chest was ripping itself apart while, at the same time, something terribly heavy was crushing in on it, making his breath come in weird shuddery gasps. So this is why they call it a broken heart.

Not even the song had been right. He had imagined himself strong and angry and confident to the point of arrogance. Instead, all he'd been was hurt and he hated himself for not being able to give himself at least that much dignity.

Suddenly, the door opened and there was the click of high heels coming across the floor, and Blaine wiped the back of his hand hurriedly across his face and tried to hide his tears, even as more pooled in his eyes. A strong female voice said in an impressed tone, "That song was badass."

Blaine flinched, curling further into himself as if becoming small enough would make him invisible. "Get out," he hissed, not even bothering to be embarrassed that his voice sounded wet and pathetic instead of the fierce growl he'd been going for.

"Feisty," Santana remarked, and Blaine didn't need to be looking at her to hear the smirk in her voice. "You look like hell."

"Screw you," Blaine snapped, and this time he succeeded in sounding properly angry.

"Did he really come back at three?" She asked, and her voice was curious, but not in the nosey way that would have ticked Blaine off.

"No," Blaine said, and he was surprised to find that it was accompanied with a chuckle.

"I didn't think so," Santana declared, sliding down the wall of lockers to sit next to Blaine, who jerked slightly away so that most of what was facing her was just his back. "He's not the type."

Blaine didn't answer, and they both fell silent, for so long that he was beginning to wonder if Santana had left, when she piped up again, "You know what's good? Revenge cheating."

"Very funny."

"I mean it," she protested, "but I guess you're not the type for that either."

"I don't want to punish him," Blaine said, somehow compelled to explain even though she hadn't really asked. "I want him to not have cheated on me." His voice broke slightly, and Blaine felt himself flush and cleared his throat.

"You'll be fine," Santana said, and she sounded so fierce and sure that, for a moment, Blaine believed her.

The moment passed, and he shrugged. "I guess so."

"You guess? Come on, Anderson. You're 'gonna make it anyway,' remember?" she quoted the song.

"I don't want to be alone," he admitted, even though the lyrics of the song had said just the opposite.

"It'll be Hummel's loss." And then, almost as if it had been obvious, an afterthought, she added, "And you'll still have me."

As she said this, Blaine realized that, while he'd been fixated on Kurt leaving for New York, Santana was another person who'd be leaving him at the end of the year. He turned around to face her, and before she could express any surprise or have time to react, he threw his arms around her and pulled her into a tight hug.

"Gross, you're all sweaty!" Santana protested, but at the same time, her arms circled around Blaine and she returned the hug.

"Too bad," Blaine muttered into her hair, though he was about to let her go because he knew how much she hated showy displays of emotion like this. But she didn't let go when he loosened his grip, so Blaine sank gratefully back into her touch and stayed there until they heard the raucous laughter of the football players returning from practice.

When the bell rang to signal the end of class the next day, Blaine had leapt from his seat in the choir room and nearly fled from the room. Kurt had decided to sing his song at the very start of class, and Blaine had spent the rest of the period sitting stiffly in his plastic chair, his arms crossed tightly over his chest as if they could keep his heart from jumping out of it and silently willing himself to not, not, start crying again or storm out.

Now that he'd finally escaped, Blaine stood in the hallway, staring into his locker at the photo of himself and Kurt pinned with a magnet to the very back of the locker. The pictures he kept in plain view on the inside of the door were all pretty and planned, both of them always just waiting for the camera to snap the photo. This one, though, was blurry and slightly out of focus, and both their expressions were caught off guard, but it was beautiful. In it, Blaine was in the middle of laughing at something Kurt had just said, and he'd turned to face the camera, but his mouth was still open in a grin and his eyes were crinkled at the corners. Kurt was holding out his hand as if telling the person on the other side of the camera to stop, but his eyes were on Blaine and even through the grainy quality of the photo, Blaine could see the love in them.

When was the last time he looked at me like that? Blaine wondered, and then as he found that he couldn't remember, he caught sight of the stuffed animal lying half-underneath a Calculus textbook, the Margaret Thatcher dog's huge eyes staring up at him. Just a couple of weeks ago, Kurt had been surprising him with it from behind his locker door and then sweetly taking his hand and telling him that he understood, that family stuff was hard.

What had gone so wrong in between then and now?

As if fate had somehow read Blaine's thoughts and twisted them around into a cruel joke, Kurt's voice suddenly said coolly from behind Blaine's open locker, "Well? Did you like the song?"

Blaine jumped and glanced at Kurt, then dropped his eyes quickly and nodded, staring at the ground. "Yeah," he said. He took a moment to swallow and get over his surprise, and then let his eyes flicker back up to Kurt's face for a moment as he added, "You did Whitney justice."

Blaine stood, one hand on his locker door, waiting for Kurt to say what he'd really come for or for him to head to class, but instead Kurt exhaled in a huff and said impatiently, "That's it?"

"What's it?" Blaine asked, wondering what it was he could have already said wrong, and thinking that maybe that was their problem, that apparently his responses were off all the time and he didn't even realize it.

"Blaine, I sang my heart out to you, and all you have to say is that I did Whitney justice? What's wrong with you?" Kurt was looking expectant, nearly bouncing on the balls of his feet, his face looking like it did when he'd finished a number that everybody knew was spectacular and was waiting for Mr. Schue to comment on it.

"I don't know, why don't you tell me," Blaine said quietly, looking away again.

"How long are you going to hold this against me? I said I was sorry, how long is it going to take for you to stop blaming me for nothing?"

"Why do you keep on telling me that what I think is nothing?"

Kurt sighed and then said, rolling his eyes, "You know that's not what I-"

"But it is, Kurt, it's exactly what you meant," Blaine interrupted. "It doesn't matter to you at all that you cheated."

"Because I didn't."

"That's why I'm still 'holding it against you.' You didn't say you were sorry, you sang me a song so that I could run into your arms and tell you that what you did is okay. And how can you even apologize for something that you don't think you did?"

"I'm sorry you're upset," Kurt repeated, as if it was the same thing.

"But you're not sorry you cheated on me." Kurt opened his mouth impatiently to argue, but Blaine shut his locker and looked up at him. "You know what? Forget it. I should have expected this after your song. You'll 'never change all your colors for me,' right?

Kurt stared. "So, what? This is it? You're breaking up with me?"

"No!" Blaine said quickly, frightened by how calm Kurt seemed about that prospect, and then he looked down, embarrassed at how desperate that had sounded. "I don't forgive you, but that doesn't mean I'm quitting. I don't just give up and go flirt with some other guy when I don't like what someone's doing."

Kurt's eyes tightened at that, and Blaine winced. "Okay. That was out of line, I know-"

"No," Kurt interrupted, sounding cold again. "Go ahead. Say it. Get it all out."

"I- I just wish you'd told me how bad it was to be my boyfriend. I would have listened." Blaine was suddenly exhausted as he realized that this was almost exactly what he'd said in Kurt's bedroom. Nothing he had tried to do had changed anything.

"It's a little hard to tell you when you never want to be around me in the first place!" Kurt snapped, and then the late bell rang before Blaine could ask what that was supposed to mean. Kurt turned and walked off in the direction of his next class, leaving those parting words to ring in Blaine's ears and make him wonder if they were true.

Blaine didn't look up as the phone in his Chemistry class rang and the teacher went to answer it. He kept on scribbling down notes, thinking happily of the shot glass Puck had given him, and almost forgetting about Kurt in the realization that he'd been accepted by all the other members of the Glee club as one of them, even when they were just weeks away from graduating and moving on to their separate lives-

"Blaine!" the teacher repeated sharply, and his head snapped up from the absent-minded doodle he'd been forming in the margin of his notes. "Miss Pillsbury wants you down in guidance now."

"Right now?" Blaine asked, his brow furrowing.

She nodded. "Take your things with you, she said it might be a while."

Blaine frowned, gathering his notes together into a messy stack and shoving them into his messenger bag. His mind raced through the past few days as he tried to think of what he'd done that would get him into trouble. There had been storming out of Glee club in the middle of their practice… but that had been after school anyway, and at least one person in the New Directions was almost always upset about something, so it wasn't uncommon for someone to burst out and leave… and he had been absent-minded and preoccupied in the past couple of days, but not nearly as much so as the girl who slept through Latin class next to him every day…

By this time, Blaine had reached Miss Pillsbury's office, and his eyebrows shot up as he saw Kurt already seated inside. "Blaine, have a seat," Miss Pillsbury said as Blaine knocked lightly on the edge of the doorway. "No need to look so worried. Did you think you were in trouble?"

"Yeah," Blaine said, staring around at his surroundings, a little lost in the pastel-themed room scattered with numerous but very meticulously organized pamphlets whose covers bore cliché little sayings. He hadn't been in this room since the morning his parents came to finalize the papers for his school transfer, and he still wasn't entirely used to the idea that, at McKinley, guidance counselors were more like therapists than disciplinarians, and that students seemed to seek out their guidance counselors for personal reasons, as if an adult they didn't know was going to care about their petty problems, let alone be expected to fix them.

"This is nothing to be concerned about," Miss Pillsbury assured him sweetly, and Blaine couldn't help but like her for her so purely good intentions, even if she was one of the most oblivious people he'd ever met, with exception of Brittany. "Have a seat and relax."

Blaine slipped his messenger bag off his shoulder and sat cautiously down next to Kurt, casting him a skeptical glance as he did so, already wary, because why was Miss Pillsbury telling him to relax if there was really nothing to worry about? "I'm a little confused as to what we're doing here," he said, narrowing his eyes and looking as Miss Pillsbury critically.

"Well, um, Kurt said that you two might need a little couple's counseling," she explained cheerily, as if it was entirely normal for her to be interjecting herself into their business.

"Are you qualified for that?" Blaine asked, giving Kurt another perplexed glance, because this seemed so unlike him, though nothing Kurt had done recently seemed like something that the boy he fell in love with would do.

"Not really… or at all," she said, and then, entirely unfazed, continued, "But Sam and Mercedes came to talk to me, and, you know, I think they found it pretty helpful."

"Yeah. I'm pretty sure they broke up," Blaine said, and was disappointed when the note of irony in his voice was entirely lost upon her in the midst of her ingratiatingly optimistic response.

"Brutal honesty is the cornerstone of any relationship," she forged on, "and I want you to feel like this is a safe space for you to air your differences."

As if having spectators to my collapsing relationship would make me feel any safer. But honesty was something that they needed, so Blaine seized the opportunity since it was clear he wasn't going to get out of having this conversation. "Okay," he said quickly, before Kurt could jump in and monopolize the conversation. "Well, first of all, Kurt has been texting this guy." Blaine could hear Kurt sighing impatiently in the background and knew without looking that he was rolling his eyes, but he wasn't about to let Kurt interrupt so early on. "And I got…" Honesty, Blaine reminded himself, "… really upset. Although, a while back, I was- I was sort of doing the same thing-"

Blaine looked over at Kurt, wanting to make sure Kurt knew he was being acknowledged, but Kurt was already speaking the moment he hesitated.

"With a guy who almost blinded him!" Kurt added, as if that made a difference. "Blaine, I sang you a song to express my regrets."

But that doesn't take back what you did. Instead of saying that, Blaine moved on, a million little offenses that he hadn't really even cared about when they'd happened springing to his mind. "Okay, if we're here to be 'brutally honest,' there are a few things I would like to change."

"I am actively listening," Kurt interrupted again in a tone that was self-satisfied and shut off and this was why therapy was stupid, Blaine thought, because people got so wrapped up in saying the right thing that there was no room in the midst of all the fake, sugar-coated lies to be any kind of honest.

"Well, for starters, Kurt has a tendency to snap his fingers at wait staff. The cheesecake is on it's way, Kurt, you don't have to snap your fingers, it's not gonna make it come any faster." Blaine knew that he was being petty as he snapped his own fingers as if to punctuate his point, but he was afraid that if he brought up the things that really mattered to him, he would give up too much of himself, say something that he'd never be able to undo or take back. And how could he trust Kurt anymore to show him that he cared about something, when all that seemed to have gotten him was having it thrust rudely back into his face?

"But, also, please stop slipping bronzer into my moisturizer," Blaine heard himself continuing, ignoring whatever Kurt had just said in reply, because this wasn't really about the finger-snapping or the bronzer at all.

"You look good with a little color," Kurt justified, and this made the pit of Blaine's stomach twist, because it was just another, though less significant, instance where what Blaine felt about something clearly didn't matter to Kurt at all.

Blaine stuck to what wasn't really important, because at least that couldn't be twisted around to prick him as soon as he said it, and he snapped, "I only use lotion on my hands, it looks weird if a person just has tan hands!"

Miss Pillsbury was saying something, trying to mediate, but suddenly Blaine was sick of pretending that things were fine when they weren't, so he ignored her and turned to actually look at Kurt, saying, "And while we're being perfectly honest, I don't like that with every conversation, we end up always talking about NYADA."

At this, Kurt's head snapped over to really see Blaine, and Blaine froze for an instant, terrified that he'd gone too far. But then Kurt narrowed his eyes, in a way that was contemplative instead of just skeptical, and Blaine knew that, for once, Kurt really was actively listening. It was too late to unsay the words, so he kept on going. "What song you're going to sing, what outfit you're going to wear to your call-back, how amazing New York is."

Blaine looked away for a moment and paused to take a breath, but this time, Kurt didn't have anything to add and was just watching and waiting, seeming surprised, but not angry. "And it's like… New York is the only thing we talk about now, Kurt." Blaine's voice broke, but now that he was finally saying everything he'd wanted to since Kurt had gotten his Finalist letter, he couldn't stop and the words tumbled out of their own accord, unstoppable, stronger than the dam that had held them back for so long. "And it's like-" Blaine glanced uncomfortably at Miss Pillsbury, "-it's like you can't even wait to get out of here." There was a beat of silence, and Blaine asked helplessly, "How's that supposed to make me feel?"

Kurt's face had softened and he looked almost remorseful, but he didn't say anything, and Blaine found himself somehow still talking. "In a few months, you're going to be gone. With this brand-new life, these brand new friends, this brand new everything, and I'm going to be right here. By myself." His voice caught on the word "friends," and suddenly he was almost in tears again, but Blaine couldn't bring himself to care. This was what Kurt had wanted. Brutal honesty. It wasn't his fault anymore if he'd just marred Kurt's joy of going to New York City.

"You're right," he added as he remembered Kurt's final words to him yesterday at his locker. "I have been distant." Blaine looked down and swallowed and tried to will himself to get it together and talk like a normal person. "And I'm sorry, but I'm just… I'm trying to practice what life is going to be like without you." Blaine looked up and met Kurt's gaze. "You are the love of my life, Kurt, and I am pissed off that I have to learn, for the next year, what being alone is going to be like."

And then the Kurt that Blaine had fallen in love with was back, as suddenly as he'd disappeared the moment he found Blaine with that phone in his hands. Now he was reaching out to take Blaine's hand, his face soft and earnest and loving. "But you're not going to be alone! I'm going to Skype you every day, and you're going to come visit me in New York every weekend, as far as I'm concerned." Blaine looked down and tried to smile, suddenly feeling like he'd made a fool of himself, but Kurt wasn't done yet. "But I promise, you aren't going to lose me."

"I love you so much," Blaine managed to whisper, and Kurt gave his hands a squeeze and whispered the words back. He smiled at Blaine and reached out, leaning over and wrapping his arms around Blaine's shoulders, pulling him close. Blaine welcomed the embrace and let himself melt into it, allowing his fingers to dig slightly into Kurt's back and pretending that he need never let go.

"I really am sorry," Kurt whispered into Blaine's ear, his breath moist and gently tickling.

"It's okay." Blaine buried his nose into Kurt's neck and inhaled the familiar smell that he hadn't realized he'd missed. And as Kurt pressed a kiss onto the side of Blaine's face, Blaine smiled genuinely and realized with an inexplicable conviction that this time the words were true, because they loved each other, and that was enough to make a couple thousand miles between them be perfectly okay.