Blaine falls in love on a Tuesday morning in June while the Ohio sun burns red stripes on his neck.
(It's always a Tuesday)
He doesn't know his name, his favorite color, or even what his voice sounds like.
What he does know is he has cold blue eyes and shoulders set in defiance. He has a slim, athletic build and sports a pair of baggy jeans torn at the knees. His left arm is in a cast devoid of markings, and when he talks one side of his mouth raises slightly higher than the other. He skateboards with all the poise of a pro and the talent of a beginner.
And when his eyes meet Blaine's, just for a moment, he shines so bright Blaine has to turn away, instinctively afraid of being burned.
He's nothing like the boys Blaine's ever been attracted to, but he has an air of danger dogging him, and right then, it's exactly what Blaine needs.
Because really, what's summer meant for if not bad decisions?
"Hello, I'm in love with you," is very likely too blunt for a first introduction.
Unfortunately for Blaine, it's been two days and it's still the best he's come up with, though "I've decided you're going to be my bad influence summer fling," is currently running a close second.
He goes to the park every evening to sit on the bench and watch. He stays on the sidelines and observes a boy who looks more alive than Blaine ever knew how to be, and waits.
A week passes and Blaine still hasn't said a word. When the boy skids to a stop a few feet away from him his mouth opens but his voice fails him. He gets a peculiar look in return, and then he's gone again, back to his life filled to the brim with neon colors while Blaine watches from his world tinted grey.
It's easy to tell himself tomorrow, tomorrow on endless repeat; even easier to stop trying.
Some days Blaine isn't alone in his voyeurism.
There's an African American girl, about his age, who wears a glare that doesn't quite manage to cover up the hurt lurking underneath. Her dark hair whips around her face like a tornado in the summer breeze and she bores holes into the back of the boy's head for an hour.
The boy doesn't once look her way, and eventually she returns to her car and drives away.
(He wonders why she didn't go talk to him; he wonders why he's such a hypocrite)
When the engine revs up, whirring dust and dirt in his direction the boy finally turns around, his face inscrutable. He watches her leave for a moment, then returns to the half-pipe with renewed concentration and wipes out horrifically on his first jump.
(The bright crimson marring his ivory skin is almost sickeningly beautiful and Blaine finds himself mesmerized by the sight, his eyes soaking it in as though he'll never see again)
Other days a tall boy in dull plaid tones comes and tries to drag his boy away, saying words like Burt and lied and why that he can just hear echoing in the distance.Blaine thinks about going to help when the taller one wraps his hand around Kurt's wrist and starts pulling.
He doesn't, and pretends he isn't a coward.
The boy (Blaine wishes he knew his name; he thinks it must be something angelic, something elegant) yanks his arm out of the other boys grasp and starts yelling, mostly just a string of curse words. The other boys from the park form a ring around him and, raising his hands in surrender, the taller boy walks away.
Blaine's already painted him as the villain, the jealous ex in Blaine's future hypothetical love story, but confusion and fear paints the tall boy's face as he spares one last glance backwards before getting in his car.
There's a story there, one that can't be unraveled from stolen glances and eavesdropped conversations, and Blaine isn't entirely sure he wants to know the full account.
Instead Blaine spends the sticky, hot hours constructing fantasies of the boy's past, his friends, his family, knowing reality won't ever live up to his dreams.
Another week passes with silent observance. On a Wednesday he goes into a skating store and browses. Five minutes later he abandons the quest and heads to a Barnes and Noble, where he picks up a handbook on how-tos, thinking he might as well be informed, if not actively participating.
The girl comes back on a Thursday. This time she doesn't wait, just stalks right up to the pile of bags and equipment lying near the half-pipe and tucks a piece of paper into the pocket and walks away.
The following Tuesday the boy Blaine has decided to love is at the park alone late in the afternoon. Blaine just got off his shift at Six Flags and settles onto his now familiar bench and reads, pretending he's not sneaking glances every few minutes.
"Skateboarding for Dummies?"
The voice is high and crystal clear and laced with a certain degree of weariness, as though deigning to communicate with mere mortals is an incredible hardship in and of itself. Blaine jerks his head up and finds himself face to face with the boy he'd been watching for weeks, his eyes hardened and his chin tilted upwards.
"I. Uh. Yeah," Blaine mutters sheepishly, closing the book and shoving it in his backpack, as though that's going to help diffuse the awkwardness.
"I'm Kurt," the boy says off-handedly, taking a seat next to him. Kurt. It's hard and short, nothing like what he'd expected, which makes it all the sweeter.
"Blaine."
"Well, did you want to learn, or just sit here?"
Blaine stares uncomprehendingly at him.
"To skateboard. I assume that's why you're reading that book. And why you've been sitting here watching us for the past two weeks."
"Oh, uh. I don't know." Blaine surveys the other boy: his am still in a cast, scraped knees and a long gash on his right shoulder. He didn't have great interest in learning the sport to begin with; even less in being taught by someone who appeared to have very little grasp on the concepts of gravity.
Sensing his apprehension, the boy, Kurt, actually smiles at him, the expression utterly foreign even after weeks of careful observation. Blaine drinks it in greedily even as his stomach sinks with the realization that he would probably do nearly anything just to see it again. "Don't worry, I'm a very good teacher."
The words should be light and airy, yet they're clipped, right beneath the surface. Kurt's jaw twitches almost imperceptibly in anticipation of the answer and Blaine exhales sharply in pleasure.
He's bored. The ethereal, unapproachable boy with the blank white cast and the eyes that could see right through him if they wanted and the voice that could cut mountains is coming to him, not out of pity or amusement, but out of sheer, unadulterated boredom and, on this day, for some unknown reason he thinks Blaine might be his cure.
In that instant Blaine rescinds all the skeptical comments he's made about the existence of a higher being in the universe because this, clearly, was the working of a kind and merciful god.
"Sure." It comes out as a croak and Blaine could kick himself for the excitement he can hear in his voice but all thoughts immediately flee his brain when a rough, calloused hand grips his own and pulls him off the bench.
Before he's entirely certain of what is happening he finds himself being steered onto Kurt's board, an ancient, run-down slab of wood really, and Blaine is wondering if it would be too forward to buy him a new one, one that doesn't look like it would fall apart under the slightest bit of pressure when suddenly he's moving, slowly, jerkily across the pavement.
It takes about thirteen seconds for Blaine to come to the revelation that hand-eye coordination is a crucial aspect in learning how to skateboard and one he very evidently lacks. Judging by the pinched look on Kurt's face when Blaine peers up at him from his place sprawled over the basketball court he realizes this as well, though he valiantly tries to overcome this obstacle for another seven and a half minutes, according to Blaine's watch, which at that point is so scratched it's a miracle he can still read it.
"I may have overestimated my teaching ability." Kurt might look slightly abashed, although it's hard to tell as his voice is as calm and sure as ever and he's determinedly looking everywhere but at Blaine trying to disentangle his traitorous limbs.
"Judging by the state of you, I'd say you also overestimated your own skateboarding abilities," Blaine muttered, feeling rather emboldened as he pushes himself to a sitting position gracelessly. When he glances upwards Kurt is grinning into the distance, all teeth and no mirth and it sends a shiver down his spine.
"I know my limits, I simply choose to ignore them," he says, his voice echoing the cool tone he uses with his skating buddies, the one that makes him sound superior and yet so young and sad simultaneously.
(It's not the harsh tenor he used with the tall boy in plaid, neither is it the stony silence the girl with the note and the broken down car received, but Blaine is jealous of them nonetheless, jealous of the ability to provoke something unmannered, something spontaneous out of Kurt, makes it his goal to do the same)
"It was probably pointless anyway, I can't even ride a bike," he says this with his most winning self-deprecating smile, inviting Kurt to join him, but Kurt's eyes simply flick over him appraisingly.
"How come?" he asks dully. "I'm assuming it's not because your parents couldn't afford one." Blaine accepts this slight against his polo shirt and expensive shoes with relative good grace, considering the boy opposite him looks like he shops primarily at Good Will and yard sales.
"My dad tried to teach me, but after a week I realized that if I hadn't learned yet I probably never would and that it was an exercise in futility."
Kurt looks at him sharply now, his sapphire eyes boring into Blaine as though he's reading him inside out, or puzzling out a particularly interesting problem. It's not an entirely unwelcome feeling. Finally Kurt quirks a smile devoid of warmth at him, and Blaine wonders if he passed whatever test he was just subjected to.
Much to his consternation, and quite a bit to his pleasure, if he's being completely honest, he doesn't receive a straightforward answer. Instead Kurt simply kicks up his board from where it lay belly-up near Blaine's feet and grasps it in his good hand and strides off toward the gate to the park.
"Uh. Bye, then?" Blaine says, his heart beating irregularly.
"Good night, Blaine Anderson." Kurt tosses the words behind him carelessly and Blaine finds himself staring after him long after his shadow has dissolved into the encroaching darkness.
That night he sleeps fitfully amid dreams of silver spoked wheels, scarlet water and black wristbands.
He doesn't plan on going back the next night.
Their encounter had exceeded all of Blaine's many and varied expectations, and he entertains the romantic notion of avoiding all future contact so that he can hold on to that one perfect, peculiar conversation and not have to worry about the future tainting it.
In the end, though, muscle memory outweighs his stubborn commitment to mystery and glamour, and he finds himself absentmindedly turning onto the neighborhood street after he gets off work and is parked in his usual spot before he fully realizes what he's doing.
From there, it's really all vanity's fault. He catches sight of Kurt's profile in the distance, chiseled and haughty and can't help but wonder if Kurt will miss him if he's not there. He sits in his car for nearly twenty minutes waiting for the other boy to glance in the direction of his customary picnic table, to gaze longingly down the street for him, or to perform some other action that smitten people in the movies always do.
He is, unsurprisingly, disappointed.
As the light slumps behind the trees and his eyes grow heavy he wonders if he misinterpreted the events of the night before. Maybe he'd made a fool of himself, maybe Kurt was laughing about the hapless boy in a heap on the ground all the way home in the dark, maybe…
Two sharp knocks on his window jerk him out of the light sleep he'd drifted into. He looks around blearily for the source of the disturbance, only to find Kurt's supremely unimpressed face watching him. His car is still running and he fumbles with the switches until he successfully rolls down his window, hoping the darkness will obscure the flush rising on his cheeks.
"I have very little tolerance for stalkers," the crisp voice intones, not bothering with the task of making eye contact.
"I. I wasn't. I mean, I had a long shift today and must have fallen asleep." Kurt is looking at him again, in the way that makes Blaine feel like he's completely nude and on display at the Met. Rationally, he knows it should make him shudder in discomfort but in reality it just makes his blood run warm because Kurt is looking at him like he's a puzzle worth figuring out, like for a moment he's the most interesting specimen in the world.
"Where do you work?" he asks finally, hitching his bag higher on his shoulder and leaning slightly into the window frame of Blaine's car.
"Six Flags. I'm performing there all summer. It's quite a prestigious job, actually. I beat out quite a few other aspiring singers to land it." It's true, although Blaine's mother is friends with one of the managers. There's no shame in taking advantage of connections, his father had told him, but Blaine saw no reason for full disclosure in this instance either.
Kurt drums his long fingers on the door in a pattern Blaine recognizes but can't quite place, and he's mesmerized by the rhythm.
"Sounds fascinating." It's insincere, Blaine can tell, but he hasn't lost interest either. He holds his breath, unsure of what to say next.
"You could come watch me if you like," he trails off when he sees the answering sneer marring Kurt's face. It's an odd and out of place expression on features, like the Mona Lisa scowling. "Or not. It's kind of lame."
"You don't think so," Kurt says astutely. It's true; Blaine is exceedingly proud of his job. He beat out no less than two other Warblers for the honor, and can make young girls swoon day in and day out. All in all, it's not a bad gig.
"No," he replies levelly. Kurt's eyes are starting to wander though, and he knows he's losing ground. "Did you want a ride?"
He blurts the words out so quickly it's not until Kurt is focusing solely on him again that he realizes he must have said them out loud. What it is about this boy that makes him lose all of his inhibitions is a question that really ought to be more fully examined when he has the chance.
"And show my designated stalker the most efficient route to my house? Seems unwise." One of his eyebrows is cocked and there's something almost playful verging on the expression. Blaine finds himself utterly taken in by it.
"I wouldn't be much of a stalker if I didn't find out eventually, you might as well take out the middle ground." Kurt spins on his heel and disappears from the window. For a second he wonders if he's gone too far, if Kurt will draw the line here and decide he's irredeemably creepy (at this point, Blaine isn't entirely sure if that's not the truth).
Then the passenger door opens and Kurt is tossing his bag carelessly into the back seat and buckling himself in. The action is so ordinary, so pedestrian, that it seems foreign on someone so strange and unearthly.
"I'm not in the business of having second-rate stalkers; it might damage my reputation. Make a right on Pine."
With a grin, Blaine follows instructions. He flicks on the radio as they go. It's set to the classic rock station his dad must have chosen when he borrowed Blaine's car the day before, and he's about to start humming along to the Stones' 'You Can't Always Get what you Want,' when the station is abruptly flipped.
"Hey, I was listening to that," he protests lightheartedly, but Kurt simply glares at him.
"A true stalker would know my taste in music; think of it as a teaching moment," he sniffs back. Blaine processes this for a moment, before realizing exactly what is playing on the station Kurt haphazardly tuned his dial to.
"I'm not sure I can, in good conscience, continue to stalk someone who likes Nickelback." Kurt's gazing out the window, but Blaine can see the corner of his mouth turned up slightly.
They don't speak for the rest of the ride, with the exception of the occasional direction, but it's a comfortable silence, one Blaine can relax into. When he pulls into Kurt's house he can't quite hide his surprise.
It's large; not as big as Blaine's own, but still much more spacious than he'd expected considering Kurt's shabby bag and the clothes that were falling apart at the seams. The lights were on in the foyer, and Blaine thought he could see the shadows of a family eating dinner.
"Would you like me to walk you in?" he asks when Kurt makes no move to get out of the car. He's rewarded with a withering look that he imagines would make most people shrink into their seats.
"Hardly." Kurt takes a breath and steels himself as though he's preparing to go to the front line and his face looks so distressingly sad in a way Blaine has never seen before, not in the weeks of observing him, nor in the seventeen years he's lived before, that he blurts out the first thing that comes to mind in an effort to make that horrid expression disappear.
"I dreamt in color last night." Kurt stares at him for a moment uncomprehendingly, but the weariness that had been etched into his features before seems to lift slightly.
"Jesus, do you always talk like a pretentious college student who just smoked his first joint?"
The response startles a laugh out of Blaine, sharp and shrill, and Kurt rubs the last of the bone-deep sorrow off his face with a coarse hand, a slight smile visible just under the crook of his thumb.
"It's just how I talk," he says finally, and wonders if he should feel self-conscious about it. He doesn't though, because he doesn't think Kurt really minds, and he's also not sure he knows another way to be.
"I can tell," Kurt mutters, not unkindly. "So what, how do you normally dream then?"
"In blacks and whites, and the shades in between. Never anything bright or alive. It was nice." And rather overwhelming, he doesn't add, because he doesn't think Kurt, who seems to live his life solely in vibrant and brilliant shades could understand his muted existence.
"Grey doesn't sound so bad to me," Kurt says ruefully. Blaine balks at the sentiment. He'd never want Kurt to stop shining as vividly as he had the moment he laid eyes on him.
"Don't," he says too quickly. "You're perfect like this, don't ever change." He can't believe he just said that out loud, and cringes in anticipation of Kurt slamming the door shut and running away, far away from the creepy boy who can't stop making an idiot of himself, who always pushes too far, too soon.
It doesn't come, and after a few moments Blaine risks opening one eye to see where he stands. Kurt is staring at him with something approaching awe, and that was new. It was almost as though no one had ever said that to him before.
"You really are a stalker, aren't you?" Kurt breathes, the words spiraled tightly around a suppressed giggle. Blaine's spine tingles painfully when he realizes that the cold superiority Kurt projects onto every syllable is missing here.
He can't really think of a suitable response to that so he stays quiet and stares fixedly out his front windshield, feeling Kurt's attention focused on him. After a minute Kurt clears his throat and his hand reaches up reflexively to fix his hair before dropping it like he'd burned something. Blaine watches out of the corner of his eye with interest; he'd never seen the other boy look flustered.
After what seems like an eternity in which Blaine can almost hear the rusty cogs in his mind groaning to life, something slides into place. "No one has ever said that to you, have they?" he asks in amazement.
Kurt shakes his head jerkily, as though trying to knock something in his brain out of place. "Not lately," he replies, and he sounds normal again, like he's managed to recover himself, or at the very least the version of himself he prefers to convey to the world. Blaine envies him, as he can't remember the last time he felt this completely unmoored.
The atmosphere in the car is heavy with tension, and Blaine can distantly hear the lilting voices from inside Kurt's house, where his family must be laughing and talking in circles around their dinner table, unconcerned that they're one down.
"Why don't you want to go home?" he asks, because if Kurt hasn't run screaming from him yet he may as well keep going.
Kurt looks at him closely, and Blaine holds his gaze with a braveness he didn't think he was capable of. He can't remember ever having a conversation like this; one where he said exactly what he thought and the other person did the same. It's liberating in a way, to drop the pretenses of being self-assured and charming and just be.
"New step-family," Kurt says at length. "Don't fit in." The words are false and ugly and Blaine scoffs them off. Kurt's eyes crinkle as the left side of his mouth jerks upward quickly, and this time Blaine is pretty sure he did pass that test.
"Really, though."
The porch light flickers on slowly, and there's a shadowy figure visible in the front window. Kurt watches it, his expression unreadable for a moment, and Blaine in turn watches him. He looks different in the darkness, his creamy skin standing out more staunchly against his chesnut hair streaked ashy and auburn by the blazing summer sun. The artificial light bounces off his eyes to make his iris' seem almost green, warmer and younger than they are in the day.
"It's like. I changed. Not suddenly, or in a day, but over time, until I don't even recognize the person I was before as still being me. Like the world stopped but I kept moving forward, and when it started again I was too far ahead for anyone to catch up to. And now I'm here, and they're stuck back there, and I tried to go back but it was fake and cold, so I just decided to keep moving forward, and they don't understand why I can't be like I was, or why I don't want to be."
The monologue concludes with a self-deprecating huff of breath and a glance at his front door. Blaine processes the outburst while Kurt idly rolls his car window up and down, the air whirring in their ears.
"You're lonely," Blaine says finally. Kurt looks up at him, his nose tinged pink from the sun and his hair falling over his eyes and nods once brusquely, like the admission causes him physical pain. "I think I'm lonely too."
They sit in silence for a while then, the only sound coming from the whir of the engine and Kurt's fingers tapping a beat into the window.
The porch light turns off and back on again twice, and Kurt's hand clenches in and out. "I should go," he says, normal again, then adds sardonically: "It's been real, Blaine Anderson."
The door is open and he's swinging his legs onto the pavement before something heavy drops somewhere in the recesses of Blaine's mind and his eyes jerk up. "Hang on, how do you know my last name?"
Kurt turns back to him as he closes the door and leans in through the open window with a knowing smirk, like he's planned this whole thing, and it's enough to knock the wind out of Blaine. "We've met before," he says smugly, with the air of someone setting out a riddle.
"I think I'd remember that," Blaine replies, not because it's the suave thing to say, or because he heard it in the movies, but because looking at the boy in front of him, (the boy with the constellation of freckles decorating creamy white skin and eyes that burned so bright it almost hurt to look at them, the boy who acted like he could read Blaine's every intention in the lines of his face and who knows, maybe he could) he really, really thinks he would have.
Kurt laughs, truly, the sound coming from his stomach and bubbling over the surface so unexpected that it startles even Kurt, and it's breathtaking.
"Figure it out," he says cheerily, and it's fake and put-on, not at all like the Kurt who whispered his fiercest secrets to a virtual stranger just minutes ago and it makes no sense whatsoever, none of this does, because this doesn't happen in the real world, not to him anyway.
But watching Kurt's silhouette as he climbs the steps to his front door Blaine has two thoughts in quick succession. First, he thinks with a bright certainty he rarely experiences that this must be what it's like to live in color. This fear, this gut-wrenching pain, this thrum of anticipation so deep he's sure he can feel his very veins bubbling with excitement.
Secondly (and this is so blatantly obvious that it's probably written into the fabric of his bones in shining indigo ink): he is, without a doubt, thoroughly and entirely fucked.