"So what's he like?" Ilsa asked, getting comfortable on Jackie's bed. Jackie was a good friend, if slightly odd. Like the way she's sharing a room with Ella when there's an extra bedroom down the hall. If she moved into that room, she wouldn't have to chase Ella out when she wanted privacy. But Jackie liked sharing a room with Ella, and Ella would leave without an argument if asked politely. And even with her oddities, or maybe because of them, Jackie was the most interesting person at McKinley High and Ilsa's only real friend.

"Who?" Jackie answered innocently.

"Your dad, what's he like?"

"You've been working with him for months. You know what he's like."

"Ass! You're an ass. You know who I mean."

"Oh, Sam. He asked me to call him Sam. You'd better call him Mr. Evans." she said with a smirk.

"Your mom's got good taste in men, I'll give her that. Imagine, the guy just showing up out of the blue like that. When it comes to long-lost fathers you hit the jackpot."

Ilsa and Jackie flipped through the yearbooks Sam borrowed from Quinn's house. "She was pregnant here?"

Jackie calculated in her head "No, just chubby." she stared at the picture. "No wonder she could hide me." she flipped to a picture of the football team. "Here he is on the football team. And this girl" she pointed to a picture of Quinn, "he married her after college. I have a brother, Rick, looks like you'd guess their kid would look, blonde hair and green eyes. Very all-American, not like around here."

"Tell me about it." Ilsa and her brother are both adopted and nobody in her family matches either. She's strawberry blonde, her brother was adopted from Korea and his hair is jet black, her mother's brunette and Brad is grey. At least the eyes matched, they all had brown eyes. "And where's your dad, your other dad?"

"He didn't go there that year. He was all about prep-school then." She pulled out the next year. "Here he is."

"Awwww, he's so adorkable. Was that a thing back then? Dressing like an idiot?"

"That was his thing at the time. He was in that glee club they talk about sometimes. Sam was gone by then and my mom wasn't in it that year. Here's my dad, here's my step-mother maybe you'd call her. This here is Rachel Berry, probably the most famous person ever to come out of Lima, Ohio."

"Who's the guy staring at your dad like he's dessert?"

"His boyfriend at the time. Guy named Kurt."

"Your dad is gay?"

"You were in health class, you heard the talk on human sexuality. He was in love with Kurt at the time." She flipped the page. "My mom sang jazz that year. See, here she is at a competition. That's why she used to hang out with Tim and Alice, the owners of this coffeehouse."

"Damn, Alice looks exactly the same as she does now. I swear she still wears that t-shirt. Hey, that's my dad!" she pointed at Brad. Brad's the only reason Ilsa's life at high school isn't a living hell. Kids like him so they tolerate her. They don't like her but they don't torment her either. That's why Ilsa was so happy when Jackie showed up. Kids don't particularly like Jackie but she doesn't give a damn if they do or not.

"That's how my mom knows him, those couple of years in jazz band. She liked him because he didn't give a shit what she looked like." She closed the book. "These years were missing from the library. I wonder who stole them and why?"

15 years earlier

"Well." Kurt said, "I guess..."

"Yes, I guess this is it."

"I love you, Blaine, you know that, don't you?"

"Of course I know that!" Blaine blinked back the tears. "And I love you. But you're going off to college. You deserve to have fun. Not too much fun" he said with a forced laugh. "but a reasonable amount of fun. If we're meant to be..."

"And we are." he said pulling Blaine close.

"Then we'll be together again." They tumbled onto the bed and made love before driving to the airport.

Two weeks after that

"Hey Mercedes, welcome to senior year!"

"Blaine! Looks like were locker neighbors this year. I like your hair that way."

"Thanks." He ran his fingers through his longer hair.

"You hair is nice too." Blaine wasn't sure if he should mention her dramatic weight loss, he decided not to.

"Natural. I don't have time for high maintenance hair. The baby takes all my time."

"Right, you had a baby last year. Sorry, I don't remember. Boy or girl?"

"Girl. Jackie." She showed him a picture hanging in her locker of a honey colored baby with green eyes. The picture of Jackie, a family portrait and a picture of the Jazz Band at a competition were the only pictures in her locker.

"How old?"

"Seven months and fiesty. Don't know where she gets it." she grinned at the picture. "So how are you? Kurt's in New York with Rachel now, isn't he?"

"Yes, he stayed here as long as he could but he's loving New York."

"And you guys still together?"

"No, we decided to try it this way. He's in college after all. College shouldn't be about being tied down to somebody hundreds of miles away."

She noticed the picture of Kurt he had in his locker and the sadness in his tone of voice. "I guess." She looked at him like she wanted to say something, but smiled and patted his arm instead. "You doing glee club this year?"

"Of course. You?"

"I don't know if I can stand Schuester's foolishness. Jazz Band was great last year and I don't have time for both. My mom's good about watching her but Jackie's my baby, not hers."

"So how was jazz band?" Blaine asked a couple of days later at their lockers.

"Not much for me to do so far. Brad needs to rebuild the string section, I'm looking for a male vocalist. You interested?"

"If you do glee club I'll do jazz band. We can do songs that overlaps so it won't take so much time."

She smiled at Blaine. "Tim, the guy I sang with last year? He graduated, but he used to practice at my house. If we practice there my mom will watch Jackie during glee club."

"Are you okay? I missed you at practice today." he placed his books on the desk in her room.

"I'm fine. Just exhausted and forgot you were coming over." she looked at the baby sleeping on the other side of her bedroom. "Teething. It's perfectly normal but she's miserable and keeping me up all night. Did I miss anything?"

"Not really. We need to do a duet and I picked a song we can use for jazz and glee."

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.

And when two lovers woo
They still say, "I love you."
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.

Moonlight and love songs
Never out of date.
Hearts full of passion
Jealousy and hate.
Woman needs man
And man must have his mate
That no one can deny.

It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

"You sound great, Blaine!"

"Not so bad yourself. With you out of glee club last year I forgot how good you sound. We're gonna kill them." He leaned back on the bed.

She reclined beside him as the next song on his playlist started. "When you begin the beguine." She sang softly.

"Oh, you know that one?"

"How could I sing jazz for a year and not recognize Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter?"

"Do you know what that means, begin the beguine?"

"The beguine is a song or something? As in - they're playing our song?"

"Good guess but according to Wikipedia it's a dance, a slow rumba. I don't know what it looks like but I can do a rumba." She laughed at that. "I can! It's a prep-school thing, we had formal dances. Want me to teach you?"

"I can't dance. Schuester made that very clear last year."

"Schuester! When I visited Kurt last weekend all he did was bitch about Schuester."

"That's right! How was your trip to visit Kurt?"

"Interesting." He stared at the ceiling. "We're definitely done. It's strange since he's older than me, only a couple of months older really, but I always felt he thought I was glamourous. Worldly. Sophisticated. I know it wasn't intentional but I felt like his 10 year old cousin, hanging out with him and his college friends. He's totally immersed in something that makes him happy. You know how he glows when he's happy? He was radiant." He sighed sadly thinking about how happy Kurt was to be out of Lima. "I expected that to happen. This time we both believed it when we said it was over. Anyway, he kept going on about how much he had to unlearn."

"Really?"

"Well, not really unlearn. He said his teacher said Kurt had the biggest collection of bad singing habits he'd ever seen. I noticed that when he first came to Dalton, the over-reliance on his falsetto. It's good, his falsetto, but he overuses it. Anyway, this teacher thought Kurt was self-taught. I guess it was retraining as opposed to unlearning." He stood up and held out his hand. "May I have this dance, Ms. Jones?"

"I don't rumba." she said standing up and laughing.

"You'll be great. It's all in the hips. Just follow me."

He played the song again and showed her the steps. Then they danced together. When the song ended he pulled her closer and kissed her. A quick, tentative kiss that took her by surprise.

"Blaine!" she said, shocked. "You're gay!"

"Sorry! I'm so sorry." He backed away from her. "I've been wanting to for so long and..." he picked up his books. "I better leave."

"Wait a minute." she glanced over at the still sleeping baby. "How long have you been wanting to?"

"Since West Side Story." he said looking down.

"Last year?"

"When you auditioned and we had to kiss for that one scene." He looked up at her. "I haven't kissed that many girls but when I did I've never felt anything before. I thought I did once but I was drunk at the time. Sober, not so much. That's why I was so sure I was gay. But then I kissed you. Maybe it sounds crazy, but I liked kissing you as much as I like kissing Kurt. That's crazy, right?"

"Not necessarily. You didn't really know either of them but Sam and Shane were like night and day. I had strong feelings for both of them."

"Football player Shane?"

"Well Sam, Jackie's dad, played football too."

"How does he feel about being a father?" Blaine asked, eager to change the subject.

"He doesn't know he's a father."

"He doesn't know? How can that be?"

"He left town before I knew I was pregnant."

"And there was no way you could get in touch with him?" Hadn't Finn gone somewhere to try to get Sam back but he had family responsibilities and refused? Or something like that? Blaine hadn't paid attention to the details of the story, the whole plan was far-fetched and destined for failure, that Sam would drop everything and come running back as a favor to Finn. But Finn didn't seem to have any trouble locating Sam, he distinctly remembered that part.

"He just doesn't know yet, okay?" She glanced back at the baby to make sure she was still sleeping. "So back to West Side Story." The way she smiled at him made him forget the point he was making. He couldn't tell if she thought he was sexy or pathetic.

"Okay, back to West Side Story." he put down his books. "I was in love with Kurt then and I didn't want to hurt him because I didn't know what it was I felt when I kissed you. And you had so much going on back then." He didn't add that at the time everybody figured she was being an arrogant diva bitch and Blaine, being new at the time, didn't want to step in the middle of that.

"You're right about that, my life was complicated enough and I wouldn't have wanted to hurt Kurt either."

"You don't have a boyfriend now do you?"

"No, I don't have time for a boyfriend."

"Well, I don't have a boyfriend either. You wannna..."

"Let's try the kiss again, a real kiss this time, so I can make up my mind."

15 years later

"Thank you." Mercedes said, turning over chairs so they could sweep the floors in the coffee shop. "Thank you for not saying I told you so."

"If you don't know me by now, you'll never ever ever know me." Blaine sang. Then he laughed, "Besides, I wanted him to stay gone as much as you did. Well, he was gone for 15 years. Now he's back. He seemed to take it well."

"Yes, he was never one to get hysterical. If Jackie wanted to go visit, that'd be okay, don't you think? We could do something special with Ella so she wouldn't feel left out but Jackie going there would be okay, huh?"

"That would be up to Jackie. She's old enough to make up her own mind. I don't know if Quinn would enjoy explaining to people exactly who Jackie is."

"Quinn's not like that. I mean, I don't like her, or at least I didn't like the way she acted back then, but she needed some serious help after she had that baby and she never got it. Her dislike of me had nothing to do with skin-tone, I was connected to a bad memory."

"Good to know. I wouldn't want Jackie to be treated the way some of my supposedly high-class relatives tried to treat you."

"Blaine, they mapped out your whole future the day you were born. When you decided you're not gay after all, even had a real live girlfriend, they started celebrating and planning a wedding. Then they discover not only are you hanging out with a black teen mom, you're planning to spend that money they put aside for Harvard bumming around the world."

"I got more of an education than I would have in a classroom."

"What you said. And all in all, it worked out pretty well. We're having fun, the girls are happy, smart and well-adjusted."

He wrapped his arms around her and tickled her ear with his tongue. "And the sex, don't forget the awesome sex." They stood there swaying, dancing to a tune Blaine started humming, until they were interrupted by a knock on the door.

"Closed!" Blaine called.

"It's me, Sam."

"Minute!"

"I noticed the lights were on..."

"Yes, we're just cleaning up." Mercedes said. "It's too late for coffee but we could make you something to eat if you're hungry."

"No thank you." Sam paced the floor of the coffeehouse. "I need to talk about Jackie. At f first I was surprised and didn't know what to think. But the more I think about it, the more upset I'm getting. How could you not tell me?"

"I just didn't." Mercedes said defiantly. "Maybe I was angry that it was so easy for you to get over me. Maybe seeing that new girlfriend reinforced what I always thought, the whole thing was a fluke and I never was your type. Maybe you were just lonely and depressed and that's why you went out with somebody like me. I don't know, it was a long time ago and I didn't want to call you so I never did."

"You can blame me as much as her." Blaine said, putting his arm around his wife. "At first, I nagged her constantly. I told her she was being petty and selfish. That it was an unresolved issue that was bound to blow up one day. But you never called her. And when you didn't call, it seemed like maybe she had a valid point. That you guys had a brief, intense relationship that burned out. Then I fell in love with both of them, Mercedes and Jackie, and I knew you were the only man that could take them away from me. So I stopped asking her to tell you. I knew it was wrong, but that's what I wanted. I started asking her to marry me instead. That took years of convincing."

"So I'm being punished for not being a mind-reader?" Sam asked. "A Christmas card would have made that big a difference?"

"It was 15 years ago. I was young, you were young." she said. "We made lots of mistakes. Except for Jackie maybe the whole thing was a mistake. Not telling you about Jackie was inexcusable, I admit that and I apologize. But she was all I had and once I accepted the fact you weren't coming back for me I didn't want a custody fight. I wanted her all for myself so I did what I did. Sorry. All this time and we haven't spent a day apart but Blaine and I were just discussing it. If Jackie wants to, if you want to, it would be a good idea for her to visit you, meet Rick and Quinn. We can work out the timing. It's about time you two got to know each other."

As Time Goes By – Dooley Wilson or Rod Stewart/Queen Latifah duet

As always, Mercedes and Sam's firstborn is named per Jadziwine's Sam and Mercedes' Tardis adventure (and Jadziwine's writing again - yippie!)

Ella's named after Ella Fitzgerald