Once again, thanks for all the feedback! I'm aiming to get the next chapter up by the 8th or the 9th.
Disclaimer: It's not true, so don't sue.
The list of questions that Blaine had devised was getting a bit long. Said list contained nearly everything there was to know about Kurtney: What's her favorite food? Her favorite drink? For that matter, does she drink alcohol? Does she have a pet? Who's her favorite designer? Who are her friends (if she has any)?
After writing that last question, Blaine set down his fountain pen. Of course she has friends. This notion caused a little tug of jealousy at his jaw, and he clenched his teeth tightly.
Does she have a boyfriend?
He didn't exactly want to be her boyfriend. He wanted to be around her more often, certainly. He wanted to have grand conversations that didn't have a single stutter. He wanted to be able to take her out somewhere (maybe a café, one that she likes, so he can find out her coffee order) without having to avoid all the men around them. He wanted to make her smile, and make her laugh.
Sometimes he wanted to see if her skin was just as soft as it looked.
His face was burning at that thought, and he crumpled up the paper and threw it at the wall. It failed to land in the wastebasket. How shameful, to think of her that way. Kurtney was better than that. All these thoughts in his head just made him feel awkward and embarrassed.
Maybe he did want to be her boyfriend after all. He'd never wanted that before.
He maneuvered around in his black dining chair, straddling it and resting his chin on the back. He'd found people attractive. Kurtney certainly was attractive, but that much was obvious to anyone. Her eyes haunted him at night with their beauty. He hadn't exactly thought about how he would ever ask out a woman (the thought of a man sent him into shivers). But he had assumed long ago that relationships weren't an option for him.
He desperately wanted them to be.
Groaning, he launched himself from the chair to walk over to his desktop computer. It was not new technology - a Dell Dimension. He had this sentimentality about everything though. He couldn't bear just... backing the thing up and shipping the data off to a new, shiny computer. It was silly. The thing still worked, though.
Blaine licked his lips as he concentrated on the desktop time. It was nearly one-thirty. He swore loudly and bounded towards the door, grabbing his muffler from the coat hanger. With a quick glance at himself in the mirror (an adjusted curl here, and a smoothed out jean pant there), he was out the door.
How could he have been so foolish? The train left at 1:45, and the station was a good ten-minute walk from his apartment. Continually cursing his own forgetfulness, Blaine rushed along the sidewalk, narrowly avoiding any contact with fellow sidewalk-goers. He shimmied past a particularly rowdy group of high schoolers (all male, except for one, who might as well have been) to jump onto the train, tapping his Metro card in the process.
He inhaled heavily when he was on the train, trying to catch his breath. He pushed a curl out of the center of his forehead, where it was stuck with sweat. A chill ran up his spine. He knew the feeling.
He'd caught the eye of the man across the train car. Immediately, he felt his jaw lock up.
The stranger was simply looking at him. Not lustfully or anything, just observing him. But somehow just the man's gaze on him made tremors rack up and down his body. He clenched his fists tightly, trying to ignore the sensation. Studiously, he stared out the window, trying to ignore him.
The mohawked man looked away.
People say that you can't really feel when somebody's eyes are on you. There wasn't any environmental change. The atoms in the air didn't shift when their eyes did. Maybe it was the socially paralyzing paranoia, but Blaine was sure that he knew when someone was looking at him.
The train ride was only fifteen minutes long, but Blaine felt like his nerves were caught in an inferno. Every little reaction was picked up and magnified a thousand times.
Look away.
Don't look at me.
Stop staring at me!
Blaine didn't realize he was holding his breath for such a long time until his stop was announced. He cast a final, unwilling glance at the stranger, who raised an eyebrow at him. Blaine's eyes widened and he dashed from the car.
He must have looked a complete, disheveled mess when he arrived at Nora's office, because Kurtney swiftly asked him if he was feeling all right.
Flushing at her concern, he gave her quick, brief assurance that he was fine ("I'm fine...") before sitting down on that leather couch. It squeaked embarrassingly as he sat, and he shifted uncomfortably.
There wasn't any music in the lobby on Nora's office, which Blaine was thankful for. It made his time with Kurtney seem just a bit longer.
His leg was nervously bouncing up and down, and he placed a hand on it to forcefully stop it. He gulped heavily and looked towards Kurtney, who was remarkably without magazine. She was marking something on a tablet with a silver stylus. Her hand came up to brush a lock of hair irritatedly from her face.
"How was your weekend?" he asked quietly. Kurtney's eyes glided up towards his, and she gazed at him from below her lashes.
How could he ever have thought she wasn't classically beautiful?
She smiled vaguely and shook her head. "It was fine. My stepbrother Finn and his idiot friend are in town."
"From?"
"I'm from Ohio. Little town called Lima. I escaped as soon as I could, but Finn wasn't so lucky." She hummed thoughtfully. "He's already buckled down with a wife and a kid on the way."
Blaine nodded, but didn't say anything else. After a beat of silence, Kurtney sat up entirely and looked at him straight-on.
What a different feeling from the man on the bus.
"Have you always lived in California?" she asked gently. His response was fluid.
"No, I moved here when I was fourteen. Difficult circumstances at home."
"Where was home, if you don't mind me asking?" Blaine watched Kurtney carefully.
She was the only person he talked to outside of Nora. She'd already given him so much.
"Westerville."
"As in, Westerville, Ohio? No kidding!" laughed Kurtney, leaning back in her swivel chair. "Maybe if you'd gone to high school in Ohio, we would have been classmates. Or rivals!"
The idea of Kurtney as a peer was invigorating. But the thought of her as a rival... nauseating. He couldn't ever say something against her.
"You never meet anyone out here from Ohio..." Kurtney muttered, smiling against a closed fist. "How great. Are you a Buckeyes fan?"
Blaine smiled at this, nodding his head. He looked at her questioningly and she shook her head vigorously. "No, no, I'm not too fond of football. That's my dad. I prefer scarves." Blaine did an obvious head jerk to the scarf around her neck and she laughed, the sound rich. "One of these days I really will open up Haus of Hummel, and everyone will prefer scarves to football. My scarves, at least."
"I'd wear your scarves," Blaine offered meekly. If he hadn't been paying so close attention to her face, he would have missed the light blush that tinted her cheeks. She didn't reply, but she charmingly tucked her cheek into her scarf to hide her growing smile.
"You're too much," teased Kurtney, showing him her grin. He shrugged and returned her smile. He'd been doing a lot of that lately. It felt nice - it wasn't like he hadn't smiled before, but it had been such a long time since it came so naturally.
These simple pleasantries that they exchanged were quickly falling into routine.
A routine.
Blaine simply adored the sound of that.
When his session was completed with Nora, Blaine felt a now-familiar shiver run up his neck. Per his routine, it was time to tell Kurtney that he'd see her tomorrow.
But his routine fell to pieces when he exited Nora's office and looked towards Kurtney's desk.
It was the man from the train. He was leaning over the desk, palms splayed on the desktop, his smirk enormous on his devilish face. Kurtney was rolling her eyes and poking the ends of the man's fingers with her stylus pen. She rolled her neck irritatedly and stared right at the man's face, facial expression unamused.
"Honestly, I told Finn I was driving home..." Blaine caught her saying. The man ran a hand down the stripe of hair on his head, ending by tousling Kurtney's own. Blaine was scandalized. Kurtney simply looked annoyed. She swatted the hand away, but there was a telltale smile at the corner of her mouth. Blaine wasn't the only one to notice this. The man reached forward and flicked her forehead in an older-brotherly gesture.
Blaine hadn't felt this far away from Kurtney since... before the first day he met her.
Kurtney's eyes caught his, and she smiled warmly. "Heading home, Blaine?" she asked, her tone sweet. Nodding nervously, Blaine edged by them, and Kurtney's smile faltered. "Are you all right?"
He nodded once more, the movement tight. Kurtney scrunched up her eyebrows in obvious concern, and Blaine's discomfort was momentarily taken over by guilt.
But he couldn't be in the same room as that man (or any man at all).
Blaine hurriedly pushed open the glass door and left the doctor's office, moving briskly along the rapidly-darkening sidewalk. He glanced upwards.
Of course it would rain. It was simply his luck. Somebody up there must have been laughing to make everything humiliating happen to Blaine on one particular day. It didn't rain out of nowhere in Southern California.
He stalked through the mist, the precipitation becoming heavier and heavier with each footfall of his. It never became a downpour, but he was sufficiently soaked by the time he got onto the Metro.
With his hair dripping with rainwater but his ears filled with the moving sounds of the train, he calmed down slightly. That wasn't true. Today wasn't entirely humiliating. He had talked to Kurtney earlier, and it had been one of the most natural conversations they'd had to date.
But the day had ended in disaster.
He groaned quietly, pressing his head against the metal pole. He could feel the droplets from his hair running down it.
He couldn't even look at that mohawked man. Kurtney was genial, even playful with him. They must have been friends.
Or more.
That thought made his gut twist with a mixture of despair, jealousy and a bit of revulsion.
When he was safe in his apartment, Blaine immediately headed to the shower, turning on the water immediately and putting his head beneath the frigidity of the water. He shivered in its coldness, but kept stewing inside, thinking about his own social incompetence. Nora wouldn't be pleased. She thought that they were mostly over this stage. How wrong she was!
There was a strange beeping coming from the hall. He squinted through the shower water, and peered around the curtain. It sounded again. Quirking an eyebrow, he wrapped a towel around his waist and headed to investigate.
Holding the towel securely and dripping water around his apartment, Blaine searched for the source. He found it on the hallway end table.
His cell phone was ringing.
His cell phone never rang. Granted, it was just a notification ring, but nevertheless...
Blaine picked up the phone and flipped it open. He had no need for one of those touch phones or those smartphones with the slide-out QWERTY keyboards. He didn't text anyone. But he had a text message.
The only person who texted him was Kurtney, and that was to remind him about appointments. But it was 7 PM. Why would he get at text at seven?
With a trembling thumb he opened the message.
"Are you OK? You didn't say your goodbye to me :( - K"
Blaine had to sit down then, and he collapsed onto the black dining chair. He ran a hand through his unruly, wet curls, his face alight with boyish, elated excitement.
His thumbs were unsteady and unfamiliar on the keypad of the phone, but he turned on the T9 function so he could text her with at least a bit of legibility.
"I wasn't feeling well. I'm not good with new people. - Blaine."
With bated breath, he stared at the cell phone, willing her to respond with a message. Would she? Or was the matter resolved?
She wouldn't text back.
At that moment, the phone vibrated in his hands, and he nearly dropped the damn thing.
"Puck doesn't count as a person. A dog is classier than that idiot. He's Finn's friend. - K"
Blaine quashed his impulse to laugh hysterically at the text. It wasn't even that funny. But she had actually replied. She found him worthy of her sense of humor.
Even to his own ears, that sounded pathetic. He shook it off. The night was young. He could probably still get away with texting her for a few more minutes without bothering her.
"Right your brother. Are you with them right now? - Blaine."
He decided to set the phone down before he did any serious damage to it. He needed to get something into his stomach because pretty soon he was going to start cramping from excitement and that would be a devastating blow to his ego. Unable to even handle text messages! Laughable.
Her response wasn't even brief: "Yeah, but they're playing the newest Call of Duty. Cannot understand pointless bloodshed. What are you up to? - K"
She wanted to know what he was up to.
So he told her he was heating up a Hot Pocket. Well, he was.
She then freaked out about calories and carbs, which made him laugh, because that was so like her. And he told her so.
She loved fashion, but she adored music. She used to sing, and had had big dreams of Broadway. She had tried her luck and lost. Her favorite dessert was a zero-calorie loganberry pumpkin torte, but her local bakery didn't make it anymore. She lamented that fact to him.
They exchanged texts until around ten, when Kurtney said that she was fifteen minutes late on her 'moisturizing routine,' whatever that meant. Blaine swallowed a heavy ball of regret, but they'd been texting for so long... he didn't want to annoy her.
"Thank you for texting with me - Blaine."
Her final text message arrived with her newly personalized ringtone (it was the sound of a door bell, for overly sentimental reasons).
"You don't have to thank me for something like that. I like talking with you. Text me anytime, B. See you Friday ;) - K"
That last message was locked and saved onto Blaine's phone and memory for eternity.