If Kitty could have frozen a single moment in time, it would have been this one. This was the last time, maybe for a long time, that they'd all be able to get together — she, Artie, Blaine, Sam, and Tina. Oh, and Hunter, who had been a part of the group ever since he discovered the pretty Asian girl who was also going to be going off to Rhode Island with him. They were all hanging out together at Artie's, swimming in the pool.
Today was the last day before two of the group would leave. Hunter and Tina were going to be following one another, all the way to Providence, on what amounted to a whopping eleven-hour road trip. The caravan was Hunter's idea, so that he could assist Tina if she had any trouble on the way, and so they could share the rental of a small trailer for all of their — mostly her — stuff. And so they could make all the same stops along the way.
Blaine was going to be leaving just a day after Tina and Hunter. He would be flying to New York, of course, where Kurt would be waiting for him at the airport, ready to move him into the apartment he currently shared with Rachel. Blaine rolled his eyes at Artie as he joked that he was going to mail Rachel some earplugs.
"Mercedes visits a lot, too," Blaine was saying, as he fussed with his now-fluffy hair, damp from swimming laps alongside Artie and Sam. "She stays with Rachel and Kurt — and now me, I guess — when she's in New York and helps with part of the rent when she comes. But otherwise, she's living with her aunt in L.A. She just booked a mini-tour with Ariana Grande for August and September."
"Who's that?" Kitty asked, looking at Artie, who shrugged. Their musical tastes were pretty different and covered a lot of ground, yet neither had heard of this girl.
"Ariana Grande?" Blaine said, with a shrug. "She's a new artist. Mercedes says she's amazing and she wanted to get us all tickets, but venues are small, and Ariana's already got a fan base, so they sold out fast. Mercedes was barely able to get them for her family."
"That's too bad," Tina pouted. "Maybe, if it's a success, she'll go on a longer tour with this Ariana Grande someday and we'll get another chance."
"Sam, do you regret not trying to work things out with Mercedes when we saw her at Nationals?" Kitty asked, bluntly, as Tina leaned in, super eager to hear this gossip.
Sam just shrugged. "I don't think she'd have much time for a guy going to college in Ohio while she's on tour," he said, trying to sound like he didn't care.
"What ever happened with that nurse?" Artie asked, as he floated past on a raft, soaking up the sun, shades in place, still rocking his contact lenses he'd been wearing more and more lately.
"She has a boyfriend," Sam said, shrugging again. "But starting off college as an available, unattached guy is the best way to go..." He trailed off, looking at Artie and Kitty. "For me, anyway."
"Long distance relationships are hard," Blaine affirmed. "I'm glad Kurt and I can finally put that behind us. It was a long year..."
He trailed off and looked at Artie, then at Kitty, and it couldn't have been plainer what he was thinking.
One year was hard, two would be even harder.
But it wasn't like Artie was going to be all that far away. His visits to see Kitty and his family could certainly be more frequent than Kurt's. Still, she and Artie had already had this conversation, already confided in each other that they both had their doubts and fears, too. Artie tilted his head up to look at Kitty, lifting his sunglasses and squinting at her. She sighed and gave a small shrug from where she currently was sitting on the edge of the pool, trying to dry off in the sun, her feet dangling in the cool water.
"Kitty and Artie can make it work," Tina said, after a pause, a vote of confidence coming from the absolute last person Kitty expected to be betting on them. But the awkward pause that followed said that neither fully believed it themselves.
"I mean..." Artie trailed off, looking at Kitty before saying anything, and she gave him the smallest nod to go ahead. "We've been talking, Kitty and I, and we might take, sort of, a break..."
"So I finally give you my blessing and you go and do that?" Tina huffed. She was looking at Kitty with that menacing stare she'd given her back in the choir room, when she'd first called Kitty out for trying to date Artie in secret.
"Tina, enough." Artie, in a rare moment, was standing up to Tina. And yes, he probably would have joked about that phrase, had he not been so absolutely over her defending him like he couldn't do it for himself. He leaned back on his raft and replaced his sunglasses. "It wasn't her idea. It was mine."
"But I understand where he's coming from," Kitty added. She moved over to be near where Artie had floated to the side of the pool now and reached for his hand, looking at all of their friends' bewildered expressions. "A break right now could be healthy. Maybe until I'm eighteen. And it's all legal and whatnot. We agreed."
Blaine broke the silence first. "Kitty and Artie will have a happy ending," he said. That did it, that broke the tension and got everyone laughing.
"I'm team Wildeabrams all the way," Sam said, then noticed the looks he got. "What? That's literally the best thing I could come up with for your couple name."
"I'm team... whatever makes you happy," Tina said, looking at Artie, who twisted his mouth into a half-smirk. She reached for her towel and wrapped it around herself. With a glance at Hunter, she added, "I've got to get going... a little more packing left to do tonight..."
"Hold on, woman," Artie, who still jokingly called Tina 'woman,' as he had apparently started to do back when they first became friends. He flopped off his raft and swam to the edge to hoist himself up. Tina stooped down to hug him for a long time. When she drew back, she was crying. To his credit, it looked like it was taking a lot out of Artie not to join her.
"I'll FaceTime you from my dorm tomorrow night," she said, straightening up and grabbing Hunter's hand. And, though no one was asking for an explanation, she added. "Oh, and um, yeah, Hunter and I are officially, publicly, a thing."
That's my line, thought Kitty, noting that she forgot 'shockingly,' except that there was nothing at all shocking about her brother falling for an Asian girl who was going to be heading off to school with him, in a perfectly convenient turn of events.
After a round of congratulations to the happy couple, Kitty and Hunter left. Blaine, who had driven both he and Sam to Artie's, said that he had to get going, too, as there was still more he had to do before going to New York.
"And then there were two," Kitty said, when they were all gone, as she wrapped her towel around her waist, waiting for Artie to finish drying himself off.
"I hope that's okay, that I told them," he said, squinting up at her. The sun didn't go down until pretty late, so it was still bright outside. "I thought you were kind of giving me the go-ahead. You nodded..."
"Yeah, it's fine," she said. "Thanks for defending my honor with Tina." Kitty slipped into her sandals as Artie busied himself with getting back into his chair. She made a face. "I guess I better get used to seeing her around, now that she and my brother are official."
"Well, haven't you always wanted a sister?" Artie teased, as he unlocked his breaks.
"Not even close," Kitty said. "It's good to be queen of the household."
"So, um, you don't have to go anywhere yet, right?" Artie started the sentence off nervously, like they were on a first date or something. "Did you want to hang around and..."
"Should we be doing that if we're going to break up in a week?" Kitty asked.
"I was gonna say 'watch a movie,'" Artie teased, leading the way into the house.
"Uh-huh," Kitty said, grinning. "Sure you were." In a way, the teasing about their impending break up was kind of a game now. They definitely weren't like any other normal couple, that was for sure. Of course, it was one thing to talk about a break, it remained to be seen how an actual break would go down. Kitty didn't know if she'd be able to joke about it then.
Since they were being coy, or at least that was Kitty's interpretation of the banter, they let it drop. She took a seat on the loveseat in his bedroom, the door staying open, as usual. His mom was home, so it wasn't like anything would've happened, even if they wanted to.
Before getting out of his chair, though, he asked her what she wanted to watch. Artie had a pretty eclectic DVD collection, all arranged in a very orderly fashion in those dated CD booklets, but there was something else Kitty was thinking about that she was almost afraid to suggest. Figuring he would just tell her if he didn't like the idea, she went ahead and put it out there.
"I'm still kind of curious about your old soccer days," she said. "You think you'd be okay with showing some of those videos to me?"
Artie hesitated just a moment, then broke into a grin. "Yeah," he said. "I was actually thinking just the other day about how I'd like to show you sometime." He wheeled over to his desk that contained one of those memory boxes, something Kitty had seen sitting out before and never really paid attention to. Artie rifled through it and pulled out a DVD with a plain case.
Just then, they were interrupted when the doorbell rang. Artie passed the DVD off to Kitty to get it started and headed to get the door. As Kitty put the disk in and returned to her seat to operate it via the remote control, she could hear Artie talking to someone, followed by the opening and closing of doors. When Artie finally returned, Sam and Blaine were with him.
"Sam forgot his cell phone," Blaine explained, as Sam suddenly plopped down next to Kitty, where Artie was going to sit. Blaine then sat on the other side of Sam, which would leave no room for Artie on the loveseat.
"And Artie said you two were watching his old home movies," Sam said. "And I've been bugging him to show me ever since he told me he used to play soccer."
"He has," Artie confirmed, rolling himself into place beside the loveseat, now that there was no room left for him to sit there. "I thought you guys might also want to see somebody else in my movies. Sam knows but I won't spoil it for Kitty and Blaine. Just watch, you'll see in a minute."
As the movie began, Mr. Abrams started it off with a title screen that included the year - 2002. There, on screen first, was a young Amy Abrams, sitting cross-legged on the sidelines of the soccer field and making a disgusted face at the camera. Her hair was worn long and braided into pigtails, and she wore blue-framed glasses.
"Amy looks thrilled to be watching yet another game," Mr. Abrams narrated, cheekily, as Amy stuck her tongue out. "The team's been dominating their bracket all day, after the devastating loss to the Tigers this morning, and now they go head-to-head with the Tigers one more time, to determine the city champs and see who will be going to the state tournament in November."
"To see who will be freezing their tail off," Nancy added, as the camera turned to her, sipping something out of a thermos where she sat, bundled up on a camping chair. "But, yes, with any luck, our boys can go to state. Go Gophers!"
"Gophers?" Blaine echoed, chuckling at their team's name, but Sam was shushing him now. The camera turned to focus on Artie, who was warming up nearby. There was no mistaking him for anyone else, but it was definitely strange, to see a little version of Artie who could walk, run, and play soccer. Kitty felt suddenly intrusive for watching, but if Artie was bothered, he didn't show it.
"Artie, you look exactly the same," Sam commented. "Do you even age?"
"Check this out, guys," Artie said, disregarding Sam's comment. The next thing that happened was that little Artie approached the camera, followed by an exceptionally tall and lanky kid. "Recognize anyone else?"
There was also no way not to know this face. "Finn, wow..." Blaine trailed off. "You never told me you and Finn played soccer together."
"Finn was the first teammate to visit me in the hospital," Artie informed him. "He was the one who made sure the team dedicated playing in the state tournament to me, and he was the first person to sit by me when I tried to come back to school."
They turned their attention back to the screen as the game began. After only a few minutes of playing, Finn passed the ball to Artie and Artie scored a goal for the team. One thing Kitty knew, from watching all three of her brothers play, was that soccer was boring and usually had very few goals. If a team scored this early in the game, they were all but guaranteed to win.
Artie did some quick fast-forwarding then, since his dad had apparently recorded the game from start to finish. But if Kitty had heard that all correctly, the state championship tournament in November was what followed this game. That meant they were watching what would've been his last game. Artie paused only to play back the goals his team scored. He seemed to somehow completely separate himself from the little kid on the screen.
The very last shot was Artie and Finn together, exchanging high fives after winning the game, Artie very much looking like the younger brother, even though they were the same age. This was the only part that seemed to bother Artie. Kitty noticed a particularly hard swallow, as he deliberately turned away from the screen just then.
"Well, there you have it," Artie said, as he stopped the DVD. "But now Sam's going to make sure I get to Rio in 2016, soccer or no soccer, right Sam?"
"Can't wait to get started," Sam affirmed.
Blaine then reminded him that he really, really needed to get back to packing for New York, and this time, they really did leave. With that, they all hugged Blaine, just in case they didn't see him before he left.
And then it was finally just the two of them again.
"Alone at last," Kitty finally said, with a glance at the open door. The sounds of Mrs. Abrams opening and shutting things and banging things around in the kitchen could be faintly defected. "Well, sort of."
"Want to stay for dinner?" Artie offered. "Since it's getting close. I know Mom won't mind."
"Sure," said Kitty. "I brought some clothes in my bag, to change in case I stayed over." At Artie's house, someone was always cooking something for dinner, a welcomed change from her house, where it was either up to her to make something or else they had take-out.
As Kitty slipped into his bathroom to change, she could hear Artie opening and shutting his drawers, to get a pair of dry shorts. Artie's bathroom was adapted, of course, with all sorts of bars and seats. She'd gotten used to it, once he'd finally stopped being secretive and embarrassed about letting her go in there.
When she stepped out, he was already clad in his shorts and stretched out on the bed. She settled down next to him, propping up on her elbows and studying every outline of his newly defined pecks and shoulders.
"What's the rest of that story?" she asked, as she recalled something he'd said before that she'd mentally made a note to ask about. "About you and school, I mean. What you said earlier, about not being ready to go back?"
"Oh, that," Artie said. "Just that... I was still in a lot of pain, from my accident and the surgeries I had after, and I was still having to re-learn pretty much every basic life function, aside from like, eating and breathing. The school tried to help, but it wasn't enough." He paused. "It's good that I stayed back a year, though."
"Why's that?" Kitty asked, although she was smiling, since she already knew the answer. Because I wouldn't have met you.
"I'm not even ready to leave now," Artie joked. "Think they'd let me stay one more?"
"Hell no, you heard Sue," Kitty said, with a laugh. She stopped then, taking in his deep blue, unobstructed eyes once more. The silence hung there for a moment or two, before Artie leaned in for a long kiss. She realized that most people who were talking about breaking up didn't do this.
They weren't most people though.