PART TWO: I COULD BE DREAMING
Kurt had seen palaces during his junior year abroad in France, and the hotel that the Duchess had put him up in might as well have been the vacation home of King Louis XIV. It was lavish in all the right ways, and his suite was less a suite and more a penthouse. It was dichromatic, all whites and blacks and the shades in-between, and he smiled fondly at realizing the Duchess knew his taste almost as well as he knew hers.
The bellhop had set his bags on the floor by the beautiful black leather sofa in the middle of the parlor of the suite. Kurt stood for a moment in a sleepy daze, wanting so badly to just go to bed, but his stomach was rumbling embarrassingly loud.
The logical thing to do would have been to call room service. It made complete and total sense. It was what he would have done under literally any other circumstances. Had he not had three glasses of wine in the plane on the way over, maybe his brain would have been running a little differently, a little less deliberately toward the inevitable decision he knew he would make. Had he taken the flight attendant up on his offer of the sesame chicken on the plane, it would have been easy to just go to sleep, but the hunger in his belly was reaching toward his chest, tickling cruelly at his heart. Had he been in any other city but Chicago, he could have shrugged off the overwhelming urge to reach for his phone and dial that number that had sat in his phone for years between his college friend Belle and his go-to maintenance guy Boris. Kurt pressed the call button almost absent-mindedly, putting the phone to his ear casually, pacing the floor in front of the sofa more out of boredom than complete pent-up nervous energy. It probably wasn't even his number any more, he was probably going to get somebody else in Chicago, a struggling actor or a waiter or something, but certainly not—
"Hello?"
"Blaine?"
There was the briefest of pauses on the other end, and Kurt thought for a cold, terrifying second that Blaine had hung up the phone, had somehow recognized the voice, because he certainly didn't have Kurt's most recent number in his phone despite Kurt having his, and why would he hang up anyway, if it were Kurt, it wasn't as if they had ended things badly, per se—
"Yes, this is Blaine. Who's this?"
Kurt's mouth went dry, and his pretenses of collected calmness melted as he dropped sitting onto the couch into a huddled position and clutched at the phone with both hands. "It's Kurt. This is Kurt."
"Kurt—Kurt Hummel?" Blaine asked, and Kurt couldn't place the tone, but somehow Blaine had ceded some of the power in the conversation and Kurt was able to say,
"Yes. I'm in Chicago for a couple days, just landed. I was wondering if you wanted to grab dinner with me tonight. I know it's kind of late—"
"Oh. No, no… it's not that late. Uh, where are you?"
Kurt told him the name of the hotel and waited while Blaine looked up the address.
"Oh, that's not far. There's a restaurant about halfway between us, actually, this nice Italian place—does that sound okay?"
Kurt could have been imagining the note of hopefulness in Blaine's voice. Could have been. "That sounds great," Kurt said. "Do you want to just meet there in twenty minutes?"
"Sure." Blaine told him the name of the restaurant and they hung up, avoiding the awkwardness of a goodbye by replacing it with easier "see you in a bit, then"s.
Kurt stared at his phone in bewilderment. Did that just happen? Then, in a panic, he grabbed his carry-on bag and fled to the bathroom to check his hair, moisturize his face and change his shirt.