PART SIX: DO YOU WANT TO DO IT NOW?

Kurt had already rehearsed what he wanted to say twelve times in the cab on the way over by the time it pulled up in front of the coffee shop. He smoothed down his blazer unnecessarily and checked his hair in the window of the coffee shop before he opened the door and went in.

"Oh." Kurt looked around the coffee shop, nostalgia seeping in every corner of it. It could not have looked more like the Lima Bean if it had been the Lima Bean. The layout, the colors, even the biscotti in the display were the same. Out of a ten-year-old habit, Kurt glanced to the table that he knew Blaine would be sitting at. And there he was.

Blaine was wearing plaid under a red sweater jacket and his hair was a little more tamed than it had been the night before. He was still wearing glasses and he was reading a small leather-bound old book. At least, he was pretending to read it. It had been ten years, but Kurt still knew exactly how Blaine's face looked when he was really reading, and how it looked when he was pretending to read while his mind raced on a million other things. Kurt walked up to his table.

"You could not look more like a librarian if you tried," Kurt said to him without thinking.

Blaine started and the book closed with a snap. He looked up at Kurt with a face painted by old habits—his eyes big, liquid, staring at Kurt like he was the only thing in the world that mattered, and his mouth in a loose grin—before his face changed and was replaced with a heartbreaking mix of uncertainty and grief.

Kurt regretted his opening remarks being so flippant, and to make up for it, sat down quickly and leaned forward toward Blaine in what to an outsider may have looked conspiratorial if Blaine had leaned in too.

"I did really well in college," Kurt started immediately, going into his speech. "In high school, before you, I didn't know how to handle myself really, and plus there was no one to notice. But after you, in college, I did really well. I always had a boyfriend—or, at least, a boy, I guess—on the hook and I almost never slept alone." Kurt looked down ruefully. "My dad had told me not to throw myself around like that. I didn't understand what he meant. I guess I thought what he meant was, don't let myself get pressured into having sex with guys. I never thought I would be the one taking advantage of people. I broke hearts. Again and again. I met a guy at a bar, took him back to my place, had a night of it, and then stopped returning his calls the next day. It was like… I didn't know how to do relationships. It didn't make sense to me because what wehad was so good, while I let it be good. But I never had a serious boyfriend after you. It wasn't like I couldn't have put in the effort—I just—I could never find the motivation to put in the effort. I always thought, 'I'm not going to marry this guy, so what's the point?' And so it went. I'm still in that pattern, though I have fewer opportunities now."

He looked up and met Blaine's eyes before continuing. "I have never felt so empty as last night when I was sitting across the table from you and I couldn't reach out to you, couldn't talk to you, like we used to. I knew, for the last ten years, how broken I made things, and how much I fucked everything up between us. But it didn't really hit me what I had been missing since then until I had it in front of me last night and couldn't have it."

Blaine bit on his lip and looked down at the book he was cradling in his hands. Kurt looked down too and saw it was a collection of short stories by Washington Irving. "That's the 'Sleepy Hollow' guy, right?" Kurt asked.

"Yes," Blaine said. "He also wrote 'Rip Van Winkle.' That's what I've been rereading since we got off the phone last night."

Kurt tilted his head and blinked slowly. "The guy who falls asleep for a hundred years and everything's different?"

"It's only twenty years," Blaine corrected. "He lives in New York and one day goes up into the mountains with his dog and finds these—I mean, they're probably like fairies, Irving never really specifies. He drinks some of their liquor and falls asleep, wakes up twenty years later, doesn't know what's happened, his beard is long, his gun is rusted, his dog is gone. He goes back down to the village and everything is just a little bit different. He fell asleep before the Revolutionary War and woke up after it, after the U.S. became independent. The bust of King George is replaced with a bust of George Washington, you know, little things. There are bigger things that are different, but it's the same town he grew up in, just, different."

"Sounds interesting—" Kurt started to say, but Blaine interrupted.

"That's what this is like for me. You're still you, but we're ten years on now and everything is a little bit different. I mean you're still that boy who—who totally broke my heart when I was 17, who skipped off to New York and didn't look back—"

Kurt tried to interrupt but Blaine waved him back with his hand.

"Even if you didn't mean it like that, that's how it felt. How it still feels. It's a bitter hurt, Kurt, and seeing you again brings it all back."

They were quiet for a minute, then Blaine said quietly. "I dated a little bit in college, and there was a guy in my master's program, but I never had anything serious—or anything like what you had either. I couldn't build relationships anymore. I could do friendships great, and all the platonic side of knowing somebody, that was easy. But even just—kissing—when every first kiss reminded me of that day in Dalton, when you were making the coffin for the bird… how could I do it? Everything hurt. Everything that reminded me of you hurt."

"I know," Kurt said softly. "Me too."

"But then I think, Jesus Christ, it was 10 years ago and we were in high school. How am I not over you? We were kids, it was first love, it didn't end ideally but why does it still hurt so much? It shouldn't. It shouldn't."

"But it does," Kurt whispered.

"I feel like Rip Van Winkle," Blaine said, looking back at the book. "But not like I just woke up. I feel like I woke up 10 years ago, and every day has been wondering why things are different than they should be. We should have stayed together. We shouldn't have gone to different schools, I should have been less obstinate about Northwestern, but my dad, and you know—"

"I know."

"When I decided to go there you had already pulled away from me, and I guess I thought, well, maybe the break will be good for us. I thought we were too close." Blaine shook his head. "But you thought the opposite. Even though we were together every day. I wish we had talked about it, back then. But it hurt so deeply, to see you pull away from me like that, and I don't know, my mom just said what you said, you know, we're young, we'll get past it, whatever…"

"I could have come here," Kurt said.

"No," Blaine said fiercely. "You belong in New York. I remember you coming back after Nationals our junior year and just exploding over how amazing it was. You were meant to live there."

Kurt sighed heavily. "But I don't love it like I did then. I mean, I really like the city, I like what I'm doing, I still feel really alive when I'm there, but it's not—as special as it was that first time. I go to work, I love it, but then I go home and—I feed the fish, I watch TV, I order takeout, and I go to bed, and I wonder, 'Is this it?'"

"Something feels like it's missing."

"Yeah," Kurt said, and met Blaine's eyes.

Blaine tentatively slid one hand off the book and pushed it across the table, his fingertips nudging against Kurt's balled-up fist. Kurt opened his fist and reached forward ever-so-slowly, his hand laying over Blaine's, and then slipping around so their fingers lay flush against each other, Kurt's open palm to the ceiling, and then he curled his fingers into Blaine's and they were holding hands again.

Kurt looked down at their hands together and could have cried. "I missed you so much," he said, nearly whimpering. "I tried to force myself not to miss you, but every night all I could was: 'Why did I do it?' And I never had an answer for myself."

"I forgive you," Blaine said softly. "Because underneath the changes you're still that boy from ten years ago. And how could I hate you, when I loved you so much?"

Kurt nodded his head and they were quiet for several minutes. Finally Kurt breathed out and looked over to the counter. "I guess I should order some coffee?"

Blaine laughed. "Yeah, I already got mine."

"Still medium drip?" Kurt asked, smiling fondly.

"The very same."

Kurt began to feel things shift back to how they should be. It was an unlocking inside him, a change that didn't feel new but felt like things were becoming how they should have always been, as if in a parallel universe he had never broken up with Blaine, and all these years of pains had been the harshness of the dissonance with what should have been his universe—and now he was falling into sync with where he was supposed to have been all along. He and Blaine fell into their old patterns, the openness they had with each other, the teasing coupled easily with the sincerity, and their hands only parted briefly when Kurt had to retrieve his coffee from the counter.

He didn't think he could look at Blaine quite yet and think mine but the simple ease in his stomach and his heart and his head told him this was right and he needed to stay on this path, this path with Blaine. Between conversations about everything and anything, Kurt caught a glance of himself in a mirror on the wall and smiled wryly at the light pink dress shirt he had thrown on that morning that he had barely thought about. Pretty in pink, he thought. The Duchess is always right.