These next few are the ever-expanding chapters! What was supposed to be chapter 12 is now more like chapters 12 - 16. The storylines kept growing and I had to keep sorting them into chapters that would make better sense in sequence. What's happened is that I haven't had a single moment in the past few weeks to transfer any of my writing from my phone (and a couple sticky-notes here and there) to my computer for editing and story-arc continuity. Thus, we have another group of chapters all coming out in rapid succession. I wish I could be more consistent and could have gotten them out on a more steady and timely basis! (Too much life getting in the way of fiction! Haha but also grrrrrrrr)

Thank you for reading! And as always, your insights and criticisms and suggestions are invaluable!

(Disclaimer: I still own no Glee, no Marshmallow Fluff recipes, and none of the lyrics to the song "I Set Fire to the Rain" by the inimitable Adele. I do wish that I could cut a deal, pay the royalties and have the song playing during the whole time this chapter is up. That would be cool.)

Chapter 12: Hot Fluff

"Hey, Handso… mm…" Blaine stopped mid-stride on his way to hugging Kurt in his dorm's kitchen, and laughed at the sight of his boyfriend turning around from the counter to face him, revealing his shirt and hands and oh my goodness how? even his arms covered in Marshmallow Fluff.

Kurt tried to look indignant at the laughter but failed, and shrugged with a laugh himself. "I was attacked by fluff!"

Grinning as huge as ever, as huge as he always seems to find himself grinning when he's around Kurt these days, Blaine asked, "What are you DOING?"

"Well… peanut butter jar, Fluff jar, bread… kinda obvious?"

"You do realize you could use a knife to spread the ingredients onto the bread, don't you?"

"There was… an incident."

Blaine could not stop himself from laughing now. "Kurt, how is it that you are the only person I know who can get himself into scrapes like this?" Through bouts of laughter, he stammered, "OK… You can tell me what happene…d… gah… OK, I think I can take it now… hold on… I swear I can stop laughing…." He took a huge breath, pretending to recover from something. "OK, Gorgeous. Tell me the story…!"

"It was… well… there was a problem with getting the fluff out of the jar, which led to some creativity you might say…."

Laughing even harder, Blaine prodded him on, "Kurt, Beautiful, what happened?"

"Well… see… the fluff seemed a bit hardened inside the jar, and I figured maybe it was like honey when it gets crystallized and you can't get it out of the jar, so you can warm the honey up and then it flows again…"

"You DIDN'T!" Still laughing. "So you…" More laughing. "…you didn't think of maybe putting the jar into some hot water to warm it up safely?"

"No. I did not think of that at the time, sadly. And I didn't think to set the microwave to 50% power or defrost setting or something smart like that. Hindsight."

All Blaine could do then was continue laughing and add a hand-slap to his forehead.

"So… when I opened the jar… it looked fine… but as soon as I introduced the cold knife into the hot fluff…" He indicated his shirt and arms, "This happened."

Through laughter, Blaine spit out in bits and pieces, "It broke the surface tension!"… "You actually boiled the fluff!" … "That is so… awesome!"

Suddenly, his laughter ceased, as something occurred to him. "Kurt, wait, was it boiling? Is that really what made it explode when the knife hit it? Did it burn you?" He moved to take Kurt's arms to check that out.

"Oh, no, actually. It wasn't that hot by the time it hit me. Well… it was awfully warm, but in a nice way, not a painful way at all. I'm not sure if it was boiling and then cooled in the air on its way to me, but that doesn't make sense, so maybe Fluff explodes at a lower temperature, or who knows…."

With relieved chuckles, Blaine grabbed a knife and a couple slices of bread, and simply started making a sandwich. Kurt did the same.

"I can't believe we're making these," Blaine said after a minute. "I haven't even thought about fluff and peanut butter since I was in like the 3rd grade or something. I used to trade my baloney sandwich for my best friend Mark's fluffernutter sandwich maybe every day for a year! I can't believe I used to like these! Gross."

Kurt chose to ignore the insult to the snack they were making, because he saw an opportunity to possibly get Blaine to open up about something from his past, and that was far more important to him than defending the honor of any sandwich. He asked, "Do you still stay in contact with Mark at all? I actually don't know any of my old friends from elementary school anymore."

"Nah, me either. I have no idea where he is now. Funny, isn't it?" Cutting a diagonal through his sandwich and placing it on top of Kurt's on the clean plate, he took his Handsome's fluff-filled hands and led him to the sink where he tested the stream of water until it was the perfect warmth for maximum fluff-removal, and led those hands into the water while he poured soap into his own.

The fact that this assistance was completely gratuitous, and Kurt could clearly more easily and effectively clean the fluff off his own hands and arms, was part of what made this moment so telling for both of them. Kurt had to struggle with his libido's reactions to Blaine's lovingly gentle and thorough ministrations to his hands with the soap and water, to keep his words on the conversation. "Yeah… elementary school was so long ago I can barely remember those friends." He glanced up to watch Blaine's face, which was deep in concentration on Kurt's right arm as he was caressing the fluff off much more slowly than necessary. "So, Blaine… do you still see any of your friends from your old high school at all?"

Kurt wasn't sure, but it seemed to him as though Blaine hadn't meant to let a bitter laugh slip out before he could check it, but it was obvious that he was covering it up immediately with, "Ah, you know. Whatever."

Kurt took the chance and probed a little, "Are any of your old friends still real friends?"

"No. My only real friends are the ones I've made here at Dalton." Blaine fetched a fresh hand-towel out of the drawer, beckoned Kurt toward it with "Here, Beautiful…" and wrapped his arms in it, drying them off for him in another completely unnecessary action that made Kurt's heart melt and compelled his lips onto Blaine's.

Expressing no complaints that Blaine turned Kurt's soft sweet kiss eventually into an increasingly passionate and urgent one, he looked deep into Blaine's eyes and thought maybe, just maybe, he was making progress at last and he could continue this moment of Blaine actually sharing his emotions from the past. He asked, "What happened with your old friends?" He thought he could feel Blaine sort of coming around, and this feeling was not off-base in the least.

"I don't know, you know… we were all young. I mean; freshman and sophomore years in high school were when my friends were figuring themselves out at the same time I was figuring myself out, you know? I know that was just last year and the year before, like as if we were SO much younger then… but it really does feel like ages ago. And freshman year really was a long time ago anyway. That's when my closest friend was always bugging me about why I never found any of these girls interesting at all, and things like that."

"How did that go over," Kurt asked as he hung the towel next to the sink and led Blaine over to the stools to sit together at the counter, running one of his excessively-clean hands through his thoughtful boyfriend's curly bangs.

"I don't know… I wasn't admitting or announcing anything ever… it was just a thing where I never was a part of all that with my friends, when they talked about girls all the time and I couldn't really be a part of that, because I never sat around pretending and making stuff up like 'oh yeah I know what you mean, what a nice rack on that one' or anything like that. So I just wasn't a part of most of their bonding, and so we kind of drifted apart I guess. But I don't know, we still talked about baseball and football all the time and everything… I don't know. It DIDN'T go over well when I finally admitted that I was gay last year. That's for sure. I was on the football team and I had to quit just because it was so uncomfortable always being avoided. And when everyone on a team refuses to touch you, there's really no way to actually play football, right? Crazy. At Dalton, that would never happen. If someone on the football team here is homophobic it's up to him to get over it himself."

Seeing all the dishes strewn over the counter from their sandwich-making adventures, they started to move them into the sink to wash them, without needing any words, just easily coordinating their efforts in that way they had together that made people think they must share a psychic connection. Kurt wished he could be psychic about Blaine's feelings, though.

Kurt was noticing Blaine's transformation beginning, with his tone of voice still open and friendly, but his body language starting to revert back to his perfect-Dalton-guarded persona, from its free and easy and uninhibited manner Kurt had enjoyed seeing in Blaine so far today, and he hoped he might be able to push him a bit more to stave off that change, and maybe get him to get real and let Kurt in just a little. He asked, "You ended up transferring here mostly because of bullies, though?" When Blaine just nodded in a way that said yeah of course, you already know that, Kurt pushed again, asking, "Was it bad?"

"You know, not really… it wasn't anywhere near as bad as your school with the physical attacks and drink-throwing and I can't believe your dumpster attacks and all that…." Blaine shook his head, remembering Kurt's stories. "For me it was just the fact that I couldn't have a normal high school education if I was always watching over my shoulder and wondering if they would one day decide to escalate their verbal abuse to something else. You just never know, so it's definitely not conducive to studying and concentrating. At all. And since there was nothing anyone could do about it, my parents and I went looking at other schools, and Dalton had all the activities I was interested in, and a good football team and an amazing glee club, and the people I met when we visited here seemed more like me than anyone at my old school… they seemed like people I would get along with. And it turned out I was right."

Kurt knew without a doubt that this wasn't the whole story. The facts may be complete, but Blaine's experience wasn't being told completely. There was more hidden emotional content to this that he wasn't opening up about, but was clear to see in its avoidance, and Kurt really hoped that he would get him to open up sometime about how all that affected him, but obviously not tonight… he could see that Blaine was already back to the body language and speech patterns of his dapper Dalton reserved and conservative mode.

Still, Kurt is the guy who always sees things through until the very last possible effort is spent. The kitchen and all the dishes were clean by now, and they sat down to look at their fluffernuter sandwiches and contemplate whether or not they were adventuresome enough to try the overly-sweet ridiculous combination. Picking one of the triangles up and playing with it in his hands, Kurt said, "Do you mind me asking about your parents, Blaine?"

"Of course not, Gorgeous. You can always ask me anything, you know that."

"Well, you said your Dad thought that fixing cars with you and things like that might get you to turn straight or something…?" He waited for Blaine's nod before he continued, "Is he still like that?"

Blaine instantly replied, "Nah. He's over that. They both are fine now. We don't talk about it all the time or anything, but it's fine."

Both of them having decided that a couple bites of a fluffernutter sandwich is more than enough, they went to the sink to wrap the sandwiches for someone else who might like them, and clean that last plate. Leaning on the sink after finishing the plate, Kurt said, "Sweetheart…" and waited for Blaine to look at him. "Do you talk about it at all with your family?"

"Talk about me being gay? Or romance in general? Or… never mind, you know, I'm answering my own question. Or rather, my clarifications on your question. No, we don't really talk about any of that. That's fine. Most kids don't. I don't really remember my brother talking all about his love life either. They show they love me and support me, and we can talk about anything… it's fine. They're good."

Now his tone was all the way back to that of his Dalton-dapper mode, and Kurt knew he wouldn't be breaking down any more walls today. So he splashed some water up at Blaine's face, then ducked away since Blaine's reflexes are astonishing and he had the water hose out of the sink and directed at Kurt's head in a split second. Kurt dove for the jar of fluff, opened it and dug his finger in even as Blaine yelled wide-eyed, "You WOULDN'T!"

"Oh… I think I would…" Kurt just barely managed to wrestle past Blaine's defending arm and the barrage of water from the other hand holding the hose at as much of Kurt as possible, and he got a huge dollop of fluff right on Blaine's nose.

"Oh, this means WAR!" Blaine dropped the hose and pinned his boyfriend, soaking wet from head to foot, against the kitchen counter, and tried to steady his breathing, not from the wrestling and water fight, but the realization that he had just pinned his boyfriend, who is soaking wet from head to foot, against the kitchen counter.

War instantly over, Kurt smiled beguilingly at their predicament, and began to lick the fluff off his suddenly flustered boyfriend's nose.

In the background, from Kurt's iPod on the shelf, Adele was singing "I set fire to the rain, watched it pour as I touched your face…" and it brought images of their first kiss to his mind, the one they both had wanted to continue but they each misinterpreted as soon as they were out of the pouring rain, and Kurt began to wonder if these two sides to Blaine, the one he unleashes with Kurt sometimes in safe moments and free moments, and the one he pulls over himself to project a conservative, controlled persona even with Kurt most of the time, may possibly be a factor in their failure to truly connect… sometimes. Like that time. That kiss in the pouring rain which should have led instantly to this. This connection.

He was thinking is this connection enough or are we missing something, even this early in our relationship, as Adele's words "there was a side to you I never knew, never knew" brushed past his conscious thoughts… should I let him come around at his own pace or does he need me to push to break through his barriers? Adele sang on and he just barely kept the tears that began welling in his eyes at bay as he realized she was singing the advice he was asking for, right then and there from his iPod, "Even now when you're already over, I can't help myself from looking for you…" Even as they kissed, and he felt Blaine's love for him in that kiss, he knew there was a truth dawning on him. Adele sang "I set fire to the rain, And I threw us into the flames…" and he knew the difficult answer. Ah, but Kurt Hummel was never one to shrink back from pushing when that's what's needed.

A/N: I'm sure it's not necessary, but a big WARNING: Do not try this at home! Fluff would indeed burn you I believe, if it was hot. And it would be stuck to you, thus intensifying the burns. Not that I would try it to find out. And neither should you.

You can try washing someone else's hands in a sink if you like. I imagine that would be safe. Depending on the relative levels of the resulting water fight.

(Hey, song drabble expert... yes, you, G.G. -I totally saw your style in my last couple paragraphs! Awww I'm learning from you! *hugs)