Butterscotch and Guilt - 1/2 Dave, Kurt [PG-13]
A Belated Post-♥ Story!
Story: Butterscotch and Guilt - 1/2
Fandom: Glee
Author: ibshafer
Rating: PG-13 - for language
Characters: Dave, Kurt, one-sided Kurtofsky
Disclaimer: I don’t own these people, they own themselves and are just nice enough to let me spin them around the page now and then.
Summary: If Dave had never thought he had a chance with Kurt, if it was all just an elaborate apology, why was he so hurt and why, oh, why, did he have to make Kurt feel guilty?
Length: 5690
A/N: Apologies if this is “off” in any way. Some might not agree with the POV. Also, apologies for making Dave sound less like Dave and more like, well, me. :( Having trouble getting his voice right and running out of time. Shelf life of story close to expiring. (It is Monday night as I type this…) Thx!
A/N 2: Also, this story pre-dates the leaks re: what will happen to Dave in 3.14, so it works more as a response to “Heart” than as a prelude to “On My Way.”
Feedback: Yes, of course! I’m like Tinkerbell (and Rachel Berry) - I need your applause (and hopefully not your rotten tomatoes!) to live…
Butterscotch and Guilt - 1/2
~ ibshafer
“I hope you like the candies. The butterscotch ones are my favorite…”
Dave was pretty sure he couldn’t be a bigger idiot.
That pitch-perfect nod to his Grandmother and her Jewish guilt act had come from out of no where.
He had not started this whole thing with the intention of making Kurt feel badly. As crazy and delusional as he’d seemed, dressed in a gorilla suit, cheesy cards and gifts in his hammy fists, he’d known he was going to be shot down, because, really, could he see Kurt forgetting their past and just jumping into his beefy arms? Could he? Especially not with the World’s Most Perfect Gay Boyfriend (probably riding in his jacket pocket).
But then he’d gone and gotten some form of passing amnesia and forgotten he had no shot. He forgot what his real purpose had been…
He should have been prepared, but he wasn’t.
It wasn’t like he didn’t remember the pull of those eyes, especially if they were looking right at your own, or how they’d make the thoughts in your head just evaporate. He should have steeled himself or looked away, maybe focused on whatever silly tie Kurt was wearing or on shredding his napkin or playing with the sugar packets or something.
But he didn’t do any of that. He heard the sound of Kurt’s voice and, damn did he smell good tonight, and he couldn’t help himself.
He’d looked up…
Once he’d seen Kurt’s face, he was lost.
He’d forgotten his whole plan, lost all sense of reality, and damn the stupid thing, Dave’s heart had gotten the better of him.
Fuck, I really do love him…
And so, yeah, he’d been hurt when Kurt had, however gently, turned him down.
“And I’m with Blaine…”
At that, his brain fog cleared quickly and he suddenly realized what a colossal mistake he’d made - coming there at all, renting the ape suit, buying all those cards, driving around like an idiot searching for the last box of See’s Candy in fucking Ohio - and that he had to get the hell out of here.
But before he could make his pathetic loser getaway, Grammy Lena was standing over his shoulder, feeding suggestions to his clearly receptive brain and >bam!<
Guilt.
‘I hope you like the candies,’ he’d said, his fucking heart grabbing onto his tear ducts with one bloody hand, squeezing his throat just ever so with the other. ‘The butterscotch ones are my favorite…’
And like some sort of twisted Jewish magic, that box, the box Kurt had just been running appreciative fingers over, was transformed from a box of candy into a frigging box of guilt.
You are such a loser, “David.” You know that?
~♥~
Maybe he had a split personality or something.
On one level, he’d known he had absolutely no chance with Kurt, but on another more delusional level, he’d wished with all his heart that Kurt would love him back.
Sometimes he didn’t know which one was in control. (He was pretty sure the ape suit was the delusional one’s idea…)
He’d told himself that his goal for the week had been to make Kurt feel special and then, at the end (tonight), he would lay it all out there as an elaborate (if romantic) apology for what Dave had put him through over the past couple years. One teary-eyed confession before Prom, no matter how heartfelt, just didn’t make up for all that he’d done to Kurt.
More than that, though, Dave thought Kurt needed to know.
Kurt needed to know why Dave had done the things he’d done.
Kurt thought any number of unflattering things about Dave; that he was a sweaty, brainless, asshole, that he was a struggling closeted gay, that he was “in pain.”
Worst of all, Kurt thought that Dave had hated him; that he’d done it all because Kurt was something Dave wasn’t - gay and proud - and he’d hated him for it.
Did he really think that was why Dave had shoved him into lockers and called him names and thrown perfectly good soft drinks at him?
Did he honestly think that was why Dave had kissed him like he was a drowning man and Kurt was air?
That Dave simply hated himself and Kurt was a convenient target? That Dave lacked the advanced communication skills to come right out and say he was gay and this was the only method his caveman brain could devise?
Kurt did think that. Dave had no doubt now.
‘You just think that you love me, you don't really love me…’
Somewhere swimming in the mud his brain was made of, Dave had realized that Kurt had no idea how Dave really felt.
Dave had never hated him.
It was, in fact, quite the opposite.
And Kurt needed to know that…
~♥~
Forty five minutes after the debacle, Dave was sitting in his driveway cursing himself. (To be accurate, he’d actually begun cursing himself long before he’d hit the driveway; he had, in fact, been cursing himself since the moment he’d run from Breadstix dragging that ape suit after him.)
Thank goodness his parents were visiting his aunt and uncle this week or he would have had to explain why he’d been sitting alone in his truck fogging up the windows and swearing for the last thirty minutes…
And though it was totally unlike him, he hadn’t even started to obsess about what that whole run-in with Nick the Asshole could mean. Nothing good, he was sure. He’d think about it later, when he was through beating himself up. (And didn’t that have an ominous ring to it?)
So, one of the things that Kurt didn’t know about Dave was that Dave had been watching him since junior high.
Kurt didn’t know that those tight pink jeans he used to wear had been how Dave had come to realize that he was gay. Because as ridiculous as they’d looked and as much as he and the other boys had picked on him every single time he’d worn them, Dave could not stop thinking about them. About the way they hugged Kurt’s slim hips or the way they smoothed over his rear. Or the way just thinking about them - and then, just thinking about the color of them - could suddenly make Dave’s jeans tight, and how freaked he’d been when he’d realized that was why. He’d spent hours that night flipping through one of his mom’s fashion mags, trying to get off to the slinky women in their barely-there clothes, and it wasn’t until his fingers and his dick were raw from trying that he’d finally, finally come, and then only because he’d found an ad that also featured a half-dressed man on a motorcycle… He’d spent the rest of the night puking Rice-a-Roni and brisket into his trash can and punching bruises into his right thigh…
So Kurt didn’t know that he was the reason, the start of Dave’s “gay,” or that the reason Dave had appeared to hate him so much was that he’d thought that if he could end his fascination with Kurt he might end, well, his fascination with Kurt.
Of course, it hadn’t worked. In part because Kurt was everywhere - in the hallways of Edgemont Junior High and later, in McKinley’s - and Dave just couldn’t get away from him, but also because he realized, after the fact, naturally, that all the time he was investing in purging himself of his gay fascination was really only serving to further it. He wasn’t spending less time thinking about Kurt Hummel and his tight little ass - no, he was spending more time thinking about him and it…and certain other parts of him…
It wasn’t until he’d gotten a little older, McKinley years, not Edgemont, that Dave had let himself do more than just growl when he saw Kurt in the halls and the classrooms. It might not have looked like it, but he’d finally started to hear what the kid was saying and see how he was living his life, and well, Dave was fascinated then in a whole new way.
He wanted to hate the kid, he really did, and outwardly, it certainly looked like that was what he was feeling, but inwardly, Dave was gone. He couldn’t process it normally, he couldn’t respond to it appropriately, but he felt it all the same.
As twisted as it might be, Dave was in love with Kurt Hummel, he just didn’t realize that was what he was feeling. And if he didn’t, then Kurt certainly didn’t.
~♥~
This was more than just about Kurt knowing that Dave had loved him all this time, though.
No, what Kurt really needed to know was something that might look the same on the surface, but was really quite different.
Kurt needed to know that Dave hadn’t hated him.
Dave had done enough reading - damn, he was clearly on his way to becoming a statistic himself, if Nick the Asshole had anything to say about it - to know that how gay kids are treated affects how they feel about themselves and could even impact the kinds of relationships they have in the future.
He knew that Kurt was strong and proud and unstoppable and Dave wasn’t conceited enough to think that Hamhock Dave Karofsky had scarred Kurt so deeply he’d never recover, but everyone has moments of doubt and Dave didn’t want to contribute to that, didn’t want whatever scars Dave might have caused to effect, say, the type of man Kurt felt himself worthy of in the future. (For instance, someone so starved for attention he often forgot his boyfriend needed attention, too, as opposed to someone who, say, went out of his way for a whole week to make him feel special…)
And certainly not, lest we be melodramatic here, that he thought Kurt would have killed himself because Dave the Loser Karofsky had supposedly hated him.
Dave just didn’t want the idea that Dave had hated him to factor into how Kurt thought of himself. Ever. (Rather like how “fat, sweaty, balding by his thirties” would be identifiers that Dave would deservedly carry with him into adulthood…)
And so he’d come up with this whole hair-brained (hair-brained! ha!) scheme as a way to deliver the mother of all apologies to Kurt - and then to make sure he understood that Dave had not hated him. He wasn’t expecting anything from Kurt in return, he just wanted Kurt to know that he had changed Dave in an essential and fundamental way.
He’d turned Dave into a human being.
Dave would have stumbled on, angry at the world and himself forever, had Kurt not been Kurt, not been brave, not been heartbreakingly beautiful, not given as much shit to Dave in return as Dave had given to him.
Fuck, did he love him.
And…and he’d just handled that whole thing really, really badly.
All because he’d forgotten himself and looked up at Kurt’s face…
After that, the disasters just piled onto each other.
First off, he forgot to mention that this week had been about an apology as much as anything else. How did he do that? Oh, yeah - he looked at Kurt’s face…
He’d remembered to tell Kurt that he loved him (well, it was written on the box of candy, so naturally he hadn’t had those eyes to distract while he was writing), but everything he’d done after that had made it seem less like a ‘you changed my life and I love you for it’ kind of confession and more like a ‘I love you and want to be with you’ kind of confession which, if we’re being honest here, was what he was really feeling.
Then he’d tempted the fates and made a complete ass out of himself by reaching across the table and taking Kurt’s hand and Kurt, god bless him, had even let Dave hold it for a few beats before pulling away, though the delay could have been out of shock or, more likely, out of pity.
And of course, he’d forgotten the most important confession of them all, though he did make a start of it. Somehow, though, Dave doubted that ‘I hated myself’ quite translated to the ‘I hated myself, Kurt, but never you’ he’d intended.
And when Kurt had assured Dave that he couldn’t be in love with him and then let him down more gently than Dave would have thought possible, Dave had bolted, but not before topping the night off with the crown jewel of Jewish guilt…
‘I hope you like the candies. The butterscotch ones are my favorite…’
If he hadn’t been so embarrassed by his own conceit and by his own misguided attempts to set things right, and by the heaping helping of guilt he’d just foisted on Kurt, he might have stuck around for a little longer and tried to explain himself a better, but that was when that smarmy asshole, Nick, had popped up from out of nowhere, and Dave, figuring his life was pretty much over anyway, he’d just run for the door.
What a loser I am…
tbc...