Glee -- Third Time Lucky 6: A Little Bit of Scandal

[tierfal]

Title: Third Time Lucky
Chapter: 6. A Little Bit of Scandal
Fandom: Glee
Pairing: Karofsky/Kurt
Rating: R (for pRofanity)
Word Count: 7,577
Warnings: STUFF, omg
Summary: Somehow the dead heat of summer gives rise to the mother(fucker) of all second chances. The road to redemption is paved with fights, phone calls, false starts, and more than a few jokes at the expense of the lovable Finn Hudson.
Author's Note: If there are any editing errors, attribute them to the fact that I have not had any caffeine today. I don't know how I am even alive. Also, have some Tool. Comment replies tomorrow when I have more brain. Enjoy! ♥


CHAPTER 6: A LITTLE BIT OF SCANDAL
“Are you okay, Kurt?” Carole asks.

He looks up, wiping the guilt off of his face. Perhaps mincing the living daylights out of his enchilada with his fork was not the best way to present a front of emotional stability.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Just tired after being on my feet all morning.”

Finn consumes enough Spanish rice in one mouthful to feed a small South American village. “How’s that going, man?”

“Fairly well, thank you,” Kurt says. “Did you and Puck sort out what you were working on?”

“Uh.” Finn wrinkles his nose. “Kind of, I guess.” If that doesn’t epitomize conviction, Kurt isn’t sure what does. “Now he wants to do some kind of video game medley… thing… and we kind of had a fight about it. But I guess that means we sorted it out. Or we sorted out what we weren’t doing.”

That’s just perfect; now Finn will be lurking around the living room all day, and Kurt won’t be able to get away with anything.

“Did you get lunch all right?” his father asks. “There’s a sandwich place two doors down, right?”

“It’s fine, Dad,” Kurt says, apparently a little too firmly, because his father and Carole share one of those looks.

God. Kurt is honestly so happy for the both of them that it makes his Sappy Senses tingle, but he didn’t really think this through. Neither Burt nor Carole needed a coconspirator in the evil acts of teenager brain-hacking that they perpetrate-they’re incisively intelligent alone; together, they’re just terrifying.

“Really,” Kurt says.  “Dina makes sure I take all of my legally-allotted breaks, probably because she, like every other adult female I have ever met-no offense, Carole-is inclined to mother me.”

“I think you’re just going to have to get used to it, Kurt,” Carole says, looking about as not offended as humanly possible.  “You’re just… adorable.”

“Yeah,” Finn says eagerly, which is the great thing about Finn-he doesn’t even seem to have noticed that his own mother just announced that his step-brother is the cute one.  “The girls in glee actually did a poll within the club of the most adorable dudes anywhere, and you beat out Jake Gyllenhaal and Justin Bieber.  And me, even though Rachel tried to throw the vote.”

Kurt pauses.  “I should really put that on my résumé.  Do you think Rachel would make me a certificate?”

“Yes,” Finn and Carole say at once.

There’s a pause, and then everyone laughs-ever-so-slightly guiltily, because Rachel, despite her lunatic competitiveness, has a good heart, and it’s frustratingly difficult to hate her.

Kurt knew that would work.

He sends one email after dinner, because he couldn’t quite work up the guts to type it the moment he got home-I’m really sorry about what happened today.  If I’d known he was coming, I would have told you so.  There’s no response by the time he goes to bed, and not for lack of forcing the program to refresh.

Eventually, go to bed he does, though going to sleep is a different matter entirely.  He wasn’t completely bullshitting at dinner; he is exhausted after all of the things that have been ricocheting around his life.  It’s just that he can’t help turning the chaotic confrontation of the morning over (and over, and over, and over) in his head, reliving and rehashing.  He should have interjected before Karofsky stormed out; he should have been kinder to Blaine after the fact; hell, he should have warned Blaine before.  He was a pathetically bad friend to both of them today, and acknowledging that is like burying a fishhook in the pit of his own stomach and threading the line up through his throat.

On second thought, that mental image is actually more nauseating than having invited the fiasco.  The upside is that any English teacher who would assign Ken Kesey to children will appreciate Kurt’s penchant for histrionic figurative language.

With the kind of systematic efficiency he admires in himself, Kurt employs all of the strategies he’s developed over the last year, but none of the deep breathing or muscle relaxation will quiet his mind.  There’s not really anything for it-he’s just going to have to man up and apologize to both of them, preferably in person.  To be fair, it’s not his fault they went at each other like four-year-olds rather than letting him explain-and it’s definitely not his fault that of all the toy stores in all of Ohio, they both walked into his… at the same time-but the buck has to stop somewhere before it careens out into the wilderness and lights something on fire.

Kurt’s prospective English teacher probably won’t be so fond of his mixed metaphors.

He lays his forearm over his eyes, more to block the little green light from his computer charger and the red numbers of his alarm clock than for the comforting melodrama, though it’s a bit of both.  The more he looks at that clock, the more it taunts him; here and there he’s been slipping into dozes, but he always drops back out of them, feeling more tired than he did when he drifted off.  If he even gets to the point of wispy dreams, they involve people being irreconcilably angry at him, and he has enough of that in reality.  Or at least, he thinks so, since reality is starting to get a little fuzzy around the edges.

So maybe his cell phone isn’t ringing.  It’s very possible he’s starting to suffer from the clinical kind of exhaustion, or that he’s hallucinating, or that it’s some combination of dreamscape and poor night vision that’s making the iPhone appear to jitter across the nightstand, dangerously close to the edge.

Kurt cannot bear to watch his iPhone fall to the floor on a day like today-is-actually-yesterday-at-two-in-the-morning.  He throws a bleary arm out and catches it before it leaps from the precipice.

It’s a local number that looks vaguely familiar.  Is he really going to tap the green button and-

“OhmyGodwhat,” he mumbles into the phone.

“…Kurt?”

He doesn’t jolt awake, because he’s too wrecked for that, but he does sit up and scrape his free hand across his eyes.  Karofsky has never, in their convoluted acquaintance, addressed him by his first name.  “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Karofsky says, presumably as a reflex. He sounds coherent-more so than Kurt, at this rate.

“Okay,” Kurt replies.  “Then I’m going back to bed, and you can figure your nothing out by yourself.”

“Just-” Karofsky’s struggling.  Kurt would help him, but it’s two in the morning, and there’s enough background noise that…

“Is Azimio having another party on a weeknight?” Kurt asks, trying to contort himself enough to massage at the ache between his shoulder-blades.  “I mean, he’s always been slightly sociopathic, but I think this is impressive even by his standards.”

“It’s one of the other guys,” Karofsky says, voice tainted by the roughness of an automatic defense.  “It’s not like there’s anything else to do until football training starts again.”

“Fine,” Kurt says.  He gives it a moment, listening to the faint, faint, tinny strains of distant laughter.  “Can I help you, David?”

“Just-”

Kurt should hang up.  Kurt should go back to sleep-or almost-close-to-kind-of-sleep, as it were.  Kurt should, for once in his life, do the Smart Thing and let this go.  His head has always been more reliable than his heart; it’s the one that’s gotten him this far, and, simply in deference to that, he should trust it now.  He should pry the phone away from his ear, hit the red button to end the call, turn it off, set it on the nightstand, and bury his face back in that unappealing dent in his pillow.

“I-need a ride,” Karofsky says.

Kurt’s better judgment gets lost on its way to lock his voicebox in a closet.  “You mean a ride home?”

“No, a ride to the fucking carnival.  What do you think?”

Kurt is just awake enough to bristle.  “It’s two in the morning, and you’re drunk-dialing me.  For all I know, all you want is a damn hamburger.”

“Fuck, now I’m hungry,” Karofsky says.  Kurt will laugh at that tomorrow.  “No.  I mean-yeah, I need a ride home.  Because-they’re just-everybody else is really wasted, and they’re all downstairs saying shit about…” Gays.  Glee.  Me.  “…stuff.  And I fucking hate it, and I want to go home.”  There’s a note of surprise creeping into his voice, but-characteristically-he shoves straight through it.  “But obviously if I’m drunk enough to call you, I’m way too drunk to fucking drive, so… yeah.”  There is an almost theatrical crispness to his voice.  “There you have it.”

Kurt tries to wake himself up by force.  He knows his decision-making is extremely impaired-he picked up the phone in the first place, after all; worse, he still hasn’t put it down yet.  “I guess next time I want you to be honest, I’ll ply you with rum.”

“Dick.”

At least it’s a very masculine playground insult.  “Your begging needs a lot of work.  Isn’t there anyone else you can call?”

Karofsky snorts.  “They’re all here.”

Kurt rubs his eyes and then peeks through his fingers at the clock.  It’s two-sixteen.  He hasn’t really been able to sleep anyway.  He thinks his father would be angrier at the prospect of Kurt letting a drunk teenager out on the road than at the thought of Kurt chauffeuring one at this hour.

He rubs his eyes again, just in case it’ll work a miracle and change the world around him.

“Do you have enough dry brain cells to remember the address?” he asks.

Kurt doesn’t have time to assess the fuel-efficiency of removing the key from the ignition before there’s a tall, broad figure slipping out the front door of the manor house and striding across the lawn.  As he draws closer, Karofsky is either frowning at Kurt, squinting in the headlights’ glare, or both.  With the typical uncanny agility, he dodges around the truckbed and climbs up onto the passenger’s side of the bench seat.

“What the hell happened to your Escalade?” he asks.

“My dad is a mechanic,” Kurt says.  “I go to a boarding school.  You’re the math genius.”

Karofsky mutters something that is almost certainly not a compliment as Kurt starts down the street, checking his mirrors more than usual.  If he gets pulled over right about now, his life is over.

“It’s funny, though,” Karofsky adds once Kurt has done due diligence (and then some) to a stop sign.  “Black Escalade.  Black pickup.  You dress like a girl and then drive, like, man-cars.”

“Much as I like that compound word,” Kurt says, “I think it bears pointing out-for when you’re sober enough to follow this train of logic-that I’m not just a gay kid, David.  I’m a human being.  There is no checklist for being homosexual, and there’s no flowchart of criteria, and there’s no test at the end to see how good a gay you were.  There are just people.”  He glances over.  Karofsky’s leaning against the window, and his eyes glint out of the deep shadows cast by the passing streetlights.  “Hence my ardent love of man-cars. And hence… you.”

He glances over again.  Karofsky’s smiling faintly.

“What?” Kurt asks, although he’s eighty-five percent sure he doesn’t want to know.

“Nothing,” Karofsky says.  “Just that you sound like Schuester.”

Yeah.  Didn’t want to know.

“Except way less lame and creepy.”

“Schue isn’t creepy,” Kurt says.  “I’m afraid he is lame.  Which is why he would have used that opportunity to talk about facets and then compare you to a special gemstone with a cut found nowhere else in the world.”

Karofsky laughs so hard that Kurt is actually worried he’ll hurt himself.

“What?” Kurt asks, and this time he’s ninety-five percent sure.

Karofsky flashes him a smirk that looks Halloweenish in the half-light.  “I’m going to tell him you said that.”

“No, you’re not,” Kurt says, guiding his man-car around the next turn, egged on by the urgent clicking of his blinker.  “As lame and naïve and out-of-touch as Mr. Schue is, he’s the only person at that entire school who’s always on our side.”  Eventually Kurt intends to use this line of reasoning to prove that Blaine is not the Antichrist, but that can wait.  “You’re good at this game, David, and you know how to hedge your bets.  You know you might not be able to keep this under wraps forever; you’ve known that from the start.  So you know that you can’t afford to alienate people who might be your only allies if this whole thing goes topside.  You’re smart enough to realize you might need people like Schue-people who are always going to take you for who you are and who you could be, not what you’ve been.”

They sit silently for a long moment, Kurt’s foot steady on the pedal, the road slipping beneath them and away.  Light dapples on the dashboard, and the air conditioning wheezes once.

“What about you?” Karofsky says.

“What about me?” Kurt asks.  It’s two-forty, and they’re nearing their destination, and he’s finally tired now, just in time to have to drive back and avoid getting his ass dragged to juvie.  If Puck couldn’t handle it… but then, maybe Kurt would just be everybody’s pet?  Honestly, it doesn’t bear thinking about; the very idea gives him goosebumps.

“How do you take me?” Karofsky asks.

“At the moment,” Kurt says, “I’m taking you to your house.  Hey, here we are.”

“Har har,” Karofsky says as Kurt parks just across the street, sizing up the dark, curtained windows of the home.  “You know what I fucking mean, Hummel.”

Kurt pulls the parking brake, kills the engine and the lights, and shifts against the seatbelt to meet Karofsky’s gaze as levelly as he can in the flickering dark.

“David,” he says.  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t see more in you than you see in yourself.”

Karofsky shifts, swallows, unbuckles his seatbelt, and darts a glance at Kurt.  “That was in Schuester territory.  But…” He picks at the seam of the seat-cover, black-on-gray.  “Thanks. I guess.”

Kurt smiles a little.  “That’s what friends are for.  Real friends, anyway.”

Something very subtle changes in the set of Karofsky’s shoulders where he’s half-turned away-or maybe it’s just the light again; one of his neighbors has a porch lamp that’s flickering like something from a horror movie.

“Is that what you are, Hummel?” There’s a very low, very small, but undeniable note of caution that sabotages the accusation Karofsky’s aiming for. “You’re my real friend?”

Kurt scrubs the back of his hand across his eyes and then folds his left arm on the wheel, angling himself to give Karofsky another long look, whether or not it gets ignored. “It seems to me that I’ve seen closer to a hundred percent of you than anyone else alive. It follows that I am a friend of the real you, and therefore a real friend.” He leans back against the seat, fighting the sleep-fog that’s seeping into his head, and scuffs the heel of his hand on the bench beside him. “And, despite the urgings of virtually everyone around me and everything in me that knows better… I’m still here.”

He watches his fingertips slide along one of the ridges in the seat-cover, and when he looks up, Karofsky is looking back, ember-eyed and still.

Then Karofsky is pressing him to the seatback and kissing him again-hot mouth on his, cold hands on his shoulders; the seatbelt scrapes against the side of Kurt’s neck, and this time David tastes like cinnamon and the heavy, jarring sting of rum.

Maybe it’s the cinnamon (too much Big Red, or the real stuff?), but nothing seems to happen in the right order.  A fragment of Kurt’s mind assesses the newfound consistency of the darkness and determines that his eyes are closed; his lungs seize; his breath stutters; his knuckles ache, and the seatbelt he’s gripping digs into his palm; there’s a smaller kick of alcohol as Karofsky’s soft, moist breath ghosts over his cheek.

Karofsky leans in, heavier by the moment.  His chin grazes Kurt’s as he shifts; there’s a tiny scrape of stubble that sends shivers chasing up and down Kurt’s limbs.  He winds his hand tighter into the seatbelt as if it’s an anchor chain; two of Karofsky’s fingertips brush warmly at his jaw and then his throat; the soft weight of the boy, concentrated in that boy’s mouth and hands and shoulders, presses harder and more insistently; the catching, almost chafing (rubber-composite) friction of their mouths deepens into wet-Kurt thinks saliva, thinks don’t French me, thinks oh my God oh my God, and then thinks no.

He opens his eyes, and the hand that’s not tangled in the seatbelt flattens against Karofsky’s everywhere-chest and pushes; he twists his head away and gasps for air and abruptly discovers he’s shaking and his cheeks are aflame.

Karofsky’s right arm is braced against the seatback; his other hand is settled like a lead weight on Kurt’s shoulder, where his spread fingers would have both the reach and the leverage to wrap around Kurt’s neck and squeeze.

He wouldn’t-except that violence comes in lots of flavors, and cinnamon-kiss is one of them, so who knows what the next might be?

David’s eyes are almost impossibly dark-the whole cab of the truck is; Kurt’s in his shadow again, as is most of the driver’s seat and half of the door.  His gaze is on Kurt’s mouth, and then Kurt’s collar, and then his own knees on the bench seat, and then it flicks up again to align with Kurt’s.

Kurt tries to squirm away, but the seatbelt’s stuck and cutting into his side, so instead he plants both hands on Karofsky’s chest and shoves.

Even now he knows it’s less a strength born of desperation than it is the element of surprise, but suddenly he can gulp in breaths of open air, because Karofsky’s fallen back against the dash.  Karofsky lifts his arms to steady himself, and his elbows look like folded wings, sharp and silhouetted, and the shadows have hidden his face again, and it’s three in the morning, and Kurt just-he just-

“Get out,” he says, and his voice is almost inaudible, but he can’t hold the panic down long enough to clear his throat.  “Get out of my-”

The seat rustles, the latch sighs, and the door slams.  Karofsky starts off around the back of the truck again, and Kurt doesn’t wait to watch him go-he turns the key, guns the ignition, flips on his headlights, and takes off just too slow to skid.

Two miles later, it occurs to him that he has no idea what part of Lima he’s in, presumably because he took a wrong turn almost immediately and didn’t correct.  He pulls over to the curb beneath an oak tree-he supposes that if he’s going to get lost at an unholy hour of night under dubious conditions with his car smelling like rum and his heart hammering and his brain about to explode, a quiet residential area is a nice place to do it-and takes out his iPhone to pin himself on the map.  He drops it into his lap three times before he can apply enough pressure to the screen to select the app.

The rest is a blur-of faded colors; of tree shapes; of fence designs and mailboxes; of the tires on the pavement and the rumble of the smooth machinery beneath the hood; of the white hyphen-lines blinking and then snapping past; of the occasional burn of opposing headlights leaving red stains on the insides of his eyelids.  Some part of his brain is conscious of the rest of it, and that portion observes critically as the cogs spin and whir without catching; that piece can whisper the words defense mechanism.

The remaining pieces narrow in on driving home.  Speed limit’s twenty-five even when it’s not posted, except on Main; that’s thirty.  He avoids Main anyway, taking the longer route; there could be cops, and then he’d be fucked, hosed, knee-deep up Shit Creek without a paddle or a pair of anglers’ boots.

He will save that one especially for next year’s English teacher.  If he or she is very lucky, there will even be time left over to talk about Cuckoo’s Nest when Kurt’s done making metaphor cocktails.

When he finally crawls back into his bed, he doesn’t fall asleep so much as pass out facedown, but unconscious is unconscious, and Kurt will take what he can get.

“Lunch,” Kurt says the next morning when Mercedes picks up the phone.  “As in, I will buy you.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Mercedes says.  “What the hell does that mean?”

“I will redeem currency to acquire edibles of your choosing,” Kurt says.

“Very freakin’ funny, Kurt,” she says, and he loves that her strict No Bullshit policy extends-or perhaps applies especially-even to her best friend.  “What’s wrong?”

“It’s complicated,” Kurt says.  “And the walls are thin, and I think Quinn taught Finn how to hear a scandalous whisper from a hundred yards.”

“There’s scandal?” Mercedes asks, sounding torn between horror and delight.

“Only a little,” Kurt says.  “And it’s not terribly salacious.  I’ll tell you over the edibles we acquire.”

“The edibles you acquire,” Mercedes says.  “You just said you’d buy.”  She can probably hear him rolling his eyes, albeit lovingly.  “But I’ll buy you ice cream.”

“Deal,” Kurt says.  “Eleven-thirty downtown?”

“Make it noon.”

“Done.”

“Later, Kurt.”

“Ta.”

“Wow,” Mercedes says when they’ve sat down to acquired edibles-the best sandwiches in town, not that Kurt has an appetite.  “You actually have a day off?  Is the store going out of business now that you’ve put the fear of God into all the eight-year-olds in Lima?”

Kurt shrugs.  “Not that I’ve been informed.  I got an email from Alyssa asking me to come back in to work Monday, and Dina will teach me how to close.”  He doesn’t mention the fact that he received the email this morning during the constant-refreshing binge that preceded a long shower and a resolution to quit vacillating and lamenting like some kind of fairytale princess on a bad day.  “Until then, I am, amazingly enough, a free man.”

Mercedes sips her drink and watches him for a moment, and he blinks innocently back.

“So,” she says.  “Just a little bit of scandal?”

“I’m losing my touch,” Kurt says.

“Still more scandal than I’ve had all week,” Mercedes says.

“I suppose my perspective is skewed by the fact that I live with Finn,” Kurt admits.  “He seems to bleed scandal and sweat controversy without even meaning to.”

Mercedes smiles sweetly.  “Honestly, I will bust somebody’s ass if I have to hear one more word about that boy and his bodily fluids.  I had Rachel on the phone for half an hour yesterday before I could finally get her to shut up.”  She leans forward, folds her hands, sets her chin on them, and beams.  “Tell me about your scandal.”

Kurt scoots his chair in a little, subtly glancing left and right.  He did a preliminary sweep of the room before they sat down, of course, but he hasn’t monitored everyone who walked through the door since.

“David Karofsky called me at two in the morning last night,” he says.

As before, Mercedes is both mortified and desperately intrigued.  Kurt can’t blame her, of course, so he indulges her instead.

“He was at a party, but he wanted to leave, and obviously nobody had thought to assign a DD, so… I told him I’d pick him up.  And I did.”

There is a pause.

“And?” Mercedes says, because she’s just that much smarter than anyone gives her credit for.

“And…” Kurt makes another quick, faux-casual survey, just in case, and softens his voice.  “When we got to his house, he-kissed me.  Again.”

Mercedes actually puts her hand over her mouth.

“I know,” Kurt says.  “That was pretty much my reaction.  After I, um, shoved him into the dash of the car and told him to get out.”

“What’d he say?” Mercedes asks in wonder.

“Nothing,” Kurt tells her.  “He just went.  And I didn’t sit around to see if he’d gotten in okay, so there’s a small chance he was sitting on his own porch for a few hours until someone in the house woke up.”

Mercedes picks up her drink, puts it down, and picks it up again.  “There’s something I shouldn’t ask, but…”

“I hereby award you awkward question amnesty,” Kurt says-which is a very bad idea, but he hasn’t had a good one in so long that it’s kind of comfortable.

Mercedes fights the impulse-and her straw-for another moment before she sets the drink aside and takes a deep breath.

“Is he a good kisser?” she asks.  When he blinks, she adds, “I mean, the way you keep throwing out crazy new intel about this guy, I wouldn’t even be surprised.”

“I see what you mean,” Kurt says.  “But I don’t have much grounds for comparison.  I don’t have any  grounds for comparison.”

“I thought you made out with Brittany,” Mercedes says.

“I wasn’t attracted to Brittany,” Kurt says.

“But you are attracted to him?” Mercedes asks.

Kurt opens his mouth and then shuts it.  Then he opens it again to say, “Pass.”

“Awkward question amnesty,” Mercedes reminds him.

“That means you can ask really awkward questions,” Kurt says, “not that I have to answer them.”

Mercedes raises her eyebrows and sits back.  “Well, in this context, I’m pretty sure ‘pass’ means ‘yes,’ so…”

“Honestly, I haven’t figured it out yet,” Kurt says, vaguely wishing he had a dumber BFF before he realizes how miserable that would make him the rest of the time.  “My track record is somewhat spotty, and I don’t want to start thinking I’m into him just because he’s there.  Availability is not a personality trait that really holds up over time.”  He frowns.  “And he’s not even available, at least not emotionally.  We have guarded conversations, and then he drunk-dials me from parties, and apparently sometimes he wants to jump me afterward.  Thinking about it, no, I’m not attracted to him; I’m too pissed off at him right now.”

“Good,” Mercedes says.  “Nobody gets to molest my Kurt unless he wants them to.”

Kurt’s face goes from zero to fire-truck in two and a half seconds.  “Okay, for the record, there has never been any molesting going on.  It’s much more like getting slapped in the face than it is like being groped.”

“I thought he was a good kisser,” Mercedes says.

Kurt fans his face.  “I never answered that.”

“Exactly,” Mercedes says.

Kurt glares at her, which unsurprisingly doesn’t help.  “I said I couldn’t make a judgment, and I still can’t.  Even if I wasn’t pissed off at him, the one thing I learned in McKinley science-the only thing I learned in McKinley science-is that you need a control group to draw viable comparative conclusions.  He’s the only…” So much for not sounding pathetic.  “Well, he’s the only boy I’ve ever kissed.  Ever been kissed by, I should say; I wasn’t exactly complicit in either case.  So I can’t form any hypotheses about his proficiency, or Newton will rise from the grave to punish me.”

“Wasn’t he gay, too?” Mercedes asks.  “Whatever.  It’s really simple, Kurt.  If it felt good, he’s good.  Bam.”

“I hate to use such a morally connotative word as ‘good,’” Kurt says.  “And, really, I’ve been so busy with the disbelief and effrontery both times that I didn’t pay much attention to how it felt.”

Mercedes crosses her arms.  “Then you have to experiment more.”

Kurt’s cheeks are burning again.  Pretty soon he’ll register to the smoke alarm.  “You know the only other thing I learned in McKinley science?  When it comes to chemistry, things tend to blow up in my face.”

“At least that’s exciting,” Mercedes says.  “This town is so dead during the summer it’s amazing.”

“I think I’ll leave the excitement for someone else,” Kurt says.  “Besides, he hasn’t gotten in contact with me since what happened last night.  Maybe he decided to change his name and move out of the country.”

“I kinda doubt it,” Mercedes says judiciously.  “More like he’s embarrassed that he can’t keep his paws off of you.”

“We’ll see,” Kurt says with much less confidence.

“Which is why you’re going to call me if the asshole ever tries anything,” Mercedes says.  “And then I’m gonna rip out a rib or two and put ’em through his eyes.”

Kurt blinks.

“Now I’m really not hungry,” he says.

Finn is tapping away at a Halo campaign again when Kurt gets home.

“Hey,” he says over his shoulder, pausing in mid-explosion-of-some-kind-of-plasma. “Can you give me some advice?”

“Don’t drink milk that’s past the expiration date,” Kurt says.  “Period.  No matter how badly you want cereal.”

Finn does one of his favorite lost puppy expressions-the one where he pouts just a little, and his eyes squint, and he looks to the side for four seconds before he follows up.

“I was kind of hoping for something more specific,” he says.  “Like, girls would be good.”

“You may recall that I don’t date those things,” Kurt says.

“Yeah, but that’s why you can be fair about it,” Finn says.  “And you understand them way better than I do.”

I understand a lot of things way better than you do, Kurt thinks.  Including but not limited to the concept of health food, the law of gravity, and words with more than eight letters.

Unfortunately, if Finn was a lost puppy, there would probably be homicides over the matter of who got to take him home.

Kurt sits down on the couch, avoiding a napkin stained with pizza sauce.  “What seems to be the problem, Mr. Hudson?”

“Well,” Finn says, fiddling with the controller.  “I guess it’s sort of stupid, but… can you love more than one person at once?”

“Of course you can,” Kurt says.

It takes him another moment to register his surprise at himself.

Finn tilts his head, using the Contemplative Lost Puppy face.  Then he nods once.

“Okay,” he says.  “Thanks, Kurt.”  He goes back to the game.

“That’s it?” Kurt asks.

“Yeah,” Finn says distractedly.  “I mean, it’s a yes or no question, right?  And you said yes.  So that’s it.”  He flashes a Sorry-but-I’m-Actually-Kind-of-Busy-Shanking-Aliens Lost Puppy smile.

“Just so you know,” Kurt says, getting up, “as far as girls are concerned, there’s no such thing as a yes or no question.”

Finn’s facial expression transitions immediately into undiluted horror.  “Oh, my God.  That’s why nothing ever makes sense.”

“Probably,” Kurt says.  “See you later, Finn.”

“If I haven’t killed myself,” Finn says.

“That would be a necessary condition.”

There is a very loud explosion sound effect from the game, and Finn’s mournful, crooning “Noooooo” follows Kurt out of the room.

Just after ten that night, he gets an email from Karofsky.  The subject line is empty, and the contents are rather sparse.

i found a song.
can show you if you want.  you can come over usual time if youre not busy.
- d

Kurt knows better.  Kurt knows so much better.

But he just finished Cuckoo’s Nest, which means that he’s well on his way to free ice cream from Blaine-and that he’s feeling furiously defiant and empty enough to be brave.  The way life has been these days… what the hell does he have to lose?

And he could leave David hanging-make him wait like Kurt waited all day, on-edge and speculating-but he was telling the truth in their earliest conversations, and he still doesn’t believe in revenge.

Unless it’s on Coach Sylvester; that kind of revenge he can get on board with.

He rubs a little more moisturizer in along his cheekbone with the back of his hand and fires back:

I’m not.  I’ll be there.
- Kurt

He puts some Madonna on and gets back to work.

Newton would be proud.

…all right, maybe not.  But Mercedes will be extremely pleased.

Mrs. Karofsky answers Kurt’s summons on the doorbell.  The moment she sees him, she smiles broadly.

“Hi, there, Kurt,” she says, and he can tell just from her expression that she’s trying to figure out if his light sweater could come in her size.  “How’s it going?”

“Very well, thank you,” he says brightly.  “How are you?”

She might as well have little hearts in her eyes.  “Oh, wonderful.  David’s in his room-I knew he’d find a way to get out of helping me shop for the church bake sale this weekend.”

“I won’t stay too long,” Kurt says.  “And I can recommend you some recipes if you need a few more.”

He isn’t really playing it up, but all the same he regrets charming her so thoroughly when he realizes that David’s almost certainly going to get That Question tonight-Why can’t you be more like your friend Kurt?

When he finally manages to stop telling Mrs. Karofsky about the best improvisational replacements for basic baking supplies and start down the hall, David’s bedroom door is closed, so Kurt pauses, straightens his sweater, and knocks.

“What?” David calls.

He takes a deep breath.  Blaine would despair of him for thinking, Courage.  “It’s Kurt.”

There’s a brief silence.

“You don’t have to stand out there,” David says.

Kurt sets his hand on the knob, turns, pushes, and slips inside.  He shuts the door again behind him quietly, and then he looks up.

There’s a less-brief silence.

David breaks the eye contact first, glancing at the floor and sweeping his hand over the curve of the guitar in his lap.  Kurt folds his arms and keeps his mouth shut.  He won’t be unmerciful, but David’s going to have to earn it back-the relative ease they had before.  He’s the one who keeps throwing it away.

David clears his throat twice.  Then he meets Kurt’s eyes and gestures to the instrument.  “So this is the part where you say…”

“I didn’t know you played the guitar,” Kurt says.  He wets his lips.  “And you say…”

“Neither did I,” David says.  “And then you laugh-” Kurt cringes.  “-and I say, ‘No, I started playing when I was, like, ten.  But I stopped taking lessons to do football, and I suck at practicing on my own, so I’m kind of shitty now.’  And then you say-”

“What’s the song?” Kurt asks quietly.

David takes a deep breath and blows it out.  “You wanna sit down?”

Kurt has already assessed and rejected the foot of the bed next to David and the desk chair all the way across the room.  “No, thank you.”

David gives him a strange look, shrugs, and curves his fingers over the frets.  Kurt braces himself for… well, he has no idea.

What he gets starts out fairly simple and just a little dark.  Then it gets a little darker, and a little louder, and then he thinks he recognizes that melody.

David sighs and then sings.

“There’s a shadow just behind me, shrouding every step I take, making every promise empty, pointing every finger at me… waiting like a stalking butler, who upon the finger rests; murder now the path of ‘must we,’ just because the Son has come…” David strums harder, faster, slamming out the chords, shifting his knee for leverage, and the neck of the guitar dips. Kurt watches his fingers dance over the strings and restrains himself from wondering what else they could play on. “Jesus, won’t you fucking whistle something but the past is done-Jesus, won’t you fucking whistle something but the past is done? Why can’t we not be sober? I just want to start this over, I… Why can’t we drink forever? I just want to start this over…”

It doesn’t get much more optimistic after that.

David blazes through a final chorus and then puts the guitar aside. He sucks on the inside of his cheek for a moment, and then he turns guarded eyes on Kurt.

“This,” he says, “is the part where you say…”

“Was that supposed to be an apology?” Kurt asks.

David sets his jaw. “Your line is ‘That wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.’”

“It wasn’t bad at all,” Kurt says. “It was excellent. Are you going to answer my question?”

David turns the guitar pick over and over with his fingers, watching it catch the light.

“Yeah,” he says after more than half of a minute. “It sort of was supposed to be an apology.”

Kurt pushes up the sleeves of his sweater and then shoves his fists into its pockets. He considers speaking, and then he gives up and just nods.

“Take it that wasn’t ‘apology accepted,’” David says, far more equably than Kurt would have expected.

Kurt lifts a shoulder, since that’s a language David will definitely understand.  “It’s probably occurred to you that you and I have more collective baggage than a 747 that doesn’t charge for a second carryon.”

David gives him another weird look, and this one he definitely deserves.

Then David heaves another sigh and glares at his sockfeet.  “I just hate that shit.  I hate saying ‘I’m sorry.’  It’s bullshit.  ‘I’m sorry’ is what you say when you bump into somebody in the hallway, or you’re ten minutes late for curfew and your mom is pissed.  It doesn’t fucking mean anything.  Nobody’s like, ‘Oh, my bad, I fucking ruined your life,’ or, like, ‘Sorry I got a little shitfaced and violated your personal space even after everything else that’s happened.  Hey, now that we’re over that, you want to make cookies and sing Kumbaya?’”

“No,” Kurt says.  “That song bothers me.  But it sounds like your mother is going to need a veritable crapload of cookies by Sunday.”

David stares at him.

Kurt takes a very deep breath, holds it, releases it, and goes to sit down beside him, carefully avoiding the guitar.

“Look,” he says.  “I’m really not pleased about the fact that you seem to disrespect my boundaries and then some every time you’ve had a drink, but we’re friends, David.  And I know that you’re trying-trying to figure it out, trying to establish yourself, trying to be okay with yourself, hopefully enough that someday you’ll open up and tell other people they have to be okay with you.  Should you stop trying, I’m going to stop trying to be patient, but I’m not about to forget how much progress we’ve already made.  And…” He gestures to the guitar.  “Unfortunately, the past is done, and it’s not going to disappear no matter how much wishful thinking-or, in your case, wishful drinking-either of us does from here.  But I think that’s okay.  I’m starting to be okay with it.  The only place to go from where we started was up, and I think we’re still straggling upward these days.”

David eyes him.

“Yes?” Kurt asks.

“I took you for a pessimist,” David says.

Kurt smiles a little.  “Actually, I took me for a pessimist, too.  I guess stranger things have happened.”

“Maybe a few,” David says.  He pauses, and then he eyes Kurt again.  “And before you ask, no way in hell am I hugging this out.”

“I would never have the audacity to suggest it,” Kurt says, which is not true.  “Although I’m curious as to how normal men reach that kind of a resolution.”

David gets up, crosses the room, picks up two Xbox controllers, comes back, and hands him one.

“Of course,” Kurt says.

Finn is suspicious.  This is both remarkable and somewhat unsettling for two reasons: first, Kurt has always believed, kind of by default, that he’s too subtle for Finn to catch on to in any way; second, overly complicated emotions sometimes leave Finn in a Feeling Coma, and Kurt would rather not deal with that this evening.

“You have flour on your face,” Finn says.

Well, that explains the catching on.  It also explains why David kept glancing at him, hesitating, and then busying himself with measuring cups.

“What?” Kurt asks innocently.  He raises a hand to his cheek and, in fairly short order, finds the offending patch of dust.  “Oh.  It’s not flour, Finn; it’s-” He pulls a face.

Finn is fascinated as well as suspicious now.  That Feeling Coma is looking more likely by the minute.  “What is it?”

“It’s, um.”  Kurt ducks his head, because he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of blushing on command yet.  “Powdered sugar.”

Finn frowns, favoring suspicion again.  “Why is there powdered sugar on your face?”

Kurt makes a show of equivocating for a moment, and then he covers his eyes and wails, “I ate a whole packet of those little donuts!”

He peeks.  Finn is blinking bewilderedly.

“Just one?” Finn asks.  “So… the problem is…?”

“You don’t understand!” Kurt howls.  Honestly, he should have been an actor.

“I really don’t,” Finn says helplessly.  “Sorry, dude.”

The word sorry kind of stops Kurt in his tracks despite him.

“Hey, I’ve got good news,” Finn says.  “Tina’s having a party at her house next Saturday.  You’re on the Facebook invite, too.”

Kurt chews on his lip.  “So… exactly what about a presumable repeat of the fiasco at Rachel’s makes this good news?”

Finn blinks.  “Oh.  Well… I’ve never been to Tina’s house before.  The way Mike talks, I’m expecting it to be like the Asian Art Museum we went to for history class that one time.”

“Fair point,” Kurt says.  “I do rather like the idea of dim sum dishes for hors d’oeuvres.  Is it another New Directions party, or should I expect lots of Asian Camp kids as well?”

“It looks like there are some,” Finn says.  “Which could be kind of cool.  And she invited Blaine, but I think maybe we should keep him and Rachel in separate rooms, just in case.”

Kurt’s not sure if this is real concern or real concern tinged with jealousy, since Finn is kind of incapable of deliberate pettiness.

“Hmm,” he says, since that sounds sufficiently ambiguous.  “Is there a time it starts, or are we just supposed to show up when we feel brave?”

“I think it’s just after dinner,” Finn says.  “Mike left a comment about how he didn’t care what happened in the movies, he was never mixing too much pizza and too much beer ever again, so there’ll be snacks, but that’s it.”

Kurt thinks it over.  “You want me to pick up some of that root beer that comes in the glass bottles so that we don’t feel quite so left out?”

“That’d be awesome,” Finn says.  His eyes light up and then dim.  “But first we have to convince your dad that we’re not going to have any fun ever for the rest of our lives.”

Kurt smiles and wishes he was wearing a tie to straighten.  “Leave it to me.”

“Okay, Kurt,” his father says.  “When you’re not talking up a storm at the dinner table, it usually means you’re thinking about how to get something you want.”

Damn, but the man is good at this game.  Kurt considers giving some vague, wistful responses and talking about how no one can come to celebrate Tina’s birthday because they’re all out of town and/or in the hospital with rare autoimmune diseases, but matching his father’s straightforwardness might be the better option.

“Tina’s having a party,” he says.  “Finn and I would like to go.”

Finn makes a throat-slashing motion from across the table, then drops his hands hastily into his lap when Burt and Carole look at him.

“Um,” he says.  “It sounds like fun.  You know.  The good, clean kind.”

Burt smiles thinly.  “Fine, but you guys know the rules.”

“Yes, we do,” Kurt says, flashing a winsome smile before his father can enumerate no booze, no sex, no gambling, keep all of your clothes on, drive other kids home but pull over and kick ’em out if they’re about to puke in the car.  “And we will adhere to them like spilt nail polish to carpet fibers.”

“Or glue,” Finn says helpfully.

They both puppy-eye his father at the same time.  This maneuver is so unfair that it should probably be illegal in all fifty states.

“All right,” Burt says, holding up his hands.  “Go.  Have your good, clean kind of fun.  Just be careful, be safe, and look out for each other, okay?”

Kurt and Finn fist-bump under the table.  Kurt is almost getting adequate at that.

[Chapter 5] [Chapter 7]