Glee -- Third Time Lucky 8: An Opportunity to Dress Well
Title: Third Time Lucky
Chapter: 8. An Opportunity to Dress Well
Fandom: Glee
Pairing: Karofsky/Kurt
Rating: R
Word Count: 5,170
Warnings: oh, you know
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: I decided it was nonsensical to try to split up the last 11,000 words, but LJ can't fit them all in a single post, soooooo… you get two smaller chapters for the price of one! Unfortunately, they're the last two. Fortunately, I hold out hope that they will be fun. :D If there are any errors left… well, shit, it's Monday; nothing ever goes right on Mondays. XD …almost forgot: if the mere mention doesn't ring a bell and keep ringing that bell for the next two days, you'll need Tubthumping.
CHAPTER 8: AN OPPORTUNITY TO DRESS WELL
Kurt flees as soon as dinner is done-or fleas, like a tick that smells the incoming pesticide and makes a leap for its life at the first opportunity.
Ten minutes later, there’s a knock on the wall, followed by his father’s voice. “Hey, Kurt?”
Kurt puts his phone down on his desk and swings his chair around. “Yeah?”
His father moves the rest of the way down the stairs with the grace of a club-footed elephant, hand trailing on the banister, and then threads his thumbs through his belt loops and settles into the space. “You don’t have to tell me, but I’m listening.”
The directness is refreshing and a bit inviting. Kurt worries his lip with his teeth. “Could you… could you stand a little closer, so that I don’t have to talk as loud?”
Burt smiles slightly and strides over to lean against the edge of Kurt’s desk, folding his arms across his chest. “That bad?” He pauses as he assesses Kurt’s expression. “All right, let’s skip the introduction stuff. Start spilling beans.”
Kurt fumbles to pick up his phone again, turning it over in his hands, his fingerprints sticking on the screen and on the back until he loses patience-as he always does-and wipes both sides meticulously with the bottom of his sleeve. “It’s not… they’re not quite my beans to spill.”
Burt’s raised eyebrows are audible in his voice without looking at him. “Kurt, if you’re this worked up about it, it’s your business now. And I’d be happy to make it mine, too.”
The words start to stick in Kurt’s throat, swelling and growing prickly spines, and he forces them out before he chokes on them. “David-the one from before, and from the other day-he said-he said he’s in love with me.”
The silence is not hostile. Kurt gets half a dozen more fingerprints on his phone, counting the heartbeats in his ears-one, two, three, fourfivesixseveneight.
Kurt gets to fifteen, not that it’s a reliable gauge of time at all, and then Burt shifts and itches behind his ear. “To tell the truth, I kind of figured that from the juggling. And the fact that he was going to sit there and watch you fiddle with his mom’s car for an hour and a half until I scared him off.”
“Dad,” Kurt says.
“I know, I know,” Burt says, holding his hands up palms out. “It’s… a problem. Sorry.” He sets one of those hands on Kurt’s desktop, leaning in close enough to rest the other on Kurt’s shoulder again. “You want my advice? I mean, if you do, that’s probably a red flag for insanity, right there, but you can have it just in case. I still don’t like that kid-I don’t know if I can like him, after what he did-and I don’t trust him. But I do trust you. I trust your judgment. What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” Kurt says. “I honestly don’t know.”
Burt looks at him for another moment. “Well, is he going to take advantage of you if you give him a chance?”
“Definitely not,” Kurt says. “He knows you would beat the crap out of him.”
“You’re damn right I would,” his father says calmly.
“But I don’t think you’d have to.” Kurt knuckles at his eyes. “He hasn’t exactly settled in, but he’s trying. He’s been trying. And he’s made so much progress that I’m kind of proud of him.”
His father looks at him for another moment of quiet.
“You like this guy,” Burt says. “You like him enough to defend him, and apparently hanging out with him is cool enough that it’s worth having everybody in this house freak out about it.” He smiles faintly at the way Kurt winces. “But there are a lot of fine lines with this stuff. You don’t have any obligation here, okay? It doesn’t matter if you’ve been helping him along all this time, and now he’s using what you taught him, like that movie you like with Audrey Hepburn and the hats.”
Kurt forgets the dilemma for a moment, because he’s too busy staring at his father to recall what he was dilemma-ing about.
“…you mean ‘My Fair Lady’?” he manages.
“That one,” Burt says. “My point is, you don’t have to love him just because you made it possible for him to be loved. You don’t have to-I don’t know-prove you succeeded. What you’ve already done is enough.” He pauses. “And I thought you liked Blaine.”
“I do like Blaine,” Kurt says. “And he likes me, too; he has told me on many occasions that I’m one of the best friends he’s ever had.”
His father makes a face. “Oh. Got it.”
“I’ve gotten used to it,” Kurt says. “And we do make excellent partners in crime-just not life partners in crime, evidently.”
“Well, that’s the other thing,” Burt says. “With the Dave kid. You don’t have to commit to anything you don’t want to.”
Kurt smiles thinly. “I think we just circled back to ‘But I don’t know what I want.’”
“That’s okay, too,” Burt tells him. “You’re a kid, Kurt. You’re allowed to act like one. And whether I like it or not, you’re allowed to try stuff out and see if it goes down in flames. I know that’s sometimes the only way I learn anything, and I don’t even have the teenager excuse.”
Kurt smiles a little wider. “Well, I, for one, think you’ve done pretty well for yourself, so I wouldn’t change the system. I mean, just look at how masterfully you raised your son.”
“Yeah,” Burt says, grinning. “He’s something else entirely-in the best possible way. Which reminds me that I owe you something.”
Kurt blinks. “What’s that?”
“Your rain check,” Burt says, leaning in for a rather literally breathtaking bear hug. “Consider it deposited.”
“Daaaaad,” Kurt wails, but unfortunately for any hopes of convincing anyone, he’s grinning like an idiot and hugging back.
“Didn’t you say you were working again tomorrow?” Burt asks when he’s finished strangling his only child.
“Only in the morning,” Kurt says.
His father frowns. “Okay, like I said-you are a kid, Kurt. And this is summer vacation. You don’t have to slave away six days a week all the time. We’ll make Dalton happen one way or another, I can promise you that-and you don’t have to take this on by yourself.”
Kurt gets that feeling of suffocatingly sincere gratitude filling up his chest again. “Thanks, Dad.” He musters a little bit of a grin. “But I’ve thought this out, you know. If I can fund enough of it myself, I’ll be less indebted to you and Carole later in life, and when I’ve finished at Harvard’s law school and started my own firm, I can buy you a BMW instead of a Porsche.”
Burt rolls his eyes. “Well, that’s ingratitude if I ever saw it. You’re supposed to help us retire in Fiji and live like kings.”
“That’s after I win the Pulitzer for my memoir,” Kurt says.
“Right,” his father says. “Sorry, I always get those out of order.” He smiles, reaches up to muss Kurt’s hair, sees Kurt’s expression, and generously goes for a shoulder-clap instead. “All right. Just… keep me in the loop, okay? I know it’s lame, but I like to know what’s going on in your life-and inside your head.”
“I sing in an a capella choir at an all-boys’ school with uniforms,” Kurt says, “and I’m wearing a shirt that quotes a French sonnet. I have no problem with lame.”
“That’s good to hear,” his father says airily on the way back to the stairs. “’Cause I’m pretty sure you’re stuck with me.”
Kurt cannot think of anyone he would rather be unable to get rid of.
“Oh, my God, Kurt,” Finn says. “You always look like you just walked out of a magazine, other than the weird poses and even weirder expressions. Besides, it’s just the Glee guys and then some kids from Asian Camp.”
“A word of advice?” Kurt says.
Finn scrunches up his nose. “I’ve never heard you say a one-word sentence, let alone give one word of advice.”
“Never,” Kurt says loudly, “miss an opportunity to dress well.”
“Okay,” Finn says, exasperated. “You didn’t miss this one; you’re dressed great. Can we go now?”
Kurt adjusts the knot of his vibrant green skinny tie, which brings out the lines of the same color in his new favorite pair of plaid pants. He selected a white shirt, less because he wants to give everyone’s retinas a break and more so that he can wear his white hat with the ensemble. He’s well-aware that this is a prime example of what most of his friends privately-and some of them publicly-refer to as a Kurt Outfit. He wishes he’d thought to call Mercedes ahead and coordinate, but she has some kind of psychic clothing field that always prevents them from clashing, so it should be fine.
“I suppose,” he says. “Although do you think these shoes-”
“They could not possibly be more perfect if you had picked from all of the shoes in the entire world,” Finn cuts in. “Which you pretty much did. Come on, Kurt, before the Asian Camp kids eat all the potstickers.”
“That’s just racist,” Kurt says. “But you may have a point.”
He’s still wishing he had another minute to contemplate the overall effect of his raiment as he climbs into the passenger seat of Finn’s battered station wagon, which he has to admit is the perfect automobile for ferrying drunk teenagers around-it’s essentially a steel cage on wheels, with six seats that have seen so much that not even projectile vomit would faze them. It also boasts a huge, flat trunk space, so if anyone goes into cardiac arrest en route to his or her home, the sufferer can be laid out and sustained with CPR until the paramedics arrive.
It’s probably really weird and slightly creepy that Kurt thinks about these things.
The Cohen-Chang household looks disappointingly normal from the outside-it’s one story with a nice lawn and a well-cultivated flowerbed, and there are exactly zero gold statues of lions or dragons perched like gargoyles on the roof. There is, however, one of those little waving cats in the front window, so Kurt holds out hope for the Asian sanctuary.
Finn parks along the curb, not too crookedly, and pulls on the door handle to make sure that he’s locked the car. Kurt thinks that the probability of any of their friends getting intoxicated and then successfully hot-wiring the station wagon is actually a negative number, but he notices Blaine’s sedan on the opposite side of the street and forgets to comment.
Tina herself opens the door when they ring the bell, admitting them into a narrow entrance hall. Doorways lead off everywhere, but Kurt is less excited about exploring the house than he is about the extremely stereotypical ceramic vase on the nearest end table-it’s one of the ones with a stylized Chinese temple theme, and it’s filled with silk lilies.
“No,” Tina says as soon as his and Finn’s eyes light on it, “it’s not a family heirloom from the Han Dynasty. My mom got it from a garage sale for, like, five bucks.”
Mike comes into view at the other end of the hall. “Hey,” he says. “I hope you like Tsingtao, because it’s the only kind of beer we have.”
Tina rolls her eyes. “Puck’s going to get more.”
“We also have enough sake to drown yourself in, just in case hara-kiri gets boring.”
Tina tries not to crack a smile. “Shut up, Mike.”
He grins. “You guys want some pineapple buns? Kelly from Asian Camp wants to be a dim sum chef.”
“They don’t go very well with Tsingtao,” Tina warns them in an undertone.
“Finn and I aren’t drinking,” Kurt says.
Finn looks miserable. “Ever again, if Kurt’s dad gets his way.”
“Good,” Tina says. “I took everybody else’s keys away, and then I forgot where I put them.”
“Come on in,” Mike says, waving them towards the doorway from which he emerged. “Tina’s mom totally bought a foosball table where all the little guys are terracotta soldiers.”
Half a dozen Asian kids Kurt doesn’t recognize are clustered around the foosball table. Mike wasn’t kidding; Kurt wonders if Tina’s mother also has an air hockey set themed after the Great Wall of China, with the puck stylized to look like a dumpling.
Another notable feature of the foosball table is that Blaine is manning one of the rows and laughing uproariously, all bright eyes and dizzying charm in the reddish light of a novelty lamp tricked out as a Chinese lantern. Kurt spots most of the other veterans of Rachel’s party as well-Santana is sitting in the corner, already surrounded by a ring of empty green bottles, and her bottom lip is wobbling; one of the Asian Camp kids is actually attempting to teach Brittany and Artie to play mahjong; Quinn is collapsed on one of the floral-patterned couches with one forearm draped over her eyes; Sam is, apparently, already drunk enough to have unwisely challenged Lauren to an arm-wrestling match. Puck is absent, presumably in pursuit of more potent beverages, and Rachel herself is… stalking up to them.
“Hello, gentlemen,” she says, head held high, not that it makes her seem much taller. “And I do mean gentlemen; I think you may be the only ones left in the room, at this rate. Are you planning to teetotal with me?”
“I don’t know what that means,” Finn says. “It sounds like something you would put on a playground.”
“That’s a teeter-totter,” Rachel says. “I wouldn’t dare to bring one of those to a party like this; there would be vomit everywhere. You’re not drinking?”
Finn frowns. “I’m driving. Well, one of us is, but it’s my mom’s car, so…”
“That’s very magnanimous of you, Finn,” Rachel says, favoring him with what she seems to think is a subtle smile of overbearing adoration. “And you, Kurt.”
“I thought you enjoyed cutting loose last time,” Kurt says.
“I enjoyed it until I actually believed I was dying the next day,” Rachel replies calmly. “And then there was the Cough Syrup-Ke$ha Incident-didn’t I tell you about this?-and I swore off drinking for the rest of my inevitably lengthy and prosperous life. I intend to keep that promise until the impromptu after-party for the stunning opening night of the first Broadway musical I star in, at which point I will indulge in a single glass of fine champagne.” Kurt knows he’s crazy, because he hopes he’ll be there. “In the meantime, if you gentlemen get bored, I did bring the karaoke machine. And most of the CDs. Blaine helped me carry them in; it took four trips.”
“What about me?” Blaine asks from across the room, but no one has time to answer before he yells, “Kurt!” and comes racing over, abandoning a slightly miffed foosball team. Judging by the unsteadiness of the ensuing tackle-hug, Blaine has thoroughly sampled the Tsingtao. “This is great!” he enthuses, taking a break from his quest to crush Kurt’s ribs and deform his spinal cord. “I’ve only been here fifteen minutes, and I’ve already learned the Cantonese word for ‘shit’!”
“How educational,” Kurt manages.
“Rachel!” Blaine cries. “Oh, my God, Rachel; you look stunning. Can we sing again? That was awesome. You’re awesome. And my back is killing me from hauling all of the discs in, so I need a good dance.”
Rachel pats his arm. “Of course we can. Go pick out something you like; I’ve sung everything we own at least once, which seems to be what happens to frighteningly talented only children.”
Blaine bounces off to start rooting through the karaoke CDs, and Kurt turns to Rachel. “Didn’t this end rather badly last time?”
“That’s a subjective judgment,” Rachel says. “And while I understand and appreciate your concern, there are two important factors to consider: this time, I’m not intoxicated, and Blaine is not in the middle of a sexual identity crisis. I think we should be fine.”
“Found one!” Blaine crows.
“Additionally,” Rachel says, “it’s almost impossible to refuse him anything when he’s smiling at you.” This has occurred to Kurt before. For instance, almost every day of the last six months of his life. “Please excuse me, gentlemen.”
As the piano intro blares tinnily out of the speakers, Kurt sees that Finn is pouting.
“Why didn’t she want to duet with me?” he asks.
“Well,” Kurt says, “there’s a possibility it’s related to the fact that that you were heartbroken when Quinn cheated on you, you dumped Rachel for making out with Puck, and then you encouraged Quinn to cheat on Sam with you. It is my understanding that most girls aren’t attracted to blatant hypocrisy.”
Finn looks wounded.
“Or it could be that she knows you wouldn’t want to sing Céline Dion,” Kurt says.
Finn twitches as Rachel starts belting out the first verse of “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” which was a good choice on Blaine’s part, since the boy could sing it drunk, sober, dying, or asleep. “I guess that could be it. She’s weirdly nice like that sometimes, and then you start to wonder if she’s trying to get you to do something.”
Companionably, they watch the Diva Duo tear through the high notes like so much tissue paper.
“We’re so not over them,” Finn says after a moment, sounding sad and surprised and a little confused.
“Speak for yourself,” Kurt replies.
Finn shoots him a betrayed look, which Kurt ignores in favor of texting Mercedes, Where are you?? And how do I get there instead of being here?
“Losers!” a familiar voice shouts at top volume, almost drowning out the wildly overemotive karaoke for a moment. “If you’re still standing, you haven’t had enough to drink!”
Kurt has to admit to being a little bit impressed with just how many bottles Puck has managed to turn up-and to carry into the building; if he gets a chance, and if Puck is still lucid, Kurt intends to inquire as to whether he stole the laden Radio Flyer behind him from an unsuspecting child.
“Sweet,” Lauren says, making a beeline for her rather enterprising boyfriend. “I was about to resort to clotheslining Asian kids to entertain myself.”
More than a few of the Asian Camp kids go slightly pale, and Kurt doesn’t blame them.
“Drink up, me hearties,” Puck growls, distributing bottles to the majority of the room as they flock to him like moths to a piratical flame. “I cut through a bunch of backyards, so the cops’ll never track me. Unless they use the dogs, in which case we’re all fucked.”
Kurt would slap his forehead, but that doesn’t seem even remotely sufficient.
“Here,” Mike says, as fluid as always-or perhaps slightly more fluid, given the circumstances-as he ducks into the room from the kitchen, balancing an extremely tall stack of red cups on the palm of his hand. “There’s Cherry Coke and about a million limes in the fridge.”
“Now we’re talkin’,” Puck decides. “Maybe this party won’t suck more than a Mormon wedding after all.”
Kurt’s phone buzzes, and he extracts it from his pocket again.
Has Puck even gotten there with the booze yet?
Kurt glances up and discovers that, in the hands of tipsily resourceful teenagers, teacups can double as shot glasses.
He’s here, all right.
From there, things lurch downhill like a weak-ankled girl in a short skirt and stilettos-which, incidentally, is a fairly accurate description of the Asian Camp girl with her hair done up in intricate braids. Simply because it takes a while for the alcohol to get absorbed into the susceptible bloodstreams scattered about the room, the general dissolution resembles a slowly-building bonfire more than an explosion.
“Jell-O shots are ready!” Tina cries, carrying a tray in from the kitchen. “Thanks for bringing them, Ryan!”
Ryan’s only response is to raise his fists-each of which is clenched around a bottle of Tsingtao-and whoop like a Western movie Indian.
“Oh, my God,” Artie gasps as Tina lowers the tray for him to take his pick. “There is a veritable rainbow of Jell-O-y goodness.”
“Hello, my Jell-O,” Puck says, grabbing one at random. “Are they color-coded?”
“I don’t remember,” Ryan says, and then he sits down on the floor and laughs like a hyena.
It’s going to be a long night.
Finn looks longingly at the passing pageant of gleaming bottles and brightly-colored drinks.
“The root beer is on the floor in the backseat of the car,” Kurt says. “Then we wouldn’t look quite as lame.”
Finn casts a covetous eye over the vast assortment of bottles Puck is setting out on the coffee table. “Um… I think I’ll go get it, yeah. Be right back.”
“Okay,” Puck is saying as Finn slips out the door. “Everybody circle up. On the run-slash-carry-the-wagon over here, I had an epiphany for a new drinking game.”
Kurt is ninety-nine-point-six percent sure that the word “epiphany” is denotatively incorrect in that context. He’s a hundred percent sure it’s offensive either way.
“Berry,” Puck says imperiously, “put on ‘Tubthumping.’”
Rachel frowns and folds her arms. “Noah-”
“Dalton kid,” Puck says, “put on ‘Tubthumping.’”
“All right!” Blaine says, diving on the karaoke CDs, knocking over a stack, and promptly sending a dozen of them skittering across the floor.
“Noah,” Rachel says louder, “if this is what I think it is-”
“Everybody get a couple different drinks,” Puck says loudly. “We are about to revive the world’s greatest one-hit wonder.”
“Actually,” Rachel says, “in 2002, VH1 rated The Macarena as the world’s greatest one-hit wond-”
The far, far too familiar song roars out of the speakers like an auditory tidal wave-the kind that will leave water in everyone’s ears for the next week, regardless of how drunk they are by now.
“We’ll be singing,” Puck shouts-more-than-sings, “when we’re winnin’-we’ll be singin’-”
None too surprisingly, everyone in the room screams the next part back at him.
“I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down-”
Kurt actually covers his ears, but it doesn’t help much. He’s expecting a headache to creep in before the song-if it can be called a song at this point, rather than a call to arms-is over.
Predictably, Rachel vacillates a little more before inevitably deciding that a performance is a performance. She settles on one of the old box speakers, crosses her legs, sits up straight, and sings the girl’s part.
Kurt is just starting to think they might all stagger away from this unscathed but for torn vocal cords when Puck starts pointing at people.
“He drinks a whiskey drink-” This to Ryan, who knocks back a detectable portion of the whiskey straight out of the bottle on command. “He drinks a vodka drink-” Puck shoves a finger towards Mike, who raises his teacup in a quick toast before he obeys. “He drinks a lager drink-” Puck points at Artie, who scrambles to find lager in the array on the table. “He drinks a cider drink-” Lauren takes a cider chug, if Kurt’s being honest.
Kurt still has his fingers in his ears as everyone gets distracted wailing out ‘the songs that remind them of the good times.’
“Uh,” Finn says, returning with the case of root beer. “What… in… the… hell.”
“It seems to be the bastard gene-spliced child of karaoke, musical chairs, and hell on Earth,” Kurt says. “With just a dash of ‘only Puck could ever think of this.’”
“I think that sums it up,” Finn says. He looks around. “Should I expect, like, alcohol poisoning by the end of the night?”
“Probably,” Kurt says.
Finn sighs feelingly. “Awesome.” He selects a bottle of root beer, twists off the cap, hands it to Kurt, and takes another for himself, raising it once it’s open. “To soberness.”
“To sobriety,” Kurt says, clinking the neck of his bottle against Finn’s.
As root beer bubbles tickle the inside of his nose, he tries very hard not to think it-Why can’t we not be sober?
Rachel stalks over to them, plucks a bottle out of the cardboard container, tussles with the cap, and then thrusts it at Finn, who calmly opens it for her and hands it back.
“We are surrounded by cretins,” she announces.
Finn blinks at her. “I’m pretty sure those are our friends, actually.”
“They can be cretins and still be our friends,” Rachel says. “I can’t believe I’m the only one in this entire room who learned my lesson after projectile-vomiting in front of the entire school.”
“That was, like, the grossest thing I’ve ever seen,” Finn says.
Kurt saw a few cell-phone photos from the audience that were uploaded to Facebook. He concurs.
“It was a bit of a dip in the thrilling and ingeniously-designed roller-coaster that is my life,” Rachel says. “Fortunately, as always, I have persevered. You might need to go talk to Blaine, Kurt; I think someone needs to stage an intervention and get him to drink some water. He could die.”
“Or he could dribble existentialism all over me,” Kurt says.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Rachel says. She points the bottle at him. “But only because you brought something for the rest of us to drink.”
She stalks off, her hair bouncing, walking on the balls of her feet, and starts attempting to convince Blaine to come down off of top of the bookshelf.
Over the yelling, the off-key singing, the tap-dancing (this only from Mike), and the general chaos, Kurt hears something incongruous-a pounding, and then a ding.
Or, more specifically, a ding-dong.
“Is anybody…?” he starts, but it’s pretty obviously a rhetorical question at this point.
Finn glances at him. “Huh?”
“Door,” Kurt says, putting down his root beer. “I’ll be right back.”
“If it’s some dude in a hockey mask,” Finn says, “shut the door again.”
“You know very well how I feel about hockey players,” Kurt says.
It’s probably a good thing that he heads off then, leaving Finn to mutter about puckheads, his musings liberally punctuated with other words that rhyme with “puck.”
The noise fades fractionally as Kurt heads down the hall, giving over to whoever’s banging on the door like the world is ending outside. Kurt would criticize-and would begin to fear for Mrs. Cohen-Chang’s decorations-if it wasn’t pretty much the only way to be heard right now.
“All right, all right,” he says, making sure to step over the tassled edge of the rug by the door, which harbors an almost-sentient will to trip him. “I hope you get carpal tunnel.”
He opens the door.
He breathes once, and his heart beats twice, and he drops his hand from the doorknob.
Then Azimio reaches out to sweep Kurt aside with one arm, slamming him back into the wall beside the doorway, where his head narrowly misses an ornate mirror, though he sees stars all the same.
“What the fuck, dude?” someone bursts out-someone familiar; someone-David.
Kurt wants to laugh, although he’s still steadying himself against the end table beside him. This is almost too cliché, even for his life.
He manages to focus enough to see that Azimio has paused in his prowl down the hallway to give David a look that’s equal parts suspicion and confusion.
“You hate that kid,” he says.
“He was holding the fucking door for you,” David says, and his eyes dart to the side-probably his poker tell; certainly a sign that he’s hoping no one notices what he hasn’t addressed. “Cut him some fucking slack; he was doing you a favor.”
“What the hell are you on?” Azimio asks, eyes narrowed and fists curled. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you wanted him to do you some kind of favor, man.”
There is a moment in which the hall shrinks, and Kurt can see the bead of sweat on Azimio’s neck, the condensation-made wrinkles on the label of the beer in some other football player’s hand, the flecks of olive-green in David’s eyes. The space might as well be airless, and the whole massive ruckus of the party is reduced to a distant thumping in some far-off other world.
David bites the inside of his lip, but he doesn’t look angry so much as kind of sad.
“Grow up, Az,” he says, and then he pushes past his best friend and heads into the living room.
A few of the other football players glance back at Kurt, but most of them ignore him. Azimio shoots him an assessing look-some combination of a onceover and a warning-but he turns without incident and starts into the party.
Kurt slumps back against the wall a little, whether or not his head is still aching from his encounter with it. He doesn’t know where to begin on this one. David shouldn’t be here-he should have known better than to mix the two universes they both inhabit, in one of which they’re friends; in the other of which David stands at the peak of the pyramid, and Kurt is slushie fodder. David should have known that if they cross those wires, sparks will fly, and something’s bound to catch on fire.
Kurt runs his thumb over the carving on the edge of the table, pressing hard to ground himself. It probably wasn’t David’s fault, to be honest; the likeliest scenario is that Azimio heard about tonight on Facebook-possibly as a result of some extremely inane over-sharing episode of Brittany’s, although Kurt shouldn’t jump to conclusions-and dragged the rest of his regular crew along. In the partial second that Kurt had to gauge the newcomers’ expressions before Azimio decided that his skull should be better acquainted with white paint and plaster, David looked reluctant, maybe even apologetic.
The question now is whether Kurt’s brave enough to go back in there. Courage and other lies.
Speaking of which, shit. He has to weather whatever happens in that room, because leaving a drunk Blaine alone with David Karofsky pretty much amounts to asking Azimio expressly to ruin both of their lives.
Kurt takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, rubs the back of his head, squares his shoulders, and forges back in.
[Chapter 7] [Chapter 9]
Chapter: 8. An Opportunity to Dress Well
Fandom: Glee
Pairing: Karofsky/Kurt
Rating: R
Word Count: 5,170
Warnings: oh, you know
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: I decided it was nonsensical to try to split up the last 11,000 words, but LJ can't fit them all in a single post, soooooo… you get two smaller chapters for the price of one! Unfortunately, they're the last two. Fortunately, I hold out hope that they will be fun. :D If there are any errors left… well, shit, it's Monday; nothing ever goes right on Mondays. XD …almost forgot: if the mere mention doesn't ring a bell and keep ringing that bell for the next two days, you'll need Tubthumping.
CHAPTER 8: AN OPPORTUNITY TO DRESS WELL
Kurt flees as soon as dinner is done-or fleas, like a tick that smells the incoming pesticide and makes a leap for its life at the first opportunity.
Ten minutes later, there’s a knock on the wall, followed by his father’s voice. “Hey, Kurt?”
Kurt puts his phone down on his desk and swings his chair around. “Yeah?”
His father moves the rest of the way down the stairs with the grace of a club-footed elephant, hand trailing on the banister, and then threads his thumbs through his belt loops and settles into the space. “You don’t have to tell me, but I’m listening.”
The directness is refreshing and a bit inviting. Kurt worries his lip with his teeth. “Could you… could you stand a little closer, so that I don’t have to talk as loud?”
Burt smiles slightly and strides over to lean against the edge of Kurt’s desk, folding his arms across his chest. “That bad?” He pauses as he assesses Kurt’s expression. “All right, let’s skip the introduction stuff. Start spilling beans.”
Kurt fumbles to pick up his phone again, turning it over in his hands, his fingerprints sticking on the screen and on the back until he loses patience-as he always does-and wipes both sides meticulously with the bottom of his sleeve. “It’s not… they’re not quite my beans to spill.”
Burt’s raised eyebrows are audible in his voice without looking at him. “Kurt, if you’re this worked up about it, it’s your business now. And I’d be happy to make it mine, too.”
The words start to stick in Kurt’s throat, swelling and growing prickly spines, and he forces them out before he chokes on them. “David-the one from before, and from the other day-he said-he said he’s in love with me.”
The silence is not hostile. Kurt gets half a dozen more fingerprints on his phone, counting the heartbeats in his ears-one, two, three, fourfivesixseveneight.
Kurt gets to fifteen, not that it’s a reliable gauge of time at all, and then Burt shifts and itches behind his ear. “To tell the truth, I kind of figured that from the juggling. And the fact that he was going to sit there and watch you fiddle with his mom’s car for an hour and a half until I scared him off.”
“Dad,” Kurt says.
“I know, I know,” Burt says, holding his hands up palms out. “It’s… a problem. Sorry.” He sets one of those hands on Kurt’s desktop, leaning in close enough to rest the other on Kurt’s shoulder again. “You want my advice? I mean, if you do, that’s probably a red flag for insanity, right there, but you can have it just in case. I still don’t like that kid-I don’t know if I can like him, after what he did-and I don’t trust him. But I do trust you. I trust your judgment. What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” Kurt says. “I honestly don’t know.”
Burt looks at him for another moment. “Well, is he going to take advantage of you if you give him a chance?”
“Definitely not,” Kurt says. “He knows you would beat the crap out of him.”
“You’re damn right I would,” his father says calmly.
“But I don’t think you’d have to.” Kurt knuckles at his eyes. “He hasn’t exactly settled in, but he’s trying. He’s been trying. And he’s made so much progress that I’m kind of proud of him.”
His father looks at him for another moment of quiet.
“You like this guy,” Burt says. “You like him enough to defend him, and apparently hanging out with him is cool enough that it’s worth having everybody in this house freak out about it.” He smiles faintly at the way Kurt winces. “But there are a lot of fine lines with this stuff. You don’t have any obligation here, okay? It doesn’t matter if you’ve been helping him along all this time, and now he’s using what you taught him, like that movie you like with Audrey Hepburn and the hats.”
Kurt forgets the dilemma for a moment, because he’s too busy staring at his father to recall what he was dilemma-ing about.
“…you mean ‘My Fair Lady’?” he manages.
“That one,” Burt says. “My point is, you don’t have to love him just because you made it possible for him to be loved. You don’t have to-I don’t know-prove you succeeded. What you’ve already done is enough.” He pauses. “And I thought you liked Blaine.”
“I do like Blaine,” Kurt says. “And he likes me, too; he has told me on many occasions that I’m one of the best friends he’s ever had.”
His father makes a face. “Oh. Got it.”
“I’ve gotten used to it,” Kurt says. “And we do make excellent partners in crime-just not life partners in crime, evidently.”
“Well, that’s the other thing,” Burt says. “With the Dave kid. You don’t have to commit to anything you don’t want to.”
Kurt smiles thinly. “I think we just circled back to ‘But I don’t know what I want.’”
“That’s okay, too,” Burt tells him. “You’re a kid, Kurt. You’re allowed to act like one. And whether I like it or not, you’re allowed to try stuff out and see if it goes down in flames. I know that’s sometimes the only way I learn anything, and I don’t even have the teenager excuse.”
Kurt smiles a little wider. “Well, I, for one, think you’ve done pretty well for yourself, so I wouldn’t change the system. I mean, just look at how masterfully you raised your son.”
“Yeah,” Burt says, grinning. “He’s something else entirely-in the best possible way. Which reminds me that I owe you something.”
Kurt blinks. “What’s that?”
“Your rain check,” Burt says, leaning in for a rather literally breathtaking bear hug. “Consider it deposited.”
“Daaaaad,” Kurt wails, but unfortunately for any hopes of convincing anyone, he’s grinning like an idiot and hugging back.
“Didn’t you say you were working again tomorrow?” Burt asks when he’s finished strangling his only child.
“Only in the morning,” Kurt says.
His father frowns. “Okay, like I said-you are a kid, Kurt. And this is summer vacation. You don’t have to slave away six days a week all the time. We’ll make Dalton happen one way or another, I can promise you that-and you don’t have to take this on by yourself.”
Kurt gets that feeling of suffocatingly sincere gratitude filling up his chest again. “Thanks, Dad.” He musters a little bit of a grin. “But I’ve thought this out, you know. If I can fund enough of it myself, I’ll be less indebted to you and Carole later in life, and when I’ve finished at Harvard’s law school and started my own firm, I can buy you a BMW instead of a Porsche.”
Burt rolls his eyes. “Well, that’s ingratitude if I ever saw it. You’re supposed to help us retire in Fiji and live like kings.”
“That’s after I win the Pulitzer for my memoir,” Kurt says.
“Right,” his father says. “Sorry, I always get those out of order.” He smiles, reaches up to muss Kurt’s hair, sees Kurt’s expression, and generously goes for a shoulder-clap instead. “All right. Just… keep me in the loop, okay? I know it’s lame, but I like to know what’s going on in your life-and inside your head.”
“I sing in an a capella choir at an all-boys’ school with uniforms,” Kurt says, “and I’m wearing a shirt that quotes a French sonnet. I have no problem with lame.”
“That’s good to hear,” his father says airily on the way back to the stairs. “’Cause I’m pretty sure you’re stuck with me.”
Kurt cannot think of anyone he would rather be unable to get rid of.
“Oh, my God, Kurt,” Finn says. “You always look like you just walked out of a magazine, other than the weird poses and even weirder expressions. Besides, it’s just the Glee guys and then some kids from Asian Camp.”
“A word of advice?” Kurt says.
Finn scrunches up his nose. “I’ve never heard you say a one-word sentence, let alone give one word of advice.”
“Never,” Kurt says loudly, “miss an opportunity to dress well.”
“Okay,” Finn says, exasperated. “You didn’t miss this one; you’re dressed great. Can we go now?”
Kurt adjusts the knot of his vibrant green skinny tie, which brings out the lines of the same color in his new favorite pair of plaid pants. He selected a white shirt, less because he wants to give everyone’s retinas a break and more so that he can wear his white hat with the ensemble. He’s well-aware that this is a prime example of what most of his friends privately-and some of them publicly-refer to as a Kurt Outfit. He wishes he’d thought to call Mercedes ahead and coordinate, but she has some kind of psychic clothing field that always prevents them from clashing, so it should be fine.
“I suppose,” he says. “Although do you think these shoes-”
“They could not possibly be more perfect if you had picked from all of the shoes in the entire world,” Finn cuts in. “Which you pretty much did. Come on, Kurt, before the Asian Camp kids eat all the potstickers.”
“That’s just racist,” Kurt says. “But you may have a point.”
He’s still wishing he had another minute to contemplate the overall effect of his raiment as he climbs into the passenger seat of Finn’s battered station wagon, which he has to admit is the perfect automobile for ferrying drunk teenagers around-it’s essentially a steel cage on wheels, with six seats that have seen so much that not even projectile vomit would faze them. It also boasts a huge, flat trunk space, so if anyone goes into cardiac arrest en route to his or her home, the sufferer can be laid out and sustained with CPR until the paramedics arrive.
It’s probably really weird and slightly creepy that Kurt thinks about these things.
The Cohen-Chang household looks disappointingly normal from the outside-it’s one story with a nice lawn and a well-cultivated flowerbed, and there are exactly zero gold statues of lions or dragons perched like gargoyles on the roof. There is, however, one of those little waving cats in the front window, so Kurt holds out hope for the Asian sanctuary.
Finn parks along the curb, not too crookedly, and pulls on the door handle to make sure that he’s locked the car. Kurt thinks that the probability of any of their friends getting intoxicated and then successfully hot-wiring the station wagon is actually a negative number, but he notices Blaine’s sedan on the opposite side of the street and forgets to comment.
Tina herself opens the door when they ring the bell, admitting them into a narrow entrance hall. Doorways lead off everywhere, but Kurt is less excited about exploring the house than he is about the extremely stereotypical ceramic vase on the nearest end table-it’s one of the ones with a stylized Chinese temple theme, and it’s filled with silk lilies.
“No,” Tina says as soon as his and Finn’s eyes light on it, “it’s not a family heirloom from the Han Dynasty. My mom got it from a garage sale for, like, five bucks.”
Mike comes into view at the other end of the hall. “Hey,” he says. “I hope you like Tsingtao, because it’s the only kind of beer we have.”
Tina rolls her eyes. “Puck’s going to get more.”
“We also have enough sake to drown yourself in, just in case hara-kiri gets boring.”
Tina tries not to crack a smile. “Shut up, Mike.”
He grins. “You guys want some pineapple buns? Kelly from Asian Camp wants to be a dim sum chef.”
“They don’t go very well with Tsingtao,” Tina warns them in an undertone.
“Finn and I aren’t drinking,” Kurt says.
Finn looks miserable. “Ever again, if Kurt’s dad gets his way.”
“Good,” Tina says. “I took everybody else’s keys away, and then I forgot where I put them.”
“Come on in,” Mike says, waving them towards the doorway from which he emerged. “Tina’s mom totally bought a foosball table where all the little guys are terracotta soldiers.”
Half a dozen Asian kids Kurt doesn’t recognize are clustered around the foosball table. Mike wasn’t kidding; Kurt wonders if Tina’s mother also has an air hockey set themed after the Great Wall of China, with the puck stylized to look like a dumpling.
Another notable feature of the foosball table is that Blaine is manning one of the rows and laughing uproariously, all bright eyes and dizzying charm in the reddish light of a novelty lamp tricked out as a Chinese lantern. Kurt spots most of the other veterans of Rachel’s party as well-Santana is sitting in the corner, already surrounded by a ring of empty green bottles, and her bottom lip is wobbling; one of the Asian Camp kids is actually attempting to teach Brittany and Artie to play mahjong; Quinn is collapsed on one of the floral-patterned couches with one forearm draped over her eyes; Sam is, apparently, already drunk enough to have unwisely challenged Lauren to an arm-wrestling match. Puck is absent, presumably in pursuit of more potent beverages, and Rachel herself is… stalking up to them.
“Hello, gentlemen,” she says, head held high, not that it makes her seem much taller. “And I do mean gentlemen; I think you may be the only ones left in the room, at this rate. Are you planning to teetotal with me?”
“I don’t know what that means,” Finn says. “It sounds like something you would put on a playground.”
“That’s a teeter-totter,” Rachel says. “I wouldn’t dare to bring one of those to a party like this; there would be vomit everywhere. You’re not drinking?”
Finn frowns. “I’m driving. Well, one of us is, but it’s my mom’s car, so…”
“That’s very magnanimous of you, Finn,” Rachel says, favoring him with what she seems to think is a subtle smile of overbearing adoration. “And you, Kurt.”
“I thought you enjoyed cutting loose last time,” Kurt says.
“I enjoyed it until I actually believed I was dying the next day,” Rachel replies calmly. “And then there was the Cough Syrup-Ke$ha Incident-didn’t I tell you about this?-and I swore off drinking for the rest of my inevitably lengthy and prosperous life. I intend to keep that promise until the impromptu after-party for the stunning opening night of the first Broadway musical I star in, at which point I will indulge in a single glass of fine champagne.” Kurt knows he’s crazy, because he hopes he’ll be there. “In the meantime, if you gentlemen get bored, I did bring the karaoke machine. And most of the CDs. Blaine helped me carry them in; it took four trips.”
“What about me?” Blaine asks from across the room, but no one has time to answer before he yells, “Kurt!” and comes racing over, abandoning a slightly miffed foosball team. Judging by the unsteadiness of the ensuing tackle-hug, Blaine has thoroughly sampled the Tsingtao. “This is great!” he enthuses, taking a break from his quest to crush Kurt’s ribs and deform his spinal cord. “I’ve only been here fifteen minutes, and I’ve already learned the Cantonese word for ‘shit’!”
“How educational,” Kurt manages.
“Rachel!” Blaine cries. “Oh, my God, Rachel; you look stunning. Can we sing again? That was awesome. You’re awesome. And my back is killing me from hauling all of the discs in, so I need a good dance.”
Rachel pats his arm. “Of course we can. Go pick out something you like; I’ve sung everything we own at least once, which seems to be what happens to frighteningly talented only children.”
Blaine bounces off to start rooting through the karaoke CDs, and Kurt turns to Rachel. “Didn’t this end rather badly last time?”
“That’s a subjective judgment,” Rachel says. “And while I understand and appreciate your concern, there are two important factors to consider: this time, I’m not intoxicated, and Blaine is not in the middle of a sexual identity crisis. I think we should be fine.”
“Found one!” Blaine crows.
“Additionally,” Rachel says, “it’s almost impossible to refuse him anything when he’s smiling at you.” This has occurred to Kurt before. For instance, almost every day of the last six months of his life. “Please excuse me, gentlemen.”
As the piano intro blares tinnily out of the speakers, Kurt sees that Finn is pouting.
“Why didn’t she want to duet with me?” he asks.
“Well,” Kurt says, “there’s a possibility it’s related to the fact that that you were heartbroken when Quinn cheated on you, you dumped Rachel for making out with Puck, and then you encouraged Quinn to cheat on Sam with you. It is my understanding that most girls aren’t attracted to blatant hypocrisy.”
Finn looks wounded.
“Or it could be that she knows you wouldn’t want to sing Céline Dion,” Kurt says.
Finn twitches as Rachel starts belting out the first verse of “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” which was a good choice on Blaine’s part, since the boy could sing it drunk, sober, dying, or asleep. “I guess that could be it. She’s weirdly nice like that sometimes, and then you start to wonder if she’s trying to get you to do something.”
Companionably, they watch the Diva Duo tear through the high notes like so much tissue paper.
“We’re so not over them,” Finn says after a moment, sounding sad and surprised and a little confused.
“Speak for yourself,” Kurt replies.
Finn shoots him a betrayed look, which Kurt ignores in favor of texting Mercedes, Where are you?? And how do I get there instead of being here?
“Losers!” a familiar voice shouts at top volume, almost drowning out the wildly overemotive karaoke for a moment. “If you’re still standing, you haven’t had enough to drink!”
Kurt has to admit to being a little bit impressed with just how many bottles Puck has managed to turn up-and to carry into the building; if he gets a chance, and if Puck is still lucid, Kurt intends to inquire as to whether he stole the laden Radio Flyer behind him from an unsuspecting child.
“Sweet,” Lauren says, making a beeline for her rather enterprising boyfriend. “I was about to resort to clotheslining Asian kids to entertain myself.”
More than a few of the Asian Camp kids go slightly pale, and Kurt doesn’t blame them.
“Drink up, me hearties,” Puck growls, distributing bottles to the majority of the room as they flock to him like moths to a piratical flame. “I cut through a bunch of backyards, so the cops’ll never track me. Unless they use the dogs, in which case we’re all fucked.”
Kurt would slap his forehead, but that doesn’t seem even remotely sufficient.
“Here,” Mike says, as fluid as always-or perhaps slightly more fluid, given the circumstances-as he ducks into the room from the kitchen, balancing an extremely tall stack of red cups on the palm of his hand. “There’s Cherry Coke and about a million limes in the fridge.”
“Now we’re talkin’,” Puck decides. “Maybe this party won’t suck more than a Mormon wedding after all.”
Kurt’s phone buzzes, and he extracts it from his pocket again.
Has Puck even gotten there with the booze yet?
Kurt glances up and discovers that, in the hands of tipsily resourceful teenagers, teacups can double as shot glasses.
He’s here, all right.
From there, things lurch downhill like a weak-ankled girl in a short skirt and stilettos-which, incidentally, is a fairly accurate description of the Asian Camp girl with her hair done up in intricate braids. Simply because it takes a while for the alcohol to get absorbed into the susceptible bloodstreams scattered about the room, the general dissolution resembles a slowly-building bonfire more than an explosion.
“Jell-O shots are ready!” Tina cries, carrying a tray in from the kitchen. “Thanks for bringing them, Ryan!”
Ryan’s only response is to raise his fists-each of which is clenched around a bottle of Tsingtao-and whoop like a Western movie Indian.
“Oh, my God,” Artie gasps as Tina lowers the tray for him to take his pick. “There is a veritable rainbow of Jell-O-y goodness.”
“Hello, my Jell-O,” Puck says, grabbing one at random. “Are they color-coded?”
“I don’t remember,” Ryan says, and then he sits down on the floor and laughs like a hyena.
It’s going to be a long night.
Finn looks longingly at the passing pageant of gleaming bottles and brightly-colored drinks.
“The root beer is on the floor in the backseat of the car,” Kurt says. “Then we wouldn’t look quite as lame.”
Finn casts a covetous eye over the vast assortment of bottles Puck is setting out on the coffee table. “Um… I think I’ll go get it, yeah. Be right back.”
“Okay,” Puck is saying as Finn slips out the door. “Everybody circle up. On the run-slash-carry-the-wagon over here, I had an epiphany for a new drinking game.”
Kurt is ninety-nine-point-six percent sure that the word “epiphany” is denotatively incorrect in that context. He’s a hundred percent sure it’s offensive either way.
“Berry,” Puck says imperiously, “put on ‘Tubthumping.’”
Rachel frowns and folds her arms. “Noah-”
“Dalton kid,” Puck says, “put on ‘Tubthumping.’”
“All right!” Blaine says, diving on the karaoke CDs, knocking over a stack, and promptly sending a dozen of them skittering across the floor.
“Noah,” Rachel says louder, “if this is what I think it is-”
“Everybody get a couple different drinks,” Puck says loudly. “We are about to revive the world’s greatest one-hit wonder.”
“Actually,” Rachel says, “in 2002, VH1 rated The Macarena as the world’s greatest one-hit wond-”
The far, far too familiar song roars out of the speakers like an auditory tidal wave-the kind that will leave water in everyone’s ears for the next week, regardless of how drunk they are by now.
“We’ll be singing,” Puck shouts-more-than-sings, “when we’re winnin’-we’ll be singin’-”
None too surprisingly, everyone in the room screams the next part back at him.
“I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down-”
Kurt actually covers his ears, but it doesn’t help much. He’s expecting a headache to creep in before the song-if it can be called a song at this point, rather than a call to arms-is over.
Predictably, Rachel vacillates a little more before inevitably deciding that a performance is a performance. She settles on one of the old box speakers, crosses her legs, sits up straight, and sings the girl’s part.
Kurt is just starting to think they might all stagger away from this unscathed but for torn vocal cords when Puck starts pointing at people.
“He drinks a whiskey drink-” This to Ryan, who knocks back a detectable portion of the whiskey straight out of the bottle on command. “He drinks a vodka drink-” Puck shoves a finger towards Mike, who raises his teacup in a quick toast before he obeys. “He drinks a lager drink-” Puck points at Artie, who scrambles to find lager in the array on the table. “He drinks a cider drink-” Lauren takes a cider chug, if Kurt’s being honest.
Kurt still has his fingers in his ears as everyone gets distracted wailing out ‘the songs that remind them of the good times.’
“Uh,” Finn says, returning with the case of root beer. “What… in… the… hell.”
“It seems to be the bastard gene-spliced child of karaoke, musical chairs, and hell on Earth,” Kurt says. “With just a dash of ‘only Puck could ever think of this.’”
“I think that sums it up,” Finn says. He looks around. “Should I expect, like, alcohol poisoning by the end of the night?”
“Probably,” Kurt says.
Finn sighs feelingly. “Awesome.” He selects a bottle of root beer, twists off the cap, hands it to Kurt, and takes another for himself, raising it once it’s open. “To soberness.”
“To sobriety,” Kurt says, clinking the neck of his bottle against Finn’s.
As root beer bubbles tickle the inside of his nose, he tries very hard not to think it-Why can’t we not be sober?
Rachel stalks over to them, plucks a bottle out of the cardboard container, tussles with the cap, and then thrusts it at Finn, who calmly opens it for her and hands it back.
“We are surrounded by cretins,” she announces.
Finn blinks at her. “I’m pretty sure those are our friends, actually.”
“They can be cretins and still be our friends,” Rachel says. “I can’t believe I’m the only one in this entire room who learned my lesson after projectile-vomiting in front of the entire school.”
“That was, like, the grossest thing I’ve ever seen,” Finn says.
Kurt saw a few cell-phone photos from the audience that were uploaded to Facebook. He concurs.
“It was a bit of a dip in the thrilling and ingeniously-designed roller-coaster that is my life,” Rachel says. “Fortunately, as always, I have persevered. You might need to go talk to Blaine, Kurt; I think someone needs to stage an intervention and get him to drink some water. He could die.”
“Or he could dribble existentialism all over me,” Kurt says.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Rachel says. She points the bottle at him. “But only because you brought something for the rest of us to drink.”
She stalks off, her hair bouncing, walking on the balls of her feet, and starts attempting to convince Blaine to come down off of top of the bookshelf.
Over the yelling, the off-key singing, the tap-dancing (this only from Mike), and the general chaos, Kurt hears something incongruous-a pounding, and then a ding.
Or, more specifically, a ding-dong.
“Is anybody…?” he starts, but it’s pretty obviously a rhetorical question at this point.
Finn glances at him. “Huh?”
“Door,” Kurt says, putting down his root beer. “I’ll be right back.”
“If it’s some dude in a hockey mask,” Finn says, “shut the door again.”
“You know very well how I feel about hockey players,” Kurt says.
It’s probably a good thing that he heads off then, leaving Finn to mutter about puckheads, his musings liberally punctuated with other words that rhyme with “puck.”
The noise fades fractionally as Kurt heads down the hall, giving over to whoever’s banging on the door like the world is ending outside. Kurt would criticize-and would begin to fear for Mrs. Cohen-Chang’s decorations-if it wasn’t pretty much the only way to be heard right now.
“All right, all right,” he says, making sure to step over the tassled edge of the rug by the door, which harbors an almost-sentient will to trip him. “I hope you get carpal tunnel.”
He opens the door.
He breathes once, and his heart beats twice, and he drops his hand from the doorknob.
Then Azimio reaches out to sweep Kurt aside with one arm, slamming him back into the wall beside the doorway, where his head narrowly misses an ornate mirror, though he sees stars all the same.
“What the fuck, dude?” someone bursts out-someone familiar; someone-David.
Kurt wants to laugh, although he’s still steadying himself against the end table beside him. This is almost too cliché, even for his life.
He manages to focus enough to see that Azimio has paused in his prowl down the hallway to give David a look that’s equal parts suspicion and confusion.
“You hate that kid,” he says.
“He was holding the fucking door for you,” David says, and his eyes dart to the side-probably his poker tell; certainly a sign that he’s hoping no one notices what he hasn’t addressed. “Cut him some fucking slack; he was doing you a favor.”
“What the hell are you on?” Azimio asks, eyes narrowed and fists curled. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you wanted him to do you some kind of favor, man.”
There is a moment in which the hall shrinks, and Kurt can see the bead of sweat on Azimio’s neck, the condensation-made wrinkles on the label of the beer in some other football player’s hand, the flecks of olive-green in David’s eyes. The space might as well be airless, and the whole massive ruckus of the party is reduced to a distant thumping in some far-off other world.
David bites the inside of his lip, but he doesn’t look angry so much as kind of sad.
“Grow up, Az,” he says, and then he pushes past his best friend and heads into the living room.
A few of the other football players glance back at Kurt, but most of them ignore him. Azimio shoots him an assessing look-some combination of a onceover and a warning-but he turns without incident and starts into the party.
Kurt slumps back against the wall a little, whether or not his head is still aching from his encounter with it. He doesn’t know where to begin on this one. David shouldn’t be here-he should have known better than to mix the two universes they both inhabit, in one of which they’re friends; in the other of which David stands at the peak of the pyramid, and Kurt is slushie fodder. David should have known that if they cross those wires, sparks will fly, and something’s bound to catch on fire.
Kurt runs his thumb over the carving on the edge of the table, pressing hard to ground himself. It probably wasn’t David’s fault, to be honest; the likeliest scenario is that Azimio heard about tonight on Facebook-possibly as a result of some extremely inane over-sharing episode of Brittany’s, although Kurt shouldn’t jump to conclusions-and dragged the rest of his regular crew along. In the partial second that Kurt had to gauge the newcomers’ expressions before Azimio decided that his skull should be better acquainted with white paint and plaster, David looked reluctant, maybe even apologetic.
The question now is whether Kurt’s brave enough to go back in there. Courage and other lies.
Speaking of which, shit. He has to weather whatever happens in that room, because leaving a drunk Blaine alone with David Karofsky pretty much amounts to asking Azimio expressly to ruin both of their lives.
Kurt takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, rubs the back of his head, squares his shoulders, and forges back in.
[Chapter 7] [Chapter 9]