Cemetery Song for Spring - Part 2 of 4
Return to Part 1
Spending time at the shop has turned out to be not as bad as Kurt had feared, on several fronts. First of all, though Ernie by no means should change careers and become an accountant, his bookkeeping is not nearly as horrific as Kurt had expected. All the information seems to be there; it’s just not always in the right place. (Kurt is very grateful his dad pestered him into taking an introductory accounting class. “Don’t give me that right-brain-left-brain excuse. If your left arm was weaker than your right arm, you’d work out your left arm more, right? Plus, I made it through one, and you’re a hell of a lot smarter than I am.”)
The sense-memories aren’t nearly as bad as they were on the first day. The moment he enters the shop each morning and is assaulted with all the familiar sensations still sets him aback, but it’s not so intense if he arrives before the mechanics do. It helps that there’s no audience, too.
He spends most of his time in the office, which he doesn’t associate Dad with the way he does when it comes to the garage itself. It’s odd, because they had spent a lot of time in here together, too. Kurt remembers playing with his Power Rangers on the floor in front of the desk on school holidays, then as he got older, reading there. Even when he’d worked at the shop part-time in high school, Dad had made him split his time between repairing cars and entering data on the computer.
(“Because I know you’re not planning on being a mechanic,” Dad had said to Kurt when he had whined about wanting to work in the garage the whole day instead of going in the office. “I want you to get the most mileage you can out of this job. That means knowing enough so you can fix your own car most of the time and not get screwed over by a crook if you do need somebody else to work on it. It also means knowing what all goes into running a business, including the boring numbers stuff.” Kurt wonders, certainly not for the first time, how he ever got so lucky as to have that man for a father.)
But mostly, he’s surprised that the memories don’t ache as much as he had dreaded they would. He cries when he finds the box of trinkets and family photos from the desk that Eddie had boxed up for him. Of course. The sports pennants adorning the walls and the dusty stack of Field & Stream and Sports Illustrated back-issues in the corner scream Burt Hummel, but the office feels more like a museum of reminders than the place with the father-shaped hole, the way the shop had felt the first day.
As long as there are no big surprises and he works at a steady pace, Kurt thinks he’ll be done here the day before the party in Westerville. He sits on the floor, leans back against the desk, and opens the box of pictures.
~*~*~
Blaine has Kurt against the wall and a hand down his pants when Blaine’s phone rings on the bedside table.
“Answer it!” Kurt says excitedly. “It’s a job offer, I know it, even this late at night. I have a sixth sense about these things.”
Blaine extricates himself and runs to look at the number. He knows the area codes for all three universities he’s still in the running at. He recognizes the number instantly. It’s definitely not a job offer.
“Nope. They can call back,” Blaine says, crossing the room back to Kurt. The interruption was long enough so that Kurt isn’t panting anymore, but his face is still flushed.
“Are you sure? Because I’ll still be here when-”
“Yes,” Blaine says. “Want you. Now.” He drops to his knees.
Kurt laughs. “It never ceases to amuse me that you somehow make yourself inarticulate during sex, even before I’m really actively contributing. I wonder-ohh, uh, yeah, about to join you in the Land of the Speechless…”
Blaine doesn’t listen to the message until they’re in bed and Kurt’s asleep.
“Hi, Blaine. Just wanted to let you know I got the invitation from your mom. Uh, I’m afraid we can’t make it. It was kind of short notice, and it’s so hard for Paula to get work off…it’s hard to walk in and say, ‘I need time off for a party’ anyway, right? Anyway, congratulations again, and I’m sorry I can’t make it. Things here are fine. Oh, and Mindy wanted me to say hi to you for her, and thank you for the graduation card. Sorry I missed you. If you ever want to call-yeah. ‘Bye, son. Uh, say hi to Kurt for me.”
“Your dad’s not coming?” Kurt murmurs against his chest.
Blaine fidgets in surprise. “Sorry. I thought you were asleep. How did you know who it was?”
Kurt looks up at him without really moving. “The phone is six inches from my head, and you always have the volume turned up high.”
“Sorry.”
Kurt shrugs against him. After a moment, he adds, “That was a really lame excuse. It’s not like your step-mother needed to come.”
Blaine doesn’t disagree, but he’s a little annoyed with Kurt for bringing up the obvious.
“It’s fine,” Blaine says. “I knew he wasn’t coming. The invitation was just a formality.”
Blaine hasn’t seen his father in years. They’d spent a year doing the regular weekend visitation thing after the divorce, and it had been as awkward for both of them as Blaine had expected. Then, in the space of a few months, everything had changed: his father moved to Florida, he got a new girlfriend-soon-wife and a step-daughter, and Blaine’s visitations went from fairly frequent but brief periods of tiptoeing around each other to a six-week stretch of concentrated discomfort each summer.
The first summer had been the worst, before his father and Paula had gotten married. Paula and Mindy had been around all the time but weren’t family, and it tired Blaine out to be constantly on his best guest behavior. The next year, his father didn’t object when Blaine asked to shave the visit down a week so he’d be back in time for soccer camp. Then the next year lost another week to an orchestra clinic, and so on, gradually whittling and wearing their time together away. Then there was the summer Blaine had turned down the plane ticket in favor of the counselor job at Camp Cheerful. His father had understood and not been angry-maybe he’d even been a little sad. Blaine hadn’t intended his rejection to act as a hint, but he’d known how his father would take it as such and had gone ahead with his plans anyway. There had been no talk of plane tickets since.
Blaine refuses to think of his father and himself as estranged. They still send birthday cards and call each other on major holidays. But Blaine is having to work harder to convince himself it’s true, now that he has a husband his father has never met and neither of them seem in any hurry to change that. Blaine’s unwillingness to put Tampa on the route for this round of family visits is not entirely out of stubbornness. For whatever reason, Blaine wants his dad to be the one that crosses that distance. Blaine’s done it enough times.
Kurt is actually asleep this time when Blaine looks down. His head rests against Blaine’s shoulder, and Blaine’s arm will no doubt go numb. He’s a little afraid that, if the meeting ever happens now, Kurt will resent his father for having waited so long. But not every father is like Burt Hummel, and not every son is like Kurt.
~*~*~
Even though work at the garage has been going smoother than he expected, Kurt is still astonished at the effervescence of his own good mood on Wednesday. He thinks back to when his mom died and remembers that the real, constant-ache kind of sadness contains small bursts of happiness within it. He remembers the first one, about a week after the funeral-the frozen chicken Dad failed so spectacularly at cooking about a week after her funeral. They had laughed for an hour, even though it wasn’t that funny. It just felt so good to loosen the numbing, tight pain in their chests.
Kurt tries not to think of the new sadness that tinges the memory now, focusing instead on the sweetness of the remembered release. He decides to actually come home for lunch, then that he’s not hungry and would really rather have a nooner than a meal. He internally laughs at the ridiculousness of the word ‘nooner,’ then acknowledges that Blaine no doubt will be hungry no matter what. He grabs a couple oversized muffins from the bakery on the corner before driving back to the house.
“Surprise!” Kurt shouts up the stairs when he enters. Now that they’re putting the house on the market, Carole has Blaine painting the upstairs. He’d started in Finn’s old bedroom this morning. As Kurt climbs the stairs, images of how fun sex involving a little paint might be flash through his mind. He’s not really dressed for it, though-no way he’s risking paint on his McQueen scarf. He takes it off and ties it to the doorknob, smiling to himself.
“Hey, I brought-” He pokes his head around the half-open door and sees his sexy plans stopped dead in their tracks.
There is paint. Blaine had been working at least for a while, because the windows and baseboards are taped and a wall and a half are a brighter, shinier eggshell white than the rest of the room. Blaine’s hands and even a cheek are streaked and dotted with paint, too. But Blaine isn’t painting anymore. He’s on the floor, hunched in front of the little TV they’d kept in the room so he’d have something to listen to as he worked. The envelope clutched in his hand is crumpled.
“Blaine?”
Blaine snaps out of his reverie but can’t force a smile. “Hi. Sorry.” He holds up the letter. Kurt can see an official, university-looking seal on the stationery. “Our mail from Philly finally caught up with us.”
Even if Kurt hadn’t known that a call is good news and a letter is bad news, Blaine’s expression leaves no reason to ask what the letter says. Kurt picks his way across the plastic over the carpet, sits down beside Blaine, and pulls him into his arms. “Oh, honey,” and “It’s okay” are the only things he can think of to say, so he repeats them at random intervals and rocks him, even though Blaine isn’t crying.
When they separate enough so Kurt can see Blaine’s face, Blaine takes a deep breath and slaps on a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “There are still two left to hear from.” Even the fake smile falters. “If it’s taken them this long to get back to me, it has to mean there’s someone else they’d rather have and I’m their back-up choice if that person falls through, but…”
Kurt wants to say something important and perfect. He’s embarrassed that what comes out is, “I brought muffins.”
Wonder of wonders, it is the perfect thing to say. “You’re a mind-reader. You’re amazing,” Blaine says, kissing Kurt before sighing at the sight of the banana-nut crumble like he’s been starving for a week.
Blaine lies back on the plastic as he peels the paper off the muffin. Kurt checks for paint first, then carefully lowers himself down beside him. It’s extremely uncomfortable-the plastic sticks to any skin it comes in contact with-but he knows Blaine needs this.
“I wish I could take credit for having a sixth-sense about trouble, but I can’t,” Kurt says sheepishly. “Those were intended as a post-orgasm snack.”
Blaine looks surprised and barely swallows the bite of muffin before he says, “You came home for a nooner?” He contemplates that, like he’s sad that this has happened on the one day when it’s not a fabulous idea. “I hate to say this, but I’m not really…”
“No, don’t worry, I figured that one out,” Kurt says. He picks up the letter. “It’s fine. But thank you, Dean McMurphy, for being not only an idiot but also a buzzkill.”
Kurt still doesn’t know what to say, but he knows that the silence needs to be filled up. He starts chattering about the first things he sees, which are the half-painted walls. He talks about plans for sprucing up the rest of the house so it’s ready for sale, then about what he’d do differently if he were remodeling this place for a specific person rather than turning it into a blank canvas.
“If you wanted a nursery, this would be the room for it,” Kurt says at one point. “I like the trend of gender-neutral colors, but I don’t understand why everyone goes with yellow. This room has enough sunlight already. I’d do a nice calming green with blue undertones, maybe a mural on that wall over there, like a forest. This room has a lot of potential.” A chuckle bubbles up within him. “Oh my god, Blaine, we’re literally watching paint dry.”
He looks over. Blaine isn’t laughing; he’s deep in thought. “You love this house,” he says.
Kurt isn’t sure where this is going, but he answers without hesitation. “I do.”
“If you wanted to start your own interior design firm, you could get a ton of referrals through Quinn,” Blaine says, still staring thoughtfully at the ceiling.
Kurt laughs. “I’d be able to get my revenge on former classmates by buying them orange and navy furniture for a puce-colored room. Paint their nurseries fire-engine red so their babies won’t sleep.” Blaine still isn’t laughing. “Wait. Are you serious?”
He shrugs. “You wouldn’t necessarily have to sell the garage if we lived close enough to manage it. You could start your own design firm, and we could buy Carole out of her share of the house…”
Kurt is so stunned he can barely form thoughts, let alone sentences. “I wasn’t kidding about the puce. Didn’t I ever tell you about the time I gave Rachel a Grease-inspired makeover?”
“It seems like Quinn’s managed to stay in Lima without dying of shame and resentment, and it sounds like she has plenty of reason to feel that way, too.”
Mostly, Kurt is pissed because that’s completely irrelevant, but he settles on saying, “That’s either because Quinn’s become a saint or has gone insane. If she’s managed to let bygones be bygones, wonderful for her, but I still hate most of these people.” Then Kurt realizes the critical detail left out of Blaine’s plan. “What would you do, Blaine?”
“I could probably find something at a junior college nearby. Maybe help you manage the garage, if you wanted.”
There it is. “Oh, no you don’t.” Blaine’s head pops up like that’s the last thing he’s expecting to hear. “You do not get to avoid the possibility of failure by preemptively giving up.”
“That’s not-”
“Yes, it is,” Kurt says. “You’re not just worried about getting a job. You’re worried that because you weren’t everyone’s instant first choice, you’re not good enough to do the job well.” When all he gets in response is a sigh, Kurt presses, “Right?” Sucks to have someone who knows you well enough to call you on your bullshit, doesn’t it?
They’re in a quiet stalemate for a long time. Finally, Blaine sits up and rubs his hands down his face. “What if I’m not?”
Kurt feels the tension break. He puts his arm around Blaine. “One, you are. Two, even if it doesn’t work out the way we planned, that’s okay. Yes, going out into the big, wide world is scarier than staying somewhere we’re familiar with, but my philosophy has always been, if you’re going to go down, might as well go down flaming.”
He worries for a moment if he’s aimed that rapier wit wrong again for the sake of a double entendre, but he’s relieved when Blaine laughs.
Kurt doesn’t go back to the garage that afternoon. He stays and helps Blaine with the painting, filling the empty space with talk of a home they have yet to find.
~*~*~
Kurt loves Mrs. Anderson, but he almost doesn’t answer when he sees she’s calling his cell.
“Hi,” Kurt says chipperly, hoping she won’t notice he’s not addressing her. He still can’t bring himself to call her “Mama,” and this is not a good time to touch on anything that hearkens back to the no-guest wedding/but we’re family! debacle of yore. “Blaine’s outside cleaning the gutters for Carole. I’ll get him. Did you try his cell before mine? If the batteries are dead on his, we’d better fix that.”
“Don’t get Blaine. I called to talk to you.”
Kurt hopes Mrs. Anderson doesn’t hear his nervous gulp. “Okay. What can I do for you?”
“I know it’s late, but I’m considering renting linens for the tables,” Mrs. Anderson says. Kurt has little doubt that she’s been fully intent on renting linens from the start, but he’s curious where this is going. “They have white, but also yellow, and a robin’s egg blue. Which do you think would be best?”
Kurt is puzzled. “I trust your judgment.”
Mrs. Anderson sighs exasperatedly. “That’s very sweet, but not the point. What do you want?”
“I really don’t care.”
“Yes you do,” she says. “You love to plan pretty things, down to every little detail. I’m sorry I took over planning what’s supposed to be your and Blaine’s party, so I’m trying to let you pick some things.”
Kurt smiles and sits down on the bottom stair of the staircase, leaning against the railing. “Mrs. Anderson, you don’t have to do that. I’m not angry at you. I’m sorry for not being very enthusiastic about the party. It has nothing to do with your planning. It’s just…hard, coming back here.”
Mrs. Anderson hums, and Kurt imagines her nodding knowingly. “Your glee club friend Mercedes finally RSVP’d. It’ll be nice to see all your old friends again, won’t it?”
“Yes, it will be.”
He hears Mrs. Anderson do a rare thing for her: she hesitates. “Has Blaine spoken to his father?”
“Sort of,” Kurt says, not hiding his annoyance. He’s careful not to be too critical of Blaine’s dad around Blaine, but the man is Mrs. Anderson’s ex. He figures he has a bit more latitude to vent. “He left a message with an incredibly lame excuse for not coming.”
“Did Blaine call him back?”
“Of course not,” Kurt says, rolling his eyes. “That might require a confrontation, and apparently we can’t have that.”
“Blaine and his father are very much alike in some ways,” Mrs. Anderson says, exasperation back in her voice. He likes her tone when it’s aimed at someone other than him. She’s nice to commiserate with.
“Blaine would come to his own son’s wedding-replacement party even if his kid were a felon. You raised him better than that,” Kurt says.
“That’s true,” Mrs. Anderson says. “But they are very alike when it comes to confrontation. Like you said, they both would rather fake-smile and say polite things that mean nothing rather than actually air everything out.” She lowers her voice. “I love my son, but don’t let him do that to you, Kurt. I don’t tell this to most people, but I think Robert and I could have worked through it if he hadn’t just-just tried to brush it under the rug when-well.”
“When things went bad at school after Blaine came out?” Kurt asked.
Kurt is surprised at how scared Mrs. Anderson sounds. “How do you know that? Did Blaine tell you?”
“No. I just pieced it together, between things you’ve said and things Blaine has said.”
“You don’t think Blaine knows?”
“He’s never flat-out said it, but considering he was there, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d figured it out by now.”
“If he has, there’s nothing I can do about it, but if not...” Kurt can tell she’s upset, but he can’t see how this could be such a shock to her. If Kurt could figure it out, Blaine had to have by now-but he supposes she’d worked so hard when Blaine was younger to convince him of some other story behind the divorce that she’d convinced herself it was a great lie, too. “Blaine has always had this notion that our home was so happy and perfect before he came out. It wasn’t, Kurt. But Blaine won’t hear that.”
“I know,” Kurt says. And he does-he knows this is exactly the sort of thing Blaine would latch on to and use to pile guilt on his own head. “If the linen company will go for it, ask for white tablecloths with yellow napkins for a nice burst of color.”
Mrs. Anderson sniffs, but that’s the only indication of sadness on her end. “Good idea. Very springy.”
“My thought exactly.” Kurt says, “I’ll take care of him, Mrs. Anderson. It’s taken us too long and we’ve worked too hard to screw this up now. I’m not guaranteeing that I won’t leave my own not-so-diplomatic message on his dad’s voicemail at some point-” she laughs and murmurs something Kurt thinks might be I’d pay to hear that one “-but I’ll take care of him. I promise.”
~*~*~
Kurt knows he should heave a sigh of relief when he scrolls through the spreadsheet and realizes he’s gotten to the end of Ernie’s data entries, but he doesn’t. He’s got four, maybe five hours of odds and ends and straightening up to do, and then he’ll have to call the business broker. (Gets to. Then he gets to call the business broker.)
He scrolls back and finds the last day his dad entered information into the computer. Of course he remembers the date, the same way he remembers the date of every one of Dad’s all too many collapses. (Every time he touches Blaine’s wedding ring, he thinks that if he’d believed in a god, he would’ve thanked him for not letting anything bad happen to Dad on any November 14th. Talk about rendering a fairly significant family heirloom useless for all future purposes.) Kurt rummages around in the desk until he finds the hand-written ledger he knows his dad kept. Dad was a good bookkeeper, but a lousy typist, so he’d always done everything but the hard math by hand and then transferred it into the computer via hunt-and-peck keyboarding.
Kurt traces his fingers over the ink. The familiarity of the handwriting is unexpectedly potent-almost like finding an undelivered letter to himself.
Two hours later, Kurt finds his first discrepancy between the handwritten ledger and the computer, a $69.87 transposed to $68.97. Ninety cents is all the justification he needs to keep looking at some of the last words his father had written.
Kurt doesn’t manage to finish his work that afternoon.
~*~*~
Blaine doesn’t expect Kurt to still be in the house when he comes home from his run.
“Don’t kiss me good-bye again,” Kurt says, grabbing the car keys off the counter. “You’re all sweaty.”
“What? I thought you liked how I looked when I’m a little sweaty,” Blaine says, grinning.
“‘A little’ being a key qualifier there.” Kurt arches an eyebrow, but there’s something brittle about his voice.
Blaine is still high on exercise endorphins, a little guilty about yesterday's aborted nooner, and really noticing how well Kurt’s jeans fit him today. “Well, since Carole left for work, we could always shower together,” he suggests, eyebrows waggling.
While of course he’d prefer sex as a response, Blaine at least expects some coy teasing before Kurt saunters out the door. Instead, he gets a frown. “I’m way behind at the shop. I need to get moving now if I’m going to have any hope of finishing before we go back to Westerville.”
Blaine easily switches gears. “I could help,” he says. “Give me fifteen minutes to get cleaned up, and we could go there together.”
Kurt shakes his head. His expression is far too closed off for Blaine’s comfort. He really hadn’t meant to be butting in, but he gets that Kurt’s time alone in the shop is sacred, in a way.
Blaine only barely manages to catch the car keys when Kurt tosses them at him. “Carole wanted one of us to take the bags of cans in the garage down to the redemption center, and it’s only open for limited hours. It’s on the other side of town, so you’d better leave now.”
“O…kay,” Blaine says, and Kurt is almost out the door already. “Wait! I’ll give you a ride.”
“I’ll walk today, thanks,” Kurt says, the door slamming shut on the end of the ‘thanks.’
Blaine stares at the keys in his hand for a moment, not quite sure what’s just happened. Eventually he shrugs, washes up a bit, and drives across town to the redemption center.
He has a hard time finding the place. It’s a grubby little enclosure sandwiched between a Laundromat and a single-stall carwash. There’s only one vehicle in the small parking lot, a beat-up pickup truck. He pulls into a spot as close to the door as he can, gets out, and wrestles the two overstuffed garbage bags out of the trunk. He tries for several seconds to grasp the doorknob without dropping a bag until someone inside opens it for him. His eyes are so shocked from the transition from full sunlight to the dark, dingy can-sorting room that he recognizes the voice long before he can see the man’s face.
“I keep telling the boss we should get a swinging door. Nobody can get that thing open.”
“Puck?”
Blaine blinks a few times until he can see. The man’s skin is more weathered and he’s mohawk-less, but the keen dark eyes and smug mouth are undoubtedly Puck’s.
That mouth is currently screwed up in confusion, and those eyes are squinting. “I know you…”
Blaine sets down the bags so he can flatten his post-run un-styled hair with his hands, so the part is in the same place it was when he was in high school.
Puck snaps his finger and points. “Hey, you’re Hummel’s dude! Uh…Blaine Warbler!”
“Anderson,” Blaine corrects, knowing he sounds a little snotty. He’s always hated that nickname, though. “But yes.”
“I’d heard Kurt was back in town with some guy,” Puck says. The phrasing is kind of awful-Blaine imagines how the rumors likely devolved on their way from the moms in the grocery store to the bar Puck must frequent-but Puck’s tone is friendly. Blaine is still wary.
“Sort of,” Blaine says, remaining polite and friendly, too. Blaine is pretty sure Puck never figured out in high school that Blaine didn’t trust Puck any farther than he could throw him. He’s not about to break that illusion now. “Not just ‘with some guy,’ though. We’re married.”
“Congrats!” Puck pauses between dumping the cans onto the counting table long enough to punch Blaine in the arm, his happiness clearly genuine. “Makin’ an honest man of him, huh? Er, I guess you’re kinda makin’ honest men out of each other. So, are you guys moving back up here, or are you just in town to visit Mrs. Hudson?”
“Just visiting Carole,” Blaine says.
Puck manages to keep up the conversation as he counts the cans, shoving them down the lipped table in twos. His questions get shorter, though. “Where do you live?”
“We’re kind of…in between homes at the moment,” Blaine says. “I’m waiting to hear back on a couple job interviews, so we’ll go from there.”
“What kind of job?”
“History professor.”
Blaine is pretty sure Carole loses about a dollar in the can count to Puck’s surprise. “Whoa. Huh.”
It’s happened to Blaine a few times before, running into people he knows from the old days. Not so much with Dalton men, but with kids from the school he went to before that. People who start off surprisingly happy to see him, who tell him proudly about their jobs as bank tellers and foremen and managers, shut down when they hear the letters “Ph.D.” spill from his mouth. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to it.
“This isn’t my normal job,” Puck says when he’s finished counting and is wiping his hands on a dirty rag. “I work down at the Ford plant. It’s honest work and it pays good, but they’ve been cutting back on everybody’s hours lately. So I picked this up a couple mornings a week for a little extra cash.”
“That’s great,” Blaine says. “Not the cutting back on hours thing, but-”
“Yeah,” Puck says. Blaine is really impressed at how oddly comfortable Puck is making this. He’s far more comfortable than the bank tellers and foremen have ever been. “That part kind of sucks, but it has its bright sides. Like I get to spend a little more time with my kids.”
Blaine is still processing that sentence when Puck fishes his wallet out of his pocket and flips it open. Two little blonde girls in Disney Princess Halloween costumes smile up at him from the photograph. Blaine’s mind catches. The older one is too old to be Puck’s, unless…
Blaine barely stops himself from asking, “Beth?”
“That’s Jenny,” Puck says, pointing to the younger one in the Sleeping Beauty costume, “and that’s Kelly.” Only then does Puck apparently notice Blaine’s confusion. “Technically, they’re not my kids. They’re my girlfriend’s, but their biological dad was a real creep. Used to beat the crap out of Tracy. But she’s a strong woman. She got a restraining order and left his sorry ass. So maybe they’re not my kids, but-they are my kids, you know?”
“Yeah, I do,” Blaine says.
Puck tilts his head and looks at Blaine seriously. “Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you? ‘Cause you and Kurt are gonna get, like, half a dozen babies from China or something someday, aren’t you?”
Blaine is so stunned at the fact that he’s talking about babies with Noah Puckerman that all he manages is a weak, “Not exactly. China doesn’t allow gay people to adopt.”
“Really? That sucks. Well, then from Russia or France or wherever.”
Blaine can’t help but raise his eyebrows at France. Puck again misinterprets.
“Maybe not half a dozen, but I don’t know, I figured Kurt would want lots of kids so he’d have more people to dress up,” Puck says. He apparently still thinks Blaine’s stupor is from shock at the idea of children in general. He says in a low, confidential voice, “You know, I knew kids would be hard work, but I never realized how much fun they are, too, until Kelly and Jenny.” He pats Blaine on the back bracingly.
Blaine shakes his head and manages to regain a modicum of composure. He reaches out and tips the photo Puck is still holding so there isn’t so much glare. “Your girls are beautiful.”
“Sure are,” Puck grins proudly, even though he has nothing to do with it. “Kelly’s the athlete-totally kicked ass in Little League softball last summer. Jenny’s like you and Kurt and Rachel-real driven and so smart. She’s always coming home from school wanting to be something when she grows up that I have to look up online to figure out what it even is. This week she wants to be an ophthalmologist.”
The door rattles; someone is trying and failing to get in. Puck snaps back to work, punching buttons on the cash register. “You guys should stop by for a beer sometime, meet the girls. How long are you two in town for?”
“Just a couple more days. Then we’re going back to Westerville for…” Blaine says. Then it dawns on him. “Wait. I know you were invited. My mom’s having a not-a-wedding-reception party for us, and you should’ve gotten an invitation a while ago.”
“Huh. That’s weird. We just moved, so maybe it got lost in the mail?” Puck says. Blaine can’t tell if Puck is telling the truth or if it’s some form of face-saving. Then again, Puck genuinely hadn’t known he and Kurt were married. He would’ve figured that much out by opening the envelope. “Give me a date and an address, and if I’m not working, I’ll be there.”
The customer who has finally struggled his way in with cartons of beer bottles clears his throat in annoyance. Blaine scribbles the party information on the back of his receipt and hands it to Puck.
“Thanks, man. Say hi to Kurt for me.”
Blaine nods and waves, and a few moments later, he’s back outside, blinded by sunlight. He can’t help but smile. Puck was never that bad of a guy-okay, maybe he was, but he wasn’t ever malicious-but Blaine never would have pictured him as someone who would grow up after high school. Sometimes, being wrong is pretty wonderful.
~*~*~
Kurt walks in the direction of the garage when he leaves Blaine with the car keys and the order to go to the redemption center across town. He doesn’t really know why he’s going through all this subterfuge, except that it’s easier than the conversation they would have had to endure, with Blaine offering to come along to hold his hand and Kurt refusing. He’s doing it this way to avoid hurting Blaine. He repeats that to himself like a mantra.
Heading in the wrong direction isn’t a complete waste of time. He turns the corner and picks up a bouquet of flowers at the supermarket, then turns in the right direction from there.
There’s no one at the graveyard but the groundskeeper; Kurt can hear the dull hum of a lawnmower a ways off. It’s a sunny day. The trees are starting to bud. The wind smells sweet and clean. He should feel at peace. He walks.
And there they are in front of him, two unobtrusive, bluish-gray stones that come up no higher than Kurt’s shins. Their names are written on the tops of the stones, along with the dates and “Beloved Daughter, Wife, and Mother,” and “Beloved Son, Husband, and Father.”
Kurt feels a phantom hand in his. He knows his grief-riddled, confused mind is creating the sensation, not god or gods or dwarves in the moon, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less there.
Hands had always been a comfort to him before in this place. Blaine had taken his hand the last time he was here. Dad had taken it every time before that, up to that very first one. But Kurt has been so focused on looking down at joined hands that he’s never thought much about what he’d seen when he looked up.
He goes through the memory of that first time in his mind. Tears fill his vision. His eight-year-old self looks up. His big, strong father, who can chase monsters out from under the bed and that raccoon from the garage and the mean neighbor boys from the backyard-that man is crying and broken and clinging to a scared little boy for dear life.
It’s only now that Kurt can articulate what the gray, gnawing dread is that has been hanging over him since he drove into town. There is nothing worse than standing beside an open grave alone. It’s the one type of pain he hasn’t had to endure yet. He’s grateful to Blaine for trying to save him from it, but that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? Sure, it’s possible Kurt won’t be the one left behind, but Kurt has an aching premonition that all Blaine has done is delayed the inevitable.
Kurt sets the flowers between Dad and Mom’s headstones, then turns on his heel and marches out of the graveyard as fast as he can go without running.
~*~*~
“You sent me to the redemption center on purpose, didn’t you?” Blaine says as they get ready for bed that night.
Kurt looks far more startled than he should, almost sick. “What?” he asks.
“To see Puck. He works there.”
“…Yeah,” Kurt says.
Blaine knows Kurt likes to think he’s a good actor, but Blaine sees right through it. “Okay. Now tell me why you really sent me to the redemption center.”
“I thought you’d enjoy seeing Puck.”
“Kurt-”
“I took your sage advice and visited their graves, okay?” he snaps. “If you’re curious, it turned out to be a spectacularly stupid idea.”
The flash of anger from Kurt confuses Blaine, but more than that, he’s not quite sure why his own jaw is tightening.
“Okay,” he says slowly. “But why did I need to be half-way across town when you went?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kurt grumbles, taking off his shirt and tossing it on the bed with a vehemence that should tip Blaine off to tread lightly. He notices, but he finds himself really, really not caring.
What Blaine wants to say is, Why the hell are you going to so much trouble to shut me out, Kurt? But he is still Blaine Anderson, so he still believes there is a way to avoid a real fight. “Did you think that I wouldn’t want to come with you?”
Now, this is the part where Kurt should say something like, “I didn’t want to bother you,” and then Blaine could say something sappy about Kurt never being a bother, and then they could climb into bed and kiss good-night, and everything would be close enough to all right that they could sleep well.
But Blaine is still married to Kurt Hummel, and Kurt does not follow comfortable scripts. Kurt snorts in derision.
How long are you going to punish me for taking so long to get back to where we always should have been? “You didn’t think maybe I wanted to go, too?” Blaine says, and he can’t help the edge of superiority and frustration creeping in.
Kurt gives him a withering look. “Oh for fuck’s sake, Blaine. You seriously think I’ll believe you’re mad at me for violating some arcane rule of graveyard etiquette?”
“I’m not mad,” Blaine says. Kurt shakes his head and mutters something about Blaine’s mother that he doesn’t catch. Blaine adds, “I’m disappointed.”
“Oh my god. Let me see if I can roll my eyes all the way back inside my head. Nope, this’ll have to be good enough.”
Blaine still doesn’t take the bait. “I am disappointed. I loved Burt, too.”
Kurt’s eyes narrow. He’s not in Blaine’s face, because the bed is between them, but he kneels on the mattress to get a little bit closer. “He wasn’t your father, Blaine.”
“I know that! But-”
“Look. You have daddy issues. I get it,” Kurt says. His voice has softened somewhat, but Blaine can barely hear the shift in Kurt’s tone over the roaring in his own ears. “Deal with them with your own father-he’s actually alive, or at least so the rumor goes.”
“This has nothing to do with him,” Blaine growls.
“It has everything to do with him!” Kurt says. “He’s the reason you won’t admit you’re angry that I’m hiding things from you! That you won’t just tell me off for being an immature brat today when I snuck off instead of having the guts to just tell you I didn’t want you to come with me! Because you’d rather pretend those problems and feelings aren’t there than go through the ugly mess it takes to fix them. I’m mad at myself for getting sucked into that way of living with you, and I’m stopping it right now.”
“You’re reading way too much into one voicemail, Kurt,” Blaine says almost warningly.
“Then what should I read into the fact you haven’t seen him in, what, eight, nine years? That we’ve been married for months and I’ve never even spoken to him? The timing of your parents splitting up?”
Blaine’s blood runs cold. Don’t go there don’t go there don’t go there. “You’re not making sense anymore. I’m sorry I brought it up. It wasn’t that big of a deal.”
“Really? Because I think it’s a fairly big deal that you’re in denial about how big of a lie the normal, ‘oh, the divorce wasn’t about you at all, darling-what happened was just between your dad and me’ thing is. I can’t believe your mother could tell it with a straight face.”
Blaine sees the horror on Kurt’s face the moment after the last syllable falls from his mouth. He looks almost as if he’s been holding out a sword, and he’s shocked that Blaine has somehow become impaled on it.
“Oh god,” Kurt breathes, “Oh god, I didn’t mean that-”
“Yes, you did,” Blaine says evenly. Blaine feels his body move of its own accord, undressing, finding his pajamas, taking an afghan out of the closet and his pillow from the bed. Kurt sits on the bed with his legs tucked under him, frozen and slack-jawed as Blaine feels his feet take him out of the room.
Blaine is lying on the couch in the darkened living room before his brain kicks back in again. He hates that his mom lied. He hates that his dad left. He hates that Kurt is mean. He hates that Kurt is right. He doesn’t know which he hates the most, so it all gets jumbled together in a mass of anger and fear and pain and exhaustion until the only coherent thoughts he can pull from it are I’m hurting and I’m alone.
It doesn’t help that this couch is the most uncomfortable thing to sleep on created by man. The cushions are sloped so the only way he can keep himself from rolling into the backrest is to keep his feet flexed and almost gripping the arm of the couch. Every time he relaxes, two seconds later, he finds his face smashed against the back cushion.
Even though he doesn’t sleep well on his side, he’s wedged himself in with his back is against the backrest so at least he won’t roll anymore when he hears footsteps on the stairs.
“Blaine?”
Blaine lurches upright. Part of him wants to run across the room and pull Kurt into his arms, but part of him is still frozen in anger. That part mostly wins, so all he does is swivel so his feet are planted on the floor. He hears Kurt’s footsteps move toward him.
“Can I sit?” Kurt asks.
“It’s your house.”
“No it isn’t.” He sits beside Blaine, close enough he can feel the warmth of his body. “Come back to bed.”
“No,” Blaine says, and his response surprises him a little. “I’m still too angry.”
“Honestly? I am, too-not to mention too tired to deal with an argument sensibly. I just know from experience that this couch is impossible to sleep on. As soon as you let your guard down, it rolls you into the backrest. Then your face is plastered against the cushions so you can’t-”
“-so you can’t breathe, yeah,” Blaine finishes.
“Now you see why neither Carole nor I would stand for a guest sleeping down here.”
“And all this time I thought you snuck back into your bed in the middle of the night when I stayed over because you wanted to be with me,” Blaine says with a little laugh.
“Don’t even joke about that,” Kurt says. “Seriously, come back to bed. It’ll be easier to figure things out in the morning if you actually get some sleep tonight. I’ll take the couch.”
“I’m not going back if you’re staying down here,” Blaine says.
“Okay, then. Come on.” Kurt stands, and it takes a moment, but Blaine follows him. They climb the stairs and go back to Kurt’s bedroom without turning any lights on. They crawl into bed and stay on their respective sides, facing away from each other. Blaine can tell when Kurt falls asleep from his breathing, which means he can finally let himself go.
Blaine always wakes up first, but today, the other side of the bed is empty when he opens his eyes. He looks out the window. The car is already gone.
Blaine goes through his day because that’s all he can do. He runs, showers, eats breakfast, then looks at Carole’s to-do list and finds it’s pretty much done. He walks down to a store nearby to get gas for the lawnmower, even though the grass is growing slowly in the cold spring weather and he already mowed on Tuesday. At eleven, he turns the TV to a soap opera for background noise, then sets to work in the kitchen chopping vegetables for the casserole Kurt had been planning on making for dinner when Finn and his girlfriend visit tonight.
His heart leaps into his throat when the door from the garage clicks open and shut, but he doesn’t move. A few moments more and Kurt is beside him at the kitchen counter.
“Need some help?” Kurt asks.
“You could do the carrots.”
“All right.”
Each of them falls into his own rhythm of chopping. It’s not anywhere near musical, but the sounds fit together nonetheless. They don’t say anything until Kurt has finished the carrots and is starting in on the onion.
“I did mean it,” Kurt finally says. “And I meant it to hurt. But that doesn’t mean I’m not so, so sorry, on both counts.”
“I know,” Blaine says, focused on slicing a tomato. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have brought up the redemption center at all, and definitely shouldn’t have pushed.”
Kurt sighs, but he’s much calmer than last night. “You’re doing it again, that thing where when life gets messy, you try to pat it back into place and hope no one notices. I got mad because even though I see you do it all the time, you don’t usually do it to me.” Blaine looks up, and Kurt manages to hold his gaze for a few moments before looking back down at the onion. “I had hoped maybe that meant something, like maybe that you trusted me. But whatever it means, we can’t do that to each other.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“There’s a reason why I do it, you know. And it honestly doesn’t have that much to do with my dad.” Suddenly, Blaine feels like he’s the one chopping an onion. “You know how much I try to…to fix things.”
“Oh yes. I’m very familiar with your chronic case of Prince Charming Syndrome,” Kurt answers a little lighter than Blaine expects.
“I avoid things when I run into something I don’t know how to fix,” Blaine says, and he’s not sure he’d known it was true until he actually says it out loud. He sets the knife aside but doesn’t lift his head. “I know you’re hurting, because of your dad…and I keep trying, but I don’t know how to fix it.”
It’s the warm hand on his shoulder that finally gets him to look up. Against all odds, Kurt is smiling. Words that could be cruel are made sympathetic and almost sweet, just by the tone of his voice. “Honey, I’m not a vending machine. You can’t just press one button, get a smile, press another, get a handjob or something.”
Blaine laughs a little, but it hurts. He looks up at the ceiling when his eyes start to sting. “That’s not what I meant. I just-I keep thinking, I used to know how…that maybe if it hadn’t taken me so long to get my head out of my ass and come back to you again-if I hadn’t missed out on so much, that maybe I would know what to do.”
“Oh, Blaine,” Kurt sighs, kneading Blaine’s shoulder tenderly. “We’ve both changed. That’s okay. That would’ve happened even if we’d been connected at the hip for the past decade.”
Blaine finally looks at Kurt, and neither looks away. “But maybe if we’d changed together…”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference. Not for this,” Kurt says. “I know you’re not going to like hearing this, but you can’t understand what I’m going through. You can’t understand what I’ve lost, because you’ve never lost anyone that close. I’m glad you can’t understand it. I would save you from ever having to feel like this if I could.”
Blaine remembers something Kurt had said to Finn a long, long time ago, about how there were certain things about his life that Finn would never understand, no matter how well-intentioned he was, because he wasn’t gay. Back then, if Blaine had been on a side at all, he’d been on Kurt’s. Now, he feels a lot of sympathy for Finn.
“What am I supposed to do?” Blaine says.
“You’re here,” Kurt says. “You’re doing all right.”
Blaine wipes irritably at a tear and wonders why Kurt is so peaceful. “So all I can do is…be here?”
“Attendance is important,” Kurt says. He adds more seriously, “I promise not to shut you out, if you’ll do the same.”
“Okay,” Blaine answers.
Kurt is still looking at him like he has something unpleasant to say. He does. “So. About your dad.”
“Kurt, no,” Blaine says firmly.
“That’s got to be a world-record for shortest time between making and breaking a promise,” Kurt says.
Blaine doesn’t like that Kurt’s choosing being clever over being nice-because really, how hard is it to just say, ‘You said you wouldn’t shut me out’?-but he’s too exhausted to start that fight.
“I can’t deal with him right now,” Blaine says. It’s the truth, and it feels good to say it. “I’m still worried about you, and all this waiting for a job I don’t think I’m going to get has me so…” He can’t finish the sentence, but he sees that Kurt knows what he means. “I know that when it rains, it pours, and we can’t do anything about that. But that doesn’t mean that when the basement is flooding, we should turn on the faucets and overflow the bathtubs on our own, too.”
As soon as he’s said it, Blaine realizes he stole that line from Coach Beiste. Of course, that makes him worry that that line only makes sense in his head.
Kurt stares back at him intently but silently, not like he’s struggling to understand, but like he’s fighting to restrain himself.
“Okay,” he finally says. It sounds like each syllable is a battle. “We’ll set it aside for now, until other things settle down a bit more.”
The fight is over, but Blaine doesn’t know what to do next. He doesn’t feel like anything has been solved, because Kurt basically told him not to try so hard at doing the one thing Blaine feels he’s built to do-be Kurt’s port in a storm. They have no plan of action, there is no script. Kurt doesn’t seem quite as bothered. He kisses Blaine lightly, a hand on his cheek, and then sets back to work chopping vegetables.
Blaine tries to start again, too, but after a few minutes, he drops his knife and pulls Kurt into a crushing hug. He only pulls back far enough to kiss him, long and firm but not demanding anything but presence.
~*~*~
On to Part 3
Spending time at the shop has turned out to be not as bad as Kurt had feared, on several fronts. First of all, though Ernie by no means should change careers and become an accountant, his bookkeeping is not nearly as horrific as Kurt had expected. All the information seems to be there; it’s just not always in the right place. (Kurt is very grateful his dad pestered him into taking an introductory accounting class. “Don’t give me that right-brain-left-brain excuse. If your left arm was weaker than your right arm, you’d work out your left arm more, right? Plus, I made it through one, and you’re a hell of a lot smarter than I am.”)
The sense-memories aren’t nearly as bad as they were on the first day. The moment he enters the shop each morning and is assaulted with all the familiar sensations still sets him aback, but it’s not so intense if he arrives before the mechanics do. It helps that there’s no audience, too.
He spends most of his time in the office, which he doesn’t associate Dad with the way he does when it comes to the garage itself. It’s odd, because they had spent a lot of time in here together, too. Kurt remembers playing with his Power Rangers on the floor in front of the desk on school holidays, then as he got older, reading there. Even when he’d worked at the shop part-time in high school, Dad had made him split his time between repairing cars and entering data on the computer.
(“Because I know you’re not planning on being a mechanic,” Dad had said to Kurt when he had whined about wanting to work in the garage the whole day instead of going in the office. “I want you to get the most mileage you can out of this job. That means knowing enough so you can fix your own car most of the time and not get screwed over by a crook if you do need somebody else to work on it. It also means knowing what all goes into running a business, including the boring numbers stuff.” Kurt wonders, certainly not for the first time, how he ever got so lucky as to have that man for a father.)
But mostly, he’s surprised that the memories don’t ache as much as he had dreaded they would. He cries when he finds the box of trinkets and family photos from the desk that Eddie had boxed up for him. Of course. The sports pennants adorning the walls and the dusty stack of Field & Stream and Sports Illustrated back-issues in the corner scream Burt Hummel, but the office feels more like a museum of reminders than the place with the father-shaped hole, the way the shop had felt the first day.
As long as there are no big surprises and he works at a steady pace, Kurt thinks he’ll be done here the day before the party in Westerville. He sits on the floor, leans back against the desk, and opens the box of pictures.
~*~*~
Blaine has Kurt against the wall and a hand down his pants when Blaine’s phone rings on the bedside table.
“Answer it!” Kurt says excitedly. “It’s a job offer, I know it, even this late at night. I have a sixth sense about these things.”
Blaine extricates himself and runs to look at the number. He knows the area codes for all three universities he’s still in the running at. He recognizes the number instantly. It’s definitely not a job offer.
“Nope. They can call back,” Blaine says, crossing the room back to Kurt. The interruption was long enough so that Kurt isn’t panting anymore, but his face is still flushed.
“Are you sure? Because I’ll still be here when-”
“Yes,” Blaine says. “Want you. Now.” He drops to his knees.
Kurt laughs. “It never ceases to amuse me that you somehow make yourself inarticulate during sex, even before I’m really actively contributing. I wonder-ohh, uh, yeah, about to join you in the Land of the Speechless…”
Blaine doesn’t listen to the message until they’re in bed and Kurt’s asleep.
“Hi, Blaine. Just wanted to let you know I got the invitation from your mom. Uh, I’m afraid we can’t make it. It was kind of short notice, and it’s so hard for Paula to get work off…it’s hard to walk in and say, ‘I need time off for a party’ anyway, right? Anyway, congratulations again, and I’m sorry I can’t make it. Things here are fine. Oh, and Mindy wanted me to say hi to you for her, and thank you for the graduation card. Sorry I missed you. If you ever want to call-yeah. ‘Bye, son. Uh, say hi to Kurt for me.”
“Your dad’s not coming?” Kurt murmurs against his chest.
Blaine fidgets in surprise. “Sorry. I thought you were asleep. How did you know who it was?”
Kurt looks up at him without really moving. “The phone is six inches from my head, and you always have the volume turned up high.”
“Sorry.”
Kurt shrugs against him. After a moment, he adds, “That was a really lame excuse. It’s not like your step-mother needed to come.”
Blaine doesn’t disagree, but he’s a little annoyed with Kurt for bringing up the obvious.
“It’s fine,” Blaine says. “I knew he wasn’t coming. The invitation was just a formality.”
Blaine hasn’t seen his father in years. They’d spent a year doing the regular weekend visitation thing after the divorce, and it had been as awkward for both of them as Blaine had expected. Then, in the space of a few months, everything had changed: his father moved to Florida, he got a new girlfriend-soon-wife and a step-daughter, and Blaine’s visitations went from fairly frequent but brief periods of tiptoeing around each other to a six-week stretch of concentrated discomfort each summer.
The first summer had been the worst, before his father and Paula had gotten married. Paula and Mindy had been around all the time but weren’t family, and it tired Blaine out to be constantly on his best guest behavior. The next year, his father didn’t object when Blaine asked to shave the visit down a week so he’d be back in time for soccer camp. Then the next year lost another week to an orchestra clinic, and so on, gradually whittling and wearing their time together away. Then there was the summer Blaine had turned down the plane ticket in favor of the counselor job at Camp Cheerful. His father had understood and not been angry-maybe he’d even been a little sad. Blaine hadn’t intended his rejection to act as a hint, but he’d known how his father would take it as such and had gone ahead with his plans anyway. There had been no talk of plane tickets since.
Blaine refuses to think of his father and himself as estranged. They still send birthday cards and call each other on major holidays. But Blaine is having to work harder to convince himself it’s true, now that he has a husband his father has never met and neither of them seem in any hurry to change that. Blaine’s unwillingness to put Tampa on the route for this round of family visits is not entirely out of stubbornness. For whatever reason, Blaine wants his dad to be the one that crosses that distance. Blaine’s done it enough times.
Kurt is actually asleep this time when Blaine looks down. His head rests against Blaine’s shoulder, and Blaine’s arm will no doubt go numb. He’s a little afraid that, if the meeting ever happens now, Kurt will resent his father for having waited so long. But not every father is like Burt Hummel, and not every son is like Kurt.
~*~*~
Even though work at the garage has been going smoother than he expected, Kurt is still astonished at the effervescence of his own good mood on Wednesday. He thinks back to when his mom died and remembers that the real, constant-ache kind of sadness contains small bursts of happiness within it. He remembers the first one, about a week after the funeral-the frozen chicken Dad failed so spectacularly at cooking about a week after her funeral. They had laughed for an hour, even though it wasn’t that funny. It just felt so good to loosen the numbing, tight pain in their chests.
Kurt tries not to think of the new sadness that tinges the memory now, focusing instead on the sweetness of the remembered release. He decides to actually come home for lunch, then that he’s not hungry and would really rather have a nooner than a meal. He internally laughs at the ridiculousness of the word ‘nooner,’ then acknowledges that Blaine no doubt will be hungry no matter what. He grabs a couple oversized muffins from the bakery on the corner before driving back to the house.
“Surprise!” Kurt shouts up the stairs when he enters. Now that they’re putting the house on the market, Carole has Blaine painting the upstairs. He’d started in Finn’s old bedroom this morning. As Kurt climbs the stairs, images of how fun sex involving a little paint might be flash through his mind. He’s not really dressed for it, though-no way he’s risking paint on his McQueen scarf. He takes it off and ties it to the doorknob, smiling to himself.
“Hey, I brought-” He pokes his head around the half-open door and sees his sexy plans stopped dead in their tracks.
There is paint. Blaine had been working at least for a while, because the windows and baseboards are taped and a wall and a half are a brighter, shinier eggshell white than the rest of the room. Blaine’s hands and even a cheek are streaked and dotted with paint, too. But Blaine isn’t painting anymore. He’s on the floor, hunched in front of the little TV they’d kept in the room so he’d have something to listen to as he worked. The envelope clutched in his hand is crumpled.
“Blaine?”
Blaine snaps out of his reverie but can’t force a smile. “Hi. Sorry.” He holds up the letter. Kurt can see an official, university-looking seal on the stationery. “Our mail from Philly finally caught up with us.”
Even if Kurt hadn’t known that a call is good news and a letter is bad news, Blaine’s expression leaves no reason to ask what the letter says. Kurt picks his way across the plastic over the carpet, sits down beside Blaine, and pulls him into his arms. “Oh, honey,” and “It’s okay” are the only things he can think of to say, so he repeats them at random intervals and rocks him, even though Blaine isn’t crying.
When they separate enough so Kurt can see Blaine’s face, Blaine takes a deep breath and slaps on a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “There are still two left to hear from.” Even the fake smile falters. “If it’s taken them this long to get back to me, it has to mean there’s someone else they’d rather have and I’m their back-up choice if that person falls through, but…”
Kurt wants to say something important and perfect. He’s embarrassed that what comes out is, “I brought muffins.”
Wonder of wonders, it is the perfect thing to say. “You’re a mind-reader. You’re amazing,” Blaine says, kissing Kurt before sighing at the sight of the banana-nut crumble like he’s been starving for a week.
Blaine lies back on the plastic as he peels the paper off the muffin. Kurt checks for paint first, then carefully lowers himself down beside him. It’s extremely uncomfortable-the plastic sticks to any skin it comes in contact with-but he knows Blaine needs this.
“I wish I could take credit for having a sixth-sense about trouble, but I can’t,” Kurt says sheepishly. “Those were intended as a post-orgasm snack.”
Blaine looks surprised and barely swallows the bite of muffin before he says, “You came home for a nooner?” He contemplates that, like he’s sad that this has happened on the one day when it’s not a fabulous idea. “I hate to say this, but I’m not really…”
“No, don’t worry, I figured that one out,” Kurt says. He picks up the letter. “It’s fine. But thank you, Dean McMurphy, for being not only an idiot but also a buzzkill.”
Kurt still doesn’t know what to say, but he knows that the silence needs to be filled up. He starts chattering about the first things he sees, which are the half-painted walls. He talks about plans for sprucing up the rest of the house so it’s ready for sale, then about what he’d do differently if he were remodeling this place for a specific person rather than turning it into a blank canvas.
“If you wanted a nursery, this would be the room for it,” Kurt says at one point. “I like the trend of gender-neutral colors, but I don’t understand why everyone goes with yellow. This room has enough sunlight already. I’d do a nice calming green with blue undertones, maybe a mural on that wall over there, like a forest. This room has a lot of potential.” A chuckle bubbles up within him. “Oh my god, Blaine, we’re literally watching paint dry.”
He looks over. Blaine isn’t laughing; he’s deep in thought. “You love this house,” he says.
Kurt isn’t sure where this is going, but he answers without hesitation. “I do.”
“If you wanted to start your own interior design firm, you could get a ton of referrals through Quinn,” Blaine says, still staring thoughtfully at the ceiling.
Kurt laughs. “I’d be able to get my revenge on former classmates by buying them orange and navy furniture for a puce-colored room. Paint their nurseries fire-engine red so their babies won’t sleep.” Blaine still isn’t laughing. “Wait. Are you serious?”
He shrugs. “You wouldn’t necessarily have to sell the garage if we lived close enough to manage it. You could start your own design firm, and we could buy Carole out of her share of the house…”
Kurt is so stunned he can barely form thoughts, let alone sentences. “I wasn’t kidding about the puce. Didn’t I ever tell you about the time I gave Rachel a Grease-inspired makeover?”
“It seems like Quinn’s managed to stay in Lima without dying of shame and resentment, and it sounds like she has plenty of reason to feel that way, too.”
Mostly, Kurt is pissed because that’s completely irrelevant, but he settles on saying, “That’s either because Quinn’s become a saint or has gone insane. If she’s managed to let bygones be bygones, wonderful for her, but I still hate most of these people.” Then Kurt realizes the critical detail left out of Blaine’s plan. “What would you do, Blaine?”
“I could probably find something at a junior college nearby. Maybe help you manage the garage, if you wanted.”
There it is. “Oh, no you don’t.” Blaine’s head pops up like that’s the last thing he’s expecting to hear. “You do not get to avoid the possibility of failure by preemptively giving up.”
“That’s not-”
“Yes, it is,” Kurt says. “You’re not just worried about getting a job. You’re worried that because you weren’t everyone’s instant first choice, you’re not good enough to do the job well.” When all he gets in response is a sigh, Kurt presses, “Right?” Sucks to have someone who knows you well enough to call you on your bullshit, doesn’t it?
They’re in a quiet stalemate for a long time. Finally, Blaine sits up and rubs his hands down his face. “What if I’m not?”
Kurt feels the tension break. He puts his arm around Blaine. “One, you are. Two, even if it doesn’t work out the way we planned, that’s okay. Yes, going out into the big, wide world is scarier than staying somewhere we’re familiar with, but my philosophy has always been, if you’re going to go down, might as well go down flaming.”
He worries for a moment if he’s aimed that rapier wit wrong again for the sake of a double entendre, but he’s relieved when Blaine laughs.
Kurt doesn’t go back to the garage that afternoon. He stays and helps Blaine with the painting, filling the empty space with talk of a home they have yet to find.
~*~*~
Kurt loves Mrs. Anderson, but he almost doesn’t answer when he sees she’s calling his cell.
“Hi,” Kurt says chipperly, hoping she won’t notice he’s not addressing her. He still can’t bring himself to call her “Mama,” and this is not a good time to touch on anything that hearkens back to the no-guest wedding/but we’re family! debacle of yore. “Blaine’s outside cleaning the gutters for Carole. I’ll get him. Did you try his cell before mine? If the batteries are dead on his, we’d better fix that.”
“Don’t get Blaine. I called to talk to you.”
Kurt hopes Mrs. Anderson doesn’t hear his nervous gulp. “Okay. What can I do for you?”
“I know it’s late, but I’m considering renting linens for the tables,” Mrs. Anderson says. Kurt has little doubt that she’s been fully intent on renting linens from the start, but he’s curious where this is going. “They have white, but also yellow, and a robin’s egg blue. Which do you think would be best?”
Kurt is puzzled. “I trust your judgment.”
Mrs. Anderson sighs exasperatedly. “That’s very sweet, but not the point. What do you want?”
“I really don’t care.”
“Yes you do,” she says. “You love to plan pretty things, down to every little detail. I’m sorry I took over planning what’s supposed to be your and Blaine’s party, so I’m trying to let you pick some things.”
Kurt smiles and sits down on the bottom stair of the staircase, leaning against the railing. “Mrs. Anderson, you don’t have to do that. I’m not angry at you. I’m sorry for not being very enthusiastic about the party. It has nothing to do with your planning. It’s just…hard, coming back here.”
Mrs. Anderson hums, and Kurt imagines her nodding knowingly. “Your glee club friend Mercedes finally RSVP’d. It’ll be nice to see all your old friends again, won’t it?”
“Yes, it will be.”
He hears Mrs. Anderson do a rare thing for her: she hesitates. “Has Blaine spoken to his father?”
“Sort of,” Kurt says, not hiding his annoyance. He’s careful not to be too critical of Blaine’s dad around Blaine, but the man is Mrs. Anderson’s ex. He figures he has a bit more latitude to vent. “He left a message with an incredibly lame excuse for not coming.”
“Did Blaine call him back?”
“Of course not,” Kurt says, rolling his eyes. “That might require a confrontation, and apparently we can’t have that.”
“Blaine and his father are very much alike in some ways,” Mrs. Anderson says, exasperation back in her voice. He likes her tone when it’s aimed at someone other than him. She’s nice to commiserate with.
“Blaine would come to his own son’s wedding-replacement party even if his kid were a felon. You raised him better than that,” Kurt says.
“That’s true,” Mrs. Anderson says. “But they are very alike when it comes to confrontation. Like you said, they both would rather fake-smile and say polite things that mean nothing rather than actually air everything out.” She lowers her voice. “I love my son, but don’t let him do that to you, Kurt. I don’t tell this to most people, but I think Robert and I could have worked through it if he hadn’t just-just tried to brush it under the rug when-well.”
“When things went bad at school after Blaine came out?” Kurt asked.
Kurt is surprised at how scared Mrs. Anderson sounds. “How do you know that? Did Blaine tell you?”
“No. I just pieced it together, between things you’ve said and things Blaine has said.”
“You don’t think Blaine knows?”
“He’s never flat-out said it, but considering he was there, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d figured it out by now.”
“If he has, there’s nothing I can do about it, but if not...” Kurt can tell she’s upset, but he can’t see how this could be such a shock to her. If Kurt could figure it out, Blaine had to have by now-but he supposes she’d worked so hard when Blaine was younger to convince him of some other story behind the divorce that she’d convinced herself it was a great lie, too. “Blaine has always had this notion that our home was so happy and perfect before he came out. It wasn’t, Kurt. But Blaine won’t hear that.”
“I know,” Kurt says. And he does-he knows this is exactly the sort of thing Blaine would latch on to and use to pile guilt on his own head. “If the linen company will go for it, ask for white tablecloths with yellow napkins for a nice burst of color.”
Mrs. Anderson sniffs, but that’s the only indication of sadness on her end. “Good idea. Very springy.”
“My thought exactly.” Kurt says, “I’ll take care of him, Mrs. Anderson. It’s taken us too long and we’ve worked too hard to screw this up now. I’m not guaranteeing that I won’t leave my own not-so-diplomatic message on his dad’s voicemail at some point-” she laughs and murmurs something Kurt thinks might be I’d pay to hear that one “-but I’ll take care of him. I promise.”
~*~*~
Kurt knows he should heave a sigh of relief when he scrolls through the spreadsheet and realizes he’s gotten to the end of Ernie’s data entries, but he doesn’t. He’s got four, maybe five hours of odds and ends and straightening up to do, and then he’ll have to call the business broker. (Gets to. Then he gets to call the business broker.)
He scrolls back and finds the last day his dad entered information into the computer. Of course he remembers the date, the same way he remembers the date of every one of Dad’s all too many collapses. (Every time he touches Blaine’s wedding ring, he thinks that if he’d believed in a god, he would’ve thanked him for not letting anything bad happen to Dad on any November 14th. Talk about rendering a fairly significant family heirloom useless for all future purposes.) Kurt rummages around in the desk until he finds the hand-written ledger he knows his dad kept. Dad was a good bookkeeper, but a lousy typist, so he’d always done everything but the hard math by hand and then transferred it into the computer via hunt-and-peck keyboarding.
Kurt traces his fingers over the ink. The familiarity of the handwriting is unexpectedly potent-almost like finding an undelivered letter to himself.
Two hours later, Kurt finds his first discrepancy between the handwritten ledger and the computer, a $69.87 transposed to $68.97. Ninety cents is all the justification he needs to keep looking at some of the last words his father had written.
Kurt doesn’t manage to finish his work that afternoon.
~*~*~
Blaine doesn’t expect Kurt to still be in the house when he comes home from his run.
“Don’t kiss me good-bye again,” Kurt says, grabbing the car keys off the counter. “You’re all sweaty.”
“What? I thought you liked how I looked when I’m a little sweaty,” Blaine says, grinning.
“‘A little’ being a key qualifier there.” Kurt arches an eyebrow, but there’s something brittle about his voice.
Blaine is still high on exercise endorphins, a little guilty about yesterday's aborted nooner, and really noticing how well Kurt’s jeans fit him today. “Well, since Carole left for work, we could always shower together,” he suggests, eyebrows waggling.
While of course he’d prefer sex as a response, Blaine at least expects some coy teasing before Kurt saunters out the door. Instead, he gets a frown. “I’m way behind at the shop. I need to get moving now if I’m going to have any hope of finishing before we go back to Westerville.”
Blaine easily switches gears. “I could help,” he says. “Give me fifteen minutes to get cleaned up, and we could go there together.”
Kurt shakes his head. His expression is far too closed off for Blaine’s comfort. He really hadn’t meant to be butting in, but he gets that Kurt’s time alone in the shop is sacred, in a way.
Blaine only barely manages to catch the car keys when Kurt tosses them at him. “Carole wanted one of us to take the bags of cans in the garage down to the redemption center, and it’s only open for limited hours. It’s on the other side of town, so you’d better leave now.”
“O…kay,” Blaine says, and Kurt is almost out the door already. “Wait! I’ll give you a ride.”
“I’ll walk today, thanks,” Kurt says, the door slamming shut on the end of the ‘thanks.’
Blaine stares at the keys in his hand for a moment, not quite sure what’s just happened. Eventually he shrugs, washes up a bit, and drives across town to the redemption center.
He has a hard time finding the place. It’s a grubby little enclosure sandwiched between a Laundromat and a single-stall carwash. There’s only one vehicle in the small parking lot, a beat-up pickup truck. He pulls into a spot as close to the door as he can, gets out, and wrestles the two overstuffed garbage bags out of the trunk. He tries for several seconds to grasp the doorknob without dropping a bag until someone inside opens it for him. His eyes are so shocked from the transition from full sunlight to the dark, dingy can-sorting room that he recognizes the voice long before he can see the man’s face.
“I keep telling the boss we should get a swinging door. Nobody can get that thing open.”
“Puck?”
Blaine blinks a few times until he can see. The man’s skin is more weathered and he’s mohawk-less, but the keen dark eyes and smug mouth are undoubtedly Puck’s.
That mouth is currently screwed up in confusion, and those eyes are squinting. “I know you…”
Blaine sets down the bags so he can flatten his post-run un-styled hair with his hands, so the part is in the same place it was when he was in high school.
Puck snaps his finger and points. “Hey, you’re Hummel’s dude! Uh…Blaine Warbler!”
“Anderson,” Blaine corrects, knowing he sounds a little snotty. He’s always hated that nickname, though. “But yes.”
“I’d heard Kurt was back in town with some guy,” Puck says. The phrasing is kind of awful-Blaine imagines how the rumors likely devolved on their way from the moms in the grocery store to the bar Puck must frequent-but Puck’s tone is friendly. Blaine is still wary.
“Sort of,” Blaine says, remaining polite and friendly, too. Blaine is pretty sure Puck never figured out in high school that Blaine didn’t trust Puck any farther than he could throw him. He’s not about to break that illusion now. “Not just ‘with some guy,’ though. We’re married.”
“Congrats!” Puck pauses between dumping the cans onto the counting table long enough to punch Blaine in the arm, his happiness clearly genuine. “Makin’ an honest man of him, huh? Er, I guess you’re kinda makin’ honest men out of each other. So, are you guys moving back up here, or are you just in town to visit Mrs. Hudson?”
“Just visiting Carole,” Blaine says.
Puck manages to keep up the conversation as he counts the cans, shoving them down the lipped table in twos. His questions get shorter, though. “Where do you live?”
“We’re kind of…in between homes at the moment,” Blaine says. “I’m waiting to hear back on a couple job interviews, so we’ll go from there.”
“What kind of job?”
“History professor.”
Blaine is pretty sure Carole loses about a dollar in the can count to Puck’s surprise. “Whoa. Huh.”
It’s happened to Blaine a few times before, running into people he knows from the old days. Not so much with Dalton men, but with kids from the school he went to before that. People who start off surprisingly happy to see him, who tell him proudly about their jobs as bank tellers and foremen and managers, shut down when they hear the letters “Ph.D.” spill from his mouth. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to it.
“This isn’t my normal job,” Puck says when he’s finished counting and is wiping his hands on a dirty rag. “I work down at the Ford plant. It’s honest work and it pays good, but they’ve been cutting back on everybody’s hours lately. So I picked this up a couple mornings a week for a little extra cash.”
“That’s great,” Blaine says. “Not the cutting back on hours thing, but-”
“Yeah,” Puck says. Blaine is really impressed at how oddly comfortable Puck is making this. He’s far more comfortable than the bank tellers and foremen have ever been. “That part kind of sucks, but it has its bright sides. Like I get to spend a little more time with my kids.”
Blaine is still processing that sentence when Puck fishes his wallet out of his pocket and flips it open. Two little blonde girls in Disney Princess Halloween costumes smile up at him from the photograph. Blaine’s mind catches. The older one is too old to be Puck’s, unless…
Blaine barely stops himself from asking, “Beth?”
“That’s Jenny,” Puck says, pointing to the younger one in the Sleeping Beauty costume, “and that’s Kelly.” Only then does Puck apparently notice Blaine’s confusion. “Technically, they’re not my kids. They’re my girlfriend’s, but their biological dad was a real creep. Used to beat the crap out of Tracy. But she’s a strong woman. She got a restraining order and left his sorry ass. So maybe they’re not my kids, but-they are my kids, you know?”
“Yeah, I do,” Blaine says.
Puck tilts his head and looks at Blaine seriously. “Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you? ‘Cause you and Kurt are gonna get, like, half a dozen babies from China or something someday, aren’t you?”
Blaine is so stunned at the fact that he’s talking about babies with Noah Puckerman that all he manages is a weak, “Not exactly. China doesn’t allow gay people to adopt.”
“Really? That sucks. Well, then from Russia or France or wherever.”
Blaine can’t help but raise his eyebrows at France. Puck again misinterprets.
“Maybe not half a dozen, but I don’t know, I figured Kurt would want lots of kids so he’d have more people to dress up,” Puck says. He apparently still thinks Blaine’s stupor is from shock at the idea of children in general. He says in a low, confidential voice, “You know, I knew kids would be hard work, but I never realized how much fun they are, too, until Kelly and Jenny.” He pats Blaine on the back bracingly.
Blaine shakes his head and manages to regain a modicum of composure. He reaches out and tips the photo Puck is still holding so there isn’t so much glare. “Your girls are beautiful.”
“Sure are,” Puck grins proudly, even though he has nothing to do with it. “Kelly’s the athlete-totally kicked ass in Little League softball last summer. Jenny’s like you and Kurt and Rachel-real driven and so smart. She’s always coming home from school wanting to be something when she grows up that I have to look up online to figure out what it even is. This week she wants to be an ophthalmologist.”
The door rattles; someone is trying and failing to get in. Puck snaps back to work, punching buttons on the cash register. “You guys should stop by for a beer sometime, meet the girls. How long are you two in town for?”
“Just a couple more days. Then we’re going back to Westerville for…” Blaine says. Then it dawns on him. “Wait. I know you were invited. My mom’s having a not-a-wedding-reception party for us, and you should’ve gotten an invitation a while ago.”
“Huh. That’s weird. We just moved, so maybe it got lost in the mail?” Puck says. Blaine can’t tell if Puck is telling the truth or if it’s some form of face-saving. Then again, Puck genuinely hadn’t known he and Kurt were married. He would’ve figured that much out by opening the envelope. “Give me a date and an address, and if I’m not working, I’ll be there.”
The customer who has finally struggled his way in with cartons of beer bottles clears his throat in annoyance. Blaine scribbles the party information on the back of his receipt and hands it to Puck.
“Thanks, man. Say hi to Kurt for me.”
Blaine nods and waves, and a few moments later, he’s back outside, blinded by sunlight. He can’t help but smile. Puck was never that bad of a guy-okay, maybe he was, but he wasn’t ever malicious-but Blaine never would have pictured him as someone who would grow up after high school. Sometimes, being wrong is pretty wonderful.
~*~*~
Kurt walks in the direction of the garage when he leaves Blaine with the car keys and the order to go to the redemption center across town. He doesn’t really know why he’s going through all this subterfuge, except that it’s easier than the conversation they would have had to endure, with Blaine offering to come along to hold his hand and Kurt refusing. He’s doing it this way to avoid hurting Blaine. He repeats that to himself like a mantra.
Heading in the wrong direction isn’t a complete waste of time. He turns the corner and picks up a bouquet of flowers at the supermarket, then turns in the right direction from there.
There’s no one at the graveyard but the groundskeeper; Kurt can hear the dull hum of a lawnmower a ways off. It’s a sunny day. The trees are starting to bud. The wind smells sweet and clean. He should feel at peace. He walks.
And there they are in front of him, two unobtrusive, bluish-gray stones that come up no higher than Kurt’s shins. Their names are written on the tops of the stones, along with the dates and “Beloved Daughter, Wife, and Mother,” and “Beloved Son, Husband, and Father.”
Kurt feels a phantom hand in his. He knows his grief-riddled, confused mind is creating the sensation, not god or gods or dwarves in the moon, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less there.
Hands had always been a comfort to him before in this place. Blaine had taken his hand the last time he was here. Dad had taken it every time before that, up to that very first one. But Kurt has been so focused on looking down at joined hands that he’s never thought much about what he’d seen when he looked up.
He goes through the memory of that first time in his mind. Tears fill his vision. His eight-year-old self looks up. His big, strong father, who can chase monsters out from under the bed and that raccoon from the garage and the mean neighbor boys from the backyard-that man is crying and broken and clinging to a scared little boy for dear life.
It’s only now that Kurt can articulate what the gray, gnawing dread is that has been hanging over him since he drove into town. There is nothing worse than standing beside an open grave alone. It’s the one type of pain he hasn’t had to endure yet. He’s grateful to Blaine for trying to save him from it, but that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? Sure, it’s possible Kurt won’t be the one left behind, but Kurt has an aching premonition that all Blaine has done is delayed the inevitable.
Kurt sets the flowers between Dad and Mom’s headstones, then turns on his heel and marches out of the graveyard as fast as he can go without running.
~*~*~
“You sent me to the redemption center on purpose, didn’t you?” Blaine says as they get ready for bed that night.
Kurt looks far more startled than he should, almost sick. “What?” he asks.
“To see Puck. He works there.”
“…Yeah,” Kurt says.
Blaine knows Kurt likes to think he’s a good actor, but Blaine sees right through it. “Okay. Now tell me why you really sent me to the redemption center.”
“I thought you’d enjoy seeing Puck.”
“Kurt-”
“I took your sage advice and visited their graves, okay?” he snaps. “If you’re curious, it turned out to be a spectacularly stupid idea.”
The flash of anger from Kurt confuses Blaine, but more than that, he’s not quite sure why his own jaw is tightening.
“Okay,” he says slowly. “But why did I need to be half-way across town when you went?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kurt grumbles, taking off his shirt and tossing it on the bed with a vehemence that should tip Blaine off to tread lightly. He notices, but he finds himself really, really not caring.
What Blaine wants to say is, Why the hell are you going to so much trouble to shut me out, Kurt? But he is still Blaine Anderson, so he still believes there is a way to avoid a real fight. “Did you think that I wouldn’t want to come with you?”
Now, this is the part where Kurt should say something like, “I didn’t want to bother you,” and then Blaine could say something sappy about Kurt never being a bother, and then they could climb into bed and kiss good-night, and everything would be close enough to all right that they could sleep well.
But Blaine is still married to Kurt Hummel, and Kurt does not follow comfortable scripts. Kurt snorts in derision.
How long are you going to punish me for taking so long to get back to where we always should have been? “You didn’t think maybe I wanted to go, too?” Blaine says, and he can’t help the edge of superiority and frustration creeping in.
Kurt gives him a withering look. “Oh for fuck’s sake, Blaine. You seriously think I’ll believe you’re mad at me for violating some arcane rule of graveyard etiquette?”
“I’m not mad,” Blaine says. Kurt shakes his head and mutters something about Blaine’s mother that he doesn’t catch. Blaine adds, “I’m disappointed.”
“Oh my god. Let me see if I can roll my eyes all the way back inside my head. Nope, this’ll have to be good enough.”
Blaine still doesn’t take the bait. “I am disappointed. I loved Burt, too.”
Kurt’s eyes narrow. He’s not in Blaine’s face, because the bed is between them, but he kneels on the mattress to get a little bit closer. “He wasn’t your father, Blaine.”
“I know that! But-”
“Look. You have daddy issues. I get it,” Kurt says. His voice has softened somewhat, but Blaine can barely hear the shift in Kurt’s tone over the roaring in his own ears. “Deal with them with your own father-he’s actually alive, or at least so the rumor goes.”
“This has nothing to do with him,” Blaine growls.
“It has everything to do with him!” Kurt says. “He’s the reason you won’t admit you’re angry that I’m hiding things from you! That you won’t just tell me off for being an immature brat today when I snuck off instead of having the guts to just tell you I didn’t want you to come with me! Because you’d rather pretend those problems and feelings aren’t there than go through the ugly mess it takes to fix them. I’m mad at myself for getting sucked into that way of living with you, and I’m stopping it right now.”
“You’re reading way too much into one voicemail, Kurt,” Blaine says almost warningly.
“Then what should I read into the fact you haven’t seen him in, what, eight, nine years? That we’ve been married for months and I’ve never even spoken to him? The timing of your parents splitting up?”
Blaine’s blood runs cold. Don’t go there don’t go there don’t go there. “You’re not making sense anymore. I’m sorry I brought it up. It wasn’t that big of a deal.”
“Really? Because I think it’s a fairly big deal that you’re in denial about how big of a lie the normal, ‘oh, the divorce wasn’t about you at all, darling-what happened was just between your dad and me’ thing is. I can’t believe your mother could tell it with a straight face.”
Blaine sees the horror on Kurt’s face the moment after the last syllable falls from his mouth. He looks almost as if he’s been holding out a sword, and he’s shocked that Blaine has somehow become impaled on it.
“Oh god,” Kurt breathes, “Oh god, I didn’t mean that-”
“Yes, you did,” Blaine says evenly. Blaine feels his body move of its own accord, undressing, finding his pajamas, taking an afghan out of the closet and his pillow from the bed. Kurt sits on the bed with his legs tucked under him, frozen and slack-jawed as Blaine feels his feet take him out of the room.
Blaine is lying on the couch in the darkened living room before his brain kicks back in again. He hates that his mom lied. He hates that his dad left. He hates that Kurt is mean. He hates that Kurt is right. He doesn’t know which he hates the most, so it all gets jumbled together in a mass of anger and fear and pain and exhaustion until the only coherent thoughts he can pull from it are I’m hurting and I’m alone.
It doesn’t help that this couch is the most uncomfortable thing to sleep on created by man. The cushions are sloped so the only way he can keep himself from rolling into the backrest is to keep his feet flexed and almost gripping the arm of the couch. Every time he relaxes, two seconds later, he finds his face smashed against the back cushion.
Even though he doesn’t sleep well on his side, he’s wedged himself in with his back is against the backrest so at least he won’t roll anymore when he hears footsteps on the stairs.
“Blaine?”
Blaine lurches upright. Part of him wants to run across the room and pull Kurt into his arms, but part of him is still frozen in anger. That part mostly wins, so all he does is swivel so his feet are planted on the floor. He hears Kurt’s footsteps move toward him.
“Can I sit?” Kurt asks.
“It’s your house.”
“No it isn’t.” He sits beside Blaine, close enough he can feel the warmth of his body. “Come back to bed.”
“No,” Blaine says, and his response surprises him a little. “I’m still too angry.”
“Honestly? I am, too-not to mention too tired to deal with an argument sensibly. I just know from experience that this couch is impossible to sleep on. As soon as you let your guard down, it rolls you into the backrest. Then your face is plastered against the cushions so you can’t-”
“-so you can’t breathe, yeah,” Blaine finishes.
“Now you see why neither Carole nor I would stand for a guest sleeping down here.”
“And all this time I thought you snuck back into your bed in the middle of the night when I stayed over because you wanted to be with me,” Blaine says with a little laugh.
“Don’t even joke about that,” Kurt says. “Seriously, come back to bed. It’ll be easier to figure things out in the morning if you actually get some sleep tonight. I’ll take the couch.”
“I’m not going back if you’re staying down here,” Blaine says.
“Okay, then. Come on.” Kurt stands, and it takes a moment, but Blaine follows him. They climb the stairs and go back to Kurt’s bedroom without turning any lights on. They crawl into bed and stay on their respective sides, facing away from each other. Blaine can tell when Kurt falls asleep from his breathing, which means he can finally let himself go.
Blaine always wakes up first, but today, the other side of the bed is empty when he opens his eyes. He looks out the window. The car is already gone.
Blaine goes through his day because that’s all he can do. He runs, showers, eats breakfast, then looks at Carole’s to-do list and finds it’s pretty much done. He walks down to a store nearby to get gas for the lawnmower, even though the grass is growing slowly in the cold spring weather and he already mowed on Tuesday. At eleven, he turns the TV to a soap opera for background noise, then sets to work in the kitchen chopping vegetables for the casserole Kurt had been planning on making for dinner when Finn and his girlfriend visit tonight.
His heart leaps into his throat when the door from the garage clicks open and shut, but he doesn’t move. A few moments more and Kurt is beside him at the kitchen counter.
“Need some help?” Kurt asks.
“You could do the carrots.”
“All right.”
Each of them falls into his own rhythm of chopping. It’s not anywhere near musical, but the sounds fit together nonetheless. They don’t say anything until Kurt has finished the carrots and is starting in on the onion.
“I did mean it,” Kurt finally says. “And I meant it to hurt. But that doesn’t mean I’m not so, so sorry, on both counts.”
“I know,” Blaine says, focused on slicing a tomato. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have brought up the redemption center at all, and definitely shouldn’t have pushed.”
Kurt sighs, but he’s much calmer than last night. “You’re doing it again, that thing where when life gets messy, you try to pat it back into place and hope no one notices. I got mad because even though I see you do it all the time, you don’t usually do it to me.” Blaine looks up, and Kurt manages to hold his gaze for a few moments before looking back down at the onion. “I had hoped maybe that meant something, like maybe that you trusted me. But whatever it means, we can’t do that to each other.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“There’s a reason why I do it, you know. And it honestly doesn’t have that much to do with my dad.” Suddenly, Blaine feels like he’s the one chopping an onion. “You know how much I try to…to fix things.”
“Oh yes. I’m very familiar with your chronic case of Prince Charming Syndrome,” Kurt answers a little lighter than Blaine expects.
“I avoid things when I run into something I don’t know how to fix,” Blaine says, and he’s not sure he’d known it was true until he actually says it out loud. He sets the knife aside but doesn’t lift his head. “I know you’re hurting, because of your dad…and I keep trying, but I don’t know how to fix it.”
It’s the warm hand on his shoulder that finally gets him to look up. Against all odds, Kurt is smiling. Words that could be cruel are made sympathetic and almost sweet, just by the tone of his voice. “Honey, I’m not a vending machine. You can’t just press one button, get a smile, press another, get a handjob or something.”
Blaine laughs a little, but it hurts. He looks up at the ceiling when his eyes start to sting. “That’s not what I meant. I just-I keep thinking, I used to know how…that maybe if it hadn’t taken me so long to get my head out of my ass and come back to you again-if I hadn’t missed out on so much, that maybe I would know what to do.”
“Oh, Blaine,” Kurt sighs, kneading Blaine’s shoulder tenderly. “We’ve both changed. That’s okay. That would’ve happened even if we’d been connected at the hip for the past decade.”
Blaine finally looks at Kurt, and neither looks away. “But maybe if we’d changed together…”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference. Not for this,” Kurt says. “I know you’re not going to like hearing this, but you can’t understand what I’m going through. You can’t understand what I’ve lost, because you’ve never lost anyone that close. I’m glad you can’t understand it. I would save you from ever having to feel like this if I could.”
Blaine remembers something Kurt had said to Finn a long, long time ago, about how there were certain things about his life that Finn would never understand, no matter how well-intentioned he was, because he wasn’t gay. Back then, if Blaine had been on a side at all, he’d been on Kurt’s. Now, he feels a lot of sympathy for Finn.
“What am I supposed to do?” Blaine says.
“You’re here,” Kurt says. “You’re doing all right.”
Blaine wipes irritably at a tear and wonders why Kurt is so peaceful. “So all I can do is…be here?”
“Attendance is important,” Kurt says. He adds more seriously, “I promise not to shut you out, if you’ll do the same.”
“Okay,” Blaine answers.
Kurt is still looking at him like he has something unpleasant to say. He does. “So. About your dad.”
“Kurt, no,” Blaine says firmly.
“That’s got to be a world-record for shortest time between making and breaking a promise,” Kurt says.
Blaine doesn’t like that Kurt’s choosing being clever over being nice-because really, how hard is it to just say, ‘You said you wouldn’t shut me out’?-but he’s too exhausted to start that fight.
“I can’t deal with him right now,” Blaine says. It’s the truth, and it feels good to say it. “I’m still worried about you, and all this waiting for a job I don’t think I’m going to get has me so…” He can’t finish the sentence, but he sees that Kurt knows what he means. “I know that when it rains, it pours, and we can’t do anything about that. But that doesn’t mean that when the basement is flooding, we should turn on the faucets and overflow the bathtubs on our own, too.”
As soon as he’s said it, Blaine realizes he stole that line from Coach Beiste. Of course, that makes him worry that that line only makes sense in his head.
Kurt stares back at him intently but silently, not like he’s struggling to understand, but like he’s fighting to restrain himself.
“Okay,” he finally says. It sounds like each syllable is a battle. “We’ll set it aside for now, until other things settle down a bit more.”
The fight is over, but Blaine doesn’t know what to do next. He doesn’t feel like anything has been solved, because Kurt basically told him not to try so hard at doing the one thing Blaine feels he’s built to do-be Kurt’s port in a storm. They have no plan of action, there is no script. Kurt doesn’t seem quite as bothered. He kisses Blaine lightly, a hand on his cheek, and then sets back to work chopping vegetables.
Blaine tries to start again, too, but after a few minutes, he drops his knife and pulls Kurt into a crushing hug. He only pulls back far enough to kiss him, long and firm but not demanding anything but presence.
~*~*~
On to Part 3