When Kurt left the hospital that night after seeing Blaine, he had every intention of calling him.  He estimated that Blaine probably wouldn't be playing for the kids for more than an hour, since children didn't have long attention spans, and these were sick kids anyway, they needed their rest.  So maybe an hour for that, and then some time to let Blaine get home – he didn't know where he lived, but hopefully it wasn't too far a commute for him – and then he could call him.  Two hours, tops, maybe three.

But four hours later Kurt still hadn't called Blaine.  Kurt was curled up in bed, his Bruce pillow resurrected from its box in the closet, and an empty take-out container with the remnants of half a cheesecake by his side.  His phone lay in front of him like a bad joke, taunting him with its offer of immediate gratification.  He couldn't call Blaine until he decided what he was going to say, and he just didn't know what he was going to say.  He wasn't even sure he knew what he wanted to say.  All these stupid aphorisms kept popping into his head, but nothing helped.  “Dance as if nobody's watching” just made him think about Blaine not being able to dance anymore.  “If you wait until you are ready, you'll be waiting for the rest of your life,” just made him nervous, because neither option (acting before he was ready, or waiting forever) seemed like a reasonable one.  Flailing, Kurt remembered Rachel's endless idolizing of Barbra Streisand, and the string of Barbra quotes she would chant for good luck.  Kurt grabbed his computer and googled Streisand quotes, coming up first with the unhelpful “I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy, and driven.”  Next he found one that showed clearly why Rachel felt so connected to Barbra, even if it didn't help him in his current situation:  “I knew that with a mouth like mine, I just had to be a star or something.”  Finally there was one that hit home:  “There is nothing more important in life than love.”  Kurt used to believe this was true, with every romantic teenage bone in his body.  And he still did, but he wasn't sure that it meant what he used to think it did (and he didn't need someone to quote The Princess Bride at him to realize it).

It wasn't a lack of love that had caused his and Blaine's relationship to fall apart.  In some ways, for him, it was love pulling him in too many different directions – the loss of it with Finn's death, and the fear of losing it with his dad's illness.  Through it all, he still loved Blaine, and he was pretty sure Blaine still loved him.  But at the time, faced with Blaine's injury, his pain, and his hopelessness, Kurt didn't know what to do.  He hadn't known how to pull Blaine out of his misery, and he didn't have the emotional resources to figure it out, not at the same time he was trying to deal with how Finn's death had affected everyone, whether or not his dad was going to die of cancer, and not failing out of NYADA.

Kurt wondered, sometimes, whether he should have quit school and moved back to Lima, to take care of his dad, and be there for Blaine.  He had thought about taking a year off, but his dad was firmly against it.  To be fair, they had talked about it soon after the accident, when neither of them had known how slow Blaine's recovery would be, and that he wasn't going to be able to start at NYU in the fall as planned.  When Kurt brought it up with Blaine, Blaine was adamant that Kurt not leave school for him.  Kurt remembered Cooper catching him in the hallway after that exchange (which, like so many of their hospital conversations, seemed to be witnessed by one or another of the Anderson clan), asking him what the hell he was doing.  When Kurt patiently recounted what seemed to him to be an entirely obvious conversation, Cooper exploded.  “Do you really believe for a minute that Blaine would ask you to quit school, no matter how bad he might need you?  Do you know him at all?”

Kurt glanced at his alarm clock, hardly surprised that it was after midnight.  It was too late to call Blaine now.  Kurt pushed away the thought that he had purposefully delayed until it was too late to call.  Of course, there had been a time when he could have called Blaine day or night, and Blaine would have picked up (unlike you, the mean voice in his head muttered).  In any case, those days were gone, and premeditated or not, it was too late to call.

Kurt hoped Blaine wouldn't take him not calling the wrong way.  Would he get that disappointed look in his eyes when he realized the evening had gone by and Kurt hadn't called?  Why on earth did Kurt say he'd call him “later,” why didn't he just leave it open?  “Can I call you sometime” would have done the trick just as well, and taken the pressure off.  Or maybe he was just fooling himself, and Blaine had forgotten entirely about the promised call.  For all he knew Blaine was out on a date, or snuggled in bed with some hunky boyfriend, a call from Kurt the last thing on his mind. 

In the end, Kurt decided that the right thing to do was send a text, to let him know he hadn't forgotten, and buy him some time.  “When in doubt, do right.  This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”  Kurt didn't know how Mark Twain fit in here, but this seemed like good advice, with a touch of needed humor.  Of course, figuring out what was the right thing to do in a situation seemed like the harder task than deciding to do right in the first place.  He shook his head, feeling himself veering off track once again.  How hard could it be to send a simple text?

Kurt agonized over what to say.  He typed and retyped the first part:  I'm glad I ran into you today; I'm SO glad I ran into you today; so good to run into you today.  He tried leaving off the sentence altogether, but then he sounded like he was scheduling a tutoring session:  I let the night get away from me and now it's too late to call.  Okay if we talk tomorrow?

Finally he gave up, typed out the only thing that made any sense to him (honesty is the best policy, a voice sang out in his head), and hit send:

1:24 a.m.

From Kurt:  I spent hours tonight afraid to dial the phone and now it's too late to talk.  Seeing you today was both the best and the most frightening thing that's happened to me in ages.  Talk tomorrow?