Kurt pressed the off switch hard before throwing the remote at the floor. He knew there was a reason he stuck to old movies.

He buried his face in the couch cushion. Without the television to distract him, memories of Blaine and Rachel Berry could take up residence in the forefront of his mind again. He willed himself not to cry. He didn’t know how he had any more tears left to shed. There were times when he was sure it hadn’t been real; that he had imagined the trip to New York, the girl in the bright coat and the heartbreak. He had cried so much he felt numb and as if he were separate from reality. Each time, however, he remembered that it was real. Each time, something in his heart snapped, as if someone were cutting the strings.

Something about the human mind makes it do those things it knows will cause it pain. That was the only way Kurt could explain himself listening to the Wicked soundtrack. If he had identified with it before, it was nothing compared to how it affected him now. Every song only made him cry harder, but he carried on. He wasn’t ready to give Rachel up yet. He had only loved her a day, after all. He had a whole lifetime to get over that loss; for now, he wanted to hold onto those tiny positive emotions. They helped to drag him through the large horde of other ones, mostly relating to Blaine, that made him want to curl in on himself.

After a few hours, Finn had tapped tentatively on Kurt’s door.

“Come in.”

Finn pushed the door open and paused just inside the room. “Hey, Kurt.”

Kurt continued to stare at the ceiling, tracks from his tears drying on his cheeks, so Finn carried on without a response.

“I know that you’re going through something really hard. I totally get that. But I just...do you think you could turn this off?” He pointed to the CD player, which had the volume turned right up as it blasted out Thank Goodness for at least the fifth time that day. “I don’t mean to be insensitive or whatever, I just…”

Finn trailed off as Kurt slid wordlessly off the bed and flicked the machine off. After hours of the noise, Kurt’s ears rang in the silence.

“It’s…” His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and started again. “It’s fine. I should stop torturing myself, anyway.”

Finn frowned as Kurt sat on the edge of his bed, his shoulders uncharacteristically slumped. He closed the door behind him and sat next to his stepbrother.

“What happened exactly? I know about you and…” He decided it was best to avoid the other boy’s name. “But Burt said something about New York. Did anything happen there?”

Kurt stared at his rug, cursing himself for crying again. He supposed telling Finn was better than anyone else. He hated to upset his father more than he already had, and he was sure both he and Carole were hurt that Kurt hadn’t trusted them enough to confide in them when he first connected to Blaine. But Finn…Finn didn’t seem to mind. He was just worried that Kurt was sad.

“Yes,” Kurt said, voice raw. “It was…” He took Finn’s hand. “It was awful.”

“Oh my God, you weren’t…no-one did anything to you, did they?” He squeezed Kurt’s fingers harder than he should have, but Kurt didn’t mind. At least Finn was there.

“No, no, nothing like that. At least, not physically.” He shuffled closer to Finn, resting against the taller boy’s side. He wasn’t sure when he had become so dependent on physical contact, but he needed something to anchor him. “I connected to someone.”

“How?”

“We were in Times Square. She grabbed our hands.”

“But weren’t you--?”

“I took one glove off to hold…to hold his hand.”

Finn nodded, the movement slow as he considered what to say in reply. “You fell in love as a friend, right?”

“She was a girl, Finn.”

He put his free hand up in front of him. “Just checking.” Kurt sighed and brought one knee up to his chest, leaning more heavily on Finn. “I wonder if that can happen, though,” Finn said. “If you can fall in love with a girl. This connection thing seems so random. Does it really take, um, sexual preference into account?”

“God, you make it sound like its own entity,” Kurt said. “That’s horrifying.”

“But seriously, dude. Do you think that could happen?”

“I really hope not.”

Puck, who Kurt knew only via overheard phone conversations, had called Finn soon after and when the other boy left to ‘shoot hoops’ with his friend, apologising profusely to Kurt for abandoning him, the faerie was left with nothing but the urge to watch mindless television. He wasn’t sure how he got sucked into a news broadcast, but he quickly realised how removed from the world he had been recently, in more ways than his physical isolation. Kurt couldn’t stand thoughts of a future without even vague rights on top of those about Blaine and Rachel Berry, as well as what Finn had said.

His stepbrother had once more spoken without a great deal of thought, while still managing to make Kurt realise something profound about himself. He knew very little about what he actually was. He didn’t know whether a person’s gender impacted on how he would connect to them. He wasn’t sure whether, if he had met Blaine at a different time, or connected to him at a different point in their relationship, he would have still fallen in love. It was a question of whether he was fated to connect to particular people in way that was predestined, or whether each connection was random, with a chance of going either way.

Inevitably, that led to more tears seeping into the couch cushion. Perhaps if he’d done things differently, Blaine would be sitting with him right now, arms around his best friend as he helped him through his loss. Perhaps they would never have gone to New York at all and they would be drinking coffee in his kitchen, talking about Blaine’s latest date with Jeremiah without a hint of jealousy from Kurt.

That wasn’t how it was going to be. Kurt and Blaine had done what they thought was right. It was a Sunday afternoon and for the first time since they met, Blaine was not in Kurt’s house. It ripped at the cracks in Kurt’s heart. He cried for Blaine, and he cried for Rachel, and he cried because he didn’t want to be crying for Rachel. He didn’t want to be crying for Blaine, either, but there was something even worse about his grief being not only amplified, but his emotions about Blaine being given less precedence than they should have. If he was going to cry over this boy, he wanted it to be the only thing he was crying over.

Instead, when he managed to slow his tears to just small hiccups, his mind would drift back to the girl. If she wasn’t from New York, then where was she from? Kurt tried to stop himself hoping that she would be from Ohio because that was such a ridiculous idea, but he was heartbroken and he needed something to wish for.

“Kurt, honey, do you want something to eat?”

He lifted his gaze to Carole, who was watching him with the same concerned expression she had worn around him since he returned from New York.

“I’m not really hungry,” he replied, dropping his eyes to the floor again.

He heard Carole sigh and the floorboards creak as she approached him. She sat next to his side on the couch, stroking her fingers through his hair when he didn’t look at her.

“How are you doing?”

“Wonderful.”

“Kurt, don’t be sarcastic. I know that you’re hurting.” She wrapped an uncharacteristic stray curl of hair around her finger, making it pull a little at Kurt’s scalp, not quite enough to cause pain. “You shouldn’t push me and your dad away. We’ve been through the loss, both of us. We understand, honey.”

“But you don’t,” Kurt said, only managing a strangled half-whisper through the fresh tears. “They didn’t turn you down.”

Carole’s fingers stilled in his hair. Kurt didn’t have to look at her to see the pained, pitying expression on her face.

“From what I heard,” she said, stroking at his scalp again, “he didn’t say that he didn’t want you.”

“But he didn’t say that he did.”

She took his hand and kissed it before she spoke. “Kurt, don’t get upset, but I don’t think you really gave him the chance. You told him how you felt,” she said, talking over his protests, “but you didn’t give him enough time to get over the shock of it before you told him to leave. Finding out that someone you thought was unreachable is in love with you is not something you just accept, Kurt. He may have been hurting you all this time, but you have to understand how it was for him. He thought you connected to him has a friend. For you to then completely contradict that…it’s not an easy thing to come to terms with.”

“So,” Kurt said, “you think he could still be in love with me?”

“I don’t want to say yes and end up hurting you more,” she said, tucking the strand she had been curling behind his ear, “but I am sure that he loves you, in whatever way. At the very least, he will come to tell you that.”

Kurt reached up behind him, tugging on Carole’s shoulder so that she leaned over his back. Realising what he wanted, she wrapped her arms around him, ignoring the awkward angle of it.

“Thank you,” Kurt said.

“Mercedes called,” Burt said as he entered the living room. He threw the iPhone to Kurt, who was still on the couch, lying on his back now as he stared at the ceiling. The boy caught it, flipping it over to check the screen. Two missed calls, both from Mercedes. Nothing from Blaine. Not even a text.

“Hey,” Burt said softly when he saw Kurt scrunch his face up and drop his phone onto his stomach. “What’s wrong?”

“Do you really need to ask that?”

Burt sighed and a crease formed between his eyebrows as he took in his despondent son. He crossed the room to sit on the edge of the coffee table, bringing him closer to Kurt’s eye level. Kurt would normally have reprimanded him for using the table when there were perfectly good chairs available. He didn’t, though, and that alone gave Burt more reason to worry.

“Kurt, I don’t want you to be blaming yourself for how this turned out.”

“Dad, I’m not—”

Burt held up a finger. “I know you. You think if you’d done things differently, this would never have happened.” Kurt turned his head from his father, facing the back of the couch. “Kurt,” Burt said, “I think that whenever you connected to Blaine, you would have…felt this way. Even if you met him twenty years from now.”

“So you think my emotions towards people are fixed?” Kurt said to the couch cushion. “You think they can never turn out differently?”

“It’s love, Kurt. If it were as variable as that, it wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t be as…powerful.”

Kurt didn’t reply. He reached up to pick at the threads of the cushion – a habit he would never have allowed himself to develop before. As he pulled one loose and wrapped it around the end of his finger, the doorbell rang. With another sigh and a brief rest of his hand on his son’s back, Burt went to answer it. Kurt was too caught up in thinking about what his father had said to really register his departure. He didn’t listen to the voice at the door enough to recognise it. Therefore, when his father tramped back into the room, he jumped, sitting upright. After a couple of seconds, he caught his father’s expression.

“Dad, what’s going on?”

“Blaine’s here.”