Kurt wasn't entirely asleep when Dave tucked him into bed. He couldn't have moved if he wanted to, opened his eyes or spoke – he was that exhausted. But he felt Dave remove his shoes and his jacket, felt him tuck the blanket around him. He heard Dave leave, then him and the kids getting dinner ready in the kitchen, and slowly he sank into his mattress. As he drifted more to sleep, he started to cry. Life would continue on, of course, despite his melancholy hangover, despite his broken heart. That was the kick-in-the-balls of it all. Blaine would go back to work, perform on Sing, and return to his life as a popular television sex symbol, with Sebastian and Mia by his side, and Kurt would wither in obscurity, nursing his ennui till the end of his days, despite all the promises Blaine made. Kurt knew he was being cruel. He knew he should give Blaine the benefit of the doubt. He had been nothing if not sincere about his feelings for Kurt, his want for them to be together, but Kurt felt too burnt by life in general, and its insistence in soldiering on as if everything was normal, as if no one was huddled under a thin, lumpy comforter, with their chest feeling like it was severed in two. For once, he wished that when something like this happened to him, the world would come to a grinding halt, so that everyone would be forced to recognize the pain he was in, and rally together to find a way to stop it…or else face flying off into space and disintegrating in the atmosphere.

He felt tired and weak, but most of all pathetic. He was stronger than this. Only teenagers hid under their covers and cried over lovers they could never have, had no hopes of having. Kurt was no teenager. He was a man, with four children.

And he was a Dominatrix.

But right now, he felt like an idiot.

A moment before he fell completely asleep, surrendering to the darkness that would take him away from his pain, he smelled something sweet - warm and comforting - waft into the back bedroom, and despite the tears drying on his cheeks and his non-stop runny nose, he smiled.

Dave remembered.

It was a tradition his mother started, which was probably where Kurt's cheesecake addiction began. What she could do with a block of Philadelphia cream cheese was unparalleled in all the dessert making world. After she passed, his father picked up the torch, even though his only experience cooking was burgers on the grill during major summer holidays and the occasional pot of spaghetti. But it was his way of helping his son cope. Neither of them knew exactly how to make Elizabeth Hummel's famous cheesecake. Kurt was the one who cooked with his mom, and he paid close attention, but she had certain techniques, special twists that she promised she would teach him when he got older. Father and son never really did learn how to make it her way, but what they came up with was good, made better by the fact that they figured it out together.

Unfortunately, this tradition had the side-effect of engraining every painful moment Kurt had ever experienced into his brain, since whenever any tragedy occurred, it was commemorated with Kurt's favorite dessert.

The first time he was tossed into a dumpster.

The first time he was called a fag.

Every time he lost a solo to Rachel.

His father's heart attack.

The day Dave kissed him in the locker room.

The day Darren cheated on him.

He remembered them, each and every one with startling cream-and-sugar clarity.

And the worst of them all so far – the day Finn and Rachel died.

Kurt had stayed up that night (since there was no way he'd ever be able to sleep) and made what was probably the finest cheesecake he had ever created, but he couldn't recall if he, or Dave, or the kids, took a bite; if they tossed it in the trash; or if they gave it to one of the neighbors, and she told him later on how amazing it was to soothe the sting of why she had really stopped by – to offer her condolences.

He made three more cheesecakes for the wake, and on the first night after they moved in to the dumpy trailer they were living in now, he made another one – the unbaked kind since the electricity wasn't the best and the oven, an old 1960s model that came with the trailer, had apparently left scorch marks on the walls from a few previous fires. Their little family had already fallen on hard times. He didn't want to add to that by setting their home ablaze.

Kurt thought about all these things, considered the depressing events he had attached to his consumption of cheesecake, and sighed.

He really had to find a different dessert to express his malaise, or he'd have to stop eating cheesecake altogether, and that he simply refused to do.