“Mr. Hummel?” asked a pretty woman in a white coat. She shook Kurt's hand, “I'm Doctor Beck. I'm the hospital psychiatrist.”

“Oh, great, they brought in the head doctors,” Kurt groaned, “Don't tell me this was psychosomatic.” Kurt was lying on a bed in the emergency room, hooked up to an IV of Ativan. The physicians had run what felt like a million tests but hadn't done anything in the way of treatment except for the IV. Nonetheless, Kurt was already feeling completely well again—actually, kind of wonderful—albeit a little foolish.

Dr. Beck laughed, “Maybe not in the way you think.” She looked at Blaine. “Would you like to step out for a minute?” she suggested.

“Yes, of course.” Blaine turned to leave.

“No, he can stay,” Kurt protested.

Blaine turned to Kurt and smiled reassuringly, “I'm going to get some coffee. I'll be back soon.” Then he was gone, and Kurt looked after him with longing.

“So,” Dr. Beck said, “what you're having feels and acts a whole lot like a heart attack, but it's really just a good, old fashioned panic attack. Have you ever had one before?”

Kurt shook his head.

“Well, sometimes when you're under a lot of stress, your nervous system just goes a little haywire. What were you doing right before this happened?”

“Sleeping.”

“Uh huh, and what were you doing just before you were sleeping?”

Kurt blushed and looked down, “I was having sex.”

Dr. Beck nodded toward the curtain, “With him?”

“Yes.”

“Nice,” she nodded.

Kurt's eyes grew wide, “Are you supposed to say things like that?”

Dr. Beck laughed, “How many psychiatrists do you think there are in a small town in Idaho? It's not like they're going to fire me. Besides, your boyfriend is really cute. I imagine you know that.”

Kurt laughed, “Yeah, it's hard to miss.”

“Did anything happen while you were having sex?”

“Nothing that wasn't supposed to happen.”

“Was this your first time?”

“Not hardly.”

“I mean with him.”

Damn, she was good. “No, not really.”

“What do you mean, not really? Have there been…problems?”

Kurt blushed again and then exhaled loudly, “The last time, I had trouble…keeping it up.”

“Has that ever happened before?”

“No, never!”

“How do you feel about this guy? His name is Blaine, right?”

“I don't know how I feel.”

“Do you know how he feels about you?”

“He loves me,” Kurt said in a small voice.

“Is it possible you love him, too?”

Kurt looked at her, then he shrugged.

Dr. Beck smiled and placed a hand on Kurt's arm, “Kurt, you're not the first person who's panicked when faced with real intimacy. Intimacy can be scary. I'm going to write you a prescription for an anti-anxiety medicine, and I would recommend that you think about some counseling. But you know what I find works best of all in these situations?”

Kurt shook his head.

Dr. Beck opened her mouth to explain, then she shook her own head as if mentally discarding one piece of advice in favor of another, “I find that most things that cause you fear are a lot more frightening in the abstract and a lot less frightening when you face them. It's like riding a roller coaster. When you're standing in line and looking at it, it's petrifying, but once you get on, it's a lot of fun, and then you find yourself getting in line again and again.

“Blaine seems like a really nice man. He brought you here and he stayed by your side, and you said yourself that he loves you. Maybe you can try letting him in. If you do, you may find that it's less scary than you think, and it could be kind of wonderful.”

Kurt wasn't convinced, but he nodded to Dr. Beck and said, “Thanks.”

Kurt thought about Dr. Beck's words after Blaine and he had returned to their hotel that night. He thought about them as they dressed in the morning and had breakfast at the café. He thought about them as they drove through western Idaho, eastern Oregon, and into Washington. He hadn't asked Blaine to accompany him; Blaine just came, and Kurt was grateful. Blaine hadn't asked Kurt what the doctors had said, but he had given Kurt a curious glance at the hospital, and Kurt had waived a hand dismissively and said, “Just stress.”

Now it was half a day later, and, at some point, an idea began to percolate in Kurt's head. As they passed Kennewick on the last leg of their Yakima journey, Kurt said to Blaine, “I want to ask you to do something.”

Blaine said, “Sure,” but his voice sounded tentative.

“Can this next stop just be about us?”

“What do you mean?”

Kurt sighed and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, “I mean, this trip has been a little crazy. We started out as perfect strangers and now we're…something else. Tomorrow night we'll be in Seattle, and I'll start my new job, and you'll become a stevedore or something until you sell your soul to the company store in July, and, well…I want an evening that's just for us.

“I mean, not that there is an us, but, for tonight, can there be? Can we be two men who are crazy about each other and want to spend time together? Can we put the future and the past and everything behind us and just be together in this moment?”

Blaine stared straight ahead for a few beats, then he turned to Kurt and smiled, “I think I'd really like that.”

Kurt smiled back, “Me, too.”

As they sped toward their destination, Blaine gave a little more thought to Kurt's proposal to make tonight just about them, “But, I mean, we're staying at your friends' place, right? So, we're going to have to spend time with them.”

“Ah, you haven't met Santana. When I tell her I picked you up on the side of the road a few days ago, she'll say something incomprehensible like, ‘Wanky,' and then insist that we go to bed early so we can fuck our short little monkey brains out, or something.”

“Oh,” Blaine responded, “well, she should be interesting.” He looked out the car window as they passed a few power poles, “Why does she live in Yakima again?”

“It's so insane.” Kurt breathed out a puff of air, “Okay, so Santana grew up in kind of the ghetto part of Lima with her mom and grandma—her abuelita. No dad, no grandpa; pretty much no men anywhere. Being a gorgeous Latina, Santana was, of course, a cheerleader and really popular even though most people secretly hated her, because she was a major bitch and also kind of a skank. Slept with everyone.”

Blaine cleared his throat, and Kurt remembered he was calling the metaphorical kettle black.

“Sorry. Anyhow, it turned out that Santana was secretly a lesbian, and she was sleeping with all these guys to hide it from her classmates, but she was really in love with another cheerleader, Brittany, who had a few boyfriends but was also sleeping with Santana on the side. But Brittany didn't think it counted because they were girls or something.”

“Dear God, where did you go to high school?”

Kurt raised an eyebrow, and Blaine backpedaled, “Sorry, sorry. Please continue.”

“Then, I think our senior year, she got outed by a sleazy politician running against my dad for Congress, so she came out to her mom and grandma. Her mom was totally cool with it, but her grandma flipped her wig and completely disowned her, which was awkward, as they lived together and all. Anyhow, one day, completely out of the blue, this old man shows up at their house. It turns out he's her mom's dad—her grandpa—and he's dying. He fights with Santana's grandma for a long time—and it's completely hilarious to hear Santana tell the story in Spanish—but he basically accuses her grandma of being mean and judgmental and cutting Santana out of her life the way she did him, or something.

“Fast forward two years, and long lost grandpa finally dies, and he leaves Santana this huge farmhouse and apple orchard in Yakima as kind of a fuck-you to grandma. So Santana's going to sell it, but it turns out that she totally loves bossing around a bunch of Mexican farmworkers, so instead of selling the place, she convinces her long-time love Brittany to drop out of MIT, and they turned the house into a bed and breakfast, and they have a working apple farm.  Its all weirdly domestic.”

“I know I'm going to regret this,” Blaine says after taking a minute to digest what must be the weirdest story he'd ever heard, “but who in your circle of friends have Santana and Brittany had relationships with?”

“Ugh. Okay, this is complicated. Sam dated both Santana and Brittany—not at the same time. Santana was Finn's first, Santana and Rachel were roommates in New York for a while, and I think that's it. Oh, except I used to date Brittany, too, sort of.”

“Um, what?”

“Oh, God, I should have never told you that. This is so humiliating. Okay, so I was a sophomore, and when my dad first started dating Carole he was spending a lot of time with Finn, and I was kind of jealous. I thought my dad was embarrassed by me because I was so effeminate, that he wanted a different kind of son, so I went on this insane binge where I wore a baseball cap and flannel every day and sang John Mellencamp songs.”

Blaine burst out laughing, grabbing Kurt's thigh, “Oh, my God. You must have trashed your voice doing Mellencamp.”

Kurt laughed, too, “Oh, yeah. My throat hurt for a week. Anyhow, part of operation macho man was dating a cheerleader. Dad caught us making out—this was after I came out. You should have seen his face.”

“You made out with her? How was that even possible?”

“Well, not so much made out as kissed a little and then grilled her about what it was like to kiss a boy.”

“And what's it like to kiss a boy?”

Kurt grinned at Blaine and squeezed his hand, “Given the right boy, it's fucking awesome.”

Blaine blushed and grinned back.