Confession

The text arrives a few days after Kurt has returned to New York, when memories of their night together are still fresh and exciting and hard.

I think I’m ready to hear about it now.

It catches Blaine off guard; he was sure that Kurt was going to skirt what had happened forever no matter how things played out between the two of them.  Blaine had been desperate to tell Kurt once, to get it off his chest, but he’d locked the urge away months ago when Kurt rejected him after the production of Grease.

He’s really not eager to think about it now.

When?  He texts back.  Then, over the phone???

It’s only a minute before the response comes in, making Blaine’s breath catch in his throat.

I’m on Skype now.

Blaine could log on now, but he needs time to think, to process, to prepare for what he will say, what Kurt will ask.  To prepare for Kurt and his walls, the ones he had so recently erected that Blaine knew were really his own fault.

Give me 15 minutes.

Blaine darts to the bathroom.  He wants to look his best.  He wants to look confident, but try as he might he just can’t see it.

The time passes too quickly, and suddenly he is sitting at his computer and Kurt is there, only of course—in so many ways—tragically not.

“Hey,” Kurt says with a small smile and familiar wave.

“Hey,” Blaine echoes weakly.  

They sit awkwardly for a few moments and stare at one another, until Blaine can’t take the silence.  “So…” he presses.

“So,” Kurt repeats.  “So I want you to tell me, what you did with….”

“Eli,” Blaine fills in the blank.  “His name was Eli.”

“…what you did with Eli.”

Kurt’s voice is so strange like this, empty of both emotion and sarcasm, and it’s a jarring reminder of what they’ve become every time he speaks.

“Right, Eli,” Blaine begins uncertainly, as if he hadn’t just said the name.  “He’s just a guy who found me on Facebook.  I think he goes to my old school, the one before…”

“Sadie Hawkins,” Kurt says when Blaine falters.  “That makes sense.”

Blaine shrugs.  “A friend of a friend, I guess.  But he sent me a friend request and started up a conversation about movies...  I saw that he was gay, but at the time I didn’t think anything of it.  I’m just…”

“Oblivious,” Kurt chimes in again.  “I know that, Blaine.  Continue.”  

Blaine frowns, feeling a little annoyed but unwilling to give in to it.  “That was before.  Then that day, I was feeling lonely because we’d talked and you… you hung up on me, without even saying I love you, to talk to some stupid gossip…” he tries, really tries to keep the bitterness out of his voice, but even after all they’ve been through it’s still there, and he fails miserably.  “I made a status post, I think, just a vague reference to how I was feeling.  It was sarcastic and stupid and hurtful, and I deleted it a few minutes later because I didn’t want you to see.  But I think… I think he saw.  And he messaged me to ask if I wanted to come over, and he called me sexy, and I just thought why not, if I don’t matter to him anyways?”

Kurt’s face—carefully blank until this moment—noticeably softens.  “You did matter,” he says quietly, past-tense, and Blaine wants so badly to trace his fingers around Kurt’s face on the screen, to feel it when Kurt mimics the gesture, but he knows it won’t happen.

“I messaged him back,” Blaine says next, and the words hurt.  “I don’t know why; it was like… it was like I was on autopilot or something, and I felt terrible and I couldn’t think and I just wanted, so badly, to feel something else.  He sent me the address, and I went, and when I got there I… we…” he stops, throat blocked and unable to continue.  Kurt’s prompting had been so irritating a minute ago, but now he wants it back.

He wants go on, Blaine, it’s okay.  But it’s not, and he’s not going to get that.

He swallows against the lump, forces the words out.  “There was no… pomp or circumstance or anything; he started kissing me at the door and I didn’t have time to get away.  I didn’t want to.  It was fast and hard and exciting and numbing and nothing like you, and that’s what I wanted, what I’d come for.”  He pauses, resigned now to follow the path before him like a dead man watching a replay of the worst moments of his life.  Actually, that was a damn near perfect metaphor.

“He pulled me to his room, started undressing me.   And I undressed him.  And then we were on the bed and he was moving against me and it was sharp and heady and—you know Kurt, you know what that can be like.”

“Don’t.” Kurt’s voice is cruel, harsh, cutting through Blaine’s momentum and shocking him to the core.  “Don’t compare me to him.”

“I wasn’t,” Blaine tells him, pleading and desperate and gravelly with too much awful feeling.  “Kurt, I never—“

“Go on,” Kurt interrupts, indifference firmly back in place.

“There’s not… there’s not much more.  We both… finished, and he left the room and I… I’ve never felt so hateful, Kurt.  I thought I was going to be sick.  I was dressed by the time he came back, and I think he tried to make a joke or something, but all I could think of was you.”

“What convenient timing,” Kurt offers dryly.

“I’ve told you how sorry I am, Kurt.  I have and I’ll tell you a million times, however long it takes until you believe it.”

“I do believe it,” Kurt says.  “I’ve forgiven you.”

Blaine smiles, sad and slight.  “It doesn’t feel like it.”  

He feels so exhausted now.  He thought that after he told Kurt he would feel better, lighter, but apparently Blaine is a terrible judge of how any given action might make him feel.  “What else?” he asks weakly, wanting this to be finished.  “What else do you want to know?”

Blaine watches Kurt carefully, hoping for any sign of emotion from the man in New York who used to feel everything for him, but now Kurt only seeks his eyes with a level, measured stare and asks the most difficult question of all.

“How?  How could you do that to me?”

Blaine’s mouth falls open as his mind blanks, completely at a loss.  He closes it quickly and his eyes, too, trying hard to think, to come up with a half-decent answer.

“I already said.  I thought I’d lost you, and then nothing seemed to matter…”

“So what, you just assumed that our relationship was over?  Based on what?  If you were going to lose me anyway, Blaine—and you knew you would for what you did—why not just tell me?  Why not just do me the courtesy of letting me know when my own relationship has ended?”

Kurt’s angry now, it’s blatant and plain, and Blaine can’t decide if it’s an improvement on triviality or not, but it’s making him angry too.  “Because I couldn’t!” he yells before he can stop himself.  “Because you wouldn’t listen to me!  And because…” he falters, voice breaking, and tries to gain back some control.  “Because I didn’t want it to be,” he finishes at a whisper.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Kurt points out.

“No,” Blaine agrees.  “No it didn’t.  But I am sorry, Kurt, more sorry than I’ve ever been.  You have no idea.”

Kurt is quiet for a moment, but he’s looking at Blaine like he’s really seeing him, and Blaine has to fight the urge to cover himself.  “I think I do,” he speaks at last.  “And I’m sorry, too.  I promised you I wouldn’t go, and…”

“It’s okay, Kurt, really.  I’m the one that screwed us up.”

“That’s not what I mean.  Not… now.  I mean before, how I made you feel alone.”

“Oh.”  Blaine wasn’t expecting that, but now that he really thinks about it, maybe he deserves it.  “Thank you,” he tells Kurt sincerely.

Kurt nods.  “Well, I guess I better say goodnight then.  Isabelle wants me early tomorrow.”

“Alright.  Goodnight, Kurt.”

“Goodnight, Blaine.  I’ll text you sometime?”

Blaine nods, and they fall silent, but Kurt doesn’t log off.  He’s just… there, sitting so still that Blaine can almost pretend that it’s one of his many pictures that he’s looking at and not the man himself.  The urge arises again, and this time Blaine can’t stop it.  He reaches forward, presses his fingers to the screen…

And it goes blank.

He feels jaded, strangely numb and empty, that feeling that he’s never sure what to do with.  But then somehow the computer is shutting off and he’s pulling off his clothes, putting on pajamas like his body is on autopilot.  Once the light is off, his bed feels warm and welcoming and familiar, and if he closes his eyes and pretends really hard, he can almost imagine that Kurt is lying beside him like he used to be.

The image fades and his eyes open and the tears come, pouring forth relentlessly as they haven’t for months now.  His phone glows and vibrates suddenly on the night stand, drawing him in like a beacon in the darkness, and Blaine sniffles and reaches for it.

It’s a text from Tina, and he closes it out without responding.  Maybe tomorrow.

He hesitates.  He shouldn’t.

The contact is easy to find, every meaningful text Kurt has ever sent him gathered together in memoriam.  His fingers fly over the keys and then it’s done, out there, another I love you that feels just as powerless as the last few dozen he’s sent.

In the morning when he wakes with his fist clenched tight around his phone, there is still no reply.