Kurt rushes through the door to his apartment, choking back infuriated sobs. He throws down his messenger bag and kicks the door shut with his foot. The sound of the door swinging closed wasn't nearly as satisfying as he had hoped, so he opens it again and slams it with all of his might. The door rattles the whole frame, but Kurt can't even manage a smirk. He throws the bolt and the chain across the door, grumbling through clenched teeth.

“Not his fault…I'm the idiot…has to be the tenth time…why did I even think he'd changed…why am I so stupid…”

Kurt falls back on the sofa, dropping his head onto the cushion behind him. He feels the prickling of tears behind his eyes and curses. He reaches out and grabs a pillow, pressing it over his face with both hands and screaming into it. He isn't going to cry. Not again. Not over that asshole.

He feels his pocket vibrate and screams louder.

“And now the pathetic apology calls start,” he mumbles to himself. Without removing the pillow, he fishes his iPhone out of his pocket and tosses it across the room – not too hard though. Scuzzy ex's aren't worth replacing $300 cell phones for.

Kurt lays on his couch in the dark and listens to his phone buzz over and over. At some point, he drifts to sleep and has a strange pseudo dream where he's being chased by giant mosquitoes. He wakes when he accidentally smacks himself in the face, swinging wildly to swat the humongous phantom insects away.

Kurt stands up, his hips and back snapping and popping as he straightens. He looks down at his wrinkled suit and grimaces. He may not have wrecked his cell phone, but his outfit is pretty much ruined. He wonders if he can reasonably sue for the cost of his dry cleaning.

He passes by the still buzzing phone, the screen boasting a whopping 27 messages waiting for him. He drops the pillow on it to dull the sound of his message alert and wanders off to bed, eager to put the night as far behind him as he can.

He changes into his pajamas and climbs into bed, tossing his already rumpled outfit on the floor and forgoing his nighttime moisturizing ritual because who cares, right? Why put in all that effort if his boyfriend (ex-boyfriend) of the last two years is going to cheat of him anyway? He knows he's going to feel differently when he wakes up in the morning – after a good cry and some coma-level sleep. He knows he's going to get out of bed in the morning and pop back to his old diva self, but for right now, he needs this time to sink into his well of self-pity and overall man hating.

It's healthy.

It's most effective when accompanied by a pint of Chunky Monkey ice cream, but he doesn't have the energy to trek back out to the kitchen and get it, so for now he'll make due.

Yes, a good cry and sleep is all he really needs…and it would work, too, if he could get the sleep part down. He closes his eyes, lies on his side, puts on his sleep mask, and his noise machine. He tries to count sheep, and when that does nothing for him, he starts dressing the herd of sheep in his mind in designer clothes and acting out scenes from the movie Clueless in his head.

That's when he knows that sleeping is a lost cause.

So it's only out of a lack of sleep and morbid curiosity that he climbs out of bed and stomps back out to the living room to fish his woebegone cell phone out from under the throw pillow on the floor and listen to his messages – not because he wants to be persuaded to go back out with that scum, but because he's interested to discover what lame excuse Senor Asshat has come up with to explain away his cheating this time – sex addiction, stress from work, side effects of a new over-the-counter antihistamine. So far, Kurt's heard them all, and not that he's believed any of them, but he always goes back.

Because he's lonely, he's scared, and he needs something familiar.

But being used and putting his health in danger is not part of the package he signed up for.

Kurt flops down on the couch with his phone and throw pillow. (He'll need something to punch. There are 32 messages of utter bullshit he's about to listen to, and he doesn't want to break anything important.)

He rests his head back and dials up his voicemail, putting the phone on speaker and closing his eyes.

“Kurt? Okay, voicemail. Very mature…”

“Very mature,” Kurt mocks in a distorted rendition of the voice on the phone, giving the pillow a good punch.

“Anyway…Hey, babe. Sorry for the misunderstanding…”

Misunderstanding? What about a blow job with the waiter in the men's room between the salad and soup course did Kurt not understand?

“…but I lost my contact lens, and…”

Ugh! That one he couldn't even bear to finish. He erases it and waits for the next one. Kurt knows the way these usually go. The first message is an attempt to excuse the act of cheating, and the next one will be…

“You know, Kurt, this wouldn't have happened if…”

…shifting the blame. Kurt sighs and erases that one, too. He's not sure why exactly he's putting himself through this. Maybe to make himself numb. Maybe to teach himself a lesson.

“Kurt, you bitch! You know, you weren't even worth…”

Maybe to prove to himself that chivalry is not just dead, but beaten, poisoned, stabbed, eviscerated, run over by a semi-truck, and buried in the dirt a hundred feet down, never to be unearthed again.

A tear rolls down his cheek as he listens to this message through to the end - the same old story about how he is too high maintenance, too stuck up, too…too what? Too much himself? This man told Kurt he loved him just the way he is, once upon a time. It seems so long ago.

Loved him just the way he is – but hoping that he would change?

And change into what – a man who is okay dropping to his knees on a bathroom floor to fulfill someone else's perverted fantasy? Sorry, but that's not who he is.

Kurt sighs and waits for the next message.

“Hey…” a foreign voice slurs. “It's me…and yeah…I might be a little drunk…alright, a lot drunk, but I'm sorry…I needed a little courage to make this call…”

Kurt sits up and looks at his phone. This call is from a number he's never seen before - New York area code, but otherwise completely unknown. He looks at his phone log and discovers that the next 28 messages are all from this number.

So, Senor Asshat stopped calling after only three messages this time.

Nice.

Kurt's first instinct is to blanketly erase the remaining messages and head back to bed, but he knows he's never going to get any sleep.

This call was obviously a drunk dial, and now Kurt is insanely curious.

Besides, this man, whoever he is, has a really nice voice.

“I know that you and I want different things. I mean, I'm not that naïve. But when you and I got together, you liked me, right? You liked me for who I was, right? I…uh…”

The message cuts off there. Kurt looks down at his phone, as if he could see the caller's face, look into his eyes somehow through the screen. Kurt doesn't erase the message, he just moves on to the next one.

“I mean, you didn't enter into this relationship thinking, ‘What a great guy. I like everything about him, but I can't wait for him to change?' You even told me you liked me for who I was. Am I…am I wrong?”

Kurt shakes his head, new tears springing from his eyes and rolling down his cheeks.

“No, voicemail guy,” he mutters. “You're not wrong.”

“When you and I met, you were my shining star,” the voice says with a slight whine and a hiccup. “You still are. There's nothing about you that I would change…well, except maybe the cheating…and the…and the lying. But that started because of me, right? Because I couldn't be everything that you wanted me to be? Maybe I should just blame myself for everything. This is all my fault?”

“No,” Kurt sniffles, brushing the tears off his cheek. “No, it's not your fault. He cheated on you. You didn't do anything wrong just by being yourself.”

“You told me to leave, to move to New York, but that's not what you wanted? I guess? You felt alone and neglected, and yeah, maybe you were and maybe I did, but…ugh! I keep getting mixed signals from you. I wish you would just tell me what you want me to do and want me to say so that next time I'll get it right!”

Kurt hears the frustration in the man's voice, the pain, the confusion. He hears the tears that he can't stop. Kurt knows because he has the same tears in his eyes. As each message goes by, the man on the phone starts to sound more and more sober. Kurt stretches out on the couch with the phone beside his head as he listens to the man's voice sound less drunkenly manic and more smooth - soothing.

“All this time, I thought we wanted the same things,” he continues. Kurt can hear him take a sip of a drink and swallow, and he wonders if the man is drinking coffee to sober up or more alcohol to keep talking. “We had our whole lives planned out together. We wanted to see the same places, do the same things, retire together. I thought…I thought you were my missing puzzle piece.”

The man on the phone sighs deeply as the message ends. Kurt waits for another message to begin, exhaling into his couch cushion. His tears have long since dried, and his heart feels less heavy than it had when this started. Out there in the world is a man who knows exactly how he feels. Through his messages, he's unwittingly made Kurt better. Kurt wishes he could do the same for this guy, whoever he is.

“And you're probably going to call me up after this and say ‘Blaine…'”

“Blaine?” Kurt repeats. “Is that your name? Blaine?”

“'Blaine, just get over me and move on,' but then you'll get drunk one night and call me, and tell me you miss me, that we were so good together. We'll end up back in bed and I'll think that we've put all the angst behind us, but that's not it at all. Our history together, it doesn't mean a thing, and every time I jump back into bed with you, I'm just another notch on your belt, right?”

Kurt closes his eyes for a moment and tries to imagine what a man named Blaine with a voice like warm melted honey might look like. Is he the rugged-outdoors type? Is he the straight-laced dapper type? Is there a possibility the two of them share more in common than questionable taste in men?

“And I know I'm wasting my time wanting someone who doesn't want me back. I get that. I get it. And you show me all the time that you don't want me. I mean, how many men do I have to find in your bed before I realize that this isn't working?”

“I don't know, Blaine,” Kurt says bitterly. “I'm at ten so far. What's your lucky number?” Kurt winces at the sound of his own cruel comment. It sounded harsher than Kurt meant it. He's just happy that Blaine wasn't actually there to hear it.

“I guess I fell in love with the idea of you, and I couldn't let that idea go. I didn't want to admit that I had invested all that time into something that was ultimately a mistake. It's not your fault…well, yeah, actually, a lot of it is your fault, but some of it is mine, too…” Kurt laughs and shakes his head. He can appreciate someone who can find the silver lining. “So, I guess what I'm saying, after all of these messages, is that I'm sorry. And I…I won't be bothering you again. I'm sorry…again…good-bye.”

Click.

End of messages.

Beep.

Kurt looks at his phone. The messages are over. Blaine is gone.

Listening to Blaine's many confessions made Kurt feel better about the sad state of his own dead relationship, but it made his heart ache for Blaine, not just because their situations are so similar, but because after 29 messages, the object of his affections had no idea how he felt.

Kurt wants to call Blaine, to tell him that he's not wrong, and that Kurt understands, that he sounds like a nice, decent guy, and Kurt would be willing to take a shot with someone sweet like Blaine.

A little pushy.

Well, at least he wants to call Blaine and tell him that his messages have all gone astray, but it's four in the morning and Blaine is most likely asleep in bed. Kurt doesn't want to wake him. Besides, how would that particular phone conversation start?

“Hey! You left 29 messages to your ex on my phone, and I listened to them all.”

Not too creepy.

Kurt looks at Blaine's number, reads it over in his head, letting it sink into his brain with other fresh tidbits of information that he might need for later reference.

Kurt decides to give it a little more thought, iron out what he intends to say, if he ever does call Blaine at all. He rolls to his feet and gets up off the couch. He wanders back to bed, this time with his phone in his hand in case Blaine calls back.

***

Kurt sleeps past his alarm in the morning, but it's Saturday, and after last night's ordeal, he declares today a personal day.

He's bummed that he missed his yoga class, but he can always reschedule to one in the afternoon.

The first thing he needs to do is get out of bed and cleanse. He can feel all the bacteria from the restaurant last night and just the overall oxidants in the air from living in the city clinging to his skin.

He was a fool to neglect his facial regimen because of a worthless, dime-a-dozen guy.

Next order of business will be to race to the dry cleaners to try and salvage his outfit.

Kurt pulls his cell phone out from under his pillow and looks at the screen. No more calls since last night. Not from his ex, not from Blaine. He's still on the wire about calling Blaine back and letting him know about the mix-up with the messages – not because he doesn't want to. After all those messages, he's dying to meet Blaine. He feels they've shared something, even if it was all one-sided. But he doesn't know what he's going to say. Opening lines were never his specialty.

He sits down at his vanity and starts pulling back his hair when his phone starts to ring.

Senor Asshat, right on time to try and pull his butt out of the ditch. He considers letting the call go to voicemail, but he doesn't want it tainting all of Blaine's beautiful messages, and if he disconnects the call, Asshat is just going to call back. Kurt sighs and answers the call.

“Fuck off,” Kurt says by way of greeting.

“Well, hello to you, too, sweetheart.”

“Don't call me sweetheart,” Kurt says, opening a bottle and pulling out a cotton ball.

“Stop being like that,” the voice on the line pleads, but in a sarcastic, less-than-worried tone.

“Being like what?” Kurt asks. “Fed up with your bullshit? Tired of feeling like crap because you can't keep your dick in your pants?”

“Kurt…”

“Can you at least give me a clue as to what kind of STIs you've exposed me to so I can get a jump start on antibiotics, or should I just play it safe and set fire to my entire pelvic region?”

“Kurt…”

A dull beeping noise interrupts whatever Asshat is trying to say. Kurt glances down at the screen and notices Blaine's number pop up on the screen.

“Uh, I'm sorry,” Kurt says. “I've got to go. Feel free to find a bridge and jump off it.” Kurt reaches out a finger and swipes to the incoming call. He sits and waits in the silence to hear Blaine's voice, but there's nothing.

“Hello?” Kurt says.

He hears a strange tapping, like the sound of someone banging their head against a wall while they try to decide their next move. Kurt takes a bold chance.

“Blaine?”

“Uh, yes?” a confused voice stumbles. Its definitely Blaine. Kurt smiles. That soothing voice sounds so much cuter when it's live and sober.

“Hi,” Kurt says, turning to the phone and giving it his full attention. “I was actually going to call you.”

“You…you were?” he asks, sounding a little crestfallen. Kurt doesn't understand why until he realizes that Blaine knows. Blaine knows he listened to the messages. Blaine didn't even mention his name until about the 13th message. Whatever Blaine had planned to say when he dialed Kurt's number is completely erased by the knowledge that the mysterious person on the line knows his personal secrets.

“Yeah,” Kurt says, feeling less excited about talking now. He curses himself out thoroughly in his mind. “I just wanted to let you know…”

“That I drunk dialed you last night and spilled my guts,” Blaine filled in, “which you obviously heard.”

“Yeah,” Kurt says, smacking his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Look, I'm really sorry…”

“No, I'm sorry…uh…”

“Kurt,” Kurt says, feeling at an unfair advantage knowing Blaine's name.

“Kurt,” Blaine repeats. “I'm sorry for calling and leaving all that garbage on your voicemail.”

“I'm sorry I listened to it,” Kurt says. “I shouldn't have. I invaded your privacy.”

“No, it's all right,” Blaine says with a sigh. “I left it on your phone, and I mean, 29 messages, that's a little extreme…”

“Maybe,” Kurt agrees with a small chuckle, “but I know why you did it.”

“Yeah,” Blaine says, more a statement than a question.

“I was…kind of having a similar situation last night myself,” Kurt admits, biting his lip.

“Really?” Blaine asks. “You drunk dialed a stranger and humiliated yourself?”

It's a biting comment, but more self-depreciating, and Blaine laughs dryly at the end.

“No,” Kurt says. “My boyfriend cheated on me last night…at dinner…in the bathroom at the restaurant…with the waiter.”

“Ouch.”

“Yup,” Kurt says, running his hands down his face and blocking the sun from his eyes.

Maybe waking up was a bad idea. This conversation isn't going at all the way he had envisioned in his head.

“That's a shame,” Blaine says. “You sound like a nice guy…I guess…I mean, I don't really know you, but, you have a nice voice and…”

“Do you always do that?” Kurt interrupts with a laugh.

“Do what?” Blaine asks.

“With the verbal diarrhea. You just…open your mouth and everything comes out?”

“Uh…yeah,” Blaine says, sounding dejected. “Yeah, I suppose I do.”

“It's cute,” Kurt chuckles.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Kurt nods, even though no one is around to see him. “You sound like a man with a lot to say. You must be…interesting.”

“I'm not too sure that I am,” Blaine replies. “At least, my ex didn't seem to think so.”

“Well, we're not talking about him,” Kurt says, realizing with a grimace that he's trying to flirt.

Blaine laughs, and when that laugh dies, it leads into an awkward silence.

Blaine clears his throat.

“Look, I don't want to take up too much of your time,” he says, “but before you change your phone number and write me off as some kind of crazed lunatic, I wanted you to know that…”

Kurt smiles at Blaine's nervous chatter.

He wasn't lying. It really is quite adorable.

“Blaine?” Kurt cuts in, stopping the man before his head explodes.

“Uh, yeah?”

“Would you maybe like to go out for a cup of coffee…with me?” he asks. “We can bitch about our ex's if you'd like, or not talk about them at all, but it's been a while since I've talked to someone who doesn't make me feel like dirt. Who knows? It might be nice.”

Kurt pauses, waiting for a reaction.

A silence that Kurt didn't anticipate follows, and suddenly he feels like an idiot.

He prepares to recant, to tell Blaine to forget it, to laugh it off as a spur-of-the-moment idea when in reality he has been thinking it over all night long.

He hears Blaine clear his voice again and braces himself for rejection.

“Yeah,” Blaine says, sounding relieved. “Yeah, I think I'd like that.”