BE WITH ME
Dave tried to hold back his tears, slipping cold hands in the pockets of his jeans.
The sound of slamming door, the snickers making their way on the wet gravel, the cold air, which felt like it was hurting his skin, and reach his bones.
Nobody would follow him, no one would try to stop him.
Turning his head would have been useless, so he didn't. He just looked ahead.
Don't cry.
Dave Karofsky decided to be strong.
Stopping himself to think about the words of that woman would have only made things worse, and Dave had enough of everything.
Getting angry would have been much easier, he knew. Kicking at an empty beer can left with distraction in the wood, yelling insults at the now shut door, grab a rock and throw it to a glass window.
Oh yes, getting angry would be the wiser choice.
But the anger was gone.
Dave promised to himself to be strong, and not cry.
Not anymore.
He inhaled and exhaled, and when the air left his lungs it was like all the pain disappeared. Like a running beast, in the dark shadows of the night.
He kept walking, looking at his feet.
The lights in the house turned out. No shadow disturbed the natural darkness.
One, two, three, four.
Dave counted the steps that separated him from the car. Math had power to calm him.
Knowing about certainties of the world.
The steps were sixty-seven.
Too much, far too much, he said to himself.
Many things could happen, during the time it took for him to walk sixty-seven steps, and Dave didn't want to think about any of them.
He prayed to a God he didn't believe in, to bless him with the inability to think.
He closed his eyes for a second, refusing once again to cry.
Finally, the car was in front of his eyes, like a big animal with red stripes. The sixty-seventh step led him to his destination.
He opened the car's door, and the heat felt like a comforting hug. Another breath, a silent imprecation against a heart that was beating too fast.
He could do it.
Kurt was sitting in the passenger seat. The hands in gloves, the hair perfectly combined, the pale skin.
Two blue eyes stared hopeful at him, and Dave knew he had to destroy that hope as a glass smashed by hammer.
They didn't need any word, just looking was enough. A sad smile, a tired sigh.
Trying again would have been stupid. They both knew it, and it was what hurt them the most.
The last hope disappeard that night, when Dave's mother threw him out of the house and yelled at him that she didn't want to see him again.
"It was not good."
It was not question, and Dave's heart broke.
He nodded, knowing that just one word would crush him.
He sat down, and closed the car door.
The heat was comforting, but the cold Dave felt had nothing to do with winter.
Kurt felt strong desire to touch his shoulder.
A friendly touch.
Nothing that could ever break the thin thread that was their relationship, nothing that could suggest to him or the other boy some kind of doubt.
Friends do it all the time.
But Kurt could not move his hand.
He did not know what exactly was really scary to him, but the idea of touching Dave's shoulder was terrific.
They talked a lot in the past months, never getting tired of each other, but never touched either. Physical contact was forbidden in their relationship.
Touching would change something, and Kurt was not ready to face the consequences.
Dave needed him though, and Kurt couldn't pretend he didn't know.
"She will probably regret this."
Kurt's voice was thin and sharp, more than it was during normal circumstances.
He was obviously not sure that Dave's mom would ever regret the way she treated her son, but the thought of her hate being permanent made his skin crawl.
Dave shook his head, with a desperate smile painted on his thin lips.
"Maybe I don't want her to do it. Maybe I want that bitch to die alone as she deserves."
It was not true.
Or maybe it was.
Another one of those things that Dave tried to ignore.
He expected a look of warning from Kurt, maybe a sarcastic comment about his language.
Yet he just got silence. Kurt did not know what to say.
Kurt didn't want to be on the side of that woman, not even to point out to Dave that he would not get other mothers.
Saying that would have been stupid, because Dave gave her last chance, but he had been rejected.
It didn't matter that she was his had all rights to feel that way about her.
Without realizing it, Kurt pushed Dave into a precipice that had no end.
But Dave was the first to feel a twinge of guilt.
Dave knew about Kurt's mom. He knew because he saw him crying, during one of these afternoons they spent talking and doing french homeworks.
Kurt was crying because his mother was dead.
Dave wanted to hug him at that time, but he didn't. He was like statue.
He just could not do it. He could not afford the feelings he tried to push away for so long. The last thing Dave needed were more troubles.
But he could not stop thinking that Kurt was crying, and those tears were what conviced Dave to try again with the woman he loved and hated the most.
Dave swallowed, searching for the right words.
"I know what it means to you, and I'm sorry." Another clearing of voice. "I'm sure your mother loved you more than anything, Kurt. But her? She was never maternal even in her best moments. "
And it was true. Dave learned to survive without bedtime stories and gentle hands in his hair.
His mother loved her job, her mother loved God. In her family she just saw the shame of years of her youth, when she discovered she was pregnant. Dave rapresented that to her. A guilt that never disappeared.
Kurt smiled to him, and Dave couldn't stop himself from fixing those lips, so full and red.
He's so beautiful.
He had to stop.
Knowing that just by stretching his arm he would be able to touch, if not grab Kurt's long fingers didnt seem to help Dave, that in that moment couldn't do anything but curse his lack of willpower.
A metaphorical slap, or maybe two. He would have thrown himself into cold water, if it had been there.
I'm masochist.
Just remembering his mother and aunt Janice looking at him like he was a freak made him distracted from Kurt's lips, and from his delicate hands covered in gloves.
Yet a part of Dave wanted Kurt to know.
He would kneel at his feet, and would offered his love to Kurt as Romeo under Juliet's balcony. He would sing a serenade, one of those silly love songs that little girls loved so much.
God only knew he would do it.
Not that it would be of some use, of course.
His self-esteem would end up lower than it was at the start, and Kurt would return into his boyfriend's arms, feeling guilty of breaking Dave's heart again.
His ex-best friend, Dave Karofsky. The boy who would no longer be part of his life.
No, neither of them needed this.
"I'm sorry I forced you to do that, David. I should never have. "
If Kurt had touched him, maybe they would have been even.
What are you so scared of, Kurt?
Kurt had always been a brave young man, yet Dave Karofsky made him nervous. In a thousand of different ways.
He had touched him in the hospital, and from then they kind of became best friends.
Kurt called him constantly, just to make sure Dave was fine.
When that boy appeared to him in front of his door, with French books in his hand and a soft smile on his lips, Kurt found himself thinking that life, despite the ups and downs, was worth living.
He might not have been here. He could being dead.
He didn't know what that feeling was, but he had learned to accept it as a consequence of his afternoons with Dave.
Blaine did not know, of course. It was Kurt's little secret.
And it was that touch in the hospital to change things, Kurt was sure. For this reason, touching Dave's hand again, or even his shoulder, didn't seem to be the brightest of ideas.
Even if doing so would make them even.
Kurt had forced Dave to face something that frightened him before he was ready. For the second time.
He knew that Dave would have forgiven him, but forgiving himself was becoming more and more difficult.
"Nah." Dave shook his head, slightly tense. "You always expect the best from people. Do not apologize for that. "
Dave had benefited from this side of Kurt's character. Probably more than anyone else.
He had never wondered exactly when his feelings for Kurt Hummel had turned into love, but that afternoon, in the corridors of McKinley High School, something had happened. The day that Dave took off the Red BullyWhips cap and had apologized for everything he had done with tears in his eyes.
The sense of guilt was killing Dave, crushing him like an insect under the sole of a shoe, and Kur, with just few words, had released him.
Before everything became too much, before Dave surrendered.
Like the touch of an angel that saves you from death during a car crash. Dave remembered reading something like this in one of her mother's books.
No one would have forgiven him, but Kurt had done it.
And Dave loved him since then or maybe a long time before.
"No, Dave. I should learn to keep my mouth shut. And you should stop apologizing every time. "
As if it was possible.
Dave would forgive Kurt for probably everything, but he could not think of anything the other guy was guilty of.
"I did nothing but put pressure on you. Remember the third year prom? "
Dave swallowed with discomfort, because remembering that night made him want to bang his head against a hard surface until bleeding.
He remembered running away, and calling himself a coward for hours.
He had changed school a few weeks later.
Kurt looked terribly nervous, and Dave could not understand why. That boy in front of him had faced the whole crowd overwhelmed by prejudices that was high school of McKinley, with a tiara on his head and the pride of a soldier, returning home after a winning battle.
Not like Dave, who had run away.
Kurt continued, avoiding the other's gaze.
"I asked you to come out in front of the same people who had made that terrible joke to me. As if it were the only thing to do. As if I had to. For me. "
And Dave thought the same thing.
It was the price he had to pay after the pain that his fear had caused.
Become the victim after being the killer.
Everything would start with sweetness. Dave would have put his hands into the ones of boy he was in love with, and he would have dance with him. Oh yes, it would have been inebriating.
But then, his life would crumble like a mirror steeped on by the hooves of a runaway horse.
Dave fisted until he got hurt, forcing himself not to run away again. Once again it seemed the easiest way.
"I should have. I would have done something good, at least. Something right. "
Something to be proud of, after the shame of hurting the only person who really counted for him.
"It does not matter," Kurt said, finally mirroring his blue eyes in the darker ones of Dave. "You were not ready!"
Dave touched Kurt's arm, covered with heavy coat. He avoided touching the naked skin of his cheek, despite the wanting, the desire.
He felt a trembling in Kurt's body, and his cheeks were pinker than normal.
Kurt felt his throat getting dry and his stomach twisted. Dave was a big boy, but he was touching him like a butterfly lying gently on a flower.
It was something so pure and delicate that it made him feel dirty.
Dave loved him, and Kurt saw it so clearly that it moved him. Once he had doubted Dave's feelings, he was so stupid.
"I forgive you," Dave whispered, and there had never been more perfect words. "Not that I believe there is something to forgive you for ..."
Kurt smiled. One of those smiles that made Dave melt.
Hidden in the corridors, around a bunch of teenagers with similar faces, dealing with classes tasks and early crushes, Dave watched Kurt laugh with textbooks in his hands and perfectly combined hair, as he walked beside Rachel Berry or Mercedes Jones.
They cheered on Lady Gaga's songs, and talked about the most handsome guys.
It was the most natural and beautiful thing Dave did ever seen. At the same time, it made him feel sick in his stomach.
Something about it made him angry, every time he watched that soft smile and eyes of Kurt so free of any concern.
He could not be him. He could not have him.
It was envy feeling, mixed with the still-eager desire that made him want to stretch his arm, grasping the other guy by the hand and saying his name, so many times that he could no longer say anything else.
"Kurt."
They had been so close but so incredibly distant.
They were still distant, despite his hand being placed on that slim arm and Kurt blushing as if that had been his first date with a boy.
"I wanted to dance with you."
Dave noticed that once they was out, those words would never disappear.
Yet the sound of truth was all that remained.
Kurt seemed to shudder again, suddenly conscious of the meaning of that moment for Dave.
He felt Dave's feelings and knew that it was just them in the car that night.
The rest was no longer important.
"It would have happened if I kept my mouth shut."
Dave would have tightened around Kurt's hips, and they would have danced like in one of those cartoons that Carole, his stepmother, was collecting from childhood. Those where a girl with a beautiful dress danced with her Disney's prince charming. There would not be any girl, of course, but that would not have prevented them from looking into their eyes and getting lost in one another.
"I told you, Kurt, you have no fault."
Dave was still touching him, as he was scared that Kurt would disappear, and there was nothing left to live for him.
Kurt instead felt the weight of that blame like a heavy rock on his back.
"You are wrong. I should have known what it meant for you, more than everyone else. "
Dave shook his head, with a much older smile than his real age painted on those lips of which Kurt still vaguely remembered the taste.
"You did not know, Kurt. You do not even know it now. "
It was not an accusation, but a simple affirmation, and Kurt felt a slight indignation, which struck his heart and then climbed up, taking the form of a huge ball stuck in his throat which prevented him from breathing.
Kurt knew. He was crying to Mercedes saying he liked guys. He lived for years in terror that his father would stop loving him.
The looks, the laughs, the insults.
Fighting for what he believed in and at the same time want to be so small and disappear from the world.
Kurt knew everything also because of what Dave did.
It was like he traveled back in time, and see those big hands that pushed him ruthlessly against the hard lockers, which never lacked to leave him big bruises on his fair skin.
Kurt wondered why, but only when his dad was asleep, and he was alone.
He wondered why he never found an answer.
Dave folded his head. He loved this Kurt's side too. His firmness.
"What I mean is that you and I are different. It would have been different. "
Kurt had chosen courage, Dave preferred to take refuge in violence. Like the hero and antagonist of the same novel.
Dave saw himself, a few years before, in front of his image reflected in a mirror.
"You like boys. You like him. "
He was beating his "dark" side until his hands were cut by broken glass.
"It's not true," she snapped.
He could see himself laughing in the mirror. It was a mocking smile that persecuted him, like the monster under the bed he was afraid of as a child.
"You're disgusting, David Karofsky."
The smile became a laugh, and Dave thought for the first time to use those sharp glasses to wound his wrists, and to see the blood slip out until he was empty.
Then his instinct of survival intervened.
Dave lay down on the bed, touching a girl with blue eyes and snow skin.
She whispered, while he was kissing those imaginary lips and sliding his hands in those brown hair.
He touched the wind, and touched her.
Lie. It's a lie.
Those laughs made him shiver.
"It's all right," he said to himself at that time, but he knew it was just an illusion.
The girl had stopped being a girl. She had never been a girl.
Dave also wanted him for that.
"It's his fault. Destroy him and you will be free."
And Dave had tried it, but every time he had destroyed himself a little bit more.
He threw away that thought, and focused on Kurt's arm, to whom he stood firm as an anchor of salvation.
Suddenly it did not seem enough.
Because Kurt did not love him.
"Everyone already knew about you, Kurt, and whoever had any problems with you being simply stayed out of your way. Your friends loved you because of who you were, and didn't want you different. The cute gay boy with voice of an angel and delicate moves. The one who likes musicals and is always dressed in fashion clothes."
Dave took a breath, then went on.
"Looking at you, they knew you'd walk hand in hand with another cute guy. I do not mean they all accepted it, but it was part of you. It was what people expected."
And for Dave, accept it was harder than for everyone else. Because that cute guy with whom he imagined Kurt with was far too different from him.
"It would have been strange if you had not been gay, actually. When you pretend to date Brittany? They laughed because they were looking at something weird. It did not make sense. "
Kurt remained speechless, and thought again about his father. The man who knew his son was gay from the day he was three years old.
None of his friends had been disturbed or disgusted by his sexuality.
Finn had insulted him in their basement, but by now Kurt had accepted his share of guilt in what had happened.
"Now look at me, Kurt," Dave went on, sadly and with a shade of anger in the deep voice of his.
"There is nothing delicate in me. I like sports and action movies. All my clothes look the same, and I've never bought anything out of a mall. "
Dave stared at his hands, holding a sob.
"People expect me to drink beer at the bar with friends and talk about women. They expect me to find a wife, make children, become more fat on the couch by eating junk food and watching football games. The people I used to hang with, my only friends, were the ones who avoided you and taken it out of you for your sexuality. Imagining a guy like me kissing another guy is just an insult to nature to them. When it comes to you it's understandable, but I'm just a monster."
Dave began to weep, weeping as a child who calls his mother. A mother who would never answer him because she thought something in him was wrong.
Dave imagined himself at McKinley's locker, punching it, as he did when Kurt had rejected his second kiss.
"They think I'm a monster."
Dave also thought about it. The mirror repeated it to him every night.
Dave had really become a monster. The Prince who becomes Beast because he is not able to love.
Kurt wiped his eyes, he could see in his mind Dave climbing on a chair and thinking of not seeing the dawn of the next day.
Dave, who might not have been there with him.
"You're not a monster," Kurt murmured, finally laying his hand on the knee of the other boy.
Touching suddenly seemed indispensable. He was no longer afraid.
The wall they had raised between their bodies to protect their hearts was finally shattering.
"Being gay has nothing to do with musicals, or with fashion. It's love, David. Someone would use the word sex, but it's wrong for me. It's about who you love. With whom you want to live your life, with whom you want to wake up every day. Love."
Love also made humans the most terrible monsters. Dave had learned it on his skin.
On Valentine's Day, Dave had taken off the gorilla mask he had worn to take Kurt's hand and tell him he loved him.
It was not the only mask to disappear that night.
"I know, Kurt. I know it. But they? No. They do not care. They think being gay is a disease that passes from one person to another as a cold. If you don't walk like a girl or spend the evenings doing pajama parties girls then you can not be gay. For them I am something so wrong that it should not exist."
Dave stared at the sky, too black and with no stars, and he realized he would snow soon.
The house where his mother lived temporarily with Aunt Janice reminded him of a Victorian villa where only ghosts could survive.
It seemed that life had drained from the ground, and that he and Kurt were the only survivors of a never-fought war.
Kurt thought again to Finn, his adorable and clumsy half-brother.
He saw his fellow footballers insulting him, because Finn was gay, in their eyes. He was because he lived with Kurt, slept in a room just a few yards away, and Finn liked to sing. And danc, even though he had never learned to do it right.
It was enough for no longer considering him one of them. One of the guys.
Kurt knew that Dave's words contained a cruel as absurd truth.
Kurt lived his daily life in the part of the world that loved acceptance, but Dave had to adapt to the opposite faction. He had learned to survive, like an animal climbing with his nails and teeth on the tallest tree to get to the only source of food and not die.
Without realizing it, he had become the monster that frightened him when he looked in the mirror.
Dave shoved his hand out of Kurt's arm, and Kurt moved away from Dave's knee as if he started to burn.
Both resumed neutral positions, sitting in the car.
Dave had stopped crying, but that silence seemed more desperate than his tears.
Kurt could hear it. His heart had a shade of black that even the night didn't know.
Kurt took off his gloves, and the warmth of his soft skin made him return to reality.
Dave was alive.
In pieces, but alive.
"Would you be straight? If you could choose, I mean."
It would have been easy to say yes. Kurt was expecting that answer.
It was equivalent to walking a safe road.
Dave's greatest desire had always been to be like everyone else, to walk through the crowd without people turning away.
But now he wanted something a lot more.
To be inebriated by those eyes of the same color of the sea, to hear that voice whispering in his ear the words of a song he did not know.
He looked at Kurt again, and knew he would never want to stop looking at him.
"No," said Dave, and could see the astonishment painted on that beautiful face.
"No, because I love you. And even if you don't love me back, I think it's worth it. "
Dave had met his mother for the last time hoping for a miracle.
But his miracle had assumed a different form, and was in front of him.
Kurt stretched out his arm, and touched Dave's warm cheek. He touched him as he would do with something small, fragile, that he could break easily.
He did not want to hurt him.
For Dave that touch was infinite.
"I know. I know you love me. "
And that was enough. To know that he knew.
The rest were just words in the wind.
"When did you notice it?" Kurt asked, with a loud, but affectionate voice.
Dave had fallen in love with Kurt the day he had been forgiven by him, but that feeling had taken several faces over the years, as Dave grew up, and from a child he had become a teenager.
Attraction. Anger. Hate.
Love had been a milestone that he had achieved after a suffering journey that had wounded him unimaginably.
It was Kurt from the very first moment, before Dave began to discuss what sex was with his peers. It was Kurt before he actually knew Kurt.
Dave was only fourteen, and his whole world had changed.
Dave could tell Kurt that his forgiveness had opened his heart to love, but it would be just a tiny bit of truth.
"The first year at McKinley," said the boy with hazel eyes, and seemed as though an unknown door finally widened.
A door beyond which little Dave was still locked.
Kurt did not know what to say. He had learned Dave's name only two years later.
Before that, Dave had thrown slushies to anyone who was different, without distinction.
Kurt knew him as the guy in the Hockey team that it was preferable to avoid passing from one class to another. He knew that Dave attended elementary school with Finn, and that he wanted to be popular. Just this.
Little awareness that made Dave Karofsky similar to a thousand other guys scattered around the world.
The idea of being the center of a boy's attentions at that time had never touched Kurt.
Kurt imagined love in the most idealistic way. If someone loved him, he would think, he would find flowers and love cards in his locker, or he would be asked out with a serenade.
He did not know that love also had a dark side.
Kurt dreamed of a perfect boy kissing his hand and opening the car doors for him, while Dave wondered why the boys talks about girls seemed so boring.
Kurt had never seen that thread that tied them to each other.
"The first… year?"
Dave was about to reveal his secret, and Kurt did not know what would change in his world after listening to him.
None of them was sure that that door would ever be closed behind them after.
If Kurt did not have a desperate need to understand, he would simply ask Dave to give him a ride home.
But he did not, because that need was based on the innate curiosity of the human being.
"It never happened before looking at you. I never thought about ... "
Dave interrupted himself, and covered his mouth with his sweaty hand. His tanned complexion sank with a crimson tint, similar to blood. He bit his lips, and imagined he was air. Enter Kurt, and then disappear into the atmosphere.
It was such a strange thought that he thought he was crazy.
Kurt had reddened cheeks too, and his eyes glittered. Dave could see the many colors of his irises. Blue and light blue, green and gold.
They seemed to be the abstract masterpiece of a visionary artist.
"about... sex?" Kurt whispered, with a voice so subtle that it seemed like a whistle in that empty world.
Kurt's rosy color had reached her ears.
Dave merely nodded.
Dave used to imagine female spirits without face. Spirits with harmonious curves that laid next to him and clutched him in their soft arms.
He breathed in their breasts, and they sang him songs using words he did not understand.
Growing up, he decided to put faces to those spirits.
He used magazine covers, faces of women smiling in commercials, actresses who played protagonist roles in his favorite movies. Sometimes she kissed them, closing his eyes, but touching them seemed wrong.
Wrong like stealing something in the shop where his father bought cigarettes.
She admired the beauty of a woman, but the idea of being part of her never came to him.
Dave was still innocent, while his friends find the hot tones of sexuality one after the other.
Azimio talked to him about his sister's babysitter, and the black lace bra that he had been able to glimpse through the semi-transparent white of her blouse. He said that he dreamed of her, and that he had vividly felt her wet lips touch his intimacy until he reached orgasm.
Dave listened with attention, as if it were the story of an alien planet.
Then interest became boring.
He could not put himself in Azimio's shoes, and he found nothing scandalously exciting in that lace bra.
His friends imagined prosperous women, Dave preferred the company of his maternal fantasies.
Sex just did not care.
He thought that maybe he was just too much of a child, and shook off that sense of restlessness that seemed to preach his diversity.
He took the middle school diploma, still sure that there was nothing strange in him.
His universe changed when he saw Kurt Hummel drying his eyes, covered with strawberry slushie, in one of McKinley high school corridors.
Dave imagined those graceful hands on his face, and that frail body without clothes lying in the blankets of his bed. A dim light that illuminated that snow-covered skin, which Dave kissed with ardor, marking it with obscenities. He slid his tongue between those lips, and moaned, while his erection painfully pressed against that of the other.
They made love for hours, find themselves letting their fingers and mouths join together to form something unique.
It was real, and Dave knew that. Real like hisalarm clock that sounded every morning at seven o'clock, real like the smell of smoke that permeated his father's studio, real like models of planes that Dave loved to build in the solitude of his room.
Dave closed himself in the school bathroom, where he masturbated for the first time before vomiting breakfast.
"I thought I didn't care so much about sex because I was just fourteen years old, and grew up in a Catholic family. I didn't think it was so strange that a kid wasn't so obsessed about sleeping with women. "
Dave spoke in a low voice, as he was saying a prayer in a confessional.
"Then I saw you."
Kurt felt no embarrassment or shame, knowing Dave's thoughts.
Because Dave referred to him as something sacred.
"If you knew you were gay thinking about me that way, why did you start bullying me just two years later?"
Dave chuckled, but it was the saddest laugh that Kurt had ever heard.
He wanted to touch him again, more intimately. Like in Dave's dreams.
Then he thought of Blaine, and closed his eyes for embarrassment.
"Because at that time it was just sex. My plan was to say nothing to anyone, and pretend it was not true. Like one of those famous men who have a family but are secretly perverted. "
At just fourteen, Dave began to live in the lie. He faked interest in cheerleaders, and began to speak of lace bras with a religious fervor.
He told his friends he had lost his virginity at a party with a girl he had forgotten name.
Everyone congratulated and no one asked too many questions.
"Wanting to have sex with a boy does not make you a pervert," Kurt said, the same tone a father who scolds a child for saying a bad word would use. His lips were close, and his eyes were annoyed.
Dave wanted to kiss him until he had no air in the lungs.
"I did not know that then." Dave spoke with emphasis, like a poet who recited verses. He wanted Kurt to understand how much he had changed.
"I was not particularly interested in girls, but I did not feel any repulsion, imagining them. To think of you was my dirty secret, but it would not have prevented me from living a normal life. "
Kurt began to understand, and calmed down.
"It was the only way I knew to deal with that situation without being crazy."
During the same year, Dave thought of getting himself a gilfriend and asked to go out to one of his peers. She was called Jessica.
He took her to the movies and kissed her before bring her home.
He decided later to never call her again. He thought he would have waited for the right girl.
"But then something has changed."
The right girl did not come. It was just a ghost similar to his faceless women.
"What?" Kurt asked.
Dave opened his eyes and saw Kurt grinning at his side.
His hair were messy, and Dave remembered having spent the night clinging with his fingers to those chocolate-colored silks. A timid smile formed on his lips, still swollen for all kisses that had been exchanged.
"Good morning, sleepy-head," Kurt murmured.
Dave touched Kurt's back, drawing geometric shapes with his fingertips.
"Good morning sunshine."
Dave told him, and it was the truth. Kurt reminded him of the first snow in winter, the rainbow after a thunderstorm, a gift wrapped under a Christmas tree.
His splendor was so vast that Dave often forgot that it was not a god but a human being.
Kurt kissed him on his lips, and Dave tried to be as close to him as possible.
"I still want you," he said.
But when he opened his eyes he was still alone.
Dave wiped his cheeks, wet by his salty tears.
Those dreams still persecuted him, and waking up seemed more and more difficult.
"It was no longer sex, it was ... intimacy. I wanted to hold you, kiss, take your hand. I could no longer pretend it was nothing. "
Kurt made himself silent, wondering what Dave's desires meant to him.
He wondered how he could talk to Blaine and pretend he did not know anything.
Awareness hit him like a fist in his stomach. He should run away from Dave. Or touch him.
Both possibilities would change his whole existence.
Kurt covered his face and cried silently. Dave knew the reason for that crying, so he did not ask for anything.
He did not try to approach Kurt, knowing that he would probably be the last time.
No action would have been enough.
"Don't cry," he begged, but Kurt was not listening.
He thought of Dave's timid smile on Valentine's Day, that big, rough hand holding his.
Before deciding what to do he needed to give something to Dave. Create with him a bond that he would never break.
Dave deserved it.
"I want to tell you a secret."
Kurt gasped among the sobs, trying to grab enough air to speak, while Dave would have preferred to run away from that car, screaming and pretending that it was only a bad dream.
Kurt was giving him a moment that would only be theirs, and to which Dave would cling to the afternoons when he would call the other without receiving a response.
A farewell gift. A reason for him to live.
While Dave just wanted him.
"I have never even told my dad, or Carol. Not even to any of my friends. "
It will be just ours.
They made love with words. They gave themselves to the other using just letters and tears.
And it was more unfair than anything else Dave could think of.
"Remember the night we met the Scandals?"
Dave remembered having looked at Kurt from afar and thought of a mirage.
He had recognized his back, and his elegant style. Kurt was seated at the bar with a soft drink in his hand, and looked at his boyfriend trying to dance with another guy. A tall, slender guy that Dave had seen many times before.
Kurt was pouting, and biting his lips. Dave was sure he was the most adorable thing he'd ever seen, but at the same time he made him terribly nervous.
Because Kurt was alone, and his boyfriend decided he was not worthy of a look.
Dave had approached, with the only intention of making him laugh.
He did not believe he had the right to want more.
But his heart refused to listen to him, and Dave had come home, wondering if to call Kurt, and to hear his crystal voice again. He would tell him about his new friends and his amazing grades in math. He would tell him about his dream to receive a football scholarship, and he would hear what Kurt's dreams were in return. He was sure they had to do with Broadway or Fashion.
He would have asked him to go out for a coffee, whispering it as a secret biggest as the future of the world.
He had imagined that conversation dozens of times, but he had never called. Kurt.
He knew that Kurt deserved more than a phone call, and Dave did not want to be like that boy who had left him in the corner of the Scandals.
Kurt did not wait for Dave's answer. He knew that the boy remembered.
"Blaine and I were at Scandals with Sebastian Smythe. He was dancing with Blaine all night. "
Sebastian Smythe.
Dave was almost certain that he was the same guy he'd been asked out months before meeting Kurt again. He wasn't looking for a serious story, but someone to call his boyfriend to feel stronger, and face life with a smile.
He did not perfectly remember Sebastian's words, but certainly had gone wrong.
"Sebastian wanted to sleep with Blaine. He didn't feel any shame in me noticing the thing. He made dirty jokes and derided my self-esteem. I was so scared. "
"You ... scared?"
Dave knew Kurt as the boy who was never afraid of anything.
Dave had watched him rise from the dumpsters where he was thrown by the Football team members, and simply shrugged.
The Kurt which Dave remembered knew how to take care for himself, but the Kurt that Dave didn't know counted too much for the support of Blaine, and often fell on the floor.
"Sebastian was sexuality, desire and passion. I knew Blaine was attracted to him, to the unknown. On the other hand, I still smelled of hot milk and stuffed animals. It was a lost war at the start. "
Dave would never have imagined it.
Kurt had made him discover sexual desire. Dave listened to him singing, staring at him as the boy bent over to pick up something, lose himself while looking at his thin hips, and then closed his eyes, and Kurt was his. It happened night after night. Dave was in Kurt, and Kurt was in Dave.
He had never stopped thinking that for Kurt those gestures were totally random and asexual.
"Blaine was drunk, he could barely stend. I tried to put him on the back seat of my car when he grabbed me. He tried to kiss me and touch me. I said no, David. But he didn't listen to me. "
Dave felt a chill shiver climbing along his spine. His sweaty hands trembled.
The wind hissed like a rattlesnake.
Kurt kept staring at the void. Dave could see the thin, dry lines of tears wetting his porcelain-colored cheeks.
He had not eaten anything, yet he was about to vomit.
Dave imagined that Kurt was safe. He firmly believed that no one could hurt him as he had done in the past.
Yet Kurt had discovered the evil in the person he loved most.
He thought of Blaine, who was dancing with Sebastian Smythe on the Scandals dance floor. He imagined to hit him on his face, and to dry his blood out of his hands.
Dave had changed, but nobody else had hurt Kurt before then. He had never considered what his reaction would be to a hypothetical scenario in which Kurt was in danger.
"Christ Kurt. Did he...? "
Dave could not pronounce that word.
He was sure that if he had the sky would have open itself, and there would have been so many horrible demons that would kill both of them.
The air was poisonous and infected, filled with anguish.
Kurt was fast to shake his head.
"No. David, no. God, he would never go so far. "
Dave finally managed to breathe again. He noticed that he had small wounds on his hands, where his nails pushed too deeply. He did not feel the pain until that moment.
"What happened next is the most important part."
Dave did not want to hear more, but he knew he would do it.
Because he loved Kurt, and Kurt wanted to be heard.
He let the other go on, trying to get rid of the sense of oppression that made him lacerate. He did not want them to be the last words Kurt ever said to him.
Not those.
"I made love to him for the first time the night after."
And Dave broke in so many pieces. He no longer knew which fragment of his person was there, and what he had lost in the void.
Kurt bit his lips as the first snow flakes fell from the dark sky.
He saw the uncertain touches of Blaine, their clothes lurking next to the bed, their moans and love statements.
"It was all I wanted. Sweet, romantic. "
He had allowed Blaine to have his body because he did not want the other to move away from him. He had tied Blaine to himself using weapons he did not think he possessed.
"Yet the reasons I did it was wrong."
Dave knew, yet he did not stop hurting.
He knew there was no way out.
"You did it because you were afraid that Sebastian would take him away."
Kurt nodded sadly, aware of telling the truth for the first time in his life.
"It was not just Sebastian. It could have been anyone. I was sure he would leave me. I told Blaine that it was the most important moment of my life. And it was, David. Yet I just want to be able to go back. "
Kurt could never cancel what he had done.
"It should be just for love, don't you think? Especially the first time. "
Dave knew it was true.
Many times he found himself at Scandals bathroom with an unknown boy. He kissed him and touched him on his clothes. He had called his name from his lips as a prayer.
Then he had stopped. Everytime.
Dave did not know intimacy but he knew love.
Kurt thought he knew both of them until he had accepted the truth.
Because Blaine had not seen him, and had not stopped.
Kurt dropped into the car seat while new tears replaced the old ones.
"You should not love me. I'm a mess. "
At that Dave laughed. He did not laugh like that in years.
Kurt looked at him as an unknown creature, and Dave could see the thousand questions that shaped between those rose-colored lips.
Dave decided then that he would play everything. Kurt would have said goodbye after, maybe, but he would be free.
"How would you think my life would be if I had not met you?"
Dave could see his shadow hanging from the ceiling. Sometimes it was dreams, sometimes simple light and dark games that in his mind became macabre performances in which he was just a corpse left to rot.
He always found his head pierced in the toilet, and with the acrid taste of vomit that burned his throat.
"You're not eighteen yet, and you've said goodbye to the world already."
He did that, he could not deny it.
His therapist called it post-traumatic stress disorder. He said there were wounds not yet healed.
And Dave felt them. Wounds open and bleeding in the deepest depths of his soul.
He left the bathroom and went back to the bedroom. He closed his eyes looking for the light switch, like a blind man moving through the crowd.
He sighed, taking away the nausea.
He slept no more than five hours, and tiredness began to be felt. He would collapse to the ground if he had not been so scared to see himself dead again.
Sometimes he stared at the wall in silence, sometimes turning to one side and losing himself in a tangle of confused thoughts that accompanied him until dawn.
It was during one of those nights, that looked all the same to Dave, that he saw the light for the first time.
He wondered how he did not see it before. It was blinding.
He took an album from under the bed, McKinley's book, and flipped through the pages until he found the one that depicted the Glee Club.
Dave laughed, in tears.
He touched Kurt's smile, clumsy and childish. He imagined that he holded that guy in his arms, and it seemed to be true.
It was all he needed.
He slept in the guest room, and did not wake up before midday. The school yearbook was under his pillow, and Dave imagined two thin arms cradling him until awakening.
"Even if you said goodbye to the world it does not matter. You are here now. We are together."
"I would have found out that I'm gay, sooner or later. I would have through anger and frustration against anyone who tried to be my friend. I would have stayed in solitude, and I would have say goodbye to my parents after graduating from high school. I wouldn't have call them anymore. I would have disappeared from the world. Perhaps with a new name. "
Kurt listened to the terrible fantasy and wondered how Dave could laugh.
"I would have never admit to being gay even to myself. Sooner or later I would have find a cute boy, and we would end up in bed. I would have taken refuge in alcohol to forget how much I liked the experience. Maybe I'd find a pretty stupid girl, and I'd marry her without even looking at her face well. "
Dave remembered Santana Lopez in McKinley's dinner table. Listening to her, Dave had been afraid of the future for the first time.
"We would end up hating each other. Not that she would be wrong. I would have done nothing but drink, go drunk at work, and touch her only if forced. The night of our anniversary, maybe.
"What matters is that sooner or later I would have done that, Kurt, I would have killed myself. And no one would have stop me. No one would care. I would have been one of those lifeless bodies thrown into a pit and nobody would not even want to bring flowers to my stone."
Kurt knew only then why Dave was laughing.
"But I met you."
Dave saw himself again, looking at Kurt's photo before falling asleep. It had become a habit.
Dave would grow up and grow older, only thanks to Kurt.
"Falling in love with you saved me. You saved me. "
And Kurt knew at that moment what was right.
He caressed Dave's face with pale hands, and approached his lips.
He regretted having made love with Blaine.
But he would never regret what he was doing at that time.
Dave's lips were warm and wet, they tasted like tears and love.
Kurt could not ask for anything else.
Dave clutched him, and Kurt was lost in that warm and thoughtful embrace. It was his home.
Just as the kiss his mother gave to his father each morning before seeing him leave for the workshop.
Kurt, just a few years old at that time, wondered if there was anything just as perfect in the world.
And now he knew there was.
Kurt pushed his tongue against Dave's lips, and the boy opened them for him.
"I love you," Dave repeated with kisses, but they both knew words were useless at that point.
Dave loved Kurt of a love that could not be explained in words.
Kurt loved Dave of a love he would never regret.
If the world had been perfect, that kiss would never end.
Both of them recomposed, and they breathed.
Dave wanted to live, even just to be able to think about this kiss over and over until his last days. He had absorbed Kurt's energy through their lips.
And he was fine.
He said nothing, but grabbed his hand.
Their fingers intertwined perfectly as a divine design, so beautiful and tremendously rich in meanings.
Kurt knew his place in the world now.
"You should go home."
Dave lit the car, sad that the traces of their passage would be canceled by the fresh snow.
They will remain in our memories.
If Kurt had listened to his heart, he would have made love with Dave that night.
If Dave had listened to his heart, he would have asked Kurt to make love that night.
None of them did that step.
Loyalty to Blaine persuaded Kurt to wait, for Dave it was insecurities.
They simply hold hands in silence, during the journey that would separate them.
They knew that time would put them in one of the arms of the other. All they had to do was wait.
Dave parked in front of Hummel-Hudson's home, and with regret left Kurt's hand. He sighed, he knew that sooner or later the moment would come.
Kurt got off the car and looked at Dave. His eyes were hazy with sparks of green, his hair too short, his solid, robust body that would have protected him and sheltered him.
Dave was his, Dave would be his always.
Likewise, Kurt wanted to belong to Dave.
"Call me. When you get home. Or before. Call me."
He could have said millions of things, yet he was acting as a kid.
Dave nodded in silence. He had listened to all the words Kurt never said.
He saw him disappear in that house with lights still lit, but a part of Kurt was still with him.
Dave saw him.
He waited for ten minutes, then grabbed the cell phone from his jeans pocket and made Kurt's number.
"David ..."
The other boy answered almost immediately. Dave heard in the background Finn Hudson's curses against the zombies of a video game, and a female voice, probably his mother, who was telling him to lower the tone.
But Dave only cared for Kurt.
"Be with me."
He did not say anything else. Everything else seemed superfluous.
He could see Kurt's smile in his mind, the same as the picture of the yearbook.
Dave had never been happier.
"I will."
Sorry, English isn't my language.