Part One

…and you know you're gonna lie to you
in your own way.

It's been seven years since Kurt Hummel left William McKinley High School behind him for New York City and an education in performance art. Six since he said good-bye to Blaine Anderson, a tearful departure at the airport when Blaine left for college in California, instead of the reunion in New York the two of them had been planning since junior year. Four years since he has been romantically involved with anyone, and honestly, he's fine with that. Kurt has grown up. He doesn't need a pair of pretty eyes looking at him like he hung the moon to make him feel special anymore. He doesn't need someone else to make him believe in his own magic; he's learned to do it himself, to stand on his own two feet and know who he is. He has too much in his life, too many blessings and responsibilities, too many wonderful friends, to bemoan a lack of romantic attachment. He is truly living his dreams.

Of course, no dream comes without a price. It's been two years since he's had the time to go home to see his parents, and somehow or other six months have gone by since he's called home at all. He's just been so busy with rehearsals, and work, and constant cycles of auditions...he'll call when he has time, and they'll understand. They know how happy he is, how hard he's worked to build these beginnings of the life he always wanted. They know that sometimes he just gets so busy that he forgets to keep in touch, and he does feel guilty sometimes, but they never try to make him feel that way.

What Kurt doesn't know yet is that when you refuse to slow down you will inevitably forget part of what it means to live, and then fate has a way of sneaking up on you, of making you stop and take notice. Today is Kurt Hummel's 25th birthday, and fate is about to throw him a curveball.

He has no special celebration plans for the day; he's going to save the partying for the weekend. He's usually quite the miser, but he did think he might take an extra-long lunch at a nice restaurant, maybe somewhere he's never tried. Other than that he has lines to learn, costumes to get fitted for, his evening jog and his weekly load of laundry…all the things he does every day of the week, and a little thing like his birthday can't be allowed to upset the routine. He doesn't think it explicitly or say it out loud, but he feels it: this life he's chosen is beautiful, but it's also quick, it's hard, and if he slows down or slacks off it will bury him alive faster than he can blink an eye.

He does allow himself the extra ten minutes it takes for a coffee detour on the way to rehearsals. They're not singing today, so he indulges in a latte for once, and a blueberry scone. He pays and is turning to leave-in and out in six minutes, a new record-when he finds himself frozen on the spot by a glimpse of a dark red shirt and a face that's familiar despite the intervention of time. He thinks, "hey, I remember you."

The hair is different: it seems thicker and darker somehow, like it's been allowed a little room to grow, and it curls slightly over the squared forehead. The eyes are the exact same, and set below the same unmistakable arch of eyebrows any beautician in the world would be defied to recreate. His heavy-jawed, masculine face looks relaxed, more contented than Kurt ever remembers seeing it. He's reading something; The New Yorker? Really? He's not going to look up, not going to notice that Kurt is there, and Kurt battles with himself for a moment, trying to decide whether to go over and say hello or just leave and forget about it, keep the past in the past where it belongs. Just as he makes up his mind to get out, the object of his indecision looks up and notices Kurt frozen halfway between the counter and the door, staring at him.

Dave Karofsky's eyes widen for a moment, but then they warm, and the corners crinkle up as he smiles, and oh. Kurt's never seen him smile like that before, and it—this whole weird moment in time-does things to his brain that he just does not understand, because this is Dave Karofsky. The last time Kurt saw him he was sitting in a gay bar in Lima, Ohio. Kurt's thought about him from time to time since then, wondered what he was doing and whether he was doing okay…but he never expected to actually see him again, and certainly not in New York City.

What is Dave doing in New York City, anyway?

"It's rude to stare, Kurt," he says, his voice pitched low and teasing. It snaps Kurt right out of whatever thoughts he had just been having. "Even in New York. Are you gonna come say hello or not?"

Well, that just about does it. Dave Karofsky is in New York City, in one of Kurt's favorite coffee shops and on Kurt's birthday, no less. He's well dressed, good-looking and positively civilized, and Kurt's the one standing around gaping like a fish. He flounders for just a second, looking for a way to save face and keep the high ground in this encounter, assuming he ever had it, but one quirk of that eyebrow has his feet moving forward instead. He folds himself into the chair across from Dave's and just looks at him, taking him in. He realizes without fully articulating it in his thoughts that he is profoundly relieved to see the man sitting across from him, looking so utterly well.

"You look great, Dave. I mean, it's great to see you. Um…how have you been?"

Bless him, Dave doesn't laugh in his face. He doesn't acknowledge at all how tongue-tied Kurt is. He just sets his reading aside, leans forward just the littlest bit, and starts to tell Kurt what he's doing here, what he's been doing for the last seven years, and how his life has been turning out. He went to a community college for a couple of years before he transferred out of the state. He worked his way through, doing an assortment of odd and interesting jobs: bartending, construction work, babysitting, even a few summers spent driving a transfer truck. Kurt listens, and asks questions; the first one he goes for is obvious: Dave came out to his parents just after he graduated from college. His father was very supportive, but his mother needed some time. Occasionally it's still a bit awkward. Yes, he's had a boyfriend or two, but no, he isn't seeing anyone right now. He's in New York on business, actually, only for about a week.

Kurt forgets that he had somewhere to be in four minutes, and doesn't remember it for hours. It's like they've stepped into some kind of time suspension where everything else is secondary to Kurt's chance sighting of David Karofsky and his sudden desire to know where he has been, and who that person is now, anyway. They sit in that coffee shop until lunchtime, just talking, catching up as if they're old friends instead of old…many things, but never really friends. Later he doesn't remember how it happened, but the subject changes to him halfway through, and as he tells Dave about his life he watches Dave listen. Really listen. He isn't waiting for his turn to speak or looking for a way to segue off into his own stories. He just listens to Kurt, and asks his own questions, and by the time Kurt's stomach reminds him that he's missed his morning rehearsal and, by the way, needs to eat something sometime soon, the two of them are laughing, and reminiscing, and poking fun at the antics of their respective social circles from William McKinley. Dave asks Kurt to lunch and Kurt, smiling, says yes.

…know too well…

David Karofsky was no longer a closet-case or a homophobic bully, but he was still, and would always be, someone who had terrified Kurt in high school, made him feel low and gross and unsafe. He was also the first kiss Kurt had ever had from a boy, and damned if he wanted to open up that Pandora's box, but the memory still made him feel a strange combination of queasy and very, very sad.

And yet...there were other memories, too. A glimpse of Dave's face from afar as he danced with the McKinley High glee club and his fellow football players during half time at the championship game. He'd looked so happy then. A shape in the darkness of the auditorium, so faint and dark he almost couldn't make it out behind the brightness of the stage lights, watching him as he performed Born This Way with his friends. He didn't know how he knew that person watching had been Dave; he just did. Who else would it be?

The strange feeling of awkward shyness and total safety he felt walking at David's side down the hallway in the weeks leading up to prom. The bright smile on his face as he accepted his crown and scepter after being named junior Prom King, and the devastation on that face mere minutes later as he walked away and left Kurt standing alone on the dance floor. Kurt didn't hate him for it; someone else had been there to take Kurt's hand and make sure he wasn't alone. It hadn't been fair of him to ask that of David...he knew that now.

Another, final memory stood above all the others, somehow. It was something Kurt had thought of more often than he even realized. Over the years it had become a ward against fear and his increasingly rare moments of self-doubt. Whenever he felt small or insufficient, not good enough...he saw a pair of hazel eyes looking out at him from underneath the bill of a baseball cap, dimly lit in his memory by red and blue lights and set against a backdrop of disco music and small-town drag queens. It always gave him a surge of confidence to think of that night, even though all things considered the very thought of it should have made him want to cry. He and Blaine had had a fight in the car, their first since they started dating and their longest by far, before or since. But whenever Kurt thought of Scandals he thought not of Blaine, but of Dave, and whenever he thought of that conversation with Dave in Scandals, he felt briefly but truly invincible.

It was too bad he couldn't reconcile these two images of Dave Karofsy in his head somehow, make them fit with the man Dave had become.

When Dave realized that their lunch was taking place on Kurt's birthday, he insisted on buying. They went to a place in Little Italy that Kurt had never tried called Caffe Napoli. It was an open-air cafe on the corner of Hester and Mulberry, and their food was exquisite. They chatted and people-watched, and Kurt thought at the time that he had never felt more at ease with another person in his life. He told Dave about college, and auditions. He admitted to how much scarier he'd found New York City when he'd arrived there for the second time, without his friends or a chaperon to act as a buffer between himself and this place that was the epitome of the real world and all his dreams combined into one terrifying spectacle of sensory overload and unfamiliar faces.

"This was…fun, David. Thank you," Kurt said. It was after lunch and they were standing at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. Dave smiled and asked Kurt for his phone. Kurt quirked an eyebrow at him, but handed it over and watched as Dave punched in his number.

"I'll be here until Wednesday," he said, looking into Kurt's face with casual, open friendliness. "Call me if you want to meet for coffee again." Kurt nodded, the light changed, and they went their separate ways. Kurt arrived to his afternoon fitting, called his director to apologize-very luckily, he had worked with this particular lady before, and she liked him and his talent enough that she didn't fire him on the spot-and went home to a lot of undone laundry and a new phone number that felt like it was burning a hole in his pocket.

He debated with himself all evening and well into the next day. He had enjoyed talking to Dave, but did that mean he needed to make it a repeated experience? They shared a lot of history, most of it mutually unpleasant to think about, and he just wasn't sure there was room in his life for the potential can of worms he was thinking of opening. Dave Karofsky had always been a confusing, worrisome force in his life. They knew too much of one another and not enough, and however well they got along for a few hours after a chance meeting, they would likely only cause each other stress. He knew this, but...

He called Dave that next evening as soon as he got home.

…know the chill…

There is no conceivable way to know when something you were lacking, something you didn't even know you were missing, is going to make itself known to you as a fundamental desire, a vital need. One minute Kurt Hummel was a self-sufficient young actor working his way up the New York City theatre circuit. He had no distractions and no romantic entanglements; he was friend to many but lover to no one. He wasn't lonely, or frigid...it just wasn't something he had worried about in a very long time.

And then, quite suddenly, it was.

They had been meeting one another for lunch and coffee-never dinner-for several months before Kurt realized that he was in trouble. It hit him square in the face one day, just like their initial chance meeting had done.

He couldn't imagine a less appropriate form for a sudden romantic interest to take. One second he was sitting across from Dave at The Thirsty Scholar-"The beer they have on tap is awful, but their food is the best,"-just listening to Dave tell him, in animated detail, about a hockey game he'd seen last weekend, and the next it suddenly occurred to him that he was listening, actually listening, to a guy describing a hockey game. And he was fascinated. Dave didn't just tell it in terms of stats and scores and technical jargon; he described it in detail, what it looked like. He turned it into a story, and Kurt just got sucked right into the drama of it all. He looked up from where he was sitting with his cheek propped against his hand, at David's eyes, alight with excitement as if he were reliving every second in living color in his mind, and oh. There it was again, that jolt he'd gotten that first day, when Dave had smiled, but...this time it was stronger. This time, Kurt wasn't too thrown off balance to understand exactly what it was.

Oh.

Oh, oh, oh.

Oh God.

Kurt felt the realization crashing around him like some post-apocalyptic scene of nuclear holocaust. Here he had been thinking it was all so harmless and innocent. Dave had never made any demands on his time, never asked him for anything he couldn't freely give; he gave Kurt his number, waited for Kurt to call him, let Kurt know when he would be in town but never acted as if he had any expectations about spending time together. He had never hinted that there was anything on his mind other than friendship, and so Kurt had let his worries relax and fade.

It never occurred to him to keep an eye on his own feelings, and now here they were, staring him in the face. He was falling-may already have fallen-for Dave Karofsky.

He stood up abruptly.

"Kurt?" Dave looked up at him, concern in his clear hazel eyes. Kurt tried to imagine what his face must look like right now, and came up blank. He didn't know what was going on in his own head, he just knew he needed to get away from this thing that was welling up inside, this feeling that he absolutely could not allow to take hold.

"I have to go," he said, his voice cracking. "I'll call you later."

He left his half of the check on the table and ran out, and Dave didn't try to stop him or follow him. He rode the subway home in a haze of silent disbelief at his own stupidity. Luckily, he had a rare afternoon off, because he just didn't think acting was in the cards for him today. Usually he would have used this time to go over lines or clean his apartment, but when he got home the only thing he did was head straight for the shower, tossing his phone in the direction of the counter on the way and wincing when he heard it start to ring as he was stepping under the hot spray. He closed his eyes, blocked out the ring tone as best he could, and tried not to picture Dave's face collapsed in lines of hurt and bewilderment. He would try to explain this away later, after he got himself under control. He would fix this anomaly in his brain and then go back to enjoying his friendship with Dave with a clear conscience. He would not, under any circumstances, allow himself to act on what he was feeling.

When he got out of the shower he had a missed call and a voicemail. He didn't look at the missed call, just opened up his inbox and listened, heart in his mouth, to the sound of Dave's voice, full of concern.

"Kurt? Please call me. You ran out of here like...I don't know what. I just want to make sure you're all right. Let me know okay?"

Kurt listened to the message twice, and then made himself delete it.

…know she breaks…

"Kurt, I haven't heard from you yet. I'm more than a little worried now. Please just call me and let me know you're okay."

"It's been a week, K. Maybe it's none of my business but I'm really starting to freak out over here. Call me."

"I haven't heard from you in a month. I can't help thinking I must have done something wrong. At least let me apologize for it? I miss...talking to you."

"Okay, I get it. You don't want to talk to me. Can you just text me? Let me know you're all right and I'll leave you alone."

Dave: I'm fine. I'll call you when I can, just really busy. -Kurt H.

Kurt: You don't have to lie to me, K. I understand. Do what you have to do. I enjoyed being your friend. -D. Karofsky

Kurt stared down at the phone in his hand. His finger hovered over the "delete" button for a moment, hesitating. This might very well be the last contact he ever had with David Karofsky, and he had been forcing himself to delete the voicemail messages Dave had been sending for the past couple of months. Every one of them had cut through his heart like a knife. He could hear the concern in Dave's voice fade to painful understanding and then, worst of all on the last one, resignation. He'd listened to each one twice, then deleted them. After a second's hesitation, he did the same to this one. He pressed "delete," watched Dave's words disappear from the screen, and told himself that it didn't matter, either because he could talk to Dave anytime or because Dave didn't mean that much to him.

Truth be told, Kurt was a mess. Oh, on the outside everything was fine. He still stuck to his routine. He still went to all his rehearsals, kept up with his fitness, cleaned his apartment and did his laundry. He still arrived on time and delivered performances that created press buzz and got him noticed for bigger and better parts each time around...

...but at some point the shine had faded. He'd let it go and he didn't know how to get it back, and he absolutely refused to acknowledge that the joy had gone out of his frenetic life the moment he'd cut Dave Karofsky out, because as he kept reminding himself on an almost hourly basis, Dave Karofsky did not matter. Couldn't matter, not like that.

Why not? He asked himself stubbornly, on his more honest nights of laying awake and staring at his ceiling, thinking of Dave. He seemed to do this a lot lately. Why can't he matter to me? He's not the same person, I know he's not. Why can't I just call him, apologize for being an asshole, and beg him to let me take him to dinner to make up for it?

But Kurt knew why. Some scars run too deep for healing. Did he really want to start a relationship with someone who was such a huge, looming black mark on his past? Even if that person had changed? Even if that person made his heart beat faster just by walking into the room, and somehow managed to make hockey games actually interesting? Kurt knew the answer; it was a no-brainer. That kind of relationship was doomed from the start, inherently dysfunctional and sure to end in tears for both of them. Kurt didn't want tears; he only liked tears when they fell as part of a moving performance, and he especially didn't want tears for Dave.

So he stopped getting coffee at that particular coffee shop, stopped going to any of the places he and Dave had gone, and just...went on with his life. The lovely thing about a city like New York is that it's so big and so complex, you can cut whole blocks out of your daily routine without batting an eye, and just go someplace else. That's also its most dangerous feature: when you can leave anything behind at any moment, it's far too easy for the important things to get lost in the shuffle. Especially if, for some strange screwed-up reason that only makes sense in your own head, you want them to.

Sometimes, too, though, the city has a mind of her own, and a funny way of wrecking even the best-laid plans.

Author's Note: Here's another one for Professional Widow. What in the world did you do to me? I listened to Siren, which is not a Tori song I'm super-familiar with, but I listened to it, and I kept listening, and then I couldn't stop thinking about some of the lines and what they might mean to Kurt and Dave. I have no idea if this is even remotely what you had in mind, but this is what came out of my head when I gave in and decided to write it down. This is only the first part, mind you. An interlude and the second part are pending. I had to make myself stop because I haven't actually done anything else but write this fic today. Thank you for the inspiration, thank you so much.

Love,
The Raisin Girl