Dave was hyperventilating as he rushed madly down the hallway towards the large double doors that led to the parking lot. He needed to get as far away from school as fast as he possibly could, NOW! He plowed down the wide front sidewalk of the campus and through the long, neat rows of cars in the parking lot towards his truck, praying he would not run into any of his friends along the way. He could not handle talking to anyone right now.
Reaching his usual space, Dave jammed his right hand into his pocket and removed his key ring. His hands were shaking violently as he tried to push his car-key into the driver side door lock, without much success. Finally he managed. Unlocking the cabin, he threw himself inside and, ignoring his seat belt, shoved his key directly into the ignition. With his foot pushing forcefully down on the break, Dave was about to turn the key when he paused momentarily and took a few deep breathes.
He retained just enough sense at that moment to realize he was in no state to drive. Taking his hand slowly off the ignition, Dave let his arms hang limply by his sides for a moment before slamming them both in unison on the edge of his steering wheel angrily. He was about to do something he had not done in a very long time: he was going to cry.
Although Dave had not been this upset about anything in years, it was amazing how familiar the feeling of it still was. His nose tingled, and he felt his throat tighten involuntarily. His eyesight became blurry and the tears stung a bit as they leaked out, down along his cheeks. Dave could not tell whether they were tears of anger, or fear, or sadness. He was feeling all three things with such intensity at the moment, it was difficult to distinguishing them from one another. However, if he had to take a guess, he would have said it was primarily anger, anger aimed almost solely at himself.
How could he have let this happen? How could he have been so utterly stupid? A part of him was still half convinced that it had not, in fact, happened at all and that it had just been a terrible nightmare. A part of him was still in complete denial about it, about the fact that he really had kissed Kurt and now Kurt knew his deep, dark secret. A part of his brain just did not seem capable of even comprehending the situation, and that part seemed thoroughly numb to it all. The rest of him was in pure panic.
Dave felt cornered on all sides, no hope of escape. He was thoroughly trapped. Kurt now knew and Kurt would tell, Dave was sure of it. The other boy hated him; why wouldn't he jump at the chance to retaliate with such splendid completeness? In a moment of weakness Dave had handed Kurt the capacity to seek revenge for every horrible thing he had ever done to the other boy. And why shouldn't the other boy take it? Dave had certainly earned it. A fact which was causing him no small amount of remorse at this very moment.
There was a word for this, Dave knew, though he could not quite get his brain to dredge it up. A word for when you get exactly what is coming to you. It was Chinese or Indian, or something. KARMA! That was it – Karma.
This was the epitome of Karma, and Dave was going to get what was coming to him, of that he was certain. The shit was about to hit the fan and his life was about to become as miserable as he had made Kurt's life. Oh, why had he been such an idiot? Why had he not just left the other boy alone? Then none of this would be happening. And for the first time in his life, Dave truly understood what it meant to regret something, to want to take it back so badly that you feel like you would give anything, including a limb, to go back in time and undo what you did. For the first time in his life, Dave fully appreciated the impenetrability of the past, the desire to access that which could not be touched. For the first time in his life, he knew the real meaning of the words 'If Only…'
Yet strangely, he became aware, as his angered sobs eventually subsided, nothing in him regretted the actual kiss, itself, the thing which had catalyzed all this regret. No part of his mind wanted to take back that act, un-ring that bell. Dave's desires to rewrite the past were thoroughly tied to the incidences where he had hurt Kurt, the times when he had done the things that would make Kurt want to use the kiss against him. Those were the things he truly regretted, he was stunned to realize. Absolutely nothing in him wanted to give up that kiss, even assuming such a giving-up was possible.
And that was the moment, the very first moment, in which Dave was willing to consciously concede that he might actually be gay. Although a part of him still found that label utterly repugnant, he was self-aware enough to acknowledge that this was the first instance in which it also felt, in any way, accurate, as applied to him. Dave may have experienced plenty of sexual desire for men in the past, but – before this moment – he truly, honestly had never felt gay.
Before now, that word had always just seemed so…wrong when applied to him, so disingenuous. And because of that, he had never quite managed to make it stick, make it attach; the word just would not hold him. In fact, it had often felt to Dave as if the word itself had been actively rejecting him, denying him, deliberately refusing him entry to what it encompassed.
Now, however, for the very first time in his life, although the word still felt deeply uncomfortable to Dave, it also did feel appropriate, genuine…fitting. For the first time in his life, Dave felt like that word truly did, in some way, say something about him. Thinking on his total incapacity to regret his kiss with Kurt, Dave suddenly felt as if the word GAY did actually apply to him, to his experience – of life, the world, and the things he was feeling. That word encompassed him, now, for the very first time, ever. For the first time ever, the word fit.
And he belonged to it. Which was utterly terrifying. Indeed, a part of his mind was still attempting to repudiate this realization, to simply refuse it. But Dave could feel that resistance waning; his denial was rapidly crumbling. Admittedly it would still be long time before he could say out loud that he was gay. It would be an even longer time before he could say it out loud to another person. But in his own head, the barriers he had erected against it appeared to be swiftly dismantling themselves.
Dave may not have liked the truth. In fact, for the most part, he still thoroughly reviled it. But for the first time in his life, he felt capable of acknowledge what the truth was, if only to himself. The locus of his fear no longer hovered over the internal recognition that truth. It had shifted. Now his fear hovered mainly over the prospect that other people would find out.
Tomorrow Kurt would tell the whole school Dave's secret, and Dave was still light years away from being able to publicly own it. He was going to have to be prepared to deny it, believably, with utter conviction. His friends would believe him, Dave knew, if only because they would have hated the thought of him being one of those people they so often degraded. Some of Kurt's friends in that Glee club might believe him, but Dave had way more credibility than Kurt and that group of rejects, and a few of them believing it did not have the potential to do that much damage.
As long as most of the school still believed him, Dave would be alright. And given how publicly he had harassed Kurt in the past it would not be unthinkable that Kurt would try to retaliate by spreading lies about him. Granted they weren't lies, but the rest of the school did not need to know that. Dave was going to be alright. All he needed to do was pull himself together before tomorrow, go to school in the morning and feign complete obliviousness. He could do that. It was all going to be okay.