"I'm going to go shower. I'll be back in a few minutes." Sam got up, went to the bathroom and took a shower. He redressed in the same underclothes he had on when he went in, but he had slipped his dress pants back on. Blaine was still sitting in the same spot when he came back. Sam sat back down on his own bed, leaned against the headboard.

"Let's go down and get some breakfast before they close the breakfast bar."

"Dressed like this?"

"Yeah, sure. No one you know is here in this hotel and your clothes are covering all of your body parts. You're fine. I'm dressed the same as you. I'm hungry. Let's go."

They went down, ate some bagels and cream cheese, drank some coffee and took a carton of juice and a muffin and some fruit back upstairs with them.

Once they were back in the room, Blaine asked, "Am I going to get to see Kurt?" He sat on the edge of the bed he had slept in.

"Not today."

He flopped back dramatically. "This is kidnapping."

"Not really. You're free to leave. You'll have to call a cab to take you back to where we parked your car though. We are going out later though – to get some supplies. I figured you need a toothbrush and maybe some other clothes?"

"Yeah. How long are we staying?"

"Just until tomorrow."

"Alright."

"So, back to the stuff we were talking about. What did reading those articles make you think about?"

"I don't really see how any of them fit me. I'm not mean or controlling. I've never threatened him or anyone else. I'm not abusive."

"A couple of weeks ago, I talked to him about why he had broken up with you again. He told me that a few days before he called it off, you had argued for three hours about a towel. In three hours, you could have washed and dried the towel three or four times at a laundromat and been back to the loft."

"He didn't care that I hate having toothpaste on a shared towel. I had asked him several times to stop doing it."

"Why didn't you just go to the dollar store and buy a week's worth of hand towels just for him? Seven bucks seems like a cheap solution to the issue if it was such a serious problem for you. Why did he have to change his vision of the purpose of a hand towel to match yours? It's just a stupid piece of cloth."

"It's the principal of it. I asked him to stop and he didn't take my perspective into consideration."

Sam rolled his eyes and moved on. "You were pushing him for a summer wedding. He wanted to graduate from college before he got married."

"He was going to get financial aid with us married."

"You could have gotten a job to help with the expenses."

"I need to focus on my schoolwork."

"You horsed around with me all the time. You always had time to hang out or go out. Were you not doing what you needed to do to make good grades?"

"I thought I was."

"So while Kurt working his ass off to cover half of the rent and make good grades, you were horsing around me too much to do well?"

"My mid-term grades were weak, but I thought I had done well enough to pull them up, and when I checked my semester grade report after finals, I thought everything was fine. But unlike a lot of schools NYADA has an end-of-year evaluation that each student has to pass to move on to the next year. I got that back a week after finals. I washed out. I didn't pass the evaluation."

"And Kurt?"

"He had rave reviews on his."

"I see. I'm sure that didn't help things between the two of you."

"I didn't tell him that I didn't pass at first. I appealed, but I lost the appeal."

"It's a tough school, dude. You knew that."

"Yeah. I turned all of my time toward working on the wedding. But that just upset him."

"He told you he wanted to wait. You didn't listen. Not being listened to upsets people, especially when the person not listening is supposed to be the person who loves you the most. And whether you want to admit it or not, you just trudge forward with your ideas when people tell you no."

"That was a misunderstanding. I was drunk."

"What are you talking about?"

"What are you talking about?" Blaine countered. "Never mind. It's not important. Continue with whatever it is you have to say to me."

"All I'm saying is that you two didn't last a month living together in the loft. You kept telling me that things didn't work when you were still living with him after I moved out because it still wasn't just the two of you. When you moved back in after we all left, the two of you had all of the time that he wasn't at school or work or doing schoolwork to spend together and you wasted three of those hours arguing over a stupid piece of cloth that you could have replaced for $1."

Blaine didn't respond.

"You weren't back very long before you started seeing Karofsky. How did that even start? You never would tell me."

"We were both at Scandals, drinking obviously. We both had had too much. We ended up doing what a lot of guys do in gay bars."

"So, you hooked up with him in the Scandals bathroom?"

"Yeah, and then we fooled around in my backseat for a while. Once we were sober enough to drive, I went to his place and we fooled around some more."

"Define 'fooled around'."

Blaine huffed. "Hand jobs. Blow jobs."

"And then you started dating after that?"

Blaine didn't respond.

"So, he became your what? Fuck buddy? Because you would have had to actually be friends to be friends-with-benefits."

"Yeah. Over time, we sort of moved from … that … into dating because we spent more time together. I was over at his place most of the time. He was living in an efficiency. After I started spending more time there, he suggested that we find a place together when his lease was up at the end of the summer. We found a place in Marysville. He was working south of Lima and going to school in Lima and it was more feasible with me driving to Dalton so frequently."

"So you two basically lived together most of the summer, but just at his old place?"

"Yeah, I guess so. I didn't like just sitting around my parents' place."

"Do they know you flunked out or whatever?"

"No. I spent that night in a motel and went back to the loft the next day when he was at work and boxed everything up and mailed the boxes to my parents' place the day after Kurt broke up with me. I had told them that I might be staying with friends in New York for the summer, but when everything fell apart, I came back and told them I had run out of people to stay with."

"So, what do they think you're doing working at Dalton?"

"A work-study thing like Kurt. They weren't thrilled with my grades, but I didn't tell them about washing out."

"I see."

Blaine went back to the first thing Sam had brought up. "Earlier you said you think I have some kind of voodoo powers to get people to like me and then I control them with my mind-bending powers of persuasion."

Sam took a deep breath and tried to relax and focus both. "Do you have any ability to self-reflect?"

"On what?"

"Your actions."

Blaine sat back up and moved to the head of the bed and put the pillows up so he could lean on them. "I'm not sure what actions you are referring to."

"Well, we were talking about you and Karofsky. Did you at any point love him?"

"No."

"So, for clarity, you moved on from blow jobs?"

"Yeah."

"So, you had sex with him, then dated him, then mostly lived with him, then actually moved in with him, and lived like a couple."

"Yeah."

"You pseudo-lived with him for a few months, then actually moved in with him over two months ago. So, for 4-5 months in total. "

"Right."

"You never managed to live with Kurt for anywhere near that length of time and you supposedly love him enough to marry him yesterday, despite the fact that you and Karofsky were still having sex a few days ago."

"Enough with the sex talk."

"Have you had sex with Kurt since you broke up with Karofsky?"

"No."

"Well, thank God for that."

"That's rude."

"There's no way you've had time to have an STI test since you quit having sex with Karofsky."

"Why do you keep bringing that up?"

"Because I am grossed out, dude. You never said 'Yeah, he always wore a condom when I blew him.' There's no way that Sue found even half the guys that Karofsky had been with. Those had to have been the ones that she could find that hang out at Scandals. From what I heard, they were all like 'Hey, Dave!' – all friendly like they were buddies that Dave was pals with. He's been out for like 2½ years. You can't seriously think he's limited himself to the pickings at Scandals if he enjoys the sex-in-public-places lifestyle. Those were more than likely his repeat weeknight hook-ups. Guys he hangs out there with, you know his 'friends-with-benefits group'. People Sue could find easily. I'd wager money I don't have that he went to swankier places on Friday and Saturday nights. Columbus? Toledo? I'm not slut shaming anyone – not at all. But I am completely grossed out by the thought of you blowing him without a condom. Remember Miss Holiday and her 'everyone's been with a random'? Maybe you weren't there. Anyway, you were with a random. Have you slept with other guys besides Kurt, your random, and Karofsky?"

"Why does it matter? I get your point. I'll go to a clinic when you let me go back to Ohio."

"It matters because I want to know if you cheated on Kurt more than once."

"We're married now. What difference does it make?"

"The fact that you won't answer seems to be an answer itself, doesn't it?"

"He already married me."

"Do you love him?"

"Yes."

"What has changed in the last 6 months to make you think that you can be more successful living together than you were the first two times you tried?"

"He's in Lima with the New Directions. He's not in New York being pulled in 20 directions by NYADA, his job, schoolwork, other friends, classes…"

"He doesn't have any friends in New York to my knowledge. You made him so miserable about having any friends of his own, he gave them up all to keep the peace."

"They were taking up too much of his time, taking him away from me."

"You are so full of yourself. You spent time with me and other people when we were in New York."

"That was different."

"Different how?"

"It just was. Kurt was wasting his time with that stupid band of his. He's never going to make it as a recording artist."

"And you will?"

"Maybe. June Dolloway was willing to back me. Now, that I'm back with Kurt, I'll have to find someone else willing to back me. She hated Kurt. But if she was willing to back me, there will be other people as well."

"She was just looking for someone to make her look good. She never got you any solo spots. She got you to sing along with her and give her the opportunity to shine while showing you off. She fed your ego. You liked the fact that she preferred you to Kurt."

Sam's phone buzzed. He picked it up and looked at it. "Time to go."

Blaine got up and put the tux shirt back on and tucked it in. He grabbed his shoes and put them on. He went in the bathroom and wet his hands and did what he could with his hair.

"Don't worry about it. We're in a place where no one knows you and we're going to, like, Wal-Mart or Target or something. We just need to grab a few things. So, have some idea what you need for the next few days or whatever."

"You're letting us leave tomorrow, right?"

"Yeah. We're not actually kidnapping you. I'm taking you out in public. I mean if you really want to leave, you can. But if you wait until tomorrow, I'll take you to your car, and then you can drive your own car back to Ohio."

"Fine. Let's go."