Kurt was distracted. He was trying to enjoy the impromptu party he and Finn were hosting at their house to celebrate the football championship. But thoughts of a certain person kept intruding on his mind.
Kurt had not been surprised to see Dave at the game, but it had still felt very strange to him. He had actually noticed the other boy long before Dave had noticed him. Kurt first saw Karofsky when he and Azimio had approached Finn down on the field, right before the game had started. He had been too far away to actually get a good look at the other boy's face, but soon enough they moved into the stands and Kurt was able to observe Dave more clearly.
Karofsky had had his usual look of general disdain plastered on his face along with a rather acute look of frustration. He was clearly quite upset about being benched in a game like this. However Kurt also was not in the least surprised the other boy had not given in. He knew, probably better than anyone in the world, Karofsky's irrational need to preserve his reputation at any cost.
At that point in the evening, Kurt also just could not have imagined the other boy dancing, full stop. The very thought of it had been so incongruous to him it was like imagining a dog walking on its' hind legs. In that sense, Kurt had been disappointed by the teams' mass defection from the half-time performance, if only because it meant he would not be able to bare witness to the extraordinary event. Happily, as Kurt was to discover later on, his disappointment was premature.
As the game had begun, Kurt had tried to avoid looking at Karofsky. He did not want Blaine or his father to notice, but he snuck peeks during big plays, while everyone else was distracted. For some reason seeing the other boy appeased something in him; Kurt found it weirdly comforting. Dave had been such an ostentatious absence from his life in the last few months and yet still such a constant presence in his thoughts that it felt good to him to have the two things materially coincide for once.
Then, about half way through the first quarter, Kurt had caught Karofsky staring at him. He had been trying to watch the game, but the other boy's gaze had been like a siren call, way too loud to disregard. Not that Kurt wanted to disregard Dave. Quite the opposite. Their sights met for the briefest of seconds before Dave whipped around in his seat and made a tremendous show of being totally enveloped in the game.
Kurt, however, continued to stare at him intermittently. He had been hoping the other boy would look at him again, that he might somehow manage to communicate his openness, his willingness to be a sympathetic ear. But Karofsky was apparently still too anxiety-ridden about their history with one another and his own closeted sexuality to acknowledge him again. Kurt had kept trying all through the first half, until he watched Karofsky stand abruptly and leave the stadium, the rest of his knuckle-dragging cronies following in his wake.
Kurt had assumed they were all leaving the game for good and, subsequently, received a significant shock when almost all of them turned up on the field twenty minutes later, decked out in zombie gear and ready to dance. All of them except Karofsky. Kurt had wondered at the time, if all his friends were doing it, why Dave had been the only one to hold out. Peer pressure was by far the other boy's biggest motivator. Clearly, Kurt had thought to himself, this revolt was not just about Dave's fears of looking uncool. Something else was obviously at play here.
At first Kurt found himself seriously contemplating this conundrum; however, he was not given the opportunity to think on it for very long. For about one minute into the song, Kurt witnessed something truly unbelievable. He watched the other boy, who had apparently been taking in the show from the safety of the sidelines, sprint onto the field, pulling on his costume-jersey as he went. Dave clapped hands congenially with Finn as he took his place in the formation and then he started to dance.
Kurt had to force himself not to descend into shocked laughter. The other boy was incredibly good, almost freakishly so. His mastery of the routine was flawless but it wasn't just that he had all the steps and moves down pat. He performed with a kind of confident, primal energy that seemed to animate his whole body from the inside out.
Most people, when they danced, followed the music and performed the routine as a memorized sequence of steps. With most people, dancing was a reactive process and a regimented, mechanical one. But for some very few people, when they danced, they seemed to manifest the music organically, via the very motions of their animated body. The synchronicity between the movement and the melody was so perfect it produced the illusion of a super-human co-existential harmony between the body and the beat. The two phenomena appeared to simultaneously mutually construct and contour one another, as if the dialectic between the bodily vibrations and the musical vibrations was the only thing keeping either one incarnate.
And Kurt had been positively floored to discover that Dave was apparently one of those people. He was a natural, a rare breed even amongst vocational dancers. The concurrently manifested symmetry between the beat of the music and Dave's body in motion was a sight to behold, and Kurt simply could not tear his eyes away. Perhaps more astonishing still was the look on the other boy's face. His was joy was palpable, even from the fifty yards of distance between them. And Kurt did not think he had ever seen the other boy look that way before.
In the past whenever Kurt has seen Dave pleased, it was always in a cynical, condescending, grimly satisfied kind of way, usually after he had slushied somebody or called them a nasty name. Kurt had never before seen the almost child-like earnest pleasure the jock fairly radiated as he performed. And in that moment, Kurt had thought to himself, with no small amount of irony, maybe he really is gay after all.
Kurt had seen a side of Dave tonight he had not previously known existed. And it made him wonder as he stood lost in thought by the punch bowl, what else might the other boy be hiding? What other unexpected talents and pleasures and proclivities lay behind that oh so cool, Cro-Magnon frat-boy exterior? Before Karofsky had kissed him, Kurt had imagined that the other boy was more or less an open book. What you saw – an ignorant, bullying homophobic jerk – was what you got. But as time pressed on, Kurt was coming to discover that the other boy was hiding a whole host of other inclinations and capacities, the full range of which he still likely remained largely ignorant.
There was clearly a lot more going on there than was readily apparent to the casual observer. And that intrigued Kurt immensely. Every time he thought he finally had Dave's number, Dave would do something wholly surprising and unexpected. Who was Dave, Kurt suddenly found himself wondering, behind all the scared posturing and the façade of cool bravado? What was the other boy really like, underneath that very convincing persona he projected?
This question compelled Kurt immensely and he suddenly found himself wishing Finn had invited the other half of the football team to their party. What he would not have given at this moment to have the chance to start peeling back the layers that still shrouded the other boy, kept him under wraps. There was someone interesting in there, somewhere, someone very worth knowing. And Kurt had a perverse yet unmistakable desire to meet that person, whoever he might be.