Kurt woke slowly, yawning and snuggling deeper into his pillow as awareness of his surroundings crept over him. He wriggled a bit, wondering why there was no give to his mattress and why his left side was so much warmer than his right.

Prying his reluctant eyelids open, he lifted his head and squinted. For a moment, the unfamiliar setting puzzled him and then he remembered the party. He was still at Tina's place, lying in a sleeping bag on the floor of her living room. Turning his head, his eyes widened a little as he realized that the warmth he had detected was coming from Rachel Berry. The small girl was cuddled against his ribs with her arm draped over his back, sleeping peacefully.

"She was there when I woke up," an amused voice said, and Kurt craned his neck trying to see the speaker over his right shoulder. Artie, dressed and groomed for the day and clearly having been up for a while, wheeled his chair closer. "I think she must've been cold."

He glanced again at Rachel then looked around the room. Surprised to see most of the floor space clear, he asked, "Am I the last one up?"

Artie grinned. "Yep. It's almost eleven and everyone else has been up for at least an hour. I always thought you'd be one of those people who wake at the slightest noise in a strange place, but instead you sleep like a dead man." He chuckled. "You snore, too. Puck wanted to carry you into the shower and turn the cold water on you to get revenge, but I talked him out of it, then Mike and Sam diverted him by offering to spring for breakfast. Most of the others headed out with them, but Mercedes, Rachel, Tina and I stuck around to wait for you."

While his friend talked, Kurt had carefully turned over and managed to extricate himself from Rachel's grasp. She had snuffled and grumbled in her sleep before rolling the other way. Kurt scrubbed a hand through his hair, wincing when he felt how wildly it was sticking up, and rubbed the grit out of his eyes. "Thanks for saving me. From Puck, I mean. I didn't mean to sleep so hard. I usually wake up around seven, even on weekends." He ran his tongue over his teeth, grimacing at how nasty they felt. Caught up in the entertainment of the party, he had forgotten to brush them last night. "Sorry about the snoring, too. I'm pretty sure that's not normal for me."

"You weren't the only one," Tina chimed in, smiling brightly as she walked in the room carrying a steaming mug, which she kindly handed to her bleary-eyed guest. "I think everyone finally crashed around 4am, and it was pretty noisy in here by the time I drifted off."

Kurt nodded, taking a grateful sip from the coffee she had given him. It was just the way he liked it. "You're a goddess," he told her, making her grin even wider. The caffeine started working and he began to feel a little bit more alive. "So, if everyone went to breakfast does that mean Finn took my car?"

Perhaps it was the mention of Finn's name or perhaps it was the loss of her human teddy bear, but Rachel suddenly woke with a loud snort, sitting upright so fast that her tangled hair flopped over her face. Clawing it back, she stared at them wild-eyed and blurted, "I have the perfect song for Sectionals!"

Everybody cracked up. Mercedes had followed Tina in from the kitchen, carrying a cup of her own, but she handed it down to Rachel without a word. "Drink that," she ordered. "It sounds like you need it worse than I do, considering that Sectionals was last month!"

Rachel blinked, took a sip and made a face, quickly handing the cup back to Mercedes. "Ugh, that is disgusting!"

"Let me guess. A cup of sugar with coffee extract?" Kurt asked, smirking knowingly at his best friend, who stuck her tongue out and drained a large swallow of her newly reclaimed beverage.

"How can you drink that?" Rachel demanded, scraping her tongue against the edge of her teeth over and over in an attempt to get rid of the super-sweet taste. Suddenly, she noticed that she was sitting so close to Kurt that their hips were pressing together and blushed, scooting back a bit. "Sorry."

He smiled. "No problem. I'm just glad to know that I'm not the only person who slept late. And I notice nobody answered my question. Does Finn have my car?"

Mercedes plunked down on the floor next to Kurt, looping her arm through his. "Yeah, he made me promise I wouldn't let you kill him when you found out. I brought Quinn and Brittany in with me last night, so Finn offered to give them a ride home before he comes back from breakfast. Everyone else took their own cars."

Kurt nodded and slurped up some more coffee. "Figured."

"You're not mad?" Tina asked in surprise. "Finn thought you'd be furious."

"I trust him with my baby," he said, then smirked. "Just don't tell him that. He's a lot more careful when he thinks he's risking a freak out and some kind of dire revenge."

The girls all laughed. Artie just shook his head. "Considering the easy access you have to all of his stuff, I can't really blame him for worrying."

Kurt waved away the comment. "He's perfectly safe from me as long as he doesn't spill food on the upholstery or scratch her up. So, anyone have any plans for this beautiful school-free Monday?"

"Mr. Schuester is taking our donations over to the McKinney-Vento youth shelter this afternoon," Rachel chirped, jumping out of her blankets and flashing a blazing smile, having gone from dead sleep to full energy wakefulness in about 8.5 seconds. Kurt stared up at her in awe as she clasped her hands and nearly bounced in place as she continued, "Some of us have volunteered to join him and put on an impromptu musical extravaganza, bringing some much needed holiday cheer into the lives of our poor, music-challenged peers."

"The impromptu performance that she's been practicing solos for over the last ten days," Mercedes muttered darkly. Then she brightened. "We're taking food and toys over too, though. It should be pretty great. You want to join us?"

Kurt beamed and hugged her arm. "I'd love to, if nobody would mind."

"The more the merrier," Artie said, grinning brightly. "We're due over at two o'clock, though, so you'd better get up and moving if you want to come."

Tina smiled, tossing her green and red streaked tresses over her shoulders. Addressing both Kurt and Rachel, she said, "We're going to get started on making sugar cookies to take to the shelter with us. Help yourselves to showers. The water should be hot again by now, and my parents are out for the day, so both of the bathrooms are free. There're loads of leftovers from the party if you want to stick around and help bake instead of going out for food."

Kurt extricated himself from his sleeping bag and stood, fussing his wrinkled pajamas into place, then grabbing his small suitcase from where it rested against a wall. Kissing Tina's cheek, he handed her his now empty coffee cup and said, "You had me at cookies."

~#~#~#~#~#~

An hour later, the Cohen-Chang kitchen was a hive of activity. Laughter and conversation rang through the air as the six teens – Finn having returned from his errand - mixed and rolled cookie dough, cut them out in festive shapes and took baking sheets in and out of the hot oven. Artie and Finn had been put in charge of setting the finished cookies out on the waxed paper covered dining room table and getting them ready to decorate, everyone reminding Finn at least once that the cookies were for the shelter and not for him to eat.

Half a dozen managed to find their way inside his belly anyway.

Watching his step-brother laugh and joke with Artie, Kurt took the opportunity of being alone with Rachel while they waited for the other two girls to mix up a new batch of dough to ask her, "Any progress on getting back together with Finn?"

She looked startled and then sad. "No, he still won't forgive me. I've tried everything. Apologies, songs, the spirit of the holidays, everything! I guess we're just not meant to be."

Rachel looked as though she might cry and Kurt could not resist pulling her into a supportive hug, ignoring the flour that was sprinkled down her front since they were both protected by large aprons. "He'll come around. He loves you, you know."

She sniffled. "I wish I could be sure of that. Why can't he just let it go, Kurt? I mean, I forgave him for sleeping with Santana and then lying to me about it."

"He shouldn't have lied," Kurt agreed, stepping back and taking a seat on the edge of a handy kitchen stool, "but I think he was embarrassed. He told me once that he wished he hadn't, because it didn't mean anything to him. In Finn's mind, not admitting it was probably the easiest way to pretend to himself that it hadn't actually happened."

"That's exactly why I forgave him. He was probably trying to protect my feelings by not telling me that he could get someone hotter any time he wanted," she muttered, crossing her arms and avoiding Kurt's gaze.

Kurt stared at her. "Is that what you think? That Santana is hotter – which, by the way, I disagree with – and therefore she must be more attractive to your boyfriend than you are? That isn't giving Finn much credit."

She looked up, a startled look in her big brown eyes. "What do you mean?"

"He was into you, even when he was still seeing Quinn, remember?" Kurt reminded her, a trifle testily. "He didn't cheat on Quinn to be with another cheerleader and he didn't cheat on you. You were dating Jesse when that fiasco happened. Finn was probably trying to move on, but it turned out to be a huge mistake and he was ashamed of it."

Her smile was a little shy. "You really think that he was more into me than her, even then?"

"I know he was," he said, bored with her lingering self-doubt. How could Rachel be so pushy and egotistical when it came to music, which affected everyone, and so unsure of herself when it came to love that was blindingly obvious to everyone else? "What I'm getting at is that using Puck against Finn was an entirely inappropriate way to get back at Finn for what he did, since he wasn't actually with you when he slept with Santana. Why did you do it, Rachel?"

She hung her head again. "I just wanted to hurt him as much as I was hurting."

Kurt sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Do you even realize how petty that was? How cruel it is throw someone's worst mistake back in his face every time you want something? Because, I do. Finn has reminded me on an annoyingly frequent basis that I made a complete idiot out of myself last year by pining after him and trying to coax him into loving me. I've noticed that how severely my seduction attempt offended him seems to change according to how guilty he wants me to feel, and how much he wants me to do something for him."

"But-"

He cut her off. "This isn't about me. I know, I'm just trying to show you that I understand. Puck was Finn's best friend for years. When he and Quinn slept together, they both cheated on Finn. I think sleeping with Santana, who is Puck's girlfriend on and off, may have felt like necessary revenge to all parties, and it allowed them to move on, as twisted as that seems to the rest of us. You deliberately hit Finn at his most vulnerable point, trying to use his best friend against him for the second time, just because you were having self-esteem issues."

Rachel had started crying and this time, Kurt steeled himself against offering comfort.

"I know what it feels like to be in love with someone who doesn't return your feelings. To be shunned because somebody else, anybody else, is better than you. I know how much that hurts, Rachel. I do have sympathy for how you were feeling at the time, but you have to realize also that even when I was at my most delusional when it came to Finn, I never intentionally tried to hurt him just to make myself feel better. I loved him more than I loved myself, and that's how I was finally able to let those dreams go and allow our relationship to evolve into real friendship. He may not love me, but deep down he's never had any reason to doubt me. That's what you need to earn his forgiveness for, Rachel. He loves you but he needs to know that he can trust you again."

She sniffled and wiped her eyes on the hem of her apron. "How?"

"It won't be easy, but I suggest that you back off and give him time to work things through on his own. Be there for him if he needs someone to lean on, but stop pushing him to do what you want. I can't guarantee that you'll get your fairy-tale ending, but maybe you'll at least have a chance to earn his friendship back."

Feeling that he had made his point, Kurt patted her on the shoulder and moved away, slipping on a pair of oven mitts just as the timer dinged to let them know that the latest batch of cookies was ready.

"I know what you two were talking about," Mercedes muttered quietly, glancing back at Rachel, who was now starting out the kitchen window with a thoughtful expression on her face. "Do you think it will do any good?"

Kurt studied Rachel for a moment, noticing that her slumped shoulders had squared and her chin raised from her chest. He smiled. He would never say so out loud, but he and Rachel really were a lot alike. He had just talked to her the way he wished somebody had talked to him last year. "I think it just might."

He carried the tray of hot cookies out to the dining room and passed it over, retrieving one of the empties from Artie. Feeling Finn's eyes on him, he looked up and smiled.

"Thanks, man," Finn said, in a slightly husky tone that startled Kurt. "I heard you and Rachel talking just now."

Kurt scratched his nose ruefully. He really needed to work on his espionage skills. Apparently spying on rival schools and conducting clandestine peace talks between feuding couples were both beyond his powers. "No guarantees," he said lightly. "I still haven't heard your side, so I may have been way off base."

"No, you weren't," he said firmly. "Not about any of it. Including the fact that I shouldn't have used last year against you. That wasn't cool."

He nodded, accepting the tacit apology. "Ears like a freaking bat," he mumbled to himself as he walked back into the kitchen.

Happily, that was the last anyone spoke of such uncomfortable matters. As soon as the last batch of cookies was cool, they had a decorating party, applying frosting, colored sugar sprinkles and tiny candy decorations to their supply. Only about a dozen cookies were sacrificed to the needs of the workforce and by the time they were ready to leave for the youth shelter, there were more than enough beautifully decorated sugar cookies to present to the kids and other volunteers.

Caroling loudly and merrily, the teenagers cleaned up Tina's house and packed everything, including themselves, into Kurt's SUV. He would bring Mercedes and Tina back later so Mercedes could pick up her car.

Tina climbed into the back row of seats next to Artie as Finn helped him out of his wheelchair and onto one of the bench seats. Mercedes took shotgun next to Kurt, leaving Finn and Rachel sharing the middle row. For the first time since their breakup, things were not entirely unfriendly between Finn and Rachel. They were not yet ready to hold hands and cuddle, but Rachel was no longer trying to force the issue, and Finn was no longer sitting as far away from her as humanly possible and trying to avoid looking at her. The two of them just exchanged a cordial nod and allowed the festive holiday mood of the others to draw them out and keep the tension at a minimum.

Watching them in the rearview mirror, Kurt exchanged a smile with Mercedes. It wasn't a perfect situation, but it was a start.