At the French restaurant, Blaine reached into his pocket and handed Kurt his new phone. "They don't like people using them at tables, though, but there's a room right off the mens' room." Kurt felt a sudden surge of appreciation at the gesture of giving him privacy from Blaine as well as the others in the restaurant.
He glanced at the long list of messages and missed calls. He'd never get through all of them, he realized, either emotionally or in the brief time he figured that he had. He wanted to be the one to decide when to come back to their table, not to have Blaine bring him back.
"Hi, Mercedes, it's me."
"Kurt, Kurt, I've been trying to get you all day, are you all right?"
He closed his eyes to block his tears, picturing his friend all too clearly, making him miss her more than he would have believed possible. "I'm...I'm okay." I can't tell her everything. I simply can't. "It's...it's not been what I was expecting. They've even been polite and Blaine, I think he's actually the only gay one." He heard her blow her nose and had to cushion the truth. Embellish it. He lowered his voice to the confidential tone they used for the best gossip or discussion of who's hot and who's a mess. "He is good-looking, lent me Modus Couture and Santorelli, which I never would have thought work together but they do, and he likes French food. So that's not bad, is it? At least, compared to my track record which hasn't been a spectacular string of successes so far." He congratulated himself. Rachel may think she's the only one in Glee who can act, but I just nailed the performance of a lifetime.
He heard another long sniffle. "He is cute. In his own way," Mercedes quickly added.
"Sweetie, I have to go in a minute. He's actually taking me to lunch and I'm calling from the room where they let you use a cell. Tell Finn and everybody, tell them that I'm going to be okay. Tell everybody I'll call them as soon as I can."
"I love you, Kurt."
"Love you too, baby."
He wiped the sweat from his hands as he pocketed the phone. Given any choice, he'd have stayed on the phone for hours with her, even if they ran out of things to say. But then, he reminded himself, he knew from that first moment after he pulled back from Blaine's kiss and found that didn't change anything, his choices now had remarkably little to do with anything. Rather than dwell on that, he raised his head high and walked back to the table where Blaine was waiting for him.
Mercedes stared at her phone as if it had the answers to the questions that kept pounding at her brain like too many people trying to get through a door. Kurt had pretended that everything was going to be okay and she had pretended that she believed him. She'd even managed to say that she thought that Blaine was cute when she couldn't remember the least tiny thing about him except hating the way that he looked at Kurt, so slick and confident and with those eyes that savored Kurt like her boy was some kind of dessert.
The part of her that had been yelling at Kurt all day in her mind, the part of her that said that if Kurt hadn't voted for continuing the competition, they might not be like this had finally shut up after hearing his voice. She'd gotten to know the voice he used when he squared his shoulders to get through another day and more bullying and when he learned the insurance wouldn't cover the operation for his father and that was the voice she had heard just then.
He'd asked her to tell everybody in Glee that he was okay and that he was going to be okay. But that just meant that she had to figure out just what she was going to say. Well, that could wait until after school, when they were all meeting at Rachel's house.
At least one thing had changed. Nobody in Glee was taking the bullying any more. Finn hadn't let Karofsky yell more to her than "Hey, your faggot buddy-" before decking him in the jaw. After loudly telling Finn that she could take that big bag of lard, she kicked Karofsky's kneecap from the side, at just the right angle to make him half-scream. When another frequent bully started to taunt Rachel, Santana had kicked him so hard in the groin that he had blacked out. Some of the students who had been indifferent, or simply glad that somebody else was the bullying target, had even very quietly taken sides and a few of the students emerging from the Science Club at the time had sworn that he had tripped and hit his head, while the others didn't say anything to contradict that.
Mercedes kept her head held high, too. She wasn't going to back down from a fight any more and she wasn't going to shrug and forget the bullying any more. They'd lost but they'd get up, too, aand nobody would rub the losing in their faces. Not any more.
After the waiter took their order, Blaine said, "Your director said that you'd been bullied at your school. He was pretty concerned about you." The remark caught Kurt off balance and he looked at Blaine in surprise as he continued. "That's something you won't have to worry about at Dalton."
"Really?" Really? Clever conversation, Kurt.
"It's not the typical culture. At Dalton, you see, we understand that when we're unified, we're all a lot stronger. We also know that now's the time when we're building the ties and alliances that can last a lifetime, the kind you want to be able to call on when you need, say, venture capital, or an introduction to somebody who knows somebody. I'm not saying that it's perfect, of course, but we work on it."
"Networking."
"Building the foundations. So since everybody will know that you're ours, nobody will hassle you." Blaine nodded in satisfaction.
Kurt decided that he had to break from the refuge of the polite chit-chat. Part of him didn't want to know yet, but maybe it would be easier to find out now. He could at least fight to keep a tone that suggested he was just curious, even though he heard his voice come out higher than normal. "That's actually a question I've got. When you say 'ours,' what will that mean?" He was going to add, "Exactly," but wasn't sure he'd keep control of his voice. It had been more difficult than he'd thought.
Blaine's lips compressed briefly as if he were trying to fight a chuckle. "Well, you'll be an honorary Warbler, so you'll sing with us at on-campus events, though that is optional if you'd prefer not. Of course, you'll be in all our rehearsals and if you like, get the private voice lessons we get." He reached across the table and took Kurt's hand, which had been wrapped around his water glass. "As for the rest..." He turned Kurt's hand over and delicately stroked the soft underside of his wrist, "I'm the only gay one in the group. Well, David's bi or at least bi-curious, but he's got a serious girlfriend. So no, we won't be squabbling over you." When the appetizers came, Blaine relinquished Kurt's hand, after one last stroke with his thumb. "You'll be just mine."
AN: Thank you so unbelievably much for the feedback and reviews. This fic is a LOT of things that I've never tried before and so the reviews help tremendously. They also helped me figure out where this fic is going, which kinda helps. ;-)