IT HAD TO be a dream. No, it was a dream.
There was no way, not even given in the slightest chance, that Kurt was actually on Lindy's doorstep, his face pink from the cold and his chin growing scruffy with the onset of a beard.
"Hi," he said. This one word was enough to nearly send Lindy toppling over the edge of her sanity.
She made another sound, this one something like a suffocated whimper, and grabbed her door frame for support. Her vision was shifting in and out and she thought that she was seeing double of him, sliding in and out of focus.
This very moment had stained her nightly dreams for months. Years, even. She had fallen asleep every evening and her brain had spun fictional tales in which Kurt would arrive at her apartment, guiding her into his arms and whispering to her that he still loved her. He would always add that he had missed her even more than she had missed him.
All at once, that dream had become a tangible thing. Even though Lindy was still questioning it in the back of her mind, she slowly realized that the figure standing in front of her was not make-believe. He was the same man that she had seen in September, who had stared at her coldly as if she were nothing but invisible air to sweep along by.
But now, he seemed less hardened. His face was full of anxious worry, his blue eyes staring at her intensely. It was like he was expecting her to hit him.
She could have done it. Despite her awe over seeing him in the flesh, the angry little part of her heart that resented Kurt for the way he had treated her two months prior was defiantly waving its fist in the air. Her sensible side was telling her to slam the door in his face, but she knew more than anything that she was not going to be able to put another barrier between them. She had been trying to for the last two years with no avail, and he hadn't even been physically there to stop her then.
"What . . . what are you doing here?" she finally asked. Speaking the words aloud felt unfamiliar as they rolled off her tongue.
"Oh," Kurt said jumpily, as if he had forgotten something. "Krist got your address from Trae. And then he gave it to me. I would have asked myself, but I didn't know if . . . um, Trae would do that for me."
Lindy leaned her bodyweight against the door again. She had been inhaling deeply enough that she was beginning to feel somewhat stable, but not even that could entirely calm her down.
"But . . . you . . . why . . ."
She was trying so hard to make a reasonable guess as to why Kurt had shown up that she had forgotten that he was standing in the freezing cold. It wasn't until she saw him pull his jacket tighter around his midsection that she bounded backwards.
"Shit! Come inside, it's deathly out there!"
She waved him in and he followed quickly, trying to get away from the cold breeze. He crossed the threshold readily, but stopped when he was finally inside. He looked around, standing still in place. His eyes seemed to fall on every item in the room within seconds.
Lindy struggled to understand what was happening. She and Kurt had not stood alone in an apartment together in over two years. And the last time that they had, they'd broken each other's hearts.
"This isn't a whole lot different from our old place," Kurt commented easily, as if the bizarre nature of his arrival was not extremely explicit.
"Kurt . . ." Lindy began slowly. "I don't mean to be . . . be rude, but why are you here?"
This question seemed to baffle Kurt. He looked at Lindy and blinked several times, as if he was just now processing that he had come to see her. In this moment, she felt her heart stutter when staring into his face. He was still so terribly and so agonizingly beautiful. It was enough to make her want to do something stupid, like grab his face and kiss him squarely on the mouth . . .
