Prologue

It was a Thursday.

Before everything went to hell, before Puck started being stupid and stopped being able to protect the only person he cared about, before Westerville and Dalton and the blazered group of warbling clowns; Thursdays were theirs.

They would meet behind the school in the afternoon, make sure no one saw them and Puck would throw in an impromptu make-out session if he felt like it. They would walk to the Navigator, Kurt driving them to the Hudmels' house, both of them pretending they weren't holding hands on Kurt's thigh.

They would sneak past Burt (and sometimes Finn and Rachel, seeing that these days, one didn't usually come without the other), giggling like the stupid teenagers they were and ignoring the feeling of we should tell him that was always there, but never quite there.

They've spent every Thursday afternoon since they started dating together. They would kiss, or just lay on the couch and to their best to reenact a soulful scene from one of the horrible Argentinian soap operas Puck's Nana always watched (which, bascially, meant 'staring into each other's eyes for ages without blinking' and Puck would immediately shut up anyone who'd imply he would ever do such a thing). They would watch Project Runway, because Puck was just that whipped, and eat waffles, because Kurt was as well. They never answered calls or texts and slept in each other's arms and Puck snuck off every morning through the window, feeling like a tiny part of him was dying over and over.

Anyway, the point is – it was a Thursday. The first one since Kurt left Dalton, the first one he was back in Lima, and it didn't really matter the school was on vacation. Puck had been waiting, sitting on the stairs by the back entrance for two hours.

It didn't really matter that Kurt refused to go anywhere near him. This was a Thursday and, no matter how late, he would show up.

~*~

In the first hour of Friday, Puck was freezing his ass off on the stairs, sipping on the bottle of beer he snatched from his mother's secret stash in the morning, and despite it being way too late for Kurt to even be awake, he'll show up was running on a loop in Puck's mind.

Needless to say, he never did – Puck spent the night on the stairs.