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'Let's go to the corn maze! Blaine said. It'll be fun! Blaine said. Like being back in Ohio!'
"We left Ohio for a reason, Blaine!" Kurt shakes his head and checks his watch. The minute hand has barely moved since the last time he checked, so he checks the time on his phone. Nope, his watch is right. That and he still has no bars. What the heck would they have running at a corn maze that could be blocking his data? He looks over at his exhausted daughter cradling an equally exhausted dog in her arms and sighs. "Yup ..." He pulls the edges of his coat closed and wraps his arms around himself "... we're having the time of our lives."
It’s been over 45 minutes.
When they got there, the sun had just barely started to sink into the horizon.
But now, it's darker than dark outside.
If it weren't for the flood lights overhead, they would be plunged into blackness.
Kurt walks along the outer row of corn stalks with daughter Tracy and their dog, Elphaba, in tow, peeking through the gaps between the plants in search of his husband.
“Where is he, Papa?” the little girl asks as she shadows her father’s footsteps.
Kurt rises up on his tiptoes to try and see over the hedge of corn. “I don’t know, Tracy.”
“Do you think he’s going to be much longer? Because I’m starting to get hungry.”
“I know, I know.” Kurt stops walking when his right heel starts to throb. He's been pacing back and forth so much, he's about to wear a hole in the soles of his Timberlands. He breathes in through his nose and exhales his frustration into the cool night air.
"Do you think we should go back inside and look for him?" Tracy asks as her father leads her back to the entrance of the maze.
"No. With our luck, we'll keep crossing paths and never bump into one another." As it is, knowing Blaine, he's probably been peeking his head out, expecting to see them there waiting for him, and when he doesn't see them, ducks back in to search for them.
At least, Kurt hopes that's how it's playing out.
A grown man lost in a corn maze built for kids for close to an hour would be too embarrassing for Kurt to contend with.
Father and daughter wait there a moment, watching as kids and parents race in and out with ease. But when - after fifteen minutes! - they see no sign of Blaine, Kurt goes back to pacing along the outer wall in hopes of catching a glimpse of his husband's curly hair.
Kurt is about to ask the attendant at the front entrance for help when his phone vibrates in his pocket. He's relieved but still rolls his eyes, answering it without even checking the incoming number.
Blaine starts talking before Kurt can say, "Hi."
“You know, if you wanted to get rid of me, divorce is a completely viable option. You didn’t have to abandon me in a field in the middle of nowhere to die.”
“No way! I married you before you became a big, successful songwriter. I have every intention of sticking this marriage out and sucking you dry.” Kurt chuckles when his husband whimpers at the double entendre. “Besides, we’re in a mall parking lot! We’re hardly in the middle of nowhere.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not the one trapped in the corn maze of death. Are you sure that this isn’t a crop circle posing as a corn maze, and I’ve been transported to an alien ship? That might explain why my service is so spotty.”
“I would like to think that a race of hyper-intelligent alien beings would have a better plan for world domination than to construct a crop circle outside a Target. Plus, they'd have 5G at least." Kurt sees Tracy mime in front of him - mouth open, pointing inside, and then rubbing her tummy with a suffering expression on her face. Drama Queen. Just like her father. "Look, could you hurry it up? Some of us are wasting away out here.”
“What’s the goal of this again?” Blaine continues as he stomps through three inches of hay in search of the exit. “Am I trying to find a port key, or do I have to fight a Minotaur …?”
“I don’t understand! Tracy and I made it in and out in ten minutes!” A small mob of kids comes around the corner, cheering, and Kurt can’t help giggling. He has seen the same three kids go in and out of the maze numerous times since Blaine has been lost, and they're going in again.
“Yeah, well, you guys have the dog,” Blaine argues.
“Don’t give me that!” Kurt says, keeping an eye on Tracy to make sure she doesn’t misinterpret his and Blaine’s banter as fighting. No reason to ruin this evening any more than it has been already. “You didn’t come with us because you said bringing Elphaba along was cheating! You wanted to make it through the maze using your manly instincts. F.Y.I., it’s not as if Elphaba is a search-and-rescue dog. She's a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel with sensitive paws. The hay didn't play nice with her feet. We had to carry her most of the way. She didn’t help us out of the maze one bit!”
“But …” Blaine starts with a defense already in mind.
“And …” Kurt rails on without giving him a chance as his stomach twists and then releases a famished growl, “might I remind you that your phone has GPS? If you found a spot where you could call me, you could have been out of there ages ago!”
“Well, if I … wait …” Blaine pauses. “Say that again?”
“Say what …?”
“Kurt?” Kurt hears Blaine’s voice inside the maze nearby without the use of his phone. “Is that … where are you?”
“I can’t exactly give you latitude and longitude …”
“Just … hold up your hand and wave,” Blaine groans, this time loud enough that Kurt knows he’s hearing him from a few feet away.
Kurt raises his hand and waves it in the air. “Hello!” he calls out with the phone pulled away from his ear. “Here I am! Yoo-hoo!”
The corn stalks in front of him begin to shudder, a shhhhhhick sound starting from somewhere inside. The sound gets louder as another, closer row of corn stalks make the same rustling sound. The stalks right in front of him start to quake wildly, and from within, he hears a pained expletive. A leg clad in dark blue denim and an arm wearing a familiar Burberry coat sleeve break through, followed by another leg and arm, then a head, until the whole of Blaine Anderson-Hummel has stumbled from the maze, his hair and clothes a mess of dried corn stalk litter, leaving a human-shaped hole in the wall.
Kurt slow claps, smirking at his disheveled husband.
“And that wasn’t cheating?” Kurt asks while Blaine dusts plant debris from his clothes.
“No,” Blaine says. “That was intelligent planning.”
“What!?” Kurt looks at the maze and back at Blaine with an incredulous expression. “How do you figure that?”
“Well” - Blaine looks left and right to see if anyone from All-Season Productions has yet caught on to the fact that he destroyed part of their maze - “a huge enclosure made entirely of dry, flammable materials with only one entrance and one exit? No, see, that’s a safety code violation.”
Kurt raises an eyebrow and side-eyes the wall.
“So, this is …?” He gestures to the hole, leaving his sentence open for an explanation.
“Pfft!” Blaine blows a piece of stalk off his lip before he answers. “It’s a fire exit.”
Kurt drops his head in exasperation and reaches out a hand for Tracy.
“You see,” Kurt says, grabbing hold of his daughter and leading her away from the compromised maze, “this is why we can’t take you anywhere.”