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The package arrives on a Thursday at 4 pm, and at first Finn assumes it’s for Shane, the guy he is still subletting from. Then he looks closer at the package. Finn Hudson, originating in Cincinnati.
“I don’t know anyone in Cincinnati,” Finn says out loud to the otherwise empty apartment as he washes his hands and then carefully removes the mask he’d grabbed when there’d been a buzz. He hangs the mask on the command hook just beside the light switch inside his bedroom and grimaces. That’s not exactly true, but he’s pretty sure he’s not getting packages from his ex… whatever they had been at the end. The end had been over four years earlier, anyway, so why would he get a package now? It’s not like he’d just left Rachel, either.
Finn sighs and looks around the tiny bedroom at the thought of Rachel. The relationship had been over by the time they’d rung in 2019 at a Long Island house party that Rachel had gotten an invite to, but it’d taken Finn nearly all of 2019 to figure out what he was going to do about that fact. He’d finally left in November when Blaine told him that his friend Shane was looking to sublet a place for six or so months. That, Finn reasoned, was time to finish out his teaching contract and decide what was next.
By the time six months was up, Finn hadn’t renewed his contract with NYC public schools, but he was also stuck inside the apartment, and he and Shane had agreed to keep the sublet going month by month “as long as this ‘rona thing lasts.”
It was now October, Finn was making money by tutoring and substituting, and covid-19 had officially let him put off even longer what was next.
None of that, Finn realizes, explains why he’s gotten a package from Cincinnati, and he sighs as he prepares to open it. The most likely scenario, he assumes, is that Puck found a few things of Finn’s while doing some stay-at-home Marie Kondo, and the package is Puck’s way of returning them. Given the way Finn left things, he acknowledges that’s pretty decent of Puck—if he were Puck, he’d’ve burnt them.
Puck taps the answer and beams at Josiah. “You got it! You do the next few while I get my Nana’s grocery list, okay?”
Before covid, Puck had only known his neighbors in passing. The little boy was friendly and waved, and sometimes Puck would stop and toss the basketball back and forth with him on his way home. Josiah’s mom reminded Puck of his own mom, years earlier, and when everyone had announced that the world was trying to flatten the curve, it had been an easy decision to go knock on her door, then stand back six feet and offer to let Josiah do his virtual school at Puck’s while his mom was work. Puck’s own job was easily done remotely and technically could be done in off hours, and he knew too well the pickle his mom would have been in when he was the same age.
Even after Josiah had gone back to the classroom, Puck had offered to let him spend his afternoons at Puck’s, helping him with homework and giving him a place to be. Jessica had protested behind her UC Healthcare System mask—she worked at a urologists’ office, thankfully, but still had to go in every day and take longer than ever because of PPE—but Puck insisted, then explained his own childhood.
Puck doesn’t actually open his messages to check for Nana’s grocery list. She’d sent it earlier, knowing he’d be at the store tomorrow at 1, enough time to safely shop and get back for Josiah before driving it up to Dayton to leave on her porch after he watches the streaming Shabbat service. Instead, Puck refreshes the UPS app for the eighth or ninth time that day, biting his lip when this time it reads “delivered.” Then he does open Messages, scrolling down to find Blaine’s name.
“It’s there,” he types, and a moment later, the response fills in.
“I’ll check in with Shane and then him later.”
Puck exhales and nods. He’s done everything—genuinely everything—that he can. The ball is in Finn’s court, and he also has to talk to Jessica when she gets home. Josiah wants to stay and watch Shabbat service with him the next day.
Finn’s glad he had the box sitting on the bed when he opened it, because instead of what he expected—a few books he’s not seen in years, some papers—there are envelopes and white-wrapped packages, all of them numbered. The printed “1” is taped to a flat, square envelope that Finn realizes belatedly is a CD envelope. He flips it over to read another taped-on, computer-printed message. “Listen to this first.”
The CD player he’s carted around since high school still works, and he places the CD in it and hits play, Shazam at the ready in case he doesn’t recognize the song. He’s not sure what’s happening—maybe the package isn’t from Puck? maybe it took four years to plan out revenge?—but he can admit he’s wildly curious. He does recognize the song almost immediately as the new single Taylor Swift put out over the summer, but he realizes three lines in he hasn’t been listening to the lyrics, so he restarts the song.
Halfway through, Finn presses his fist to his mouth and squeezes his eyes shut. At the end of the song, he makes sure his door is closed—Shane is likely to be back relatively soon, and while he’s a nice enough guy, Finn doesn’t want him asking any questions—and restarts the song while picking up the envelope marked with a “2.” Finn notes almost absently that it looks like Georgia, not Times New Roman.
A printed photograph flutters out, and Finn gasps when he realizes what it is. A front porch, with the light on. “Like the song,” Finn murmurs, looking at his CD player and waiting until the line repeats itself. In the small driveway is what looks like a late-model Toyota Corolla, the license plate out of frame, and a “Biden Harris 2020” decal in the window. It looks like it was taken just before sunset, Finn decides, and if he squints, he can make out the number—1511—but no street name.
Finn gives in and puts the CD on repeat, eyeing the remaining two packages and wondering what the next surprise is. Puck—because surely it’s Puck—already sent him what Finn has to assume is a picture of his house and his car, and Finn feels a tiny bit of hope that’s eluded him for a long time. Probably since the same ill-fated New Year’s Eve party, as the first few hours of 2019 ticked by and he realized that he’d been living some kind of self-told lie for two and a half years.
Finn holds the package marked “3” for longer than strictly necessary, then unwraps the box and lifts the lid. A typed note is covering the contents, and Finn stares at it, reading it over and over.
“This still your brand? It’s a nasty habit and we’re in the middle of a respiratory pandemic, but… I miss it sometimes. And there’s room on the porch even if it’s raining or snowing.”
Finn looks guiltily at his underwear drawer. No one in New York knows about his ‘pack or so’ a month habit, or at least he’s pretty sure they don’t. Even in the winter, he goes down to the park or opens the window and sits on the fire escape. He’s pretty sure that when he lifts the paper, there’s going to be a pack of Marlboro Lights.
There are actually two, along with a lighter and a strip of paper that says in small font, “Heard they were more expensive there.”
Finn covers his mouth. The last package is the biggest by far, the reason for the overall size of the box, and he doesn’t know what to expect. He listens to the song another time through, staring at the photograph and indulging himself in picturing himself on that porch with the lighter in the box.
When the song restarts again, and Finn realizes he’s lost count of how many times he’s listened already, he picks up package “4” and slowly unwraps it. He hears Shane come into the apartment, then go into his own bedroom, and Finn continues.
The first thing he sees is a pair of KN95 masks and a face shield. He frowns a little, not completely sure why they’re there, until he moves them to the side and sees the pair of Delta gift cards. Finn exhales heavily, picking them up and weighing them in his hands, then picks up the last piece of paper in the entire package.
“All three NYC airports have several flights to here during the day, at least when I put in the second or the third.”
Finn looks reflexively at the calendar on his wall. It’s only October 22nd, which he realizes gives him time. Time to decide, time to take care of things, time to buy a ticket. When Taylor sings, again, “I knew you’d haunt all of my what-ifs,” Finn covers his face with his hands and bursts into tears.
After everything, Puck is still offering him a second chance.
Puck doesn’t talk to Blaine until Saturday afternoon, after he’s polished off a turkey-on-challah sandwich studded with hot pickles for lunch. He has errands to run later, but he wants to wait out the early afternoon crowds, plus Blaine had texted the “call me this weekend” the previous night while Puck was still on his way towards Dayton and Nana’s porch with the fresh challah waiting.
Blaine picks up on the third ring, and Puck can hear a door closing softly behind him before Blaine’s voice trills out “Hey!”
“Out on the balcony again?” Puck asks.
“You know how Kurt gets,” Blaine answers, sounding both amused and frustrated at the same time. Neither Puck nor Blaine is sure how Kurt figured out Puck’s queerness, but it means that Kurt views Puck and Blaine’s friendship with far more suspicion than warranted. On top of that, Kurt hasn’t spoken to Finn since Finn left Rachel almost a year earlier.
“I can guess, anyway,” Puck agrees. “Did he actually get the package?”
“He did,” Blaine confirms. “And before you ask, yes, he opened it.” Puck exhales in spite of himself. “When I talked to Shane, he said he thought he heard some crying Thursday afternoon, but he wasn’t sure.”
Puck isn’t sure how he feels about that, but it’s a lot better than yelling or tossing things out a window. “And you talked to him?”
“What else did you put in there?” Blaine asks. “He was really cagey about some of it but he said he thought it had to be you.”
Puck laughs as he looks out at the back patio. “I know habits of his no one else does,” he says. “Did he realize he didn’t have all of the necessary information?”
“Oh yeah, he kept asking me if I could just tell him what street you’re on,” Blaine confirms. “I didn’t tell him yet that I have the information you found on shipping belongings, but I’ll be honest, Puck, I’m not sure how much he really has to ship. He didn’t take much when he left Rachel, and the bedroom at Shane’s is small.”
Puck looks around his own house, which the real estate agent had referred to, back in early 2018, as a bungalow. At under 1200 square feet, it isn’t exactly large, but Puck knows that compared to a sublet bedroom, it probably is. “Well, he doesn’t need to bring any kind of household stuff anyway, unless he has an espresso machine. He should bring that if he has one,” Puck says.
“I’ll make sure and pass that along, in case he bought an espresso maker during quarantine,” Blaine says dryly.
“Hey, I considered it,” Puck says. “Rohs stayed open, though, and I couldn’t justify taking the business away from them.”
“What did you buy instead?” Blaine asks knowingly.
“A second Roomba, and an enameled cast iron dutch oven. Actually two of the dutch ovens, but one was for Nana,” Puck says.
“Fair,” Blaine says. “I bought a Breville oven last week.”
“I just don’t have the counter space for that and an espresso machine, and you know how I feel about coffee,” Puck says.
“I do know how you feel about coffee,” Blaine agrees with a laugh. “He did seem surprised that I called.”
“I told you that no one ever knew about us. It’s why I’m not sure anything will happen,” Puck admits. “As late as 2018, he was referring to himself as straight to other people.”
Blaine is quiet for a solid minute, and Puck forces himself not to keep talking. Instead, he starts writing on the whiteboard as he brainstorms what’s left to do before the first snow really falls, and lets Blaine think.
“He seemed awed that you’d done anything at all,” Blaine finally says. “Like it was an unexpected gift. I think of the two options, it’s more likely he acts and then you have things to work through after.”
“Hmm.” Puck considers that for awhile. At nearly 27, he doesn’t mind the idea of working through something, but he’s also antsy to feel settled. If Finn comes to Cincinnati and then runs, he knows he won’t handle it well. “As long as… well, as long as he stays and works through it.”
“Neither of you are 22 anymore, luckily,” Blaine says.
“That’s true,” Puck says, and he looks out the window again. On a day like today, chilly but sunny, Finn could be standing on the patio with one of his stinky Marlboro Lights, and Puck could time the espresso—from the machine he doesn’t know if Finn has—for the moment Finn walks back in the door, fingertips and nose cold, trailing the smell of smoke with him. They could drink their espresso together on the couch, and then Finn could help Puck navigate Target and the multiple lists, each written on envelopes stuffed with cash and collected over the course of the week from his neighbors—Jessica, sure, but also Mrs. Warren on the other side of Jessica and Josiah, and Mr. Dyer across the the street.
“I’ll check in with him again on Tuesday, probably,” Blaine says. “Maybe Monday, but definitely before I go to bed on Tuesday.”
“You go to bed at 8 pm,” Puck points out.
“I get up at 5!” Blaine says defensively.
“Yeah, yeah,” Puck says with a laugh. “I’ll talk to you Wednesday, then.”
“Wednesday,” Blaine agrees before they both hang up.
Puck studies the dark screen of his phone as if it’s some kind of scrying lens, ready to offer him a glimpse of Finn. No vision appears, and Puck doesn’t really know what to imagine. It’s been four years since he saw Finn in person and two years since Blaine sent him a picture. He doesn’t know what Finn’s sublet is like, or what his haircut is, or anything.
It’s best, he decides, not to dwell on it too much. He pockets his phone and collects his Target envelopes. If he’s lucky today, he’ll have time to walk to Rohs for some espresso when he gets home.
Finn leans out the window of his bedroom, puffing frantically on what he has to admit is his fourth or fifth cigarette, at least, since that morning. At fifteen dollars a pack in the city, cutting back from two or three packs a month to one had been an easy decision. It’s the one big con he’s thought of about going back to Ohio: he’s pretty sure he’s set up to become someone who smokes a pack a week. On the other hand, he figures Puck may not let him go down that road.
His ticket to Cincinnati is less than an hour old, purchased at 5:06 pm. He’d gone to vote early the day before, determined to make sure he voted before leaving New York. After voting, he’d stopped to buy a new, larger suitcase and a duffel bag. Everything he wants, he’s pretty sure, will fit in the two of them, or his existing backpack and carryon, with only a couple of exceptions. He doesn’t even want to keep the cheap sheets he’d bought when he moved in with Shane.
The phone rings just as he puts out the butt, and Finn jumps, nearly banging his head on the window. Blaine. Finn had never realized Blaine and Puck were close friends, but Finn thinks he missed a lot of things during college. College-Finn, 2020-Finn thinks, was an idiot.
“Hey, Blaine,” Finn answers.
“How’s your Tuesday?” Blaine asks.
“Nervewracking,” Finn says. “I bought a second suitcase yesterday after I voted, and an hour ago I bought a one-way plane ticket, and only two people in the world know I’ve ever even kissed a man.”
“Much less that you’re going to go live with one?”
“Yeah, that too,” Finn says. “Is it weird? That part doesn’t sound hard. Getting to meet new people and just being with him. It’s the stuff like telling Mom that sounds hard.”
“I know you don’t talk to your mother that often,” Blaine says, and it sounds like he’s stifling a laugh. “Did you take one of the hints he said he put in the package?”
“You don’t know when he said to fly?” Finn realizes the answer as he asks.
“Not a clue,” Blaine says cheerfully. “Oh, hey, did you make any ill-advised quarantine purchases that you need to ship? I bought a Breville oven last week.”
Finn almost drops the phone before responding. “How did you know about the espresso machine?”
Blaine’s answer is a full two and a half minutes of laughter.
“I’m sending you information about a couple of companies that can ship small boxes safely,” Blaine says when he finally stops. “Of course, you’ll need to know where you’re shipping them.”
“Fuck.” Finn looks around for his pack of cigarettes, resolution to stop for the night be damned. He’ll cut back again tomorrow. “I managed to forget that part.”
“You do remember how to use Google? 2020 didn’t take that, did it?”
“Shut up,” Finn grumbles as he balances the phone with his shoulder and lights a cigarette, leaning out the window at the same time. “Is it really that easy?”
“Why would it be overly difficult?”
Finn can’t really think of why it would be, but googling “Noah Puckerman” and getting all the information he needs—it’s not just that it feels too easy. It feels like something he should have done a year ago.
“I’ll text you what I find and you’ll make sure I don’t ship a Breville espresso machine to a stranger’s address?” Finn finally says.
“Deal,” Blaine says.
Finn exhales and looks back into his room. The ticket is for Monday, November 2, and even though it’s nearly a week away, he’s already started some of his packing. Now he has to find the house in the photograph.
Puck had been certain about his timeline. It was well-reasoned, well-thought out, and absolute torture for the week leading up to Halloweeen. It’s in the middle of a slow season at work, and it doesn’t take that long to carve a pumpkin or open two bags of candy and pour them into a bowl that he leaves by the door waiting for Saturday night.
It would be better, he thinks, if he knew there was any kind of certainty, but part of the reason he’d done things the way he had was to give Finn a choice. It had to be a choice, something Finn actively did. So it would make the week easier if there were no choice involved for Finn, but instead Puck fills his early mornings with exercise, days with work, evenings with housework and errands, and Friday night and Saturday morning feeling the prayers a little more deeply.
Some part of him thought that waiting for Finn would be a distraction from waiting for the election, but instead the waiting intensifies for both of them. Puck spends Sunday phonebanking, mostly calling Wisconsin numbers to urge them to make a voting plan and cast their vote for Democrats up and down the ballot. He knocks on his neighbors’ doors before and after, asking if anyone needs a ride to vote on Tuesday.
“When we vote, we win,” he repeats so many times that he dreams about it that night.
Let this week be a win Puck thinks when he wakes on Monday morning, his head still fuzzy with sleep. As many wins as possible.
Steering two rolling suitcases through the airport with a duffel bag on one shoulder and a backpack on the other is harder than Finn thinks it should be. He stops just outside the doors and maneuvers his phone out of his pocket to request a Lyft. He’d sent the address to Blaine twice, once on Wednesday and once on Saturday, just to make sure. The boxes had been shipped early that morning from the City, and then he’d collected his bags and made his way to JFK. Now he’s in Hebron, Kentucky, listening to fellow overly-masked travelers chatter about a bridge being closed and worrying that he still doesn’t have the right address.
1511 Victor Street, Cincinnati, Ohio, 45219. He triple-checks his typing, then hits request. The system doesn’t reject it, which means it must see it as an appropriate address. The Lyft arrives six minutes later, and after a bit of Tetris-like work, Finn’s bags and Finn himself are all squeezed into a Versa, much to the driver’s amusement.
“Visiting or getting back home?” he asks as he leaves the airport to take what he assures Finn is “the best detour around the bridge.”
“Moving,” Finn says through his mask after a few moments. Mentally he adds, “Home, but I haven’t been there yet.”
“Where’d you move from?” the driver asks conversationally.
“I was in New York,” Finn says. “But I’m from Ohio.”
“Can’t live with it, can’t live without it,” the driver says with a nod. “Like Rowlf the Dog said. Though I guess he was talking about women, not Ohio.”
“Living without women’s easy,” Finn mutters mostly to himself, jumping a little when the driver starts laughing. He realizes he was louder than he meant to be, and he can feel his cheeks heat up beyond the regular mask-induced warmth. “Sorry,” he adds in another mutter.
“Not a fan of the ladies,” the driver says with a nod as he keeps chuckling.
“Not really, no,” Finn says, surprised with how easy the words are coming to his lips. Maybe he’s known for nearly two years that he isn’t bi like he tried to tell himself, or straight like he tried to tell everyone else, but he’s never said it. Maybe he should at least once before he gets to Puck. “I’m gay.”
“Card-carrying?” the driver says jokingly.
“Nah, they stopped issuing them in November four years ago. Safety reasons.”
“Amen,” the driver says. “Tomorrow, though.”
“Tomorrow,” Finn agrees.
The clock in the Versa says 5:20 when it turns onto Victor Street, and the sun is low enough in the sky that the streetlights are flickering on. There’s an older man out getting his mail, and at the house next to the navy blue Corolla, a boy who looks like he could have been one of Finn’s fourth graders is dribbling a basketball.
The driver helps Finn unload his bags, but Finn is listening to the little boy, who runs past the Corolla to a side door and yells out “Mr. Noah!”
“What’s up, Josiah?” Puck’s voice floats out. “Your mom not home yet?”
“There’s a stranger with suitcases,” the boy reports.
“Yeah?” Puck’s voice gets closer, like he went to the door. “I’ll come look.”
Finn nods at the driver as he leaves. Bags on his shoulders, he carries the two suitcases up the stairs slowly, stopping at the top to pull his mask down just as the door in front of him opens. He registers the boy running back down to the sidewalk and picking up the basketball, but no dribbling follows.
“Hi,” Finn says, taking in his first sight of Puck in years. The curls are the same as they were in April 2016, the day Puck furiously told him to find a new place to live for the last three weeks of college. The jeans fit better than any Finn’s ever seen on him before. The purple of his sweatshirt looks good against his skin, and Finn assumes “Keshet” is something Jewish. Finn smiles a little at the knit slippers on Puck’s feet, assuming they came from Nana like so many pair before.
“Hey,” Puck says, looking like he’s doing his own assessment of Finn’s appearance. Finn mentally catalogues what he thinks Puck sees. His hair is longer than he’s had it in years, mostly because of covid, and he knows he’s probably a little rounder than the last time they saw each other, mostly thanks to the well-named quarantine fifteen. He’d like to think the grey sweater he’s wearing looks good on him, though, and while his face is rounder, he knows his jeans still make him look decent.
“Hey!” the boy’s voice calls from the sidewalk. “Like the song! He’s in your porchlight!”
Puck starts to laugh and then raises his voice. “Go eat dinner, Josiah!” He looks back at Finn a little sheepishly.
“‘The worst thing I ever did, was what I did to you’,” Finn quotes softly. “I never should have made fun of you for loving Taylor Swift, either.”
“Get in here,” Puck says with a slight shake of his head as he opens the storm door. “You came back, didn’t you?”
Finn can feel the giddy laughter burbling up as they push his suitcases into the cozy living room, and he takes in the plush turkey sitting on the mantle of an electric fireplace as Puck closes the door behind them. “I did,” he agrees. “I came back to you.”