“Are you sure you want to do this, baby?” Kurt asked, rolling on to his side and watching his boyfriend chug his second beer. Blaine only ever drank the two – not enough to make him fall down drunk, but just to make him feel a little more mellow, a little less stressed.

That, coupled with the gorgeous, naked body of his boyfriend lying beside him post-coitus, was all the inebriation Blaine needed.

“Well, it’s kind of hard to take it back now, darling,” Blaine laughed. “The house goes on sale tomorrow. Most of the furniture is already gone.” Blaine’s eyes flicked around his room, the only one in the house that still had most of its furnishings – a dresser, a chair, his desk, a nightstand, a standing lamp. But everything else, his bed included, had been sold on Craigslist, and was now the property of Patricia Billings, a resident of North Lima, purchased for her son John, and at a steal if Blaine did say so himself. But Blaine didn’t need the money, so he really didn’t care. “No use canceling the sale so I can own a huge, empty house, and for what? Coming back during the summer? Hanging over Christmas break when we should be camping out at your dad’s? Nu-uh. Good bye, good riddance.”

“Still,” Kurt insisted, “I’m sure we could pull some strings if you…”

“What’s done is done,” Blaine said, cutting Kurt off more forcefully than he normally would. When he saw the hurt in Kurt’s eyes, he blew out a long, tired sigh, and put his beer bottle on the floor. “I’m sorry, darling,” he murmured. “I shouldn’t have…”

“It’s okay,” Kurt said. “I mean, you’ve already made up your mind. And it’s your decision. I shouldn’t be bugging you about it.”

Blaine didn’t mean to snap, but he was so done talking about this. Kurt wasn’t the only one who had made a comment about Blaine selling the house, but he was the least annoying about it. Sam got on Blaine’s case for giving up the ultimate party pad. It started off as a joke, but after a few conversations, Sam really seemed upset by it. Puck was pissed that Blaine didn’t offer to let him live there after his mother kicked him out. Though, to be fair, Puck’s situation had gotten a bit extreme, getting a girl pregnant the way he did toward the end of the school year. But Blaine didn’t hold anything against him. Santana, in prime Santana fashion, joked unendingly about how he and Kurt should convert it into the new Liberace Museum, or a gay artists’ colony, maybe form a cult of limp-wristed car enthusiasts.

Jeff, ultimately, was the only one of Blaine’s friends who seemed to understand.

Kurt didn’t fully comprehend why the house bothered Blaine, but that wasn’t Kurt’s fault. Blaine wasn’t ready to talk about it. His boyfriend was only looking out for him. When things got rough, that’s what Blaine had to remember.

Blaine took Kurt’s hand in his, dragging it toward him to place a kiss on Kurt’s knuckles. “What I mean, darling, is there’s no going back now. But believe me, this is a good thing. I promise.”

Kurt watched his boyfriend kiss his skin, feeling as concerned as he did when Blaine first told him he was selling the house.

“So…you don’t have a connection to this place at all?” Kurt slid across the sleeping bag they were lying on to give his boyfriend an easier reach. “Nothing you might want to come back to?” Kurt knew Blaine’s history with his parents was a sour one, but this house could give him security, a place to return to if everything fell through.

A safety net.

“Kurt, your house is a home because your father lives there,” Blaine said. “The physical building doesn’t make your house a home. He does.” Blaine shook his head, slower and sadder with each pass. “I don’t have that with my folks, not here. And all this stupid house does is remind me of how much I don’t have that.”

Kurt still didn’t know a lot about Blaine’s family. It was information that Blaine felt unnecessary. The past was the past. It couldn’t be fixed and it couldn’t be changed. When they talked, Blaine preferred they talk about their future together. Blaine had minimized his world, shortened it to contain mostly himself and Kurt, along with a few other players, and that gave him comfort. He was happy with that.

Kurt abided by Blaine’s wishes, didn’t ask too many questions, but he’d gathered bits and pieces of information in round about ways – through letters and photo albums left around the house, and from the occasional loose lips of the guys during Saturday overnighters. They’d down a few wine coolers and tell stories out of school. Blaine played along somewhat, dismissed most of it as bullshit, but Kurt could tell which stories were true by the way his boyfriend reacted – when his lips became a tight line, his jaw got tense, or when he grabbed Kurt’s hand and they left the room entirely.

Blaine would recover quickly in his bedroom and tell Kurt that they left those drunk knuckleheads because Blaine needed to have him now, but Kurt knew.

Kurt knew that Blaine had an estranged older brother, Cooper, who left home at eighteen to pursue acting. He tried a stint on Broadway, but ended up living on the streets, doing things that he wasn’t proud of to make ends meet. Eventually, when his attempts to make it on stage hit a wall, and his name basically became synonymous with mud, he set his sights on Hollywood and boom. Success…sort of. He reached B-rate status and hovered there, making a comfortable but ambiguous living. But according to Finn, even in interviews, Cooper didn’t mention his family, dodged questions about his mother and father, where he was born, where he grew up.

And he didn’t mention that he had a little brother. In one interview that Finn remembered, Cooper made it a point to say that he had no siblings whatsoever.

The really sad part, according to Finn, was that Blaine had looked up to his older brother. He’d been so proud that Cooper struck out on his own, went for what he wanted, and let nothing hold him back. Blaine had hoped to follow in his footsteps one day. After that interview, Blaine defended him, blew it off by saying that Cooper was just trying to protect their family from nosy paparazzi, but Blaine knew. They all knew. But being his friends, they went along with it, then dropped it soon after.

Blaine’s father, of course, kicked Blaine out of his house in Chicago during Blaine’s junior year. Blaine hadn’t spoken to him since. Kurt was probably in no danger of ever meeting him.

But Blaine’s mother…

During the course of their entire relationship, Kurt didn’t realize that Blaine’s mother had left him. Blaine kept it a carefully guarded secret, didn’t bring her up, and Kurt glanced over her non-presence. Not until that day when Kurt, his father, and Carole had to take Blaine to the hospital did they find out that Blaine’s mother had gotten fed up with the drama surrounding Blaine’s homosexuality and left him.

Blaine had omitted that information for the most innocent reason imaginable. He always thought that she would return eventually.

He’d hoped she would.

Apparently, big blow ups weren’t uncommon in the Anderson household. His mother had yelled and screamed about him being a huge disappointment, about how her marriage ending was all his fault, his father kicking him out for having a boy in his room the last straw, and then she left. She did come back after about a week, snuck in to the house while Blaine was at school, but that was to collect a few things. Blaine only knew because some of the stuff she took with her was obvious – China from a cabinet in the dining room, a Tiffany lamp, an antique desk clock.

The second time she left, she left for good.

Blaine never went looking for a note, so he didn’t know there was one. Not until he decided that he needed to move on and work towards preparing for the future did he stumble across it.

Blaine didn’t know how the house was being maintained financially. The electricity stayed on, the land line, his cell phone, so did the cable, and yet Blaine never saw a bill. At first, he figured it would start automatically coming out of his bank account, something his mother could have arranged with the bank through her accountant. He kept an eye, but it never did, so he didn’t know where the bills went. He figured that was proof that someday (regardless of her comments to the contrary) his mother would show back up on the doorstep and resume life as usual. They wouldn’t discuss her leaving. Important things like that rarely got discussed. She’d just re-insert herself into Blaine’s life, and they’d go on from there.

As high school started coming to an end, and Blaine got his acceptance to NYU, he decided to sell the furniture in the house as an act of revenge. He figured his mother would come home to an empty house, and wouldn’t that serve her right? It took them around two months to have it appraised and sold by the most appropriate means. Blaine’s mother and father were big collectors of mediocre art, but even that fetched a decent price with nouveau collectors. The one room of the house Blaine left untouched, however, was his mother and father’s bedroom. But as he rifled through things, getting rid of anything and everything, preparing for his move to New York with Kurt, he started to get more and more bitter, more and more angry. Eventually, he decided that the room was no longer off limits, and he went in there in search of anything that they could liquidate.

That’s when he found it - Pamela Anderson’s Dear John letter to her youngest son.

The letter hit upon the classic relationship clichés – her and his father married too young, they had an accidental child, they kept him in the hopes of rebuilding their marriage, and when that didn’t work out the way they planned, they had Blaine, hoping that the second time was the charm.

It wasn’t, not for the purposes of keeping them together anyway.

She didn’t say if she’d gone to Chicago. She didn’t mention where she was headed. She simply said she couldn’t be the mother Blaine needed, that she’d tried her best, but it wasn’t good enough.

Along with her letter, she left a folder full of paperwork, which included a revised copy of her will and the deed to the house, along with the deed to a few other minor properties Blaine didn’t know his family owned, each of them transferred to his name. The minute Blaine discovered the house belonged to him, he was determined to sell it. The money he made he funneled straight into his trust fund, except for a few thou for one or two important things - namely some upgrades to his Mustang, and a gift for Kurt, one that Blaine had taken to carrying around in his pocket and which he had yet to give him.

That was part of the future, too.

Surprisingly, the only person who had a clue about that present was Burt Hummel. When he noticed the telltale outline of the box in Blaine’s pocket and mentioned it to him in private, Blaine let him in on the secret.

“So, New York’s going to be home now?” Kurt asked. “We leave Ohio behind and we never look back?”

“No.” Blaine pulled Kurt’s body to him, holding him so he could feel every inch of Kurt against every inch of him. “We’ll still come back and visit. Our friends are here. Your dad is here. But home isn’t a place for me anymore.”

“Is it your Mustang?” Kurt laughed, resting his chin on Blaine’s chest. “Because that’s going to be a tight squeeze considering your clothes and my clothes and...”

“No!” Blaine smacked Kurt on his bare ass. “It’s you.”

Kurt’s brow furrowed and he stopped laughing. “Me?”

“Yup,” Blaine said. “You’re home.”

“How am I home?” Kurt brought his fingers to Blaine’s mouth and traced over them lightly while he spoke, waiting for the moment when he’d be allowed to kiss him again, when they could make love again, violating the room as many times as they could before they had to leave it for good.

“Home is you,” Blaine explained. “Your hand to hold, your lips to kiss, your heartbeat, the sound of your voice.” Blaine grabbed Kurt’s fingers in his hand and kissed them along the tips. “Home is wherever you are, Kurt. And it will be, as long as we’re together.”