If you had asked Kurt later, he wouldn't have been able to tell you why he stopped. He'd never picked up a hitchhiker before, but it was snowing, and this guy was so small. That was apparent even bundled up as he was in a puffy coat, woolen scarf and red knit cap. It wasn't a conscious decision. One minute Kurt was driving on the off-ramp, the next minute he was pulling onto the shoulder, and the guy was running toward his car.

The hitchhiker opened the back door of Kurt's Toyota Matrix and slung a back pack and a guitar case on the seat. Then he opened the front passenger door and slid in. “Thanks,” he said simply.

The Matrix was a far cry from the spacious Navigator that Kurt drove in high school, but such a huge vehicle was beyond impractical in New York City, so when Kurt had gone off to college, he had opted for the Toyota because it was cheap and got good gas mileage. A small part of him also chose it because he knew that he wouldn't care at all if it was ever stolen. Everything about the vehicle screamed middle-aged, Midwestern housewife. There was nothing sexy about it.

Now that Kurt was sharing the car with a perfect stranger, however, the small cross-over vehicle (the modern term to distract people from what they really were: hatchbacks) seemed even smaller.

“Where are you headed?” Kurt asked.

“Um, just…West,” the man said vaguely. “You?”

Kurt paused for a second while he thought quickly, “Youngstown,” he finally answered.

It was only a partial lie. Kurt's ultimate destination was Seattle, but he planned to spend a day in Lima before he continued on his cross-country adventure where he would visit friends along the way. However, Lima was ten hours from New York City, and Kurt was not going to be trapped in a car with a perfect stranger for that long, and he would pass through Youngstown. Youngstown was still a fair drive—nearly six hours—but, for the life of him, Kurt couldn't think of the names of the any of the Pennsylvania towns he would pass first.

“Sounds good,” the man nodded. “Thanks again for picking me up.”

“It's my pleasure,” Kurt turned his head and gave the man a close-lipped smile. The man returned the smile with a bright grin, and Kurt noticed that snowflakes had melted on the man's eyelashes where his whiskey-colored eyes peeked out from under his cap. Kurt had the inexplicable urge to brush the droplets away with his thumb.

Weird. Kurt was not the touchy-feely type.

“I'm Kurt.”

“Blaine.”

“Nice to meet you, Blaine.”

“You, too.”

After that banal exchange, they drove in silence for a while, Kurt concentrating on steering competently through the snow as it came down in fluffy, white flakes. When he finally looked over at his passenger, Blaine was sound asleep, temple pressed against the passenger window, lips slightly parted.