Disclaimer: I do not own Glee, if I did I would not be in debt, own a ten year old Taurus, and I definitely would not have resorted to trying an at home waxing kit so I for sure wouldn't look so surprised all of the time.
He hadn't really planned on coming to New York, but after all of his friends left town for their after high school plans left there was only him and the gleeks who hadn't graduated yet left in Lima. He would hang with Artie and Sam occasionally but those guys were busy with their senior year and trying to secure a second nationals win to give future gleeks a solid foundation. One day, a few weeks after Thanksgiving, he was sitting in class at Lima Community College and it occurred to him that he really didn't want to fucking be there and as a nineteen year old stud this was probably the only time in his life where it was acceptable for him to just leave. Shelby had taken Beth to Boston at the end of his senior year when a job opportunity opens up with an established theater company, and his sister is pretty settled into the swing of things as a freshmen. He knew he had a little bit of money in his account from years of pool cleaning and his job at Sheets N' Things, plus he was sure he could get Burt to let him pick up a few shifts at the shop to give him a little more cushion. Puck did the math and realized he could reasonably expect to be out of Lima on a permanent basis by mid-January. He chose New York because it was the first place he had ever been outside of Lima for longer than a day besides football camp in Kentucky, which except for the awesome "I Got Lucky In Kentucky" shirt he stole from a gas station, he had very little in the way of fond memories. A little less than two months later he was sitting in a four floor walk-up studio apartment that had a view of the building next door, questionable neighbors, no real furniture besides his bed and a recliner, and shitty water pressure but was in a semi decent neighborhood and was actually pretty clean and had been updated sometime in the late nineties.
Her finding him a few weeks after he left Lima wasn't all that hard. There was no dramatic coffee shop scene, or hearing his voice in a smoky bar. One day she saw on Facebook that he had changed his current location to NY, NY. She messaged him and said that he should meet up with her and Kurt and a few of their new college friends at a bar that is lax on the legal drinking age and around the corner from the closet sized six-floor walkup that she and Kurt shared. He was new to a city that could fit about ten Lima's, so he accepted the invite and woke up the next morning tangled in her gold star embossed bed sheets in nothing but his boxers and his left sock. Rachel I sitting cross legged at the foot of her bed, staring at him, and a tank top, underwear, and for some strange reason Noah's other sock.
There is about a minute of awkwardness before she levels him with a stare and gives him one of her patented RachelBerrySpeeches* about how they had spent three years of high school changing in front of each other backstage and he had been her first boyfriend so really there was nothing wrong with two consenting adults who trusted each other "doing the deed" after a brief sexual hiatus. He argues with her about the sexual hiatus part but she gives him a knowing look and he remembers that despite all of her crazy, she does have a sixth sense about the most random shit. When they enter her tiny kitchen for coffee Kurt is awake and happily informs them that they did not have sex but they did play a fairly intense game of strip Monopoly before Rachel passed out and Noah carried her to bed where he quickly passed out as well.
Rachel seems relieved and mentions that the small silver race car under her pillow makes much more sense now.
Noah asked what kind of freaky shit she was in to that she hadn't questioned that sooner.
He thinks about how New York Rachel is so much more relaxed than Lima Rachel, but then when he really thinks about it maybe it isn't about New York at all and just the fact that she had been in love and got to do the leaving for once. Noah knew all about the power of being the one to leave after always being the one who got left, the old wounds it could heal and the confidence it could give you. He thinks about these things as he wipes down the front window of the small music store he works at part time, and when he is shelving books at the book store that he works at part time, and when he is glaring at the temperamental espresso machine at the coffee shop he picks up the occasional shift at. New York is really fucking expensive.
He sees a lot of Rachel and Kurt, because between work, the few community college courses he's taking, and the gigs he occasionally manages to land, he really doesn't have time to make new friends and figures why not stick with the ones he already knows don't suck completely. When he shares this thought with them Rachel hugs him and Kurt makes an off color remark about the fact that Puck is actually the only one of them who doesn't suck. Puck snorts shitty beer through his nose and Kurt hands him a silk handkerchief to wipe his face with.
Really though he isn't entirely sure he would make new friends even if he did have the time. Rachel and Kurt knew him at his absolute worst, emotionally and physically, and they still kept a six pack in their fridge even though he knew for a fact that neither of them drank anything that wasn't pink or was something Judy Garland may have ordered in a movie. Also three years of glee had brainwashed him enough to know who Judy Garland was, and he figured that the work it took the Gleeks to force that through sixteen years of Playboy editorials and football stats shouldn't go to waste.
Finn is not really an issue for Rachel anymore. They broke up the day after graduation when she and Kurt left for New York and then he left for boot camp at the end of August. Puck and Finn spent a few evenings that summer drinking beer and playing video games, and Finn mentioned Rachel once or twice in passing but never with any strong emotions attached. This gives Puck a strange sense of ease, like some minor imbalance has been set right. Puck does not think about that when he is at any of his jobs and he does not tell Rachel and Kurt, so they do not hug him or make him snort beer out of his nose.
Shelby is an issue for Rachel. Despite the letter of recommendation her mother wrote for her and the framed picture of the two of them with her fathers and Beth on graduation day she still freezes up when Noah mentions the Shelby is bringing Beth to town to visit him and has asked him if he thought Rachel would like to join them for dinner. She calmly stands and leaves the apartment and paces on the sidewalk out front for twenty minutes while he and Kurt watch from the window. After she kicks a plastic cup with enough force to send it all the way down the street and out of sight she comes back up to her apartment and says that she thinks a visit with her mother sounds lovely.
It is lovely. Sort of. Things get awkward when the waiter assumes that he and Rachel are together and Beth calls Rachel mama, which while completely understandable because of how alike Rachel and Shelby look, it still causes a moment of tension. It also makes Puck realize that despite the fact that he has always preached about how the Puckerone is a ride for all different kinds of ladies that maybe he does have a type, and maybe that type is small aggressive brunettes with big voices and guarded hearts. Which is super weird. So despite the fact that he is ten kinds of ecstatic about seeing Beth, he can't say that he doesn't breathe a small sigh of relief when he drops her and Shelby at JFK.
About six months after he gets to New York a few of the other gleeks show up in the city. Sam is here and doing the same thing as Puck, making music and money, and taking a few classes plus he's doing caricatures in the park honing his drawing skills. He and Puck share an apartment with Artie who is at NYU, studying film so he can someday take over the world. They live in a not great but not awful apartment that has two bedrooms and a den that is just slightly smaller than the bedrooms that Puck takes because Artie needs the biggest room because of his chair and Sam needs enough space for his drawing table, plus it means Puck pays fifty bucks less a month. Besides the ones he lives with he happens to know that Mike, Tina, Mercedes, and Blaine are all living in the city and attending Merrymount (Mike and Tina), Mannes (Mercedes), and NYADA (Blaine), for dance, dance, singing, and theatre respectively. Despite having all those other gleeks around he still spends the majority of his time with Rachel and Kurt, but now he has his dudes around for bro time and Kurt has stopped whining about missing Blaine, and the final third of his "diva soul", Mercedes. Things in his life have never been better and he would be scared about the other shoe dropping but none of this seems to be borrowed or stolen happiness.
He and Rachel get together about a month before the shows official Broadway open. He is sitting in her room as she compulsively runs lines and paces and he spends over an hour watching her do that. An hour of his time during the week where he already works forty hours, attends class for nearly twenty, sleeps a minimum of forty two, performs for two hours, practices for seven, and once you factor in things like the time he spend on the subway, eating, showering, and working out every day, he has roughly three hours of truly free time every week. Three hours of time, and he just used a third of it listening to her repeat lines the he has memorized by now so he knows that she has them down cold. Noah takes a moment to think about what this means, gets up, blocks the path she has been wearing in the carpet, and kisses he mid word of her monologue. On a literal level she tastes like the lemonade lip gloss she's wearing, on a metaphorical level she tastes like proving everybody wrong and grape slushy. When he pulls away she smile and nods. For the first time in their lives it is just that simple.
Rachel lands a small part in an off Broadway show about a bunch of horny German kids. She ends up as the lead and defers her second year at NYU to try and take the show to Broadway. Puck and Kurt sit through the show at a few different stages between script reading and dress rehearsals, and Puck sees Rachel's boobs so often he almost doesn't have to place his hands in his lap anymore and he even comes to appreciate the twisted humor of her male lead despite him being St. Douche Bags doppelganger. He and Kurt bring her flowers and stage door like a couple of mid-western fan girls in town on a school trip (Stagedoor-ing is something his fourteen year old self would punch him in the nads for knowing or doing.) She smiles and pretends she doesn't know them as she signs their playbills and poses for a photo with Kurt. As soon as Noah throws his arm around her though throws her arms around him and kisses him fiercely, ending their little game. Kurt snaps the photo anyways, he has a feeling they will want it.
All of the gleeks plus Rachel's newer theater friends meet up at a bar with the rest of the cast to wait for the reviews. Noah stays be her side all night, and when Sam comes running in with the papers and Artie starts pulling up all the blog sites and reading the reviews out loud, the ones that call Rachel mesmerizing and talented and especially the one with the headline 'A Star is Born', he pulls her tight to him and whispers in her ear that wanting everything too much wasn't a bad thing at all. How could it be if wanting everything too much is what led them here?
She answers him with a smile and a kiss.