Coming into her program two years after everyone else, Rachel has to work even harder to prove herself. Fortunately, working hard to show people that she's something special is something she's been practicing for her entire life. She's going to have to take intersession and summer classes to graduate in two years, and the number of course hours she's going to be taking each semester is bordering on insane, but that's just fine. The things that are new and difficult are interspersed with things that come quite naturally, like her private voice lessons, and she took as many of the non-performance related courses as she could while she was at OSU, like music theater history and piano and dance classes (and fortunately, OSU has quite a good dance program, so she doesn't feel like any of those skills are lacking).
It doesn't take her long to prove herself to her professors. Dr. Weaver, her private voice teacher, is easily Rachel's favorite. The woman is obviously impressed with Rachel's talent and her dedication, but she isn't afraid to be critical and push Rachel to work harder and be better, and that's exactly why Rachel loves her. (Dr. Weaver is the sort of teacher Rachel always thought Mr. Schuester could have been if he hadn't been so distracted by whatever was going on in his personal life.)
Generally, the men in her classes seem to like her more than the women. She isn't surprised. At this point in her life, she's aware that she's an attractive woman, even if she isn't traditionally pretty, and she's come to believe men when they express interest. What's more, she isn't the competition, not as far as these guys are concerned.
The fact that she is the competition is why, she thinks, the other girls in her classes are less fond of her. And that makes sense. It must be frustrating to work hard somewhere for two years only to have some new girl show up and make you look inferior (which, if she's being honest, most of them are).
It's not at all a surprise that the first real friend she makes is in a Shakespeare class she's taking because her early modern English literature class didn't transfer from OSU. A lovely brunette girl sits next to Rachel on the first day of class, and when their professor walks into the room in a long skirt printed like the skin of a giraffe with a matching button-down shirt, she mutters, "Sweet Jesus, it's like we're on safari," under her breath. A laugh escapes from the back of Rachel's throat before she can bite down on her tongue and stop it, and the girl glances at her with a little grin on her lips. Rachel spends the entire hour thinking about how much that sounded like something Santana would have said, and beyond missing her friend, she decides that she wants to talk to this girl.
Her name is Christina, and she's a marketing major getting her minor in English, "because everything else irritated me." They exchange phone numbers after class under the guise of having someone to call for notes if they miss a class, but Rachel feels quite sure that they're going to become friends. It's a relief, knowing that she'll have a friend with whom she isn't in competition, someone who isn't secretly hoping that she's going to fall on her face.
Architecture? It's hard.
Puck spent years avoiding hard work, to the extent that everything he did was half-assed right up until he joined glee club sophomore year and the combination of Rachel fucking Berry and wanting not to look like a complete tool for singing and dancing convinced him that working hard for something could really pay off. Then Coach Beiste showed up and proved that football could get them somewhere if they were willing to put in the effort, so Puck started working hard there, too. And that was about the time, after the juvie thing, that it really hit home that the best way to get the fuck out of Lima was to go to college. Even though he'd always scraped by in school because the shit wasn't really all that difficult, he figured that showing colleges what he could do when he actually did the work was the best way to get in somewhere.
Puck's never going to be the over-achiever at the head of the class, but he refuses to be at the back of the line, to have people think that he isn't good enough or he won't amount to anything again. People in Lima always thought that about him because of his dad, and when he went and knocked Quinn up, he basically proved them right. Except everything he's done in the five years since has been a big fuck you to those people, and he kinda likes it.
His classes are hard as fuck, but he actually really likes them. He never really saw the point of math in high school, because there wasn't one. But now, seeing how the numbers come together to create actual structures...math isn't totally useless. Plus, it turns out that this stuff comes pretty naturally to him, which is awesome, if not entirely unexpected. (He didn't actually skip every math class for the first two years of high school, but he was checked out of most of them and still never failed; math just isn't hard for him.)
And yeah, he's working his ass off to keep his GPA up for grad school (which he'll have to do if he ever wants to get his certification and make real money), but he's still him. He still goes out and drinks and shit, and he meets Anna in October.
He meets her at Finnegan's Wake when he's there with Santana celebrating the end of midterms. He's just standing at the bar, waiting to order more whiskey, when the crowd around him shifts and this little blonde girl practically falls into him, her sharp little elbow catching him hard in the ribs. She snaps something at the dude in front of her, who apparently just stepped all over her feet, then looks up at Puck. He's got one hand at the small of her back, steadying her, he supposes, while the other rubs at the spot on his ribs that's probably going to bruise. "I'm so sorry," she tells him sincerely, looking up at him with eyes that are just about the color of the whiskey he's been drinking all night. "Some people just have no concept of personal space." She says the last bit a little sharply, looking over at the other guy again, before smiling up at Puck.
"'S'fine."
She buys his drink when they finally get up to the bar, and since Santana's found some dude to play darts with, Puck sits with Anna at a table and flirts with her like crazy. She's a senior accounting major, which sounds boring as fuck, but whatever. She's from Tennessee and has just a little bit of an accent, which is fucking cute, and less than an hour after he's met her, she's asking if he wants to come back to her place.
Uh, yeah.
She pulls a blue satin nightgown over her head after, tells him to wait when she slips out of the room. He's still kind of drunk, so Puck just lays there with his eyes closed, and he's half-asleep when she reappears with a glass of water.
"I have absolutely no interest in dating you," she says seriously, sliding her legs beneath the blankets and folding them Indian-style. Puck nearly chokes on the water he's drinking. "I don't have time for a boyfriend, and I don't want one."
He hands her the water glass. "Uh, no offense, but I don't want to be your boyfriend," he tells her with a furrowed brow. If this is her way of telling him to get out, it's kind of stupid, especially since she told him to wait like, five minutes ago.
She smiles a little, setting the glass on her bedside table. "I would, however, be more than happy to have sex with you again."
There it is. Puck smirks, shifting to push her onto her back as he hovers over her. "Now?"
Anna slides her hand around the back of his neck, scratching lightly with her fingernails, her thighs squeezing his hips. "Yes." She pulls back when he leans down to kiss her, keeping out of reach. "And other times."
"Baby, are you asking me to be your fuck buddy?" he asks, sliding one hand up her side to cup her breast through the smooth fabric of her nightgown. He nips at her lips when she nods, plucking at her nipple until she arches her back. "All right."
He sees a lot of her (ha) even though they don't spend any real time together, which makes her the best fuck buddy ever. The only thing she expects from him is orgasms, so, you know. It's almost like a business arrangement, and maybe it's weird, but Puck likes it that way, easy and straightforward.
Rachel has her first ever one-night stand at the beginning of November.
A bunch of people in her program decide to go out to a club, and Rachel brings Christina along so she'll have an ally in the group. No one asks any questions about Rachel's fake ID (though she is relieved that she'll be twenty-one soon and will be able to throw the thing away), and after a few drinks and lots of dancing, she's feeling sort of wonderful.
She's adjusting the neckline of her top when she comes out of the bathroom, her eyes cast downward so she doesn't see him come out of the men's room before she walks straight into his chest. She apologizes, blinking up at him with wide eyes and running a hand through her hair.
"It's fine." He smiles at her, and the fact that he pauses to look at her combines with that adorable smile to make her offer to buy him a drink 'to make up for my carelessness.'
She likes that he lets her.
He sort of reminds her of Dominic Cooper, who she's had a crush on since she first saw the film version of Mama Mia!, and when he reaches over to set his hand on her thigh over her jeans as she's talking, she decides that it's been much too long since she's had sex, and she's going to let this man - Joshua - change that.
Christina tells her to go for it when she drags the girl with her to the bathroom and tells her the plan.
She starts tugging at his clothes as soon as they're in her apartment, and for the first time since she moved in, she doesn't bother with locking more than the first deadbolt on her door before stepping away from it, pulling Joshua by his belt loops with her.
She comes on his fingers before he even has his jeans off, which is amazing simply on the merit of it not being her own fingers for the first time in nearly a year.
It's ridiculous that she starts to feel apprehensive when he's smoothing a condom down over his length, kneeling between her parted legs and watching her with dark eyes. Ridiculous or not, it's the truth, and he seems to be able to sense it as he moves to hover over her again, his length pressed against where she's wet as he teases at her lips. "You okay?" he asks.
"I'm fine. It's-" She gasps when he rocks his hips against her, his hardness bumping her nerves. "It's been a while," she admits, and he pulls back to look at her. She wraps her arms around his neck to pull him back to her. "Just be nice," she murmurs against his neck.
He starts slowly, giving her a chance to adjust, but she's wound so tightly that it doesn't really take much to push her over the edge, which he seems to like.
It's easier than she expects, having sex with a stranger, and honestly, it's nice to let herself sink into the physical sensations without thinking about anything else. She walks him to the door after he's gotten dressed, tells him it was fun and maybe she'll see him around. She doesn't ask for his number because, frankly, she doesn't want it.
Santana would be so proud.
She's never been the kind of girl who thinks of sex as a means to an end, but sleeping with Joshua doesn't make her feel dirty or cheap or wrong in any way. It isn't the way she wants to conduct herself all the time, certainly, but as a one-time thing? It's not so bad.
She calls Noah after she's booked her flight back to Ohio for Thanksgiving. It's been more than a couple of weeks since they actually spoke, though they text one another every couple of days, mostly random, inconsequential things that are designed more to stay in touch with one another than to really communicate in a serious way.
Yes, she's still embarrassed, though that's dissipating. She thinks that she'll at least be able to spend time alone with him again when she's back in Lima without feeling awkward, and she's glad. She misses him.
"My mom was just asking about you the other day," Noah says in lieu of a real greeting when he answers.
She smiles, leaning forward to set her laptop on her coffee table before settling back into the couch. "What did you tell her?"
"That you were too busy learning how to be famous to talk to my stupid ass," he answers, grinning at the indignant little noise that she makes. He's actually sort of glad for the interruption; studying gothic architecture isn't the most exciting thing in the world, and reading about these cathedrals is making his eyes cross. "What's up?"
"I just booked my flight back for Thanksgiving."
She gives him a quick rundown of the details, then gets a little quiet. "What is it, Rachel?"
"I miss you," she admits, speaking softly. "I miss talking to you."
Well, she's the one who started avoiding him, but since she knows that, he doesn't remind her. "Me too," he says instead, and that's the truth. There's something about talking to Rachel, to being friends with Rachel, that's different than it is with anyone else.
"Then we're going to change it," she says firmly. If she could push aside the feelings she had for Finn and be his friend, then she can certainly do the same thing with Noah. A silly little unrequited crush and a moment of physical embarrassment aren't reasons enough to end a friendship that means so much to her.
Noah is important enough to her that she's willing to take what she can get.
It's the longest she's ever gone without seeing her father, so she absolutely launches herself at him when he picks her up at the airport late Tuesday night. Honestly, she's so happy to see him that she nearly tears up, though she manages to hold it back. They spend the entire drive back to Lima talking about everything from her role in one of the productions that's going to open at the end of the semester to Rock Hudson's latest strange cat habit (drowning his stuffed toy mice in his water bowl).
She turns on the television when she goes up to her room to get ready for bed, because even though she isn't going to watch it, it seems too quiet. It's absurd, because she's lived in Lima most of her life, and it isn't like the street she lived on in Columbus was loud, but just a few months in New York have gotten her used to a lot more noise at night. She swears it's quiet enough that she can hear the leaves skittering across the porch roof outside her window, which, somehow, become big, fat rats climbing around in the walls, at least in her mind's eye, and then it doesn't matter how tired she is, she isn't going to be able to fall asleep.
She goes downstairs for a glass of water, but walking through the too quiet house isn't any better than being in her too quiet room, and she doesn't even bother getting her drink before going back up to her room.
It seems like it takes forever, but she finally falls asleep halfway through an episode of Home Improvement on TV Land. It's fitful sleep through, and her dreams are filled with rats and cockroaches and muscle cars, a bizarre combination that has her waking before the sun even comes up.
Rachel calls him on Wednesday afternoon to tell him that she's baking pies and he's welcome to come over and keep her company. He knows she means for it to be an olive branch or whatever the hell metaphor she'd use, and watching Rachel bake is better than watching his mom bake because Rachel isn't going to give him the third degree about...Rachel.
Whatever.
He rings the bell at the Berrys' twice without getting any answer, which is weird since Rachel replied to the text he sent just before he left his house with a little smiley face. He assumes that means she's expecting him, but it's not like he can tell whether or not she's home by her car in the driveway. (It's in the garage, actually, where it's been since she moved and left her car behind. Not helpful.)
He pushes the front door open carefully, and he immediately understands why she isn't answering the doorbell. She's rocking out, blaring something (Paramore, he thinks, which is kind of funny) from the kitchen so loudly that he knows she hasn't heard him open the door and come into the house.
The scream she lets out when she closes the refrigerator door and sees him standing in the kitchen doorway is fucking epic.
She presses a hand to her heart and reaches over to the iPod dock, switching it off completely. "You scared me," she tells him, stating the obvious because she doesn't know what else to say. He smirks, and she takes just a second to look at him. "No shave November?"
She watches him scrub a hand over his beard at his jaw. "My mom fucking hates it," he answers, sounding pretty pleased about it.
Rachel shakes her head, then moves around the center island to stand in front of him. "Hi," she says quietly, looking up at him for a moment before standing on her toes to hug him. She doesn't hate the beard at all, though she doesn't think it's a look she'd like to see on him all the time.
"Hey," he murmurs, and she lets herself sort of sink into his arms. Noah gives wonderful hugs, and with the exception of her father yesterday, it's been a while since she's gotten a good hug. "What are you making?" he asks once he's let her go.
"Apple pie and a cranberry-pear tart," she answers with a smile. "I don't suppose you're interested in peeling fruit?"
He pulls out one of the stools on the opposite side of the counter from where she's been working and sits down. "Nah. You got this."
And just that easy, they're pretty much back to the way they were before everything happened, with Rachel peeling and slicing fruit while he offers her his opinions on Santana's latest conquests. (The girl's dating a guy and a girl at the same time, and Puck has thoughts.)
He's sitting on the couch on Thanksgiving, watching the Lions embarrass themselves and feeling smug as fuck about the fact that his Nana Helen has decided to grill Abby this year instead of him when his phone buzzes in his pocket.
My crazy anti-vegan aunt attempted to cook seitan for dinner. Wonders never cease!
Puck doesn't know what the fuck seitan is, but apparently she's happy about it. He knows Thanksgiving is kind of hard for her, so he's all for anything that's making her smile instead of cry or whatever. They text back and forth a bit, not really talking about anything, and it's nice to be able to do this with her again. Sure, they've texted and whatever since she went to school, but it was always weird and kind of forced. It's kind of awesome to just have his friend back.
"I cannot stay in this house tonight."
Rachel blinks, even though Noah obviously can't see her face over the phone. "What?"
"My sister is having like, six of her little cheerleader friends over for a slumber party or what the fuck ever, and I cannot stay in this house tonight," he repeats seriously. "These girls are fucking scary."
"Who knew there would ever be a day when Noah Puckerman wasn't excited at the prospect of spending a Friday night in a house full of cheerleaders?" She's teasing him, because honestly.
"Rach, you gotta help me out," he pleads.
"What do you want me to do about it?"
He makes an impatient noise into the phone. For a smart girl, she's taking a while to catch on. "Let me hang out at your place."
"Noah-"
"Please."
He sounds so pathetic that she agrees, with the caveat that she gets to choose what they watch. Maybe the fact that he doesn't say anything about how much he hates musicals is evidence of how much he really doesn't want to be around for Abby's sleepover.
He's shaking his head when he walks into her room a little after seven o'clock. He puts his hands on his hips and looks down at where she's sitting on her bed in a pair of yoga pants and an NYU sweatshirt. "Are sleepovers always that loud?"
She blinks at him for a second, then realizes that it's a completely serious question. "I wouldn't know," she answers after a moment. "The first time I was ever at a slumber party was our junior year of high school, and it was just me, Mercedes, and Kurt."
Well, fuck.
She can tell he doesn't know what to say to that, but part of what she likes about him so much is that he doesn't try to come up with anything. No, he just toes off his shoes and shrugs off his jacket, tossing it towards the chair in the corner of her room before flopping down on the bed beside her. "What're we watching?"
She knows he's surprised when she offers The Godfather, but it's a classic and the last time she tried to watch it (with her fathers back in high school), she fell asleep before the end. She generally prefers her movies to have a romantic storyline - or even just a significant role for a woman - but she can appreciate the film as the foremost of the mob movie genre.
The thing about watching movies with Rachel is that she doesn't do anything half-assed. If she's planned a movie night, you can be sure that she'll have popcorn and your favorite candy (Puck's is strawberry Twizzlers) and drinks, and she'll dim the lights and even insist that you silence your phone so you aren't interrupted.
It's pretty awesome.
Puck's seen The Godfather. Rachel apparently hasn't before, if the way she's acting is any indication. He looks over at her after Sonny Coroleon gets wasted, and she's practically pouting, hugging a throw pillow to her chest and almost glaring at the TV. He nudges her with his shoulder. "What?"
"I liked Sonny," she admits, barely even glancing over at him. "Better than Michael."
"Rach," he laughs, shaking his head. "That's not the point."
She shushes him instead of responding, eyes on the TV, so Puck just lets himself sink a little further into her mountain of pillows.
The first thing she says when the credits roll is, "Well, now I have to watch the other two." She shrugs one shoulder when Noah laughs. "I have to know how it all ends," she insists.
"Sofia Coppola is a shitty actress," he offers, chuckling when she furrows her brow in confusion. "Yeah, you should watch the other two." She turns off the television, setting the remote on her bedside table and sinking back into the pillows a little more. "So, hey. We're okay, right?"
She turns onto her side, tucking one hand under her cheek as she looks at him. "We're okay," she agrees quietly, smiling when he grins down at her.
The first thing Rachel does on her twenty-first birthday - before she even checks her text messages or starts water for a cup of tea - is remove her fake ID from her wallet. She's sitting in bed with a pair of scissors before she reconsiders actually cutting the thing up, instead slipping it into the back of the journal that she uses to record quotations she likes. The ID is keeping company with an article about New Directions from the Lima newspaper and her collection of wallet-sized senior photos of her friends. She has a couple of fond memories thanks to that illegal piece of laminated paper, and just because she doesn't have an need for it any more doesn't mean that she should destroy it.
She takes a moment to let the nostalgia wash over her, then slides her feet into her pink slippers so they don't freeze on her way to the kitchen for tea.
She goes out with Christina and a handful of her friends that night, first to dinner and then to a club in SoHo. She likes Christina a lot, and the girl has hilarious friends who treat Rachel like they've known her forever from the moment they meet. She misses her own friends, but it doesn't stop her from having fun. She "makes friends" (flirts shamelessly and leans over the bar to show her cleavage like she knows Santana would) with one of the bartenders, whose name is Aaron, and between him and Christina, she doesn't pay for a single drink.
She does, however, get completely drunk.
She's sipping from the glass of water that Aaron gave her ('trust me, sweetheart, you don't need any more rum') perched on a bar stool when "Don't Stop Believin'" starts playing. Truthfully, it's hard to go out anywhere without hearing a song that she's performed with the glee club, but this one is special.
Puck's sitting with Santana in the kitchen when he gets the text from Rachel. He just picked his roommate up from a bar; he's still nursing a bit of a hangover from last night, the kind that makes you swear never to drink again even though you know that you'll be killing brain cells within a week. He's waiting for the nachos that Santana promised him in exchange for a ride after she got into a fight with her flavor of the week (Lizzie, this time; last week was Derek).
"dont stop believinf! I miss you guys so much!a
Santana must get the same message, because she snorts out a laugh from where she's standing next to the microwave. "Am I this hilarious when I'm drunk?" she asks when she sees that he's looking at his phone too.
"No," he answers honestly, making her stick her tongue out. Seriously though, Santana's mood when she drinks is almost totally dependent upon what she drinks, more than anyone else he's ever known. Vodka makes her weepy, gin and tequila make her horny, whiskey makes her fucking mean. Beer and wine both just sort of amp up whatever she'd be like normally, but it she won't stop drinking liquor no matter how many times Puck tells her it makes her crazy.
call me when you get home so I know you're alive
Everyone (Finn, Sam, Santana, and Noah) responds to her mass text, and even though she misses them so much that she can barely stand it, that they all care enough to reply to her is better than any material gift they could have given her.
It might even be better than the Burberry trench coat that Dad sent her as a combination birthday/Hanukkah gift.
Christina offers to stay with Rachel for the night, but Rachel declines. She has a bag of PopChips and bottles of Vitamin Water in her kitchen, and then she's going to take two asprin and watch Clueless until she falls asleep.
She waits just until she's in the elevator, riding up to her floor, to call Noah. "I'm drunk," she announces when he answers. "Legally drunk. For the first time."
He snorts out a laugh, which makes her smile as she walks down the hall to her apartment. "You make it home all right, lush?"
"I am unlocking my door now," she answers, fumbling a bit with her keys. If there's anything bad about living in New York, it's how long it takes to unlock her stupid door.
Puck listens to the noises on her end of the call and waits until it sounds like she's actually inside her place to say anything else. "Good birthday?" he finally asks.
Rachel shrugs, dropping her keys on the little table just inside her front door and peeling off her coat. "It was pretty good," she says when she realizes that he can't hear her shoulders moving however many hundreds of miles away. "I heard 'Don't Stop Believin' and it made me miss you guys."
Maybe it's a little lame, but Puck can't hear that song without thinking about glee club either. (Though, if he's being really honest, "Somebody to Love" has a lot better memories; at least they won a competition with that song, and Queen is way more badass than Journey.) "You just saw me like, three weeks ago," he reminds her.
She kicks her heels off in the direction of her closet when she walks into her room. "It's not the same." She unbuttons her jeans and pushes them down off her hips, then realizes that she can't really take off her shirt while she's holding the phone. "Hold on a sec." She sets it on her bedside table and goes about changing her clothes.
Rachel's pretty hilarious when she drinks, and unlike Santana, she doesn't have multiple personality disorder based on what she drinks. Everything makes her happy and smiley and cuddly, and it turns out that it's almost as good over the phone as it is in person.
She flops back onto the bed once she's changed into her pajamas, just leaving her clothes in a pile on the floor at the foot of the bed. She knows she should eat something, or drink some water at the very least, but her feet hurt and she's really tired, so she just pushes herself up against her pillows, moving around until she's under the covers. "What is it about drinking that makes you tired all of a sudden?" she asks Noah once she's remembered that he's sitting there waiting for her. This seems like the sort of thing she should know, and if he doesn't, she's going to have to google it.
"Fuck if I know." She makes an impatient noise, but it sounds sort of sleepy, too. "Baby, you need to drink some water or you're going to feel like shit tomorrow."
"I haven't been this drunk in years," she says, ignoring him, mostly because she's pretty sure she's going to feel terrible tomorrow regardless of what she does tonight. She planned for it, actually, and has all of tomorrow free to lie on the couch and recover. "The last time I was this drunk, I was with you," she realizes. She reaches over to turn off the lamp on her bedside table - when did she turn it on? - because she knows she isn't getting up again.
"When was that?"
"That Thanksgiving. Freshman year," she clarifies. "There was wine."
"I remember." She was upset about her dad, and maybe getting her drunk wasn't the best way to deal with it, but it was the best Puck knew. Fuck, he'd probably do the same thing today.
"I was going to watch Clueless," she says suddenly, pouting into the dark room.
"You should probably just go to sleep."
"All right," she agrees easily. He likes that she isn't all fighty like Santana gets sometimes. "Good night, Noah."
She does feel terrible when she wakes up the next morning, dehydrated and queasy, and her head is pounding. She lies on her couch and watches Clueless, nibbling Wheat Thins and sipping Vitamin Water. When Noah texts and asks her how she's feeling, she lies and tells him she's great.
The yeah, right he sends back just makes her smile.
When a few of the girls from her program - Charlotte, Alexis, and Maggie, who is her only true competition here - invite Rachel along to see a dance exhibition in Brooklyn in early January, she's excited to go. It's a handful of dance crews doing interesting things with various styles of hip hop, which is a nice change of pace from all of the very traditional performances she's attended since coming to New York.
She nearly falls out of her chair when she sees Mike Chang on the stage. Literally, she has to grab onto Charlotte's arm to keep herself upright. The girl glares until Rachel hisses that she knows one of the dancers. "The Asian one," she says when prompted.
There are two more groups left to perform after Mike's, but Rachel slips out of her seat and heads to the doorway that leads backstage, putting on her best 'of course I'm supposed to be here' face in hopes of avoiding being kicked out of the club all together. (And if she'd known she was going to be sneaking backstage at a hip hop show, she would have at least worn Converse sneakers instead of her pewter, crystal-embellished ballet flats.)
He spots her before she can find him, which isn't at all the way these things are supposed to go, but he's saying her name and pulling her into a hug before she can let herself get too disappointed about that. He keeps his hands on her upper arms after she's pulled away, keeping her close. "What are you doing here?" he asks.
"Watching you be amazing," she answers, and it isn't pandering. Mike was always an excellent dancer, but seeing him like this is something different. He's grown as a dancer in the years since she saw him last, has obviously expanded his skill set.
She thinks he's gotten more handsome, too.
She doesn't even hesitate to say yes when he asks if she wants to go somewhere to get a drink and catch up. She hisses a quick explanation at Charlotte when she goes back to her seat to get her bag and her coat, ignoring the dirty looks she's getting from Maggie, and slips out the back door of the venue into a creepy alleyway that makes her grateful that she's with Mike and not by herself.
Mike holds her hand in his as they walk down the street, and they duck into the first bar they come to. It's an absolute hole in the wall, and the bartender looks like he hasn't smiled since Clinton was president, but the glass he makes her gin and tonic in is clean, and he's heavy-handed with the gin, which makes the place at least passable.
Rachel crosses her legs when they sit at a table at a little table (clean, despite her intial worries), takes a little sip of her drink, and looks at Mike seriously. "Tell me everything that's happened in the last two years," she insists, and she means it. The last she heard from him - beyond seeing his Facebook updates, which are sporadic, at best - was the summer after freshman year. She's always liked Mike, and now that she's found him again in New York, this city where she's basically all alone...
Well, she wants to know everything.
Mike just takes a sip of his beer and grins, his eyes sparkling a little when he starts talking.
His parents had wanted him to be an accountant, which was all well and good except for the fact that Mike hates math and thinking about money. He wanted to dance, so he chose NYU instead of OSU or Kentucky, like his parents wanted, because he knew he'd have a better chance of finding opportunities to do what he really wanted in New York than he would in Columbus or Lexington. He found his dance crew in February of his sophomore year, got hired to dance in some Disney-style pop princess' video in April, and didn't bother registering for the fall semester.
"I've been doing the dance thing ever since," he tells her simply before taking a sip of his beer.
"That's amazing," Rachel says, and she means it. And yes, she's jealous. She wishes that she'd been able to follow her dreams from the beginning.
(She catches herself thinking this sometimes, resenting her daddy for getting sick, and then she hates herself for feeling that way. This time, it makes her suck back a good third of her gin and tonic in one drink.)
He listens intently as she talks about coming to New York, and even though her story is far less exciting than his, he doesn't seem to think that anything about it is mundane. Instead, he agrees that Maggie sounds like a bitch and asks more about the production of Cabaret they're putting on in the spring that she intends to audition for. (He also agrees that it'll probably go better than the last time she tried to do this particular play.)
They spend a good bit of time discussing their mutual friends. Mike has kept in touch with Brittany over the years, and he tells Rachel that the girl is working in Los Angeles as a dancer and is planning to audition for So You Think You Can Dance in the spring unless she's hired to dance on a tour. She's really the only person that he's kept in touch with, though his mother is friends with Tina's parents and has told him that the girl is spending a year in the Czech Republic teaching English. Rachel catches him up on what the others are doing back in Columbus, and she wonders, not for the first time, what the hell happened to Quinn. She doesn't talk to them, but Rachel knows that Artie went to school in Boston, Mercedes is in Cleveland, and Kurt is somewhere in New York. She culled all of this information from Facebook, but other than the fact that she was planning on cheering at the University of Kentucky, Rachel has no idea what happened to Quinn.
Not that it matters.
Rachel is shaking her head over Mike's brother's story about the slushying that she's still going on at McKinley when the bartender comes over to tell them that he's closing in ten minutes, "So you better knock that back," gesturing at Rachel's half-full drink.
She finishes her drink quickly and looks across the table at Mike. "What do you think are my chances of catching a cab back into Manhattan?" Normally she would take the subway, but it's after two a.m. She's independent, not stupid.
"Stay with me," Mike suggests, shaking his head when she arches an eyebrow. "It's not like, a proposition, Rachel. It's just practical."
She goes back to the loft that he shares with two of the guys from his dance crew, a place that is obviously inhabited by twenty-something-year-old boys. Mike's room is tidy though, his bed made neatly and all of his laundry in its proper place. She looks at the framed photographs he has on his wall while he pulls open the drawers on his dresser, black and white sillhouettes of trees in winter, and when she turns around, he's handing her a black tee shirt and a pair of blue shorts with a drawstring and telling her that the bathroom is right across the hall.
There's something interesting about Mike, that he gives her the clothes without even asking and she catches herself smiling at her reflection in the bathroom mirror once she's changed. He's always been such a gentleman.
The next morning, Rachel sits at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking with Mike and his roommate Tadd in the jeans and wrap sweater she wore the night before, and she makes plans to meet up with them in a few days for a night out.
She's smiling on the train ride back into Manhattan.