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Puck meets Penny the day he gets fired from his dream job.
*
He gets fired because Giselle complains that the pool boy hasn't been cleaning the pool properly, and the high level of chlorine is the reason her underwater photoshoot was shot to hell. Tyra has no option but to respond. That's Tyra Banks, by the way, which is what makes this the best job of his life. In fact, he's in the middle of consoling Anaïs, who's always crying, when the warning clickety-click of Tyra's six-inch heels heralds the sound of the door to the pool shed being thrown open.
Anaïs hitches up her bikini top, and Puck's unwilling to let her get off his lap because he doesn't want Tyra to think he's that happy to see her. She fires him on the spot, which is ironic, because she'd come to tell him that Giselle is on the warpath and he's doing a surprisingly good cleaning job.
Puck ends up on the highway, one thumb in the universal sign that he needs a quick lift. He gets picked up by two guys in blue CB&T overalls. Admittedly, cable repairmen aren't quite the same as hot babes in bikinis who are riding a convertible with the top down, but California is nothing but the land of promise. Cable guys today, hot babes in another thirty minutes once he reaches civilisation again.
"We're going to Pasadena," announces the Indian guy behind the wheel.
Puck grin is like a shark's. "What a coincidence. So am I."
"Did you know the America's Next Top Model house is near here?"
"Yeah, I used to—"
"We found it," says the guy in the passenger-side seat, a really pasty number with a bowl haircut. He says it like it's we landed on the moon. "Of course, the U. S. military did its part in helping us. Did we ever put NORAD back into its orbit?" he asks the driver off-handedly.
"I don't know, dude. You tell me what you did with the high-powered defence satellite on a top-secret mission that you used to spy on sunbathing nineteen-year-old models."
"Top models. I wouldn't waste it on any skinny two-bit girl doing rounds at my temple's annual beauty pageant."
"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realise there were levels of acceptability for your stalking."
"Hey, don't diss the time-tested method of long-distance romance. You might benefit from it, for all you know— after all, it doesn't involve any kind of, oh I don't know, talking to these women."
Puck takes advantage of the sullen silence in the front seat to slip into the back. He grins to himself when the driver guns the engine, and drives off. "I don't know why you even bother," the driver mutters. "It's not like your potential Mrs. Wolowitzes get along with your mother: the real Mrs. Wolowitz."
Puck finds out really fast that these two guys are called Raj and Howard, and better yet: they live next door to the ultimate "California gurl."
"I'm from Nebraska, actually," she corrects him, leaning in the doorway of her apartment, smiling guilelessly at him. Her gaze travels interestedly down the expanse of his chest, exposed by the shirt that's currently flapping open. His regular pool cleaning outfit is just a pair of jeans, after all, and even those were nearly off him because of Annalise. "And Raj and Howard don't live here, that's Leonard and Sheldon's apartment."
He's only somewhat listening. It's not his fault. He doesn't remember this girl's name, but he's seriously distracted by the micro-mini shorts that are so high he can almost see her ass if she were to bend over. The same ass that he's told, in blinding fluorescent letters, is 'JUICY'.
"Wait… who did you say lives across the hall?"
"Leonard and Sheldon."
"Oh."
Mental note: drop the current two ASAP, and get into the good books of these other two. His feelings of Jewish fraternity extend only as far hot Jewish girls. Howard Wolowitz doesn't fill quite all of those criteria.
He learns over Thai food that the girl next door is called Penny. The only reason he's invited to Thai food at all is because Howard had insisted, once he learned that Puck had cleaned pools in the Top Model house. He figures he would need to know the secret of backdoor re-entry into that place, and Puck needs to keep coming round 4A so that he can get close to Penny. It's win-win.
And then someone brings up Penny, and he sees the look on Leonard's face.
He's seen that look before.
Finn used to look at Quinn at that way. The hopeless expression of someone in love with someone way, way out of his league.
Puck's always had a thing for blondes anyway.
On the pretence needing something to drink, he follows Leonard to the fridge. As the latter extracts a bottle of orange juice for him, Puck says as casually as he can: "So, Penny from next door. You want to ask her out."
It takes him five minutes to make Leonard mentally revisit what sounds more like a cold than a relationship, and decide that it's about time he needs to be moving on and freeing up Penny's attentions (for Puck to swoop in) anyway. He waits until Howard leaves, taking his theory about 'negs' (negative compliments to demolish a woman's self-esteem so that she'll sleep with a nerd) and Leonard with him.
Puck wastes no time in knocking on Penny's door.
"That Raj dude says that you're great at mixing drinks," he says by way of greeting.
She grins. "He said that, huh?"
"Yup. And what a coincidence. I came to California to be a bartender."
She frowns. "Didn't you have a pool-cleaning job with the—"
"That was so that I could pay the rent. My real calling is alcohol and serving others with it." When she still looks utterly sceptical, he adds: "How about I fix you a drink and show you myself?"
She catches his drift really fast after that, but to his horror, she just laughs and starts to close the door gently. "Give me a call when you're not so underage," she says. "You are really cute." And the door slams in his face.
*
Then Howard does a really stupid thing (according to Puck, anyway) and falls out with Leonard so Puck no longer has an excuse to go over there. That Sheldon dude doesn't count. That Sheldon dude is freaky. He's like a male Rachel Berry, trying to stab all ten of fingers in every pie he can reach, but he's also such an insufferable… know-it-all that Puck can feel himself regressing to the time that his hand itched for a slushie.
(By contrast, the other three are okay. They're much easier to browbeat, and by extension manipulate into letting Puck getting more alone-time with Penny.)
So when Howard gets all huffy over some girl Leonard stole from him over eye-patches and some Go-Kart on Mars, Puck loses his only connection to Penny. He does the next best thing: ferrets out the next time she'll be on bartending duty at the restaurant where she works, and stalks her at the Cheescake Factory.
"Penny's, um, having a mental breakdown in the back," says the waitress wearing a 'Bernadette' nametag. Puck has to step carefully around her: she's so short he's perennially afraid of squishing her underfoot.
He goes outside, round to the back of the Cheescake Factory to where the kitchen doors are. Penny is pressed up against a wall in that godawful cheesecake-yellow uniform all waitresses here wear, staring glassily up at the sky. It could be a romantic picture: the girl with the grease-fumed golden hair, gazing up with pent-up emotion at the stars that are obscured by the thick city smog.
She's been crying. Puck feels the first twinge of something other than moving target must bang when he sees her. Seriously. Tears just do him in. It's not fair. It's some kind of conditioning that Ma and Quinn have built into him over the years. Those two women, god, they're like compulsive criers, guilt-machines making something trip inside his chest, hammering home that he's the reason they're in tears.
There's no freaking way he's Penny's reason. He has neither slept with her nor brought up his father in the same sentence as "Who needs that fucking idiot around? Hannah'll stop asking one of these days, don't worry." There is absolutely no reason why he should feel guilty for the fact that Penny is a girl and girls get upset really upset and out of the blue.
"Hey," he says quietly, stepping into a patch of light so that he can see her better. Penny doesn't recognise him at first; in fact, she looks like she might scream for help. Then the tension leaves her shoulders, and she slumps again.
Puck doesn't give up. "You should be inside, showing off your mad skills. Like, you know, try and get cast as the new lead in Cocktail II."
Her smile strains and pulls tight at that. "Sure. And it'll go direct-to-video and sell only five copies: my dad, the director, Leonard, and Howard buying one original and one back-up for it. Oh wait. Not Leonard. Well, two back-ups for Howard then. God knows he's going to need both."
Oh. He gets it. Howard isn't the only one unhappy about Leonard's new relationship.
He considers casually bringing up that her name is Stephanie, but not even he's that cruel.
She crosses her arms, hunching her shoulders, shooting daggers at him from her eyes. "How many copies are you going to buy?"
Puck's heart jumps in his throat. Penny in a direct-to-video movie. The first thing he imagines his straining his eyes to make out anything taking place in the bad lighting. If he doesn't think of Rachel's sweater animals or Finn's mailman, his pants are going to get uncomfortably tight very fast.
"I'll be borrowing Leonard's copy," he tells her innocently. "Trust me, I won't be giving it back."
She rolls her eyes, and punches him. It feels like her fist is padded with feathers. Puck winces obligingly anyway.
"Did you know Stephanie's a doctor?"
What he does know is that this question is rhetorical.
"I bet she never set foot in community college. I bet she even graduated college, she's probably getting him ditzy over wine spritzers and exchanging stories about how great it was to wear those graduation gowns and talk about science things. I bet she'd laugh if he tried to compare her to Princess Leia."
"Princess who?"
"Exactly."
In his head, he's really saying but you're blonde.
This is how she ends up defying the professional code of all bartenders everywhere, crosses the invisible line that makes her cool, and lets a nineteen-year-old do her job. She sits on the wrong side of the bar and watches with amused patience as Puck tries to pretend he can be Tom Cruise.
He fails. Abysmally.
But it's cute.
In fact, one might say it's so endearingly cute that it's why she leans over, forcibly takes away the mixer from him and kisses him. In her horrible yellow factory-drone uniform, and in plain sight of an entire restaurant.
(She said it was cute, not rational.)
And he's a good kisser. Slow, careful, with just that hint of teenage urgency that promises he's up for the fun part. Which is obviously not going to happen, she assures herself firmly, one foot hooking around the barstool as she leans forward, deeper, against his lips. Because he's nineteen. But he's nineteen.
Puck's hand is against her stomach, and she inhales rather sharply in shock. Against her bare stomach under her shirt. She giggles a little tipsily. But he's nineteen indeed. She sincerely hopes the rest of the Cheesecake Factory will agree.
(And then her manager storms over and ruins any future plans for the evening.)
(Of course.)