the broken bed redux {tbbt - sheldon/penny}
Title: The Broken Bed Redux
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory
Characters/Pairings: Sheldon/Penny, Leonard.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 13,341
Author's Note: I started this right after episode 3x03, so there's spoilers up to there. And I've been staring at it for so long since then that I'm not even sure if it makes sense anywhere but my own head. Not to mention that half of this is in Sheldon POV. Feedback is very appreciated with this guys. Thank you to all of the S/P fans on Twitter who were so encouraging -- you guys kept me going.
Spoilers: Spoilers for 3.03 AND some plot based spoiler for early 4.5 Battlestar Galactica, though knowledge of the show isn't necessary.
Summary:Post 3.03, and then a month or so in the future after that. Sheldon always assumed that when Penny and Leonard broke up, it would lead to her spending a lot less time in their apartment. However, it appeared that Penny had so altered her routine that she still found herself in their apartment with a similar frequency to before they broke up, only now she was in his space even more.
Sheldon always assumed that when - and it was certainly a when - Penny and Leonard broke up, it would lead to her spending a lot less time in their apartment. Granted this wasn’t necessarily a result that didn’t have its negative aspects but it was the one that made the most sense if what he knew about relationships and the aftermath of them was correct. Namely, that some degree of awkwardness was supposed to ensue.
Some awkwardness ensued. However, it appeared that Penny had so altered her routine that she still found herself in their apartment with a similar frequency to before they broke up, only now she was in his space even more, asking him questions and holding conversations with him, most likely to compensate for what she wasn’t doing with Leonard anymore.
He had ceased his experimentation with chocolate-based behavioral modification awhile back, after Penny had figured him out and threatened him with all manner of bodily harm. That was over a month ago but, thankfully, French toast was not made on a Monday since that first morning and he took the small victories when they came.
This newfound need to take an intense interest in his life made it apparent that he was now going to have to find another way to deal with her little quirks, as Leonard so helpfully referred to them. Particularly, he needed a new, more foolproof way to discourage the annoying behaviors that had since resurfaced, magnified by her sudden proximity to him.
Unfortunately, all other options he’s insofar been able to come up with seems just as likely to result in infliction of injury or perhaps driving her away entirely.
For the first time in a very, very long time, Sheldon finds himself stumped.
---
“Explain it to me again.”
His thumb hits the pause button for the fifth time in half an hour. There’s a muscle in his jaw that begins to twitch. “What part?”
“The Cylonoid Human things.” He blinks at her. She offers, “There was something about a tribe.”
“Humanoid Cylons, Penny,” he corrects, swiftly, and she can tell by his expression that it’s quite possibly physically painful for him to maintain an even, not entirely condescending tone. “I believe you are referring to the Final Five, who were the descendants of the Thirteenth Tribe. They created the rest of the Cylon models.”
“Right, but why?”
“In order to stop the war between the humans and the Centurions.”
She sighs heavily, leaning even further back into the couch cushions. He’s still looking at her, like he’s sure that she’s not done and is probably waiting for permission to start the show up again. She considers this for a moment, then points to the screen, “So that’s one of the Final Five?”
He looks positively outraged by that notion. “No, that’s an eight.”
This she actually knows. Mostly, she just wants to get a rise out of him now, for her own entertainment. A whole minute later he’s still staring at her, and she coaxes, “Well - start it.”
“Are you sure you’re done?”
Rather than answer that, she presses the play button while the remote is still in his hand, settling back down to try and make sense of the rest of Battlestar Galactica. She manages to keep her mouth shut for the remainder of the episode, deciding that she’s pushed his buttons enough for one night. In return, his replies to her for the rest of the night are significantly less snappy.
That is, until this.
“Penny, I understand that it’s most likely considered inappropriate according to social conventions to ask this, but why is it that you’re spending a Wednesday night in our apartment when I’m the only one awake?”
It takes her far too long for the shrug she eventually gives to be considered casual. “Because usually friends hang out with each other.”
“Ah yes, we are considered friends. So according to the friendship algorithm you would consider this the least objectionable activity?” He asks, with wide, way too focused eyes.
She isn’t entirely sure what he just said, but she’ll go with it in order to save him the trouble of explaining it to her. Or maybe to save her the trouble of having to listen to it. “Sure, okay. Does everything really have to have an explanation? Can’t I just feel like watching television?”
“Of course you can. You can also feel like jumping off a bridge, but that doesn’t mean that you do.” The order of his thoughts seems to be reversed, because his next words are certainly the ones she would’ve opened with. “Also, you have a television in your apartment.”
She bites her tongue pretty damn hard to keep various sarcastic retorts from slipping through her lips, instead asking, “Do you have a problem with me hanging out here?”
“Problem, no.” Instantly, she knows there’s another word he’s got for it, another explanation, and he’ll push until she stops him so she does.
“Leave it, Sheldon,” she grinds out, and for once he takes a hint.
Penny leaves after just enough time has passed that he doesn’t think it’s because of anything he said. It’s the first time that she realizes that not only is her relationship with Leonard screwed up, but her relationship with Sheldon too.
---
It bothers him far more than it should.
Sheldon is entirely used to people snapping at him. In fact, as far as he’s concerned, that’s just part of the normal flow of conversation. It bothers him, tonight, however, because it feels like he’s accidentally stumbled upon something and managed to miss what that something is entirely.
This he finds both unusual and discomforting, so much so that he doesn’t drop off the minute he switches off the lights and goes to bed like he normally does. Instead he stares at his ceiling and thinks of equations and his board and ways to undermine Leslie Winkle in the future, all the while with the unshakeable feeling that something is not right with his universe.
In the morning, he is tired.
---
She’s in their apartment by early afternoon.
It’s a Saturday and she’s got errands to run and can’t find her favorite sweatshirt. When it doesn’t turn up in her apartment, she figures theirs is just the next most logical place for it to be.
Sheldon’s the one who lets her in. She glances down at the floor beneath her feet before shaking off all of last night and meeting his eyes. “I lost my sweatshirt,” she offers, by way of explanation, and he lets her in before he presses.
“Perhaps if you had a better organizational scheme at your apartment that could’ve been prevented.” She listens to exactly half of that sentence before she heads down the hallway to Leonard’s bedroom; he follows her.
“I think I left it here,” she replies, opening the door to Leonard’s bedroom, finding it empty and mostly neat, if not as immaculate as Sheldon’s. A quick survey of the room tells her that it’s not there, not casually thrown on the back of a chair or in that drawer she used to put a change of clothes in for when she slept over, because she didn’t want to have to walk across the hall to her apartment. It made things seem more real, like with every other guy she had gotten serious with.
It doesn’t leave her with any other options. Every other room in the apartment is Sheldon’s domain, more or less, which means that everything has a place and is presumably in that exact place. If he’d seen her sweatshirt it would’ve been returned pronto.
“Maybe I left it at work,” she thinks aloud, trying to picture the coat rack by the door in the back, thinking back to what she’d worn to work the last time she’d been there. She couldn’t remember.
“A likely explanation.” He answers, even if she hadn’t really meant him to. “But not quite as likely as the possibility that it’s in your apartment.”
“It’s not; I looked,” she says, for the last time, voice firm. In her head, she rerouted her trip to include a brief stopover at work, to look for it. “Thanks anyways,” she tells him, and he nods and follows her straight to the door.
She doesn’t say goodbye, and she doesn’t think about it until she’s halfway down the stairs on the way to her car. By then, he’s already closed the door.
---
Penny has claimed the rightmost washer by the time he comes downstairs at 8:15 to do his laundry. It’s another habit of hers that’s stuck and intertwined with his. But that preceded her relationship with Leonard anyways.
He watches her as he separates his clothes, lights and darks and brights, all in their own piles, all with their own specific settings. Despite all his efforts to correct her, she still just dumps it all into the same load, two sometimes, if it’s been a particularly busy week.
“Were you able to locate your sweatshirt?” He asks, and it must be the first time that she’s aware of his presence because she spins to look at him a little too quickly.
After a moment, the line of her shoulders relaxes, tension dissipating. “No. I’m sure it’ll turn up eventually.”
It’s not an incorrect statement, considering he’s almost positive that it’s just hidden in some pile in that mess she refers to as a living room - he can’t understand how anyone can live comfortably there - but he chooses not to point that out. It would be futile, repetition of the same basic idea that he’d put forth hours ago, one that she had neither welcomed nor acted upon.
They make the bare bones of small talk, a practice which he despises but has acclimated to over time. She tells him about a role that she’s considering auditioning for, and he in turn tells her about research he’s been doing at work, when she prompts him. He knows that she doesn’t comprehend the bulk of what he’s saying but he’s learned both that pointing that fact out is bordering on rude and that asking about his day-to-day life is part of this whole friendship thing.
When that’s worn thin and silence permeates the air once more, undercut by the sound of the washer and dryer running the background, he finally lets onto the unease he felt last night, in the form of, “Penny, I feel the need to make it clear that I was in no way trying to deter you from coming to our apartment. However, from your behavior last night and this afternoon I’ve come to the conclusion that you read it as such.”
She squints her eyes at him. At first he thinks it’s the beginnings of a glare, and that he’s managed to make a socially unacceptable mistake somewhere in there. But then it softens, a little, and she says, “You know, there’s a term for what you just said.”
He frowns. He’s fairly sure that there is no such thing. “Such as?”
“Growth.”
Later, upon further analyzation, he’ll come to understand that she means that socially. In the moment, however, he has little idea of what she could mean by that.
What he does know is that he has just managed to completely undermine his own attempts to break her from her newfound routine of splitting her time between her apartment and theirs, in the interest of easing the mutual discomfort that had been serving as an undercurrent to their present interactions. Accidentally. Or perhaps not, he’s rather unclear on that.
He is clear on the fact that this will most likely have inconvenient consequences for him later on.
---
Sunday morning comes earlier than she’d like.
She stumbles out of her room, into the bathroom, and then into the kitchen to make coffee, bleary-eyed and fairly unaware of her surroundings. It’s only after she’s turned the coffeemaker on and turned around to head for the couch that she notices.
Mostly, she notices that her couch, the coffee table, and the surrounding floor space is clean. Spotless. Like a cleaning crew the size of a small army had spent a few hours here while she was asleep. Various clothes that had been strewn around had been folded and placed on the table she sometimes ate at, probably for lack of access to her bedroom, and the only thing that didn’t belong was her missing sweatshirt, folded and placed in the middle of the green and white patterned chair that he’d claimed as his own once.
She sighs, something grateful and somehow a little sad, and slips into it.
Penny thinks of things that she could say to him, variations around the theme of ‘thank you’ and ‘I still think breaking into people’s apartments in the middle of the night is creepy’, but she both can’t find a happy median and can’t bring herself to knock on their door, so she doesn’t say anything at all.
---
When eleven o’clock has passed and there are no sounds of yelling or screaming or various curse words, Sheldon determines that Penny has deemed this a situation unworthy of any sort of negative retribution.
Leonard, on the other hand, appears to have a hard time believing this. He sputters and glares and gets halfway to Penny’s apartment twice, prepared to apologize just like the last time, and stopping for reasons that Sheldon both doesn’t know and doesn’t care about.
“Did you learn nothing from the last time?” Leonard asks, still not over it, even after he’s been awake and aware for a full hour.
“Actually, Penny has led me to believe that I’ve made substantial progress with social norms in the arena of correct social interaction.” He pauses, throwing a look Leonard’s way, watching the lines in his forehead as he frowns. “And I’m far more likely to believe her on these matters.”
Leonard’s mouth opens but he fails to vocalize his thoughts for a few moments, despite the way his mouth forms around the words. “She told you that?”
“Well not in those exact words.” Sheldon amends. “I believe the word she used was ‘growth’.”
This also appears to confuse Leonard because he just stands there, staring, for the longest time. Sheldon pays fairly little mind to his reaction, instead going about returning emails.
Finally, Leonard shakes his head and starts down the hallway. He can hear snatches of the other man’s exasperated monologue, words like ‘sanity’ and ‘freak of nature’ peppering his speech.
As usual, Sheldon pays no mind to that.
---
“And you were specific?”
“I swear to…” Penny stops herself, knowing that old standby amounts to nothing with him, and goes with, “I swear I was specific. I’ve been there at least a dozen times; they know what I’m going to say before I say it.”
“Well apparently they don’t.” Sheldon insists, defiant to the very end.
She finds herself looking to Leonard, something she hasn’t done in too long, and he comes through like it’s nothing but instinct. Sometimes, in these situations, she feels a lot like a parent to a fussy five year old. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting a little bit? You haven’t even tasted it.”
“I don’t have to,” he replies, “I can see it.”
“You can see that they made it wrong?” Penny asks, crossing her arms, looking down at him deliberately. It made her feel superior and it probably pissed him off in the process. If he was going to act like a child then she was going to act like an authority figure, at the very least. Sweatshirt or no sweatshirt.
“Yes.”
She shoves chopsticks into the hand that isn’t holding the apparently offending container, leveling him with a glare that would, and has, melted most men, including the other three in the room, and waits until he’s begrudgingly poking at his food to take her own seat.
“Wow,” Howard says, after at least thirty seconds of ridiculously tense silence, Penny all but daring Sheldon to say a single word about his food. Fairly predictably, Raj took that as his cue to lean in and do some heavy-duty conspiratory whispering with Howard, none of it audible to her and maybe that was a good thing considering Howard’s reply once they’d separated. “More than just the bed.”
---
“Sheldon,” Leonard’s voice is the first he’s heard in nearly an hour. “Why are you still up? It’s almost midnight and we have work in the morning.”
He turns in his chair to face his robe and pajama clad roommate who’s fixing him with a sleep-addled frown as he adjusts his glasses. “I know full well what time it is.” He points to the watch on his wrist, the one linked to the atomic clock. “And probably more accurately than you do.”
“That is not the…” The other man starts, walking towards him and squinting at the computer screen as he does, trying to read the text on it at a distance. Unfortunately, the header of the page is in bold twenty-eight point font, which makes that a fairly easy task to achieve. “Behavior modification techniques - Sheldon, what the hell. Not this again.”
“Again implies that I’ve done the same thing before, and seeing as she caught onto my experimentations with chocolate that is simply not an option.” If it was again, his life would be made so much easier. But the dinner fiasco, and her sudden absolute defiance that would most likely only continue, needed to be prevented if she was going to spend half of her day that she wasn’t working here. He needed to deter her from continuously stealing their milk and singing or humming while in their apartment, not to mention constantly interrupting him when he’s attempting to write very important emails, reading over his shoulder and asking him what various terms mean.
“Whatever. It’s wrong, and you shouldn’t be doing it.”
“Wrong according to some people. I still fail to see how it’s harmful.”
Leonard blinks at him.
“Judging by your lack of an answer, neither do you.”
“Nevermind,” Leonard says, giving up once more with him. It’s startlingly easy to get him to do so, he’s quickly discovering. “Just remember to sleep with one eye open if she finds out, because if she murders you I’m going to say it was self-defense.”
As expected, it does nothing to deter him.
---
The next time she sees him is at the mailboxes.
“Sheldon,” she greets, the definition of sugary sweet and actively ignoring every single part of last night’s dinnertime fiasco. There are slightly narrowed eyes sent her way, like maybe he expected her to adopt a different tone. Penny smiles even wider; compensation. It’s just easier to gloss over the little things if it keeps things comfortable and cohesive.
“Penny,” he returns, his stack of mail half the size of hers and probably filled with fewer bills. And magazines. Something tells her neither the credit card companies nor Allure frequent his mailbox. “Will you be joining us for dinner this evening?”
When he says things like that, in that particular mannerism, she always feels like she somehow got accidentally transferred back several decades and is expected to curtsy and speak in proper sentences. His inquiries always end up sounding way more formal than anyone else’s that she’s ever known. Of course, she never actually does. “Actually, no. I’ve got a friend coming over to fix my bed - I’m not sure Leonard actually fixed it the last time, which is weird because he swore he did.”
Sheldon stares at her for a moment, and then says, “I think he was more concerned with achieving coitus than with the structural integrity of your bed.”
She’s never going to find sentences like that easy to swallow. Still, she plasters a smile on her face and replies, “Yeah, that must’ve been it.”
The sarcasm in her voice goes undetected. She doesn’t know why she bothers to wait for him to get it.
“Anyways, I’m going to head upstairs. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
His nod must be his equivalent to the wave and she keeps the smile on her face until she reaches the top of the first flight of stairs, let the façade fall, and wondering if maybe it’s better that she’s not joining them for dinner tonight.
---
The reminder of the broken bed reminds Sheldon of other things. Specifically, the conclusion he came across countless weeks ago:
Sex works even better than chocolate to modify behavior.
He has insofar been unable to come up with a proper alternative to his initial chocolate-based experiments, and yet there it was, somewhere hidden in the recesses of his mind.
The data is all there, right in front of him, concrete as it can possibly be for something he stumbled upon accidentally. But what acting upon that data entails is something he finds hard to imagine.
Not impossible, however. After all, nothing is impossible for someone like himself.
---
Penny comes out of the shower sometime after nine, wrapped only in a towel. Her bed has long since been fixed, and dinner has been had. Her friend, Ben, is on the couch with the television blaring, right where she left him, and he flags her down nearly as soon as she opens the bathroom door. Somehow, over all that noise his hearing is ridiculously good.
“Tall, dark, and geeky stopped by ten minutes ago.” He informs her, without looking away from the television. “Is there a particular reason he kept right on knocking after I had already answered the door.”
The nickname throws her off. The description is unmistakable. “Yeah, he does that. It’s…it’s him. What did he want?”
“He wanted to know what you did with the low-sodium soy sauce.” She doesn’t have to be looking at him to understand that it’s a concentrated effort to keep himself from bursting out laughing. “I really, really hope that’s code for something.”
Penny licks her lips and dearly wishes it wasn’t. Hers and Sheldon’s is a strange relationship. “Sadly. no.”
She heads to her bedroom, dropping her towel to the floor and pulling on a t-shirt and shorts. Her disappearance into the other room doesn’t stop Ben’s line of questioning. “I think I can see why you broke up with him then.”
Her grip on her hairbrush loosens considerably and she barely catches it before it falls to the floor, or more accurately on her foot. “What?”
“That guy. I can see why you broke up with him. He’s not exactly Mr. Personality.”
And she realizes that Ben thinks she was dating Sheldon, because he had only heard about Leonard and their relationship in passing. Leonard never met any of her friends while they were dating, and she’s ninety percent sure that only about half of them knew his name. They just know it’s the guy across the hall. Hence the confusion. It’s mostly her fault. “No, that’s Sheldon. I was dating his roommate.”
“Hmm.” She hears him flip channels, the sounds of the latest catfight on America’s Next Top Model filtering through her speakers. This gives her no pause at all because, while Ben serves as her very occasional handyman, Ben is also gay and fairly unafraid of fulfilling the stereotype of being interested in fashion. Really though, he’s less interested in that part and more interested in watching these girls tear into each other for sheer entertainment purpose. “Is that the short one with the glasses and the…” she knows he’s gesturing now, even if she can’t see him, “hair situation? The one that stood in the doorway and kept telling him to please come back inside?”
She flinches a little at the fairly unforgiving description, before confirming, “Yeah, that would be Leonard.”
The topic dies for a minute or two, comfortable silence between them, the television filling up the empty spaces, until she’s getting a drink in the kitchen and the television cuts to commercial and Ben tells her, “I would’ve gone with other one.”
---
“I see you’ve entered into a new relationship.”
It feels like a socially correct opening. It is inquiring about the other person and making an attempt to connect with them and their life. Judging by the look on Penny’s face, eyebrows raised, mouth small and tight, perhaps a simple ‘hello’ would’ve better sufficed. “Good afternoon to you too.”
“Fine,” he acquiesces, confused as to what he did wrong. “Good afternoon. It sure is chilly outside. I see you’ve entered into a new relationship.”
Penny blinks at him, then nods slowly. He’s unsure which of those two statements she’s agreeing with. Or if it’s even directed at him. “That was my friend. Remember, the one who was coming to fix my bed? We’ve had this conversation.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve come to understand that an attractive man leaving your apartment at a ridiculous hour generally meant you were previously engaged in some sort of pleasureable activitiy.” He ends up quite proud of himself for coming up with a new word instead of ‘coitus’, which, as she hadn’t hesitated to point out, she found quite off-putting.
“Sheldon, honey, that really makes it sound like you’re calling me a slut. And friends don’t call friends sluts.”
“I was unaware I was making that implication. My apologies.” They start up the stairs, headed towards their floor.
“He’s just a friend,” She says, rather futilely further refuting his earlier accusation. He’s already aware that he was wrong; he doesn’t need the point driven home once more. “A friend who said you came a-knocking, and, by the way, I have no idea what you did with the soy sauce or what that has to do with me. I’m just the mule; I don’t participate in the cleanup.”
“Oh, yes. That turned out to be Leonard’s fault. He didn’t organize the cabinet correctly. He received a strike.”
“It’s soy sauce,” she states, purposelessly.
He wonders what part of that she misunderstood that she felt the need to essentially repeat herself, as he replies, “Yes, Penny, it is.”
“That wasn’t really…never mind,” she decides, as they start up the next flight, falling into sync with each other.
---
Tuesday night she has a shift and the four guys take up residence at a table for the next two hours. It’s a comfort, to be able to wander over to them under the guise of being a helpful server every time the dirty, forty-something guy who’s both balding and sunburned gives her one of those smiles that he must think is charming.
“Is he…” Leonard starts, like he’s about to ask if the guy is giving her trouble, and she gives him a raised eyebrow. Even if he was, there isn’t all that much Leonard, or any of these guys, would be able to do without looking like a fool or getting their ass kicked.
“Just leering. Comes with the territory,” she explains, noting that Leonard’s still watching at the man staring at her ass. Sheldon is fairly oblivious to it, and the other two are facing away from him. It’s sweet but that’s all there is to it. She makes an effort at changing the topic. “So do you guys have plans for the rest of the night?”
“Comic book store,” Leonard tells her, presumably speaking for all of them, at least until Sheldon throws an annoyed glance his way.
“I told you I have to stop at the grocery store,” Sheldon insists, attempting significant eye contact that Leonard absolutely will not return.
“Sheldon, can’t you just do that tomorrow?” Leonard asks, leaning his head back and looking up, the set of his jaw telling her that he is aware that, no, Sheldon cannot. Because he’s Sheldon.
“No,” he replies, the expected answer.
Penny looks at her watch, sighs, and makes a potentially stupid decision. “I’ll take him. I get off in an hour and I need to buy shampoo anyway.”
Leonard looks at her as if she’s insane. She might just be. “You really don’t have to do that - he can wait.”
“Excuse me, but I am sitting right here and perfectly capable of speaking for myself,” Sheldon interrupts, perturbed. “And thank you, Penny.”
She flashes a smile his way. It might not be in about half an hour when they’re in the car, but right now it’s worth it.
In a way, she’s right. The ride from the Cheesecake Factory to the store is fine. He behaves himself, more or less keeping quiet, either because he’s grateful or reflective - she doesn’t know which and doesn’t really care as long as she doesn’t have the urge to throttle him in the car like she normally does. Once in the store, they go their separate ways and meet up at the register when they’re done, a quick five minute stop, and on the walk back to the car she makes the mistake of thinking that maybe she was wrong in just assuming he’d drive her crazy.
On the ride back home, she finds the combination of darkness and extended time on her feet has made her sleepy, and she turns up the radio in an effort to keep herself alert. Sheldon does not take to this, at first letting out a small noise of protest which progresses to a heavy sigh as the station blares some overplayed Coldplay song and, ironically, Radiohead.
She draws the line when he turns it down. “Sheldon, honey, my car, my rules.”
“There was no agreement made to that.” He disputes, before she has the chance to turn the music back up. “You might be surprised to know that my hearing is quiet sensitive, which I find benefits me more often than not, except in instances such as this.”
“I’ve heard you watch television with the sound up loud enough that I can hear it in my apartment,” she tells him, adding, “and the radio wasn’t even turned halfway up.”
“As you are aware I’m not the only one living in my apartment,” he defends, arms crossed, one hand on his seatbelt, the same way it usually falls across the strap of his messenger bag. It really is all habit and routine with him. “And I fail to see how approximations on how far the dial was turned up has anything to do with my level of discomfort.”
With that, Penny turns into the parking lot of the drugstore, simply so that she could look him in the eye when she said, “You need to learn to pick your battles.”
“Excuse me?” He says, frowning.
“You need to learn to pick your battles,” she says, repeating it for effect. “It’s a radio, Sheldon, and I’m doing you a favor by driving you to the grocery store. That generally means you need to compromise in order to please the other person, since they’re doing something nice for you.”
Penny wonders if maybe she would’ve been a good kindergarten teacher, in another life. Through her time with Sheldon, she’s discovered she has more patience than herself or others had ever given her credit for. A year ago, she would’ve let him out in the parking lot or the side of the road and just kept on driving. Now, she’s bothering to try and teach him something. It’s something like progress.
There’s a change in his eyes too, a shift, and she thinks and half-hopes that it’s a sign that some of what she said has just sunk in. For four seconds, she’s almost sure it has.
What happens next only serves to confuse her.
He unbuckles his seatbelt, and at first she thinks he might actually be voluntarily getting out of the car. It’s stupid and it’s dangerous since it’s nighttime and they’re too far away from their apartment building, and she nearly puts out a hand to stop him before she realizes his hands are nowhere near the door. Instead, one of them moves awkwardly to rest on the console between them and the other on her shoulder as he leans across the car and kisses her full on the mouth.
For a count of three, Penny is absolutely still. Her muscles are tense, the spot where his hand rests on her shoulder on fire, bringing to the forefront the knowledge that she was, in fact, quite cold, even if it hadn’t registered before right now. Sheldon is warm, and his lips move against hers in a way that insists he knows exactly what he’s doing, and at some point it clicks in her mind that this may not be the first time he’s done this but it’s the first in a long while and she’s just self-important enough to think that if she pushes him away right now she’ll also be the last for a long while.
At four, she wraps a hand around his long neck, feeling muscles and tendons underneath her fingertips, and she shifts so that she’s closer to him, the positions of their bodies gradually becoming less awkward, her mouth opening to him. It takes her too long to remember to unbuckle her seatbelt, and even longer to stop panicking because this is Sheldon and she can do that later anyways. Somehow she ends up kneeling in her seat, and his hands are cupping her face, deliberate and with a tenderness she hasn’t seen from him before.
He’s the one who ends it. It leaves her just as stunned as when he began it, and she doesn’t quite know what to do with herself when he returns to the exact same position he was in just moments ago, putting his seatbelt back on, face completely blank. One glance at herself in the mirror lets her know her cheeks are flushed, as if she couldn’t already feel that, and she can’t quite help but feel awkward and uncomfortable and kind of suffocated.
So she does the only thing she can do. She gets her feet flat on the floor once more, puts the car in gear, and backs the hell out of the parking lot, driving them home in record time.
The entire rest of the trip, he is silent.
---
These are the facts:
She had backed him into an argument in which he was unlikely to win.
When he kissed her, she stopped arguing.
When he kissed her, she kissed him back.
After he’d pulled away, she had driven them home quickly, without further argument.
This was his desired outcome.
If he was actually keeping notes on this, these would all be bullet pointed, the word ‘success’ written in black ink at the bottom, quite possibly underlined. In fact, at a later date, he may consider taking notes on this.
This is the rest, the parts that need to be analyzed and picked apart over time, looking for those subtle nuances that he can neither grasp, recognize, nor understand, also known as, according to some, the most important part of the whole equation:
“Are you not coming inside?” He asks, when she has yet to unbuckle her seatbelt or turn the key in the ignition, despite the fact that he’s already out of the car, standing there with his door open.
There’s a pause. “Yeah, I’ve…I forgot something at work. I should go back and get it.”
It’s a perfectly legitimate reply, as far as he’s concerned, and he nods to her, “Well then thank you for the ride.”
She smiles at him and her lips stretch thin and tight. “Have a good night.”
On the walk up to his apartment, he plays the four lines of conversation over in his head. He’s aware that, because of his actions, he is supposed to expect a reaction from her. It follows a little bit like Newton’s Third Law, in that way, and he thinks that if people just related these things to scientific concepts he’d make more sense of them.
Leonard’s already home when he gets there, and he frowns the second Sheldon walks in the door. “I didn’t hear Penny out there; is everything alright?”
“Of course you didn’t hear her. She realized she forgot something at the Cheesecake Factory and went back to get it.” He replies.
“It’s kind of late.” Leonard remarks, a fact which Sheldon confirms with a glance down at his watch.
“Yes, it is. But it doesn’t close until eleven so she has perfectly adequate time to retrieve whatever it is that she left.”
The other man eyes him, carefully, remaining silent for longer than Sheldon feels is absolutely necessary, before he finally says, “Are you sure you didn’t do anything?”
“I never confirmed that I hadn’t,” Sheldon pauses, making the proper correction before answering the question. “However, I don’t remember do anything wrong.”
Wrong has multiple interpretations after all, and they vary from individual to individual. There’s no possible way for him to know what she considered his maneuver in the car as; he only has the facts. The evidence that she kissed him back leads him to a conclusion that she didn’t outright object to his actions, therefore making the term wrong as a description fairly improbable, according to either of their interpretations.
“I’m going to bed,” he states, deciding Leonard’s silence meant that he was finished with the conversation, half a second before turning on his heel and heading to his bedroom.
---
Penny did not actually forget a damn thing at the Cheesecake Factory. Except maybe her sanity. And her judgment. She’s fairly sure both of those got lost somewhere in there. But it’s the only cover story she could think up at the drop of the hat, so she drives around the block for five minutes, in order to spare herself from having to walk up four flights of stairs with Sheldon, all the while either having him pretend everything was fine or having to endure tension-filled silence.
Then she climbs the stairs quickly and quietly and locks herself in her apartment, hoping that Sheldon hadn’t heard her come in. When ten minutes pass and he hasn’t started knocking, inquiring why she’s back so early, she finally lets herself breathe.
She avoids Sheldon, and the rest of the guys by extension, until Friday. It’s two days of working and catching up with the friends she’s been neglecting, and that last is refreshing. She laughs and drinks and dances her ass off Thursday night, stumbling back to her apartment in the wee hours of the morning.
The door across the hall opens audibly, seconds after she shuts her own, but she hears it close a minute later. It’s two in the morning.
Friday afternoon, around noon, just as she’s getting ready to go into work for an afternoon shift, someone finally knocks. Once. Which is how she knows it’s only Leonard.
“It’s open,” she says, pulling her hair back into a ponytail and checking herself in the mirror. From her bedroom, she can hear the front door open and close with a soft click. This marks the first time she’s been in her apartment with Leonard, alone, since they broke up. She’d be lying if she said it didn’t make her a little nervous. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“It’s my lunch break,” he replies, and she can hear his footsteps, tracking her voice, pausing at the doorway to her bedroom like he isn’t quite sure if he should go in. Seeing this, she abandons her reflection and walks back out into the living room with him at her heels. It’s comfortable out there; it’s familiar in this context. “Haven’t seen you in a few days.”
“Yeah, I’ve just been busy.” She busies herself in the kitchen, pouring herself something to drink so as to give her hands something to do. When he doesn’t reply to that, she feels the need to add, “You know, friends, work. But I’ve missed you guys.”
He shuffles his feet, hands shoved in his pockets just about as far as they can go. She can tell simply having this conversation troubles him, though she isn’t sure why. “Have you?”
“Of course I have,” she says, and means it. This really isn’t about whether or not she misses them. This is about how she needs a break, and she’s been neglecting her other friends, and, although she doesn’t want to admit it, this is about Sheldon kissing her in the car the other night.
“Sheldon said you had to go back to work Tuesday night,” he starts, and she instantly knows where this is going. She admires the guts he has to have to call her out on the lie, and half wonders where they were before. “Except I heard you come in five minutes later.”
“It’s not nice to eavesdrop,” she chastises, somewhat jokingly. It’s her only choice, to stall until she can come up with a story, a lie, something to avoid this conversation going any further.
“It’s not so much eavesdropping, more…being aware of your surroundings.” She lifts her eyes from the sink, doing dishes now. There’s three days worth of them in there, more or less, and it’ll keep her occupied. “I don’t know what he did to piss you off but…it’s Sheldon and he doesn’t even know half of the time unless you tell him.”
“Leonard,” she starts, before she even really knows what she’s going to say. She has his full attention, and it makes it that much harder to find her next words. Eventually, she just goes with, “Can you just please let it go?”
Because, as she should’ve expected, she can’t tell him this sort of stuff. She can’t now, and maybe she never could. She can, however, count on him to give her the space she needs, for the most part, and that’s just what he does. “Yeah, of course.”
He’s halfway out the door, and she’s just about to drop her dish-cleaning, perfectly fine façade when he turns at the last moment.
“If you decide you don’t want to let it go,” he pauses, like he doesn’t know how to put it. There’s more confidence in his voice when he continues, “I’m right across the hall.”
Before she probably would’ve marched over there and kissed him on the cheek or hugged him. It’s too soon for that. Instead, she merely smiles, thankful. “Thanks, Leonard. You really are a good guy.”
He leaves before the moment dies, and Penny knows now that if nothing else at least they’re okay.
---
Part 2
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory
Characters/Pairings: Sheldon/Penny, Leonard.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 13,341
Author's Note: I started this right after episode 3x03, so there's spoilers up to there. And I've been staring at it for so long since then that I'm not even sure if it makes sense anywhere but my own head. Not to mention that half of this is in Sheldon POV. Feedback is very appreciated with this guys. Thank you to all of the S/P fans on Twitter who were so encouraging -- you guys kept me going.
Spoilers: Spoilers for 3.03 AND some plot based spoiler for early 4.5 Battlestar Galactica, though knowledge of the show isn't necessary.
Summary:Post 3.03, and then a month or so in the future after that. Sheldon always assumed that when Penny and Leonard broke up, it would lead to her spending a lot less time in their apartment. However, it appeared that Penny had so altered her routine that she still found herself in their apartment with a similar frequency to before they broke up, only now she was in his space even more.
Sheldon always assumed that when - and it was certainly a when - Penny and Leonard broke up, it would lead to her spending a lot less time in their apartment. Granted this wasn’t necessarily a result that didn’t have its negative aspects but it was the one that made the most sense if what he knew about relationships and the aftermath of them was correct. Namely, that some degree of awkwardness was supposed to ensue.
Some awkwardness ensued. However, it appeared that Penny had so altered her routine that she still found herself in their apartment with a similar frequency to before they broke up, only now she was in his space even more, asking him questions and holding conversations with him, most likely to compensate for what she wasn’t doing with Leonard anymore.
He had ceased his experimentation with chocolate-based behavioral modification awhile back, after Penny had figured him out and threatened him with all manner of bodily harm. That was over a month ago but, thankfully, French toast was not made on a Monday since that first morning and he took the small victories when they came.
This newfound need to take an intense interest in his life made it apparent that he was now going to have to find another way to deal with her little quirks, as Leonard so helpfully referred to them. Particularly, he needed a new, more foolproof way to discourage the annoying behaviors that had since resurfaced, magnified by her sudden proximity to him.
Unfortunately, all other options he’s insofar been able to come up with seems just as likely to result in infliction of injury or perhaps driving her away entirely.
For the first time in a very, very long time, Sheldon finds himself stumped.
---
“Explain it to me again.”
His thumb hits the pause button for the fifth time in half an hour. There’s a muscle in his jaw that begins to twitch. “What part?”
“The Cylonoid Human things.” He blinks at her. She offers, “There was something about a tribe.”
“Humanoid Cylons, Penny,” he corrects, swiftly, and she can tell by his expression that it’s quite possibly physically painful for him to maintain an even, not entirely condescending tone. “I believe you are referring to the Final Five, who were the descendants of the Thirteenth Tribe. They created the rest of the Cylon models.”
“Right, but why?”
“In order to stop the war between the humans and the Centurions.”
She sighs heavily, leaning even further back into the couch cushions. He’s still looking at her, like he’s sure that she’s not done and is probably waiting for permission to start the show up again. She considers this for a moment, then points to the screen, “So that’s one of the Final Five?”
He looks positively outraged by that notion. “No, that’s an eight.”
This she actually knows. Mostly, she just wants to get a rise out of him now, for her own entertainment. A whole minute later he’s still staring at her, and she coaxes, “Well - start it.”
“Are you sure you’re done?”
Rather than answer that, she presses the play button while the remote is still in his hand, settling back down to try and make sense of the rest of Battlestar Galactica. She manages to keep her mouth shut for the remainder of the episode, deciding that she’s pushed his buttons enough for one night. In return, his replies to her for the rest of the night are significantly less snappy.
That is, until this.
“Penny, I understand that it’s most likely considered inappropriate according to social conventions to ask this, but why is it that you’re spending a Wednesday night in our apartment when I’m the only one awake?”
It takes her far too long for the shrug she eventually gives to be considered casual. “Because usually friends hang out with each other.”
“Ah yes, we are considered friends. So according to the friendship algorithm you would consider this the least objectionable activity?” He asks, with wide, way too focused eyes.
She isn’t entirely sure what he just said, but she’ll go with it in order to save him the trouble of explaining it to her. Or maybe to save her the trouble of having to listen to it. “Sure, okay. Does everything really have to have an explanation? Can’t I just feel like watching television?”
“Of course you can. You can also feel like jumping off a bridge, but that doesn’t mean that you do.” The order of his thoughts seems to be reversed, because his next words are certainly the ones she would’ve opened with. “Also, you have a television in your apartment.”
She bites her tongue pretty damn hard to keep various sarcastic retorts from slipping through her lips, instead asking, “Do you have a problem with me hanging out here?”
“Problem, no.” Instantly, she knows there’s another word he’s got for it, another explanation, and he’ll push until she stops him so she does.
“Leave it, Sheldon,” she grinds out, and for once he takes a hint.
Penny leaves after just enough time has passed that he doesn’t think it’s because of anything he said. It’s the first time that she realizes that not only is her relationship with Leonard screwed up, but her relationship with Sheldon too.
---
It bothers him far more than it should.
Sheldon is entirely used to people snapping at him. In fact, as far as he’s concerned, that’s just part of the normal flow of conversation. It bothers him, tonight, however, because it feels like he’s accidentally stumbled upon something and managed to miss what that something is entirely.
This he finds both unusual and discomforting, so much so that he doesn’t drop off the minute he switches off the lights and goes to bed like he normally does. Instead he stares at his ceiling and thinks of equations and his board and ways to undermine Leslie Winkle in the future, all the while with the unshakeable feeling that something is not right with his universe.
In the morning, he is tired.
---
She’s in their apartment by early afternoon.
It’s a Saturday and she’s got errands to run and can’t find her favorite sweatshirt. When it doesn’t turn up in her apartment, she figures theirs is just the next most logical place for it to be.
Sheldon’s the one who lets her in. She glances down at the floor beneath her feet before shaking off all of last night and meeting his eyes. “I lost my sweatshirt,” she offers, by way of explanation, and he lets her in before he presses.
“Perhaps if you had a better organizational scheme at your apartment that could’ve been prevented.” She listens to exactly half of that sentence before she heads down the hallway to Leonard’s bedroom; he follows her.
“I think I left it here,” she replies, opening the door to Leonard’s bedroom, finding it empty and mostly neat, if not as immaculate as Sheldon’s. A quick survey of the room tells her that it’s not there, not casually thrown on the back of a chair or in that drawer she used to put a change of clothes in for when she slept over, because she didn’t want to have to walk across the hall to her apartment. It made things seem more real, like with every other guy she had gotten serious with.
It doesn’t leave her with any other options. Every other room in the apartment is Sheldon’s domain, more or less, which means that everything has a place and is presumably in that exact place. If he’d seen her sweatshirt it would’ve been returned pronto.
“Maybe I left it at work,” she thinks aloud, trying to picture the coat rack by the door in the back, thinking back to what she’d worn to work the last time she’d been there. She couldn’t remember.
“A likely explanation.” He answers, even if she hadn’t really meant him to. “But not quite as likely as the possibility that it’s in your apartment.”
“It’s not; I looked,” she says, for the last time, voice firm. In her head, she rerouted her trip to include a brief stopover at work, to look for it. “Thanks anyways,” she tells him, and he nods and follows her straight to the door.
She doesn’t say goodbye, and she doesn’t think about it until she’s halfway down the stairs on the way to her car. By then, he’s already closed the door.
---
Penny has claimed the rightmost washer by the time he comes downstairs at 8:15 to do his laundry. It’s another habit of hers that’s stuck and intertwined with his. But that preceded her relationship with Leonard anyways.
He watches her as he separates his clothes, lights and darks and brights, all in their own piles, all with their own specific settings. Despite all his efforts to correct her, she still just dumps it all into the same load, two sometimes, if it’s been a particularly busy week.
“Were you able to locate your sweatshirt?” He asks, and it must be the first time that she’s aware of his presence because she spins to look at him a little too quickly.
After a moment, the line of her shoulders relaxes, tension dissipating. “No. I’m sure it’ll turn up eventually.”
It’s not an incorrect statement, considering he’s almost positive that it’s just hidden in some pile in that mess she refers to as a living room - he can’t understand how anyone can live comfortably there - but he chooses not to point that out. It would be futile, repetition of the same basic idea that he’d put forth hours ago, one that she had neither welcomed nor acted upon.
They make the bare bones of small talk, a practice which he despises but has acclimated to over time. She tells him about a role that she’s considering auditioning for, and he in turn tells her about research he’s been doing at work, when she prompts him. He knows that she doesn’t comprehend the bulk of what he’s saying but he’s learned both that pointing that fact out is bordering on rude and that asking about his day-to-day life is part of this whole friendship thing.
When that’s worn thin and silence permeates the air once more, undercut by the sound of the washer and dryer running the background, he finally lets onto the unease he felt last night, in the form of, “Penny, I feel the need to make it clear that I was in no way trying to deter you from coming to our apartment. However, from your behavior last night and this afternoon I’ve come to the conclusion that you read it as such.”
She squints her eyes at him. At first he thinks it’s the beginnings of a glare, and that he’s managed to make a socially unacceptable mistake somewhere in there. But then it softens, a little, and she says, “You know, there’s a term for what you just said.”
He frowns. He’s fairly sure that there is no such thing. “Such as?”
“Growth.”
Later, upon further analyzation, he’ll come to understand that she means that socially. In the moment, however, he has little idea of what she could mean by that.
What he does know is that he has just managed to completely undermine his own attempts to break her from her newfound routine of splitting her time between her apartment and theirs, in the interest of easing the mutual discomfort that had been serving as an undercurrent to their present interactions. Accidentally. Or perhaps not, he’s rather unclear on that.
He is clear on the fact that this will most likely have inconvenient consequences for him later on.
---
Sunday morning comes earlier than she’d like.
She stumbles out of her room, into the bathroom, and then into the kitchen to make coffee, bleary-eyed and fairly unaware of her surroundings. It’s only after she’s turned the coffeemaker on and turned around to head for the couch that she notices.
Mostly, she notices that her couch, the coffee table, and the surrounding floor space is clean. Spotless. Like a cleaning crew the size of a small army had spent a few hours here while she was asleep. Various clothes that had been strewn around had been folded and placed on the table she sometimes ate at, probably for lack of access to her bedroom, and the only thing that didn’t belong was her missing sweatshirt, folded and placed in the middle of the green and white patterned chair that he’d claimed as his own once.
She sighs, something grateful and somehow a little sad, and slips into it.
Penny thinks of things that she could say to him, variations around the theme of ‘thank you’ and ‘I still think breaking into people’s apartments in the middle of the night is creepy’, but she both can’t find a happy median and can’t bring herself to knock on their door, so she doesn’t say anything at all.
---
When eleven o’clock has passed and there are no sounds of yelling or screaming or various curse words, Sheldon determines that Penny has deemed this a situation unworthy of any sort of negative retribution.
Leonard, on the other hand, appears to have a hard time believing this. He sputters and glares and gets halfway to Penny’s apartment twice, prepared to apologize just like the last time, and stopping for reasons that Sheldon both doesn’t know and doesn’t care about.
“Did you learn nothing from the last time?” Leonard asks, still not over it, even after he’s been awake and aware for a full hour.
“Actually, Penny has led me to believe that I’ve made substantial progress with social norms in the arena of correct social interaction.” He pauses, throwing a look Leonard’s way, watching the lines in his forehead as he frowns. “And I’m far more likely to believe her on these matters.”
Leonard’s mouth opens but he fails to vocalize his thoughts for a few moments, despite the way his mouth forms around the words. “She told you that?”
“Well not in those exact words.” Sheldon amends. “I believe the word she used was ‘growth’.”
This also appears to confuse Leonard because he just stands there, staring, for the longest time. Sheldon pays fairly little mind to his reaction, instead going about returning emails.
Finally, Leonard shakes his head and starts down the hallway. He can hear snatches of the other man’s exasperated monologue, words like ‘sanity’ and ‘freak of nature’ peppering his speech.
As usual, Sheldon pays no mind to that.
---
“And you were specific?”
“I swear to…” Penny stops herself, knowing that old standby amounts to nothing with him, and goes with, “I swear I was specific. I’ve been there at least a dozen times; they know what I’m going to say before I say it.”
“Well apparently they don’t.” Sheldon insists, defiant to the very end.
She finds herself looking to Leonard, something she hasn’t done in too long, and he comes through like it’s nothing but instinct. Sometimes, in these situations, she feels a lot like a parent to a fussy five year old. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting a little bit? You haven’t even tasted it.”
“I don’t have to,” he replies, “I can see it.”
“You can see that they made it wrong?” Penny asks, crossing her arms, looking down at him deliberately. It made her feel superior and it probably pissed him off in the process. If he was going to act like a child then she was going to act like an authority figure, at the very least. Sweatshirt or no sweatshirt.
“Yes.”
She shoves chopsticks into the hand that isn’t holding the apparently offending container, leveling him with a glare that would, and has, melted most men, including the other three in the room, and waits until he’s begrudgingly poking at his food to take her own seat.
“Wow,” Howard says, after at least thirty seconds of ridiculously tense silence, Penny all but daring Sheldon to say a single word about his food. Fairly predictably, Raj took that as his cue to lean in and do some heavy-duty conspiratory whispering with Howard, none of it audible to her and maybe that was a good thing considering Howard’s reply once they’d separated. “More than just the bed.”
---
“Sheldon,” Leonard’s voice is the first he’s heard in nearly an hour. “Why are you still up? It’s almost midnight and we have work in the morning.”
He turns in his chair to face his robe and pajama clad roommate who’s fixing him with a sleep-addled frown as he adjusts his glasses. “I know full well what time it is.” He points to the watch on his wrist, the one linked to the atomic clock. “And probably more accurately than you do.”
“That is not the…” The other man starts, walking towards him and squinting at the computer screen as he does, trying to read the text on it at a distance. Unfortunately, the header of the page is in bold twenty-eight point font, which makes that a fairly easy task to achieve. “Behavior modification techniques - Sheldon, what the hell. Not this again.”
“Again implies that I’ve done the same thing before, and seeing as she caught onto my experimentations with chocolate that is simply not an option.” If it was again, his life would be made so much easier. But the dinner fiasco, and her sudden absolute defiance that would most likely only continue, needed to be prevented if she was going to spend half of her day that she wasn’t working here. He needed to deter her from continuously stealing their milk and singing or humming while in their apartment, not to mention constantly interrupting him when he’s attempting to write very important emails, reading over his shoulder and asking him what various terms mean.
“Whatever. It’s wrong, and you shouldn’t be doing it.”
“Wrong according to some people. I still fail to see how it’s harmful.”
Leonard blinks at him.
“Judging by your lack of an answer, neither do you.”
“Nevermind,” Leonard says, giving up once more with him. It’s startlingly easy to get him to do so, he’s quickly discovering. “Just remember to sleep with one eye open if she finds out, because if she murders you I’m going to say it was self-defense.”
As expected, it does nothing to deter him.
---
The next time she sees him is at the mailboxes.
“Sheldon,” she greets, the definition of sugary sweet and actively ignoring every single part of last night’s dinnertime fiasco. There are slightly narrowed eyes sent her way, like maybe he expected her to adopt a different tone. Penny smiles even wider; compensation. It’s just easier to gloss over the little things if it keeps things comfortable and cohesive.
“Penny,” he returns, his stack of mail half the size of hers and probably filled with fewer bills. And magazines. Something tells her neither the credit card companies nor Allure frequent his mailbox. “Will you be joining us for dinner this evening?”
When he says things like that, in that particular mannerism, she always feels like she somehow got accidentally transferred back several decades and is expected to curtsy and speak in proper sentences. His inquiries always end up sounding way more formal than anyone else’s that she’s ever known. Of course, she never actually does. “Actually, no. I’ve got a friend coming over to fix my bed - I’m not sure Leonard actually fixed it the last time, which is weird because he swore he did.”
Sheldon stares at her for a moment, and then says, “I think he was more concerned with achieving coitus than with the structural integrity of your bed.”
She’s never going to find sentences like that easy to swallow. Still, she plasters a smile on her face and replies, “Yeah, that must’ve been it.”
The sarcasm in her voice goes undetected. She doesn’t know why she bothers to wait for him to get it.
“Anyways, I’m going to head upstairs. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
His nod must be his equivalent to the wave and she keeps the smile on her face until she reaches the top of the first flight of stairs, let the façade fall, and wondering if maybe it’s better that she’s not joining them for dinner tonight.
---
The reminder of the broken bed reminds Sheldon of other things. Specifically, the conclusion he came across countless weeks ago:
Sex works even better than chocolate to modify behavior.
He has insofar been unable to come up with a proper alternative to his initial chocolate-based experiments, and yet there it was, somewhere hidden in the recesses of his mind.
The data is all there, right in front of him, concrete as it can possibly be for something he stumbled upon accidentally. But what acting upon that data entails is something he finds hard to imagine.
Not impossible, however. After all, nothing is impossible for someone like himself.
---
Penny comes out of the shower sometime after nine, wrapped only in a towel. Her bed has long since been fixed, and dinner has been had. Her friend, Ben, is on the couch with the television blaring, right where she left him, and he flags her down nearly as soon as she opens the bathroom door. Somehow, over all that noise his hearing is ridiculously good.
“Tall, dark, and geeky stopped by ten minutes ago.” He informs her, without looking away from the television. “Is there a particular reason he kept right on knocking after I had already answered the door.”
The nickname throws her off. The description is unmistakable. “Yeah, he does that. It’s…it’s him. What did he want?”
“He wanted to know what you did with the low-sodium soy sauce.” She doesn’t have to be looking at him to understand that it’s a concentrated effort to keep himself from bursting out laughing. “I really, really hope that’s code for something.”
Penny licks her lips and dearly wishes it wasn’t. Hers and Sheldon’s is a strange relationship. “Sadly. no.”
She heads to her bedroom, dropping her towel to the floor and pulling on a t-shirt and shorts. Her disappearance into the other room doesn’t stop Ben’s line of questioning. “I think I can see why you broke up with him then.”
Her grip on her hairbrush loosens considerably and she barely catches it before it falls to the floor, or more accurately on her foot. “What?”
“That guy. I can see why you broke up with him. He’s not exactly Mr. Personality.”
And she realizes that Ben thinks she was dating Sheldon, because he had only heard about Leonard and their relationship in passing. Leonard never met any of her friends while they were dating, and she’s ninety percent sure that only about half of them knew his name. They just know it’s the guy across the hall. Hence the confusion. It’s mostly her fault. “No, that’s Sheldon. I was dating his roommate.”
“Hmm.” She hears him flip channels, the sounds of the latest catfight on America’s Next Top Model filtering through her speakers. This gives her no pause at all because, while Ben serves as her very occasional handyman, Ben is also gay and fairly unafraid of fulfilling the stereotype of being interested in fashion. Really though, he’s less interested in that part and more interested in watching these girls tear into each other for sheer entertainment purpose. “Is that the short one with the glasses and the…” she knows he’s gesturing now, even if she can’t see him, “hair situation? The one that stood in the doorway and kept telling him to please come back inside?”
She flinches a little at the fairly unforgiving description, before confirming, “Yeah, that would be Leonard.”
The topic dies for a minute or two, comfortable silence between them, the television filling up the empty spaces, until she’s getting a drink in the kitchen and the television cuts to commercial and Ben tells her, “I would’ve gone with other one.”
---
“I see you’ve entered into a new relationship.”
It feels like a socially correct opening. It is inquiring about the other person and making an attempt to connect with them and their life. Judging by the look on Penny’s face, eyebrows raised, mouth small and tight, perhaps a simple ‘hello’ would’ve better sufficed. “Good afternoon to you too.”
“Fine,” he acquiesces, confused as to what he did wrong. “Good afternoon. It sure is chilly outside. I see you’ve entered into a new relationship.”
Penny blinks at him, then nods slowly. He’s unsure which of those two statements she’s agreeing with. Or if it’s even directed at him. “That was my friend. Remember, the one who was coming to fix my bed? We’ve had this conversation.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve come to understand that an attractive man leaving your apartment at a ridiculous hour generally meant you were previously engaged in some sort of pleasureable activitiy.” He ends up quite proud of himself for coming up with a new word instead of ‘coitus’, which, as she hadn’t hesitated to point out, she found quite off-putting.
“Sheldon, honey, that really makes it sound like you’re calling me a slut. And friends don’t call friends sluts.”
“I was unaware I was making that implication. My apologies.” They start up the stairs, headed towards their floor.
“He’s just a friend,” She says, rather futilely further refuting his earlier accusation. He’s already aware that he was wrong; he doesn’t need the point driven home once more. “A friend who said you came a-knocking, and, by the way, I have no idea what you did with the soy sauce or what that has to do with me. I’m just the mule; I don’t participate in the cleanup.”
“Oh, yes. That turned out to be Leonard’s fault. He didn’t organize the cabinet correctly. He received a strike.”
“It’s soy sauce,” she states, purposelessly.
He wonders what part of that she misunderstood that she felt the need to essentially repeat herself, as he replies, “Yes, Penny, it is.”
“That wasn’t really…never mind,” she decides, as they start up the next flight, falling into sync with each other.
---
Tuesday night she has a shift and the four guys take up residence at a table for the next two hours. It’s a comfort, to be able to wander over to them under the guise of being a helpful server every time the dirty, forty-something guy who’s both balding and sunburned gives her one of those smiles that he must think is charming.
“Is he…” Leonard starts, like he’s about to ask if the guy is giving her trouble, and she gives him a raised eyebrow. Even if he was, there isn’t all that much Leonard, or any of these guys, would be able to do without looking like a fool or getting their ass kicked.
“Just leering. Comes with the territory,” she explains, noting that Leonard’s still watching at the man staring at her ass. Sheldon is fairly oblivious to it, and the other two are facing away from him. It’s sweet but that’s all there is to it. She makes an effort at changing the topic. “So do you guys have plans for the rest of the night?”
“Comic book store,” Leonard tells her, presumably speaking for all of them, at least until Sheldon throws an annoyed glance his way.
“I told you I have to stop at the grocery store,” Sheldon insists, attempting significant eye contact that Leonard absolutely will not return.
“Sheldon, can’t you just do that tomorrow?” Leonard asks, leaning his head back and looking up, the set of his jaw telling her that he is aware that, no, Sheldon cannot. Because he’s Sheldon.
“No,” he replies, the expected answer.
Penny looks at her watch, sighs, and makes a potentially stupid decision. “I’ll take him. I get off in an hour and I need to buy shampoo anyway.”
Leonard looks at her as if she’s insane. She might just be. “You really don’t have to do that - he can wait.”
“Excuse me, but I am sitting right here and perfectly capable of speaking for myself,” Sheldon interrupts, perturbed. “And thank you, Penny.”
She flashes a smile his way. It might not be in about half an hour when they’re in the car, but right now it’s worth it.
In a way, she’s right. The ride from the Cheesecake Factory to the store is fine. He behaves himself, more or less keeping quiet, either because he’s grateful or reflective - she doesn’t know which and doesn’t really care as long as she doesn’t have the urge to throttle him in the car like she normally does. Once in the store, they go their separate ways and meet up at the register when they’re done, a quick five minute stop, and on the walk back to the car she makes the mistake of thinking that maybe she was wrong in just assuming he’d drive her crazy.
On the ride back home, she finds the combination of darkness and extended time on her feet has made her sleepy, and she turns up the radio in an effort to keep herself alert. Sheldon does not take to this, at first letting out a small noise of protest which progresses to a heavy sigh as the station blares some overplayed Coldplay song and, ironically, Radiohead.
She draws the line when he turns it down. “Sheldon, honey, my car, my rules.”
“There was no agreement made to that.” He disputes, before she has the chance to turn the music back up. “You might be surprised to know that my hearing is quiet sensitive, which I find benefits me more often than not, except in instances such as this.”
“I’ve heard you watch television with the sound up loud enough that I can hear it in my apartment,” she tells him, adding, “and the radio wasn’t even turned halfway up.”
“As you are aware I’m not the only one living in my apartment,” he defends, arms crossed, one hand on his seatbelt, the same way it usually falls across the strap of his messenger bag. It really is all habit and routine with him. “And I fail to see how approximations on how far the dial was turned up has anything to do with my level of discomfort.”
With that, Penny turns into the parking lot of the drugstore, simply so that she could look him in the eye when she said, “You need to learn to pick your battles.”
“Excuse me?” He says, frowning.
“You need to learn to pick your battles,” she says, repeating it for effect. “It’s a radio, Sheldon, and I’m doing you a favor by driving you to the grocery store. That generally means you need to compromise in order to please the other person, since they’re doing something nice for you.”
Penny wonders if maybe she would’ve been a good kindergarten teacher, in another life. Through her time with Sheldon, she’s discovered she has more patience than herself or others had ever given her credit for. A year ago, she would’ve let him out in the parking lot or the side of the road and just kept on driving. Now, she’s bothering to try and teach him something. It’s something like progress.
There’s a change in his eyes too, a shift, and she thinks and half-hopes that it’s a sign that some of what she said has just sunk in. For four seconds, she’s almost sure it has.
What happens next only serves to confuse her.
He unbuckles his seatbelt, and at first she thinks he might actually be voluntarily getting out of the car. It’s stupid and it’s dangerous since it’s nighttime and they’re too far away from their apartment building, and she nearly puts out a hand to stop him before she realizes his hands are nowhere near the door. Instead, one of them moves awkwardly to rest on the console between them and the other on her shoulder as he leans across the car and kisses her full on the mouth.
For a count of three, Penny is absolutely still. Her muscles are tense, the spot where his hand rests on her shoulder on fire, bringing to the forefront the knowledge that she was, in fact, quite cold, even if it hadn’t registered before right now. Sheldon is warm, and his lips move against hers in a way that insists he knows exactly what he’s doing, and at some point it clicks in her mind that this may not be the first time he’s done this but it’s the first in a long while and she’s just self-important enough to think that if she pushes him away right now she’ll also be the last for a long while.
At four, she wraps a hand around his long neck, feeling muscles and tendons underneath her fingertips, and she shifts so that she’s closer to him, the positions of their bodies gradually becoming less awkward, her mouth opening to him. It takes her too long to remember to unbuckle her seatbelt, and even longer to stop panicking because this is Sheldon and she can do that later anyways. Somehow she ends up kneeling in her seat, and his hands are cupping her face, deliberate and with a tenderness she hasn’t seen from him before.
He’s the one who ends it. It leaves her just as stunned as when he began it, and she doesn’t quite know what to do with herself when he returns to the exact same position he was in just moments ago, putting his seatbelt back on, face completely blank. One glance at herself in the mirror lets her know her cheeks are flushed, as if she couldn’t already feel that, and she can’t quite help but feel awkward and uncomfortable and kind of suffocated.
So she does the only thing she can do. She gets her feet flat on the floor once more, puts the car in gear, and backs the hell out of the parking lot, driving them home in record time.
The entire rest of the trip, he is silent.
---
These are the facts:
She had backed him into an argument in which he was unlikely to win.
When he kissed her, she stopped arguing.
When he kissed her, she kissed him back.
After he’d pulled away, she had driven them home quickly, without further argument.
This was his desired outcome.
If he was actually keeping notes on this, these would all be bullet pointed, the word ‘success’ written in black ink at the bottom, quite possibly underlined. In fact, at a later date, he may consider taking notes on this.
This is the rest, the parts that need to be analyzed and picked apart over time, looking for those subtle nuances that he can neither grasp, recognize, nor understand, also known as, according to some, the most important part of the whole equation:
“Are you not coming inside?” He asks, when she has yet to unbuckle her seatbelt or turn the key in the ignition, despite the fact that he’s already out of the car, standing there with his door open.
There’s a pause. “Yeah, I’ve…I forgot something at work. I should go back and get it.”
It’s a perfectly legitimate reply, as far as he’s concerned, and he nods to her, “Well then thank you for the ride.”
She smiles at him and her lips stretch thin and tight. “Have a good night.”
On the walk up to his apartment, he plays the four lines of conversation over in his head. He’s aware that, because of his actions, he is supposed to expect a reaction from her. It follows a little bit like Newton’s Third Law, in that way, and he thinks that if people just related these things to scientific concepts he’d make more sense of them.
Leonard’s already home when he gets there, and he frowns the second Sheldon walks in the door. “I didn’t hear Penny out there; is everything alright?”
“Of course you didn’t hear her. She realized she forgot something at the Cheesecake Factory and went back to get it.” He replies.
“It’s kind of late.” Leonard remarks, a fact which Sheldon confirms with a glance down at his watch.
“Yes, it is. But it doesn’t close until eleven so she has perfectly adequate time to retrieve whatever it is that she left.”
The other man eyes him, carefully, remaining silent for longer than Sheldon feels is absolutely necessary, before he finally says, “Are you sure you didn’t do anything?”
“I never confirmed that I hadn’t,” Sheldon pauses, making the proper correction before answering the question. “However, I don’t remember do anything wrong.”
Wrong has multiple interpretations after all, and they vary from individual to individual. There’s no possible way for him to know what she considered his maneuver in the car as; he only has the facts. The evidence that she kissed him back leads him to a conclusion that she didn’t outright object to his actions, therefore making the term wrong as a description fairly improbable, according to either of their interpretations.
“I’m going to bed,” he states, deciding Leonard’s silence meant that he was finished with the conversation, half a second before turning on his heel and heading to his bedroom.
---
Penny did not actually forget a damn thing at the Cheesecake Factory. Except maybe her sanity. And her judgment. She’s fairly sure both of those got lost somewhere in there. But it’s the only cover story she could think up at the drop of the hat, so she drives around the block for five minutes, in order to spare herself from having to walk up four flights of stairs with Sheldon, all the while either having him pretend everything was fine or having to endure tension-filled silence.
Then she climbs the stairs quickly and quietly and locks herself in her apartment, hoping that Sheldon hadn’t heard her come in. When ten minutes pass and he hasn’t started knocking, inquiring why she’s back so early, she finally lets herself breathe.
She avoids Sheldon, and the rest of the guys by extension, until Friday. It’s two days of working and catching up with the friends she’s been neglecting, and that last is refreshing. She laughs and drinks and dances her ass off Thursday night, stumbling back to her apartment in the wee hours of the morning.
The door across the hall opens audibly, seconds after she shuts her own, but she hears it close a minute later. It’s two in the morning.
Friday afternoon, around noon, just as she’s getting ready to go into work for an afternoon shift, someone finally knocks. Once. Which is how she knows it’s only Leonard.
“It’s open,” she says, pulling her hair back into a ponytail and checking herself in the mirror. From her bedroom, she can hear the front door open and close with a soft click. This marks the first time she’s been in her apartment with Leonard, alone, since they broke up. She’d be lying if she said it didn’t make her a little nervous. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“It’s my lunch break,” he replies, and she can hear his footsteps, tracking her voice, pausing at the doorway to her bedroom like he isn’t quite sure if he should go in. Seeing this, she abandons her reflection and walks back out into the living room with him at her heels. It’s comfortable out there; it’s familiar in this context. “Haven’t seen you in a few days.”
“Yeah, I’ve just been busy.” She busies herself in the kitchen, pouring herself something to drink so as to give her hands something to do. When he doesn’t reply to that, she feels the need to add, “You know, friends, work. But I’ve missed you guys.”
He shuffles his feet, hands shoved in his pockets just about as far as they can go. She can tell simply having this conversation troubles him, though she isn’t sure why. “Have you?”
“Of course I have,” she says, and means it. This really isn’t about whether or not she misses them. This is about how she needs a break, and she’s been neglecting her other friends, and, although she doesn’t want to admit it, this is about Sheldon kissing her in the car the other night.
“Sheldon said you had to go back to work Tuesday night,” he starts, and she instantly knows where this is going. She admires the guts he has to have to call her out on the lie, and half wonders where they were before. “Except I heard you come in five minutes later.”
“It’s not nice to eavesdrop,” she chastises, somewhat jokingly. It’s her only choice, to stall until she can come up with a story, a lie, something to avoid this conversation going any further.
“It’s not so much eavesdropping, more…being aware of your surroundings.” She lifts her eyes from the sink, doing dishes now. There’s three days worth of them in there, more or less, and it’ll keep her occupied. “I don’t know what he did to piss you off but…it’s Sheldon and he doesn’t even know half of the time unless you tell him.”
“Leonard,” she starts, before she even really knows what she’s going to say. She has his full attention, and it makes it that much harder to find her next words. Eventually, she just goes with, “Can you just please let it go?”
Because, as she should’ve expected, she can’t tell him this sort of stuff. She can’t now, and maybe she never could. She can, however, count on him to give her the space she needs, for the most part, and that’s just what he does. “Yeah, of course.”
He’s halfway out the door, and she’s just about to drop her dish-cleaning, perfectly fine façade when he turns at the last moment.
“If you decide you don’t want to let it go,” he pauses, like he doesn’t know how to put it. There’s more confidence in his voice when he continues, “I’m right across the hall.”
Before she probably would’ve marched over there and kissed him on the cheek or hugged him. It’s too soon for that. Instead, she merely smiles, thankful. “Thanks, Leonard. You really are a good guy.”
He leaves before the moment dies, and Penny knows now that if nothing else at least they’re okay.
---
Part 2