The Law of Universal Gravitation 2: A Greater Affinity
Title: The Law of Universal Gravitation 2: A Greater Affinity
Authors: dashakay, with allthingsholy, juniperlane and montycrowley
Summary: This should be everything she's ever wanted.
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Penny/Leonard, Penny/Sheldon
Spoilers: Through 3.02, The Jiminy Conjecture
Word Count: 7,000
Disclaimer: The characters in this story do not belong to me and no copyright infringement is intended.
Warnings: Please make sure you've read the warnings here.
Author's Notes: I don't have the proper words to thank my co-writers, who are fabulous at ripping my writing apart and helping me to put it back together again. Big thanks to lovely ishie for taking the time to share her perspective. And so much gratitude to all of you who were kind and generous enough to comment on the first story. Your feedback really does help keep us motivated and excited about this project.
Part 1 | Part 2
Geoffroy's Law of Affinity: Whenever two substances are united that have a disposition to combine and a third is added that has a greater affinity with one of them, these two will unite and drive out the other.
This should be everything she's ever wanted. After more than a year of dancing around each other-near misses, tequila and lime, comic misunderstandings, one weird date, and three months of truly out-of-character longing on her part while Leonard was in the Arctic-she has him. Or he has her. Whatever.
They're sprawled across her unmade bed and he's sliding his hand up her shirt. She's kissing him as if the world has run out of oxygen and the only way to breathe is through his mouth. This should be amazing, after all the buildup. This should be epic. But it isn't and she doesn't know why.
(Okay, fine, maybe she does know why, or at least have an inkling of why, but she's not going to think about that because it was a mistake, just three mistaken minutes out of her life and it'll never happen again, so it's like it never happened. Right? Right?)
Leonard looks different with his glasses off. His eyes are slightly unfocused and he has a strange habit of keeping them open when he kisses her, as if he needs to keep checking to see if it's really her. She wants to shout, "It's me, Leonard! Now close your damn eyes and keep kissing me!"
"Get a nice guy," her mother had told her during the spring of her senior year. Penny had discovered, the night before prom, that her boyfriend Brent had gotten the star forward on the girls' basketball team pregnant.
Maybe being naked will help. They won't have anything to hide from each other. It'll be the two of them, nothing between them and it will be awesome, just like it's supposed to be. She helps Leonard wrestle his hoodie and t-shirt off and somewhere in all that, her own shirt is discarded on the floor. It takes Leonard a few tries to get her bra undone, but Penny's not going to hold it against him. Kurt could whip that thing off in less than two seconds, and look what happened with him. For a second she's actually warmed by the expression on Leonard's face as he sees her semi-naked for the first time. He looks like he just saw the face of God.
"You're so beautiful," he blurts out and her face grows warm. It's been a long time since she's heard a guy say that to her and actually believed it.
Penny pushes him onto the mattress and straddles his body. His chest isn't bad. He could use some definition and maybe a decent tan, but he's not bad and not nearly as hairy as she would have imagined. She can work with this.
"Can't you find yourself a nice guy?" her best friend Emily said after Penny called her from Pasadena, sobbing hysterically. She'd come home from work one night to find Kurt getting a blow job on the sofa from the next door neighbor-a skinny, twice-divorced manicurist named Mysti.
She kisses Leonard again.
(And she's not going to think about what it was like to kiss Sheldon because it didn't happen.)
Leonard runs his hands through her hair and the look on his face almost makes her want to cry because she wishes she could feel like that about him. Just a few days ago, she was so sure she did. While he was gone, she seemed to do little else but think about him. She was so certain that Leonard was what she wanted.
Really, he's not horrible at this. He touches her in almost all the right ways. Sure, maybe he's a little too gentle, too tentative, but it's better than some guys she's been with who pushed and prodded and pulled at her until she felt like a human Barbie doll or something. Like she wasn't really there, was a thing instead of a live woman. Leonard's not like that. He's exploring, prowling her body with his fingers and his mouth and it should be just what she wants, just what she likes, except it's not.
"Jesus, Penny, why don't you try going out with a nice guy for a change?" her friend Jamie has said after Tyler or Taylor or Tyson or whoever failed to return her calls after they slept together.
Penny has to snap herself back into focus. She's being entirely too passive with Leonard and that's probably part of the problem. She's not a passive person, especially in bed, and she's not going to have a good time if she continues to let Leonard take control of things.
Time to go buck wild on your ass, she thinks, straightening her spine with new resolve.
She does everything she thinks she's supposed to do. She scratches at his back, she bites his nipples, she takes him into her mouth and feels him harden against her tongue. Penny hears Leonard's rough breathing and his hands thrashing against the sheets and this should turn her on more than just about anything in the world. It always gets her hot to feel like she's in control, she's the one running the show. By this time she should be dripping wet, practically begging to have him inside her, but right now it only makes her feel tired, somehow. She wishes she could pull the comforter over her head and sleep for a week.
Leonard pushes her head away. "Penny," he gasps.
She sits up, knowing that it's time. After all this, she can't go back now. She's into it up to her neck. She leans over and finds the condom packet on the bedside stand and silently hands it to him.
Damn it, she's done what everyone in her life has been telling her all along. She's found herself a nice guy. Leonard would never cheat on her. It wouldn't even occur to him. He'd never lie. He'd never so much as look cross-eyed at another woman. What the fuck is wrong with her that this isn't doing it for her at all? Is she so damaged that she's can't get turned on by a guy unless she's relatively sure that he's going to be a complete douche in the near future?
Penny flops over onto her back and stares at the cracks in the ceiling. Time to let Leonard take the reins. Maybe that will help. It takes him quite a while to get the condom on. She hears him fumbling to get the wrapper open and then she hears him softly swear under his breath as he works to get it on himself.
"Aha!" Leonard says, as if he's suddenly discovered the trick to putting on condoms. She laughs, just because it feels good to let some of the tension out and besides, sex wouldn't be half as fun without a little humor.
"Are you laughing with me or at me?" he asks.
"With you," she says, grasping his cock at the root. "Definitely with you."
With her hand, she guides him in her. He comes to a rest once he's fully inside her and looks into her eyes. "Oh, Penny," he says with a sigh.
"Oh, Leonard," she echoes, because it seems like the polite thing to do. She crosses her ankles at his lower back and starts moving her hips to get things going a little.
(She definitely, definitely does not think about anyone else while she's in bed with Leonard because that would be really bad. Worse than actually kissing someone other than Leonard, for sure.)
Leonard pushes into her, making a small "oh" sound every time he thrusts into her. Penny closes her eyes and for a minute she's able to lose herself in the sensations and yes, it feels good, it feels natural and right and then she opens her eyes again, and damn.
Seriously, what the fucking fuck is wrong with her?
He's sweaty against her, pressing his moist forehead to hers. She finds herself worrying that they're somehow going to slide out of her bed and onto the floor and wondering how much it would hurt if that happened. Would she actually break a bone or just get bruised?
On a side not, has her bed always been this squeaky, or is this something new?
She lifts her hips, meeting each thrust of his, hoping that if she finds the right angle, that maybe the magic will happen. If it weren't their first time, if she felt more comfortable, she'd maybe reach between their bodies and touch herself, but a lot of guys are weird about that sort of thing and need time to warm up to the idea that sometimes girls require more than their magic penises to come.
Come on, magic, she thinks.
Leonard starts drumming into her hard and fast. Just the sort of thing she likes sometimes if the mood is right, but the mood's not right tonight. It actually kind of hurts a little bit, especially since he's somehow put all of his weight on her chest and it's sort of hard to breathe.
This is when she has a minor ethical dilemma. Should she fake an orgasm, for the sake of politeness? Or should she be honest about the fact that she hasn't come and isn't going to? She doesn't want Leonard to think that she hasn't enjoyed herself-even if it's true-or that he's bad in bed-he's really not-but on the other hand, faking it can set a dangerous precedent.
Penny decides that honesty is the best policy.
(Except when it's not.)
"Oh yeah," she breathes into her ear. "Come for me, Leonard. Come for me."
"But you, but you..." he sputters.
"Come on," says, squeezing his shoulders under her hands.
And he stops.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing," he says, breathing a little hard. "I just came."
"Really?"
"Yeah, really." He sounds surprised that she's surprised. "You couldn't tell?"
"Um, not really."
"Huh. I thought I was being kind of loud." Leonard rolls off her.
She sits up. "So, you're one of those stealth orgasm guys, huh?"
He shrugs. "I guess I am." He pulls off the condom and she hears it hit the bottom of her wastebasket.
Penny flops back down into bed, facing away from Leonard. Coming with hardly a sound-weirdest thing she's ever seen, and she's seen a lot.
Leonard absently strokes her back. "Was that all right for you?"
"Of course it was," she says, trying to sound cheerful. "It was nice."
"Nice?"
"It was just fine," Penny says. It sounds so lame. She needs to be more complimentary. The male ego can be a fragile thing. "You know, just fiiiiine."
"Yeah," Leonard says, sounding sleepy now. "It was." He pecks her on the forehead and rolls onto his side.
Soon, she can hear his soft sleep breathing.
(She goes right to sleep. She doesn't stop to think about how it could have been different if Leonard had been someone else.)
*
To put it bluntly, Penny likes sex.
She doesn't have any of the hang-ups around sex like so many of her friends do. She actually likes her body and isn't afraid to be seen naked. Despite the influence of strict parents and six years of CCD classes at Maternity of Mary, she doesn't believe that there's anything wrong with enjoying sex. And she doesn't believe that enjoying sex makes her slutty or bad or wrong or a sinner headed straight to the eternal fires of Hell. Penny has plenty of issues, but sex isn't one of them.
Some guys are better in bed than others, but Penny's an optimist and always can find something to enjoy about the experience. She likes it hard and fast, against the wall in the hallway because they can't wait and walk the ten steps to the bedroom. She enjoys it slow and tender, Sunday morning after pancakes and coffee. She loves how boys smell-like deodorant soap and leather and shaving cream. It makes her happy to see their faces after they've come, their muscles relaxed and their eyes dreamy. Nothing thrills her more than to get a guy hard.
Penny is good at sex.
Sex is one of the few things where she's always been a natural, from the very beginning.
She's not a particularly good dancer and it took her forever to learn to do a back handspring but she made the cheerleading team because she decided she wanted to make the team. It was the hours and hours of practice and sweat and bruises everywhere from falling on her ass and gritting her teeth that allowed her to make the team, not any kind of natural talent.
There were a couple of other girls at her high school who were amazing actors. Haley McKenzie was like Meryl Streep-she could do any accent. Jessica Welch could cry on cue. Bam, just like that. But Penny was the one who almost always got the lead role in the play, as long as it didn't involve any singing. Why? Because she wanted it more than Haley or Jessica. She'd show up at the auditions not only knowing the lines of the part she was trying out for, but everyone else's, too. Penny would spend days running lines with her best friend, her mother, her dog, pretty much anyone who'd listen. When her school did Children of a Lesser God, she drove 75 miles each way every night for two weeks so she could learn some American Sign Language from a Creighton student who was Deaf. She got the part of Sarah even though Jessica cried better than her at the auditions.
Sex was different. Penny lost her virginity at sixteen to Dave Ames, who had already graduated, drove a really cool motorcycle and had big brown eyes. He was the experienced one. He told her he'd lost it at fourteen and had slept with five girls, including a twenty-six-year-old waitress at the Golden Kettle. They did at his brother's house when the brother was on vacation in Reno and when it was all over, Dave rolled off of her. "Sweet Jesus," he said, gasping for air. "You're fucking incredible, Penny."
From the very beginning, sex felt right. There was no awkwardness, no fumbling. It felt instinctual to her. Her body just knew what to do. She's the only girl she knows who had an orgasm her first time and definitely the only one she knows who once had eighteen in a row.
And just about every guy she's ever slept with has told her that she's the best they've ever had. Sure, some of them were probably just saying it to make her happy and get more sex for themselves, but Penny is one hundred percent certain that she's pretty damn good in bed.
That's why it's so humiliating when Leonard admits to her, the next day, that it wasn't so great for him, either.
She's already kind of mad at him for talking about said not-so-great sex with the other guys. Not because he doesn't have the right to discuss his sex life with his friends. If she had a girlfriend she felt she could really trust, Penny probably would have told her about last night. But Howard, Raj and Sheldon are their mutual friends. And they really, really don't need to know that level of detail about her sex life with Leonard. Or that she's apparently not very good in bed.
(Especially not Sheldon because of the Thing That Cannot Be Mentioned, but she's not going to think about him in particular because how can you think about something that didn't happen?)
Her ears are still burning from the guys' sniggering when Leonard says that last night was "just fine." It doesn't make any sense to her. Even when the sex has been less than wonderful with some guy, it's always been at least pretty good for her and the best ever for him.
What's wrong with her? Has she lost her touch?
(Was her mind entirely elsewhere?)
She doesn't know what to do. Besides grab a bottle of wine from the fridge.
Booze always makes things better. Maybe it'll work a miracle.
*
The booze doesn't work any sort of miracle. By 10:00, Leonard has staggered across the hall to pass out in the comfort of his own bed and she's thrown up three times. White wine and peppermint schnapps do not taste good on their way back up.
She wakes at five in the morning, an hour fit only for milking cows, which she swore off permanently the minute she crossed the Nebraska state line on her way to California. Penny doesn't feel particularly hungover-the gallon of water she drank and the Advil she took before bed seem to have done the trick-but she can't get back to sleep, no matter how much tossing and turning she does. The sun hasn't even risen yet, for fuck's sake.
She takes a hot bath, hoping that it'll make her sleepy, but it paradoxically wakes her up even more. Penny admits defeat, dresses and scoops handfuls of dirty clothes off her bedroom floor and stuffs them in the laundry basket. When in doubt, do laundry.
(She's doing her laundry at a non-standard hour, as someone she knows would say. Why is that, Penny?)
The laundry room is dank and shabby, as usual, and even creepier than normal at this unholy hour. Every little noise startles her, making her think of those true crime shows on cable that feature attractive young women abducted and murdered while doing their laundry in the middle of the night. While her clothes churn in the washer, she checks and rechecks her phone to make sure she still has coverage down here.
She's just shoving a handful of panties and tank tops in the dryer when she hears footsteps approaching. Her spine stiffens and she cautiously turns around to see who's there.
It's Sheldon, carrying his laundry basket. The t-shirt du jour is a green Hulk shirt with a purple long-sleeved tee underneath. He's a blinding sight first thing in the morning. Her stomach clenches at the sight of him. He's just the person she doesn't want to see right now.
This is only the second time she's seen him since he returned from Texas. She still wonders what happened down there. What did Leonard and the other guys say to make him come back? Is Sheldon still angry about what they did to his experiment?
Sheldon stops in his tracks, his mouth open a little. "Perhaps this isn't a good time to do my laundry," he says, starting to back out of the room.
"Sheldon," she sighs, waving her hand. "Don't be ridiculous."
He nods his head and walks into the room, sets his basket down on the table. "You're awake at a non-standard hour," he says, his face as bland as her mother's rice pudding.
She totally called what Sheldon was going to say. She's the freaking genius, not Sheldon.
"Yep," she says and turns to finish loading the dryer. This is the first time she and Sheldon have been alone in a room since...since that thing that didn't happen happened. And she doesn't quite know what to say.
("Hey, so what was up with you kissing me the other day?"
"Did you enjoy announcing the news that Leonard and I had unsatisfying sex?")
He begins meticulously separating the whites from the lights from the colors. She's pretty sure he has even more categories than those, but in all the times they've done their laundry together she's never bothered to keep count.
Penny slams the dryer door shut and sticks quarters in the slots. There's something weirdly satisfying about pushing the silver quarter thingie into the machine and hearing it roar to a start.
She hops up on the unused dryer, her favorite perch during laundry time. She watches Sheldon place each pile of clothes into the washers.
The silence in the room is almost hurting her ears. She's been doing her laundry with Sheldon for a long time. Sometimes they talk and sometimes they get the job done in a comfortable silence. This silence is anything but comfortable. It feels thick and heavy between them.
"So, what's new?" She strives for a cheerful tone.
He turns his head toward her. "D-branes," he says.
"What about brains?" God, he's weird. Does he ever think about regular, boring stuff like normal people do?
"Dirichlet P-branes, Penny." He sighs as if she should know what the hell he's talking about. "In light of re-starting my research, I've been considering Polchinski's theory that D-branes are the sources of electric and magnetic Ramond-Ramond fields. It would seem that..." She pretty much tunes him out right there as he launches into a classic Sheldon speech that makes no sense whatsoever.
There's something about the neutral look on his face that starts to bother her. Penny knows that she's not supposed to acknowledge that yes, they kissed the other night. They were lying on his bed and she was comforting him in an entirely non-sexual, non-romantic kind of way and then he turned and kissed her. And she kissed him right back, although she still doesn't understand exactly why she did.
(And she enjoyed it. A whole lot. That's the weird part. She's never been attracted to Sheldon. No, seriously. Never given it any thought because being attracted to Sheldon would be like being attracted to a stapler, or maybe a houseplant. But kissing Sheldon was oddly hot. Seriously hot. Just thinking about it makes her stomach roll and her mouth water. She bit his lip that night on his bed. His full lower lip that's currently pouting and fuck, why won't her brain shut up?)
She still doesn't understand why he kissed her. Sheldon isn't susceptible to the same urges other guys have. She's pretty sure of that. And he's never given the slightest indication that he's attracted to her, or anyone else for that matter. So what made him do it in the first place? And continue to kiss her for many, many minutes afterwards?
And why is he acting like absolutely nothing happened?
Which is a totally contradictory thought, she knows. She doesn't want him to acknowledge it but she does and right now she really can't think. Maybe she has brain damage from all the peppermint schnapps.
Penny hops off the dryer and walks closer to Sheldon.
"What are you doing?" He looks faintly alarmed.
Don't say anything, she tells herself. Don't open this can of worms. You're with Leonard now and it's just not worth it to even discuss it. But she can never keep her big mouth shut. Ever.
"So, what was that the other night?"
Sheldon squints at her. "What are you talking about, Penny?"
She puts her hands on her hips. "You know very well what I'm talking about." She tries to flash him a significant look, even though she knows that Sheldon's not good at reading facial expressions. Or tones of voice. Or people, in general.
"Do you mean the fact that I brought up your sexual activities with Leonard last night at dinner? Raj and Howard informed me that it was foolish and tactless to do so."
"I'm not thrilled about it," she mutters, "but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about you kissing me. Do you remember it or have you developed amnesia?"
Sheldon fiddles with the cap on his bottle of Tide. She notices that his hands seem to be shaking and that realization floods her with an emotion she wouldn't be able to name or categorize if you put a gun to her head.
He doesn't say anything for a long moment. Finally, "I remember." His voice is so soft she can hardly hear him.
She takes two steps closer. "Why did you do it?"
The look on his face is one of pure confusion. "I don't know."
"You don't know? You hauled off and kissed me and you don't know? What kind of bullshit answer is that?" She feels her cheeks coloring and anger climbing up her spine. She's not sure why she's so angry, but she is.
"I don't know," he repeats.
"You just felt like it? You were bored and so you thought, 'I know, I'll make out with Penny today?'"
"No, I-"
She doesn't let him finish. "Or is it because you were mad at Leonard? So you thought you'd get back at him by making out with his girlfriend, huh?"
Sheldon's nostrils flare and his eyes narrow. Oh, so that's it. How fucking humiliating.
"I knew it," she says, her voice almost a hiss. She didn't let herself think about it, not consciously, but part of her always knew. "Jesus, is that what you guys do? Piss all over stuff to mark your territory? Kiss random girls to even the score with each other?"
"Penny, it's not that simple," he says.
She takes several more steps towards him and Sheldon takes an equal number backwards, until he's up against the washer. Penny marches right up to him, toe-to-toe. Her heart is thumping wildly against her ribs.
"How would you like it if I kissed you?" she says, trying her best to keep her voice even. "If I kissed you to get back at Leonard because our first time in bed together wasn't that great? How would you feel about that?" She's so close to him that she can smell the soap he used in the shower and the mint of his toothpaste.
"I wouldn't like it at all," he says.
"Yeah, I'm sure you wouldn't, but let's try this on for size." She doesn't know what she's doing or why she's doing it but she stands on tiptoe and finds herself grabbing his neck so that his face is level with hers. He's just too damn tall for his own good. "Let's see how you like this." And she kisses him.
Penny fully expects Sheldon to pull away from her, to mutter something in disgust and stomp out of the laundry room but he doesn't. She kisses him and he kisses back with all his might, his tongue venturing out to meet hers halfway.
Once she's certain he's into it, when he's making that sound again, that sound that threatens to turn her legs to grape jelly, she pulls away from him-so suddenly that their lips make a weird smacking sound as they separate.
"So," she says, "How'd you enjoy that? Enjoy being treated like a thing and not a human being?"
He doesn't say anything, just stares at her as if she's turned bright green and started speaking Martian. He rubs his neck, right where she'd grabbed him, as if it hurts.
"I figured you wouldn't have anything to say." She starts to turn, figuring she'll go upstairs and hide out until it's time for her clothes to be dry and then come back down for it once cooler heads have prevailed.
"Penny," he rasps.
Maybe it's the sound of his voice or the stunned expression on his face. Or it could be that she's still pissed as hell and feels like she has a point to prove. For all she knows, she just wants to kiss him again because, weirdly enough, he's one hell of a kisser. Who knows what goes on in her brain at six in the morning after drinking most of the liquor in her apartment? The next thing she knows, she is kissing him again, pushing him up against the washer as it churns away. Her hands wander past the layers of his shirts and find the smooth, warm skin of his back. Sheldon's mouth tastes good, so fucking good, his lips moving under hers and where the fuck did he learn to kiss like this?
This is bad, really bad. Someone could walk in at any time.
Hell, Leonard could walk in at any time.
This is hot, really hot.
She presses herself up against his body until a piece of paper wouldn't fit between them. She feels his hard-on pushing into her stomach and it's the strangest sensation because she's not sure she's ever really believed that Sheldon had a cock and now here it is, rubbing against her.
He traces the curve of her ear with the tip of his tongue. Penny shivers when his mouth finds the sensitive nerve area that runs from behind her ear to the place where her neck meets her shoulder. How the hell would Sheldon know about that nerve? He must have done his research because he works it for all its worth until she's almost begging him to stop.
She doesn't think about Leonard during any of this. He doesn't exist in this universe.
Her hands grab at his ass, small but definitely present under those ugly pants of his. She can't seem to get him close enough to her. She wonders what Sheldon would do if she unzipped his pants. If she got down on her knees, right here on this filthy laundry room floor, and took him in her mouth. If she pulled down her shorts and bent over the table. What would he do? Would he flee in horror or would he come up behind her and slide his cock deep inside her?
This is getting out of hand, she thinks, but she can't stop kissing him. And it would seem that he can't stop kissing her, either. He kisses like a man on a mission, as if he'll win a grand prize of a Toyota Camry and a trip to Hawaii if she's properly kissed when all is said and done.
Sheldon thrusts his pelvis against her, hard, and she's just about to either push him away and run like hell or truly get those pants of his off him, when she hears a long, low groan from deep in his throat. It's a sound she's never heard from him, never expected to hear in her life, but she knows that sound all too well. He's insistently pushing into her as he makes that otherworldly noise, his fingers tangled in her hair and almost pulling them out by the roots. And then it all just stops.
He staggers back, his cheeks pink.
"Did you just...you know?" For some reason she feels shy actually saying the words.
Sheldon is breathing hard. He runs one hand through his cropped brown hair. He nods, looking down at his beige pants, where a wet patch is spreading.
Oh, God. She hasn't made a guy cream his pants since after the Homecoming dance freshman year of high school.
She just made Sheldon come in his pants. In the laundry room. Of their building. Where Leonard lives. You know, her boyfriend. And Sheldon's roommate. Yeah, that Leonard.
Penny attempts to straighten her hair, which she can feel is all tangled in the back from Sheldon's fingers. Her lips feel swollen and raw and her cheeks are warm with razor burn.
One of the washers buzzes, indicating that one of Sheldon's loads is done. He straightens his spine. "I need something to wear," he says, his voice flat.
She opens the dryer and finds a pair of gray sweatpants. "These will be way too short for you but you're skinny enough." She tosses them to Sheldon.
"Watch the door for me."
"What for?"
"I need to change my pants," he says in his familiar, arrogant voice. She almost feels relieved to hear it.
She stands by the door, staring at the empty hallway. It's probably not even seven in the morning yet. Penny suddenly feels exhausted.
"All clear," Sheldon says from inside the room. She tries not to laugh when she sees him in her sweatpants, which end at mid-calf for him.
She walks to the dryer and throws the clothes in her basket. Some of her stuff is still damp but she doesn't want to wait around for it to finish drying.
Penny turns to Sheldon, the basket in her arms. "Now you know better."
He gives her one of his patented I don't understand your tricky human emotions looks.
She may have just spent the last twenty minutes kissing him and made him come in his pants, but she discovers that she's still plenty pissed off at Sheldon for kissing her to get back at Leonard.
"You know better than to use me as a pawn in your little game of chess with Leonard. I'm not a thing, got it? I'm a person, Sheldon. I have feelings. If you have issues with Leonard, you need to take them up with him."
And she stomps out of the room and up the stairs, powered all the while by her glorious and righteous indignation.
*
Penny is stuck in truly horrendous traffic on her way home from two auditions. Bumper-to-bumper for more than a half hour. She's lived in Southern California for more than five years and there's a whole lot she's gotten used to but no matter how long she lives here, she'll never grow accustomed to traffic jams. The town she grew up in had exactly one stoplight. Growing up, a traffic jam to her was getting stuck on County Road 62 behind a tractor or an Amish buggy.
The stereo in her car is broken. For a while it worked if she gave the dashboard a good whack with the heel of her hand but now even that doesn't work. So here she is, trapped in the car with her own thoughts. Which isn't a good thing at all. She needs less time to be alone with her brain, not more.
Penny consciously makes the effort not to think about Sheldon or Leonard while stuck in the car, breathing exhaust fumes. Frankly, she's sick and tired of thinking about boys. She wishes she could stop making guys the center of her entire universe. Look where it got her with Kurt. Four years with an asshole who lied to her, cheated on her and treated her like a combination servant and fuck toy. It's not that guys aren't important to her-they totally are-but there are lots of other things in her life that deserve her time and energy. Her acting "career," for example.
Sweating in the late afternoon sunshine (the air conditioning in her car stopped working more than a year ago), she thinks about the fact that she's been out here for ages and still hasn't picked up an acting job of any significance. So much for desire and hard work equaling success in her life. If wishes were horses, she'd have a stable of thoroughbreds ready for the Kentucky Derby.
Today she had two commercial auditions. At the first, the casting agent told her that she wasn't mature enough to sell baby food. At the second, she was informed that she was too mature to hawk an energy drink. What the fuck?
At the second audition today, she ran into Tania, who'd briefly worked at the Cheesecake Factory. Tania was accompanied by her "manager," some guy with an orange tan and way too much Axe body spray. While Tania was inside meeting with the casting people, the manager took Penny aside and told her that if she got a boob job and maybe a little lipo, he could get her lots of work making "adult films." Jesus Fucking Christ.
Her agent barely returns her calls anymore.
She's twenty-three years old and already feels chewed up and spit out by the bullshit that is Los Angeles and acting.
She's always been the optimistic type, stubbornly insisting that success is just around the corner, but she's rounded a lot of corners out here and there's never anything there in the end.
*
Penny shuts her front door and sighs with relief. She saw Sheldon at the mailbox and it was like nothing had ever happened. They had a completely normal conversation like two friendly neighbors. It was like a reset button had been pushed and they were back to their regular dynamic-comic books and chickens and cricket wagers, oh my.
Maybe they got it all out of their systems last night.
This thought cheers her up, which she desperately needs right now. Her acting career is in shambles, she's got $42.37 in her checking account, she's sick of the Cheesecake Factory, and her apartment looks like a traveling circus came through, tossing various items of clothing and dirty dishes as it went. There's not a lot to put her in a jolly mood.
She really should clean up, but she's just too exhausted to deal with it. Instead, she flops on the sofa with the latest issue of Cosmopolitan.
Leonard and I always go back to being friends, she thinks, wondering what Sheldon really meant when he said that at the mailboxes.
Is that what she really wants? She doesn't know. There's a large part of her that's stubborn, that doesn't want to concede defeat so early in the game. She hasn't even given Leonard half a chance. Is one disappointing time in bed truly a reason to dump him?
Nearly everyone in her life has told her to find a nice guy and she has. Leonard is a nice guy and no matter how you twist it, Sheldon is not. Interesting, brilliant, strangely generous, occasionally thoughtful, often unintentionally hilarious-Sheldon is all of those things. But "nice" is not a word she'd apply to Sheldon.
She doesn't want to think about all this right now. It's too much. She opens Cosmo, hoping that the cover story on Taylor Swift and an article on how to tone her buns with ballroom dancing will distract her from the ten thousand thoughts frantically swirling around in her brain.
Flipping through the glossy pages, she finds an article titled 5 Mucho Caliente Tips to Make Him HOT HOT HOT!!! Tip #1 makes Penny roll her eyes. Seduce him with super-sexy lingerie. Well, duh. Although, come to think of it, she doesn't own much in the way of sexy under things. Penny's more of the cotton bikinis type. Maybe if she pulls in a good tip haul on Saturday night she'll be able to justify a trip to Victoria's Secret. She wonders how Leonard would respond to a black lace garter belt and stockings. Would he be into fucking her with her high heels on? She has a pair of black patent leather shoes with four-inch heels that would be perfect.
Her mind begins to wander and the magazine page blurs before her eyes. She feels her hand creep down her body and between her legs. It feels like it's been ages since she's had a good, solid orgasm. A lot of tension has been building up lately. Time for some release.
She pulls her leggings off and closes her eyes, her fingers finding her clit. It's time to think about something hot. Something hot involving Leonard. Leonard can get her hot. There was that night with the tequila and the body shots. That was hot, so clearly he has it in him.
Penny is in the laundry room, folding her clothes. She hears footsteps and turns around. It's Leonard.
"Hey," she says. "I thought you were working late tonight."
"Came home early," he says, his voice huskier than normal.
"How come?" She sets down a pile of towels.
Leonard comes up behind her, his lips brushing against the nape of her neck. "I wanted to see you." His hands reach around to cup her breasts. Penny shivers.
"Mmm-that's nice." She leans into him, humming with pleasure as he lightly pinches her nipples through the thin cotton of her tank top.
"I want you," Leonard whispers in her ear.
"You have me," she says.
He turns her around and pushes her onto the table, right onto a pile of her neatly folded clothes. Leonard pushes her shorts and panties down and she kicks them off. This is so fucking hot. Anyone could walk into the laundry room and catch them.
He gets down on his knees and spreads her legs. "I've been thinking all day about eating you," he says. Penny tilts her head back and stifles a moan as he slips his fingers between her folds-his long, long fingers. She feels his breath on her clit.
Penny buries her hands in his short, straight hair as his tongue begins circling her clit. She doesn't understand how Sheldon knows just what to do, just how she wants him to lick her, but he does. He thrusts three fingers deep inside her while his tongue insistently flicks against her clitoris.
This is bad, really bad. Someone could walk in at any time. Hell, Leonard could walk in at any time.
She finds she doesn't fucking care one bit. She guides Sheldon with her hands, controlling the rhythm. Her orgasm surprises her when it explodes through her body. Penny collapses into a pile of Downy-scented towels as wave after wave take her over.
Penny opens her eyes.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck.
Every cell in her body is alive and thrumming with pleasure, but at the same time, the bitter taste of guilt floods her mouth. There must be something seriously wrong with her. Why can't she get Sheldon out of her damn head?
Just as soon as she's able to catch her breath and has wiggled back into her leggings, she hears a knock at her door. She knows that knock. It's Leonard.
She has no idea what to do.
"Get a nice guy," her mother says almost every time Penny talks to her on the phone.
"Can't you find yourself a nice guy?" her best friend from home always says.
"Jesus, Penny, why don't you try going out with a nice guy for a change?" Jamie tells her whenever they go out for drinks.
She jumps off the couch, straightens her hair with a shaky hand, and opens the door to Leonard.
Authors: dashakay, with allthingsholy, juniperlane and montycrowley
Summary: This should be everything she's ever wanted.
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Penny/Leonard, Penny/Sheldon
Spoilers: Through 3.02, The Jiminy Conjecture
Word Count: 7,000
Disclaimer: The characters in this story do not belong to me and no copyright infringement is intended.
Warnings: Please make sure you've read the warnings here.
Author's Notes: I don't have the proper words to thank my co-writers, who are fabulous at ripping my writing apart and helping me to put it back together again. Big thanks to lovely ishie for taking the time to share her perspective. And so much gratitude to all of you who were kind and generous enough to comment on the first story. Your feedback really does help keep us motivated and excited about this project.
Part 1 | Part 2
Geoffroy's Law of Affinity: Whenever two substances are united that have a disposition to combine and a third is added that has a greater affinity with one of them, these two will unite and drive out the other.
This should be everything she's ever wanted. After more than a year of dancing around each other-near misses, tequila and lime, comic misunderstandings, one weird date, and three months of truly out-of-character longing on her part while Leonard was in the Arctic-she has him. Or he has her. Whatever.
They're sprawled across her unmade bed and he's sliding his hand up her shirt. She's kissing him as if the world has run out of oxygen and the only way to breathe is through his mouth. This should be amazing, after all the buildup. This should be epic. But it isn't and she doesn't know why.
(Okay, fine, maybe she does know why, or at least have an inkling of why, but she's not going to think about that because it was a mistake, just three mistaken minutes out of her life and it'll never happen again, so it's like it never happened. Right? Right?)
Leonard looks different with his glasses off. His eyes are slightly unfocused and he has a strange habit of keeping them open when he kisses her, as if he needs to keep checking to see if it's really her. She wants to shout, "It's me, Leonard! Now close your damn eyes and keep kissing me!"
"Get a nice guy," her mother had told her during the spring of her senior year. Penny had discovered, the night before prom, that her boyfriend Brent had gotten the star forward on the girls' basketball team pregnant.
Maybe being naked will help. They won't have anything to hide from each other. It'll be the two of them, nothing between them and it will be awesome, just like it's supposed to be. She helps Leonard wrestle his hoodie and t-shirt off and somewhere in all that, her own shirt is discarded on the floor. It takes Leonard a few tries to get her bra undone, but Penny's not going to hold it against him. Kurt could whip that thing off in less than two seconds, and look what happened with him. For a second she's actually warmed by the expression on Leonard's face as he sees her semi-naked for the first time. He looks like he just saw the face of God.
"You're so beautiful," he blurts out and her face grows warm. It's been a long time since she's heard a guy say that to her and actually believed it.
Penny pushes him onto the mattress and straddles his body. His chest isn't bad. He could use some definition and maybe a decent tan, but he's not bad and not nearly as hairy as she would have imagined. She can work with this.
"Can't you find yourself a nice guy?" her best friend Emily said after Penny called her from Pasadena, sobbing hysterically. She'd come home from work one night to find Kurt getting a blow job on the sofa from the next door neighbor-a skinny, twice-divorced manicurist named Mysti.
She kisses Leonard again.
(And she's not going to think about what it was like to kiss Sheldon because it didn't happen.)
Leonard runs his hands through her hair and the look on his face almost makes her want to cry because she wishes she could feel like that about him. Just a few days ago, she was so sure she did. While he was gone, she seemed to do little else but think about him. She was so certain that Leonard was what she wanted.
Really, he's not horrible at this. He touches her in almost all the right ways. Sure, maybe he's a little too gentle, too tentative, but it's better than some guys she's been with who pushed and prodded and pulled at her until she felt like a human Barbie doll or something. Like she wasn't really there, was a thing instead of a live woman. Leonard's not like that. He's exploring, prowling her body with his fingers and his mouth and it should be just what she wants, just what she likes, except it's not.
"Jesus, Penny, why don't you try going out with a nice guy for a change?" her friend Jamie has said after Tyler or Taylor or Tyson or whoever failed to return her calls after they slept together.
Penny has to snap herself back into focus. She's being entirely too passive with Leonard and that's probably part of the problem. She's not a passive person, especially in bed, and she's not going to have a good time if she continues to let Leonard take control of things.
Time to go buck wild on your ass, she thinks, straightening her spine with new resolve.
She does everything she thinks she's supposed to do. She scratches at his back, she bites his nipples, she takes him into her mouth and feels him harden against her tongue. Penny hears Leonard's rough breathing and his hands thrashing against the sheets and this should turn her on more than just about anything in the world. It always gets her hot to feel like she's in control, she's the one running the show. By this time she should be dripping wet, practically begging to have him inside her, but right now it only makes her feel tired, somehow. She wishes she could pull the comforter over her head and sleep for a week.
Leonard pushes her head away. "Penny," he gasps.
She sits up, knowing that it's time. After all this, she can't go back now. She's into it up to her neck. She leans over and finds the condom packet on the bedside stand and silently hands it to him.
Damn it, she's done what everyone in her life has been telling her all along. She's found herself a nice guy. Leonard would never cheat on her. It wouldn't even occur to him. He'd never lie. He'd never so much as look cross-eyed at another woman. What the fuck is wrong with her that this isn't doing it for her at all? Is she so damaged that she's can't get turned on by a guy unless she's relatively sure that he's going to be a complete douche in the near future?
Penny flops over onto her back and stares at the cracks in the ceiling. Time to let Leonard take the reins. Maybe that will help. It takes him quite a while to get the condom on. She hears him fumbling to get the wrapper open and then she hears him softly swear under his breath as he works to get it on himself.
"Aha!" Leonard says, as if he's suddenly discovered the trick to putting on condoms. She laughs, just because it feels good to let some of the tension out and besides, sex wouldn't be half as fun without a little humor.
"Are you laughing with me or at me?" he asks.
"With you," she says, grasping his cock at the root. "Definitely with you."
With her hand, she guides him in her. He comes to a rest once he's fully inside her and looks into her eyes. "Oh, Penny," he says with a sigh.
"Oh, Leonard," she echoes, because it seems like the polite thing to do. She crosses her ankles at his lower back and starts moving her hips to get things going a little.
(She definitely, definitely does not think about anyone else while she's in bed with Leonard because that would be really bad. Worse than actually kissing someone other than Leonard, for sure.)
Leonard pushes into her, making a small "oh" sound every time he thrusts into her. Penny closes her eyes and for a minute she's able to lose herself in the sensations and yes, it feels good, it feels natural and right and then she opens her eyes again, and damn.
Seriously, what the fucking fuck is wrong with her?
He's sweaty against her, pressing his moist forehead to hers. She finds herself worrying that they're somehow going to slide out of her bed and onto the floor and wondering how much it would hurt if that happened. Would she actually break a bone or just get bruised?
On a side not, has her bed always been this squeaky, or is this something new?
She lifts her hips, meeting each thrust of his, hoping that if she finds the right angle, that maybe the magic will happen. If it weren't their first time, if she felt more comfortable, she'd maybe reach between their bodies and touch herself, but a lot of guys are weird about that sort of thing and need time to warm up to the idea that sometimes girls require more than their magic penises to come.
Come on, magic, she thinks.
Leonard starts drumming into her hard and fast. Just the sort of thing she likes sometimes if the mood is right, but the mood's not right tonight. It actually kind of hurts a little bit, especially since he's somehow put all of his weight on her chest and it's sort of hard to breathe.
This is when she has a minor ethical dilemma. Should she fake an orgasm, for the sake of politeness? Or should she be honest about the fact that she hasn't come and isn't going to? She doesn't want Leonard to think that she hasn't enjoyed herself-even if it's true-or that he's bad in bed-he's really not-but on the other hand, faking it can set a dangerous precedent.
Penny decides that honesty is the best policy.
(Except when it's not.)
"Oh yeah," she breathes into her ear. "Come for me, Leonard. Come for me."
"But you, but you..." he sputters.
"Come on," says, squeezing his shoulders under her hands.
And he stops.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing," he says, breathing a little hard. "I just came."
"Really?"
"Yeah, really." He sounds surprised that she's surprised. "You couldn't tell?"
"Um, not really."
"Huh. I thought I was being kind of loud." Leonard rolls off her.
She sits up. "So, you're one of those stealth orgasm guys, huh?"
He shrugs. "I guess I am." He pulls off the condom and she hears it hit the bottom of her wastebasket.
Penny flops back down into bed, facing away from Leonard. Coming with hardly a sound-weirdest thing she's ever seen, and she's seen a lot.
Leonard absently strokes her back. "Was that all right for you?"
"Of course it was," she says, trying to sound cheerful. "It was nice."
"Nice?"
"It was just fine," Penny says. It sounds so lame. She needs to be more complimentary. The male ego can be a fragile thing. "You know, just fiiiiine."
"Yeah," Leonard says, sounding sleepy now. "It was." He pecks her on the forehead and rolls onto his side.
Soon, she can hear his soft sleep breathing.
(She goes right to sleep. She doesn't stop to think about how it could have been different if Leonard had been someone else.)
*
To put it bluntly, Penny likes sex.
She doesn't have any of the hang-ups around sex like so many of her friends do. She actually likes her body and isn't afraid to be seen naked. Despite the influence of strict parents and six years of CCD classes at Maternity of Mary, she doesn't believe that there's anything wrong with enjoying sex. And she doesn't believe that enjoying sex makes her slutty or bad or wrong or a sinner headed straight to the eternal fires of Hell. Penny has plenty of issues, but sex isn't one of them.
Some guys are better in bed than others, but Penny's an optimist and always can find something to enjoy about the experience. She likes it hard and fast, against the wall in the hallway because they can't wait and walk the ten steps to the bedroom. She enjoys it slow and tender, Sunday morning after pancakes and coffee. She loves how boys smell-like deodorant soap and leather and shaving cream. It makes her happy to see their faces after they've come, their muscles relaxed and their eyes dreamy. Nothing thrills her more than to get a guy hard.
Penny is good at sex.
Sex is one of the few things where she's always been a natural, from the very beginning.
She's not a particularly good dancer and it took her forever to learn to do a back handspring but she made the cheerleading team because she decided she wanted to make the team. It was the hours and hours of practice and sweat and bruises everywhere from falling on her ass and gritting her teeth that allowed her to make the team, not any kind of natural talent.
There were a couple of other girls at her high school who were amazing actors. Haley McKenzie was like Meryl Streep-she could do any accent. Jessica Welch could cry on cue. Bam, just like that. But Penny was the one who almost always got the lead role in the play, as long as it didn't involve any singing. Why? Because she wanted it more than Haley or Jessica. She'd show up at the auditions not only knowing the lines of the part she was trying out for, but everyone else's, too. Penny would spend days running lines with her best friend, her mother, her dog, pretty much anyone who'd listen. When her school did Children of a Lesser God, she drove 75 miles each way every night for two weeks so she could learn some American Sign Language from a Creighton student who was Deaf. She got the part of Sarah even though Jessica cried better than her at the auditions.
Sex was different. Penny lost her virginity at sixteen to Dave Ames, who had already graduated, drove a really cool motorcycle and had big brown eyes. He was the experienced one. He told her he'd lost it at fourteen and had slept with five girls, including a twenty-six-year-old waitress at the Golden Kettle. They did at his brother's house when the brother was on vacation in Reno and when it was all over, Dave rolled off of her. "Sweet Jesus," he said, gasping for air. "You're fucking incredible, Penny."
From the very beginning, sex felt right. There was no awkwardness, no fumbling. It felt instinctual to her. Her body just knew what to do. She's the only girl she knows who had an orgasm her first time and definitely the only one she knows who once had eighteen in a row.
And just about every guy she's ever slept with has told her that she's the best they've ever had. Sure, some of them were probably just saying it to make her happy and get more sex for themselves, but Penny is one hundred percent certain that she's pretty damn good in bed.
That's why it's so humiliating when Leonard admits to her, the next day, that it wasn't so great for him, either.
She's already kind of mad at him for talking about said not-so-great sex with the other guys. Not because he doesn't have the right to discuss his sex life with his friends. If she had a girlfriend she felt she could really trust, Penny probably would have told her about last night. But Howard, Raj and Sheldon are their mutual friends. And they really, really don't need to know that level of detail about her sex life with Leonard. Or that she's apparently not very good in bed.
(Especially not Sheldon because of the Thing That Cannot Be Mentioned, but she's not going to think about him in particular because how can you think about something that didn't happen?)
Her ears are still burning from the guys' sniggering when Leonard says that last night was "just fine." It doesn't make any sense to her. Even when the sex has been less than wonderful with some guy, it's always been at least pretty good for her and the best ever for him.
What's wrong with her? Has she lost her touch?
(Was her mind entirely elsewhere?)
She doesn't know what to do. Besides grab a bottle of wine from the fridge.
Booze always makes things better. Maybe it'll work a miracle.
*
The booze doesn't work any sort of miracle. By 10:00, Leonard has staggered across the hall to pass out in the comfort of his own bed and she's thrown up three times. White wine and peppermint schnapps do not taste good on their way back up.
She wakes at five in the morning, an hour fit only for milking cows, which she swore off permanently the minute she crossed the Nebraska state line on her way to California. Penny doesn't feel particularly hungover-the gallon of water she drank and the Advil she took before bed seem to have done the trick-but she can't get back to sleep, no matter how much tossing and turning she does. The sun hasn't even risen yet, for fuck's sake.
She takes a hot bath, hoping that it'll make her sleepy, but it paradoxically wakes her up even more. Penny admits defeat, dresses and scoops handfuls of dirty clothes off her bedroom floor and stuffs them in the laundry basket. When in doubt, do laundry.
(She's doing her laundry at a non-standard hour, as someone she knows would say. Why is that, Penny?)
The laundry room is dank and shabby, as usual, and even creepier than normal at this unholy hour. Every little noise startles her, making her think of those true crime shows on cable that feature attractive young women abducted and murdered while doing their laundry in the middle of the night. While her clothes churn in the washer, she checks and rechecks her phone to make sure she still has coverage down here.
She's just shoving a handful of panties and tank tops in the dryer when she hears footsteps approaching. Her spine stiffens and she cautiously turns around to see who's there.
It's Sheldon, carrying his laundry basket. The t-shirt du jour is a green Hulk shirt with a purple long-sleeved tee underneath. He's a blinding sight first thing in the morning. Her stomach clenches at the sight of him. He's just the person she doesn't want to see right now.
This is only the second time she's seen him since he returned from Texas. She still wonders what happened down there. What did Leonard and the other guys say to make him come back? Is Sheldon still angry about what they did to his experiment?
Sheldon stops in his tracks, his mouth open a little. "Perhaps this isn't a good time to do my laundry," he says, starting to back out of the room.
"Sheldon," she sighs, waving her hand. "Don't be ridiculous."
He nods his head and walks into the room, sets his basket down on the table. "You're awake at a non-standard hour," he says, his face as bland as her mother's rice pudding.
She totally called what Sheldon was going to say. She's the freaking genius, not Sheldon.
"Yep," she says and turns to finish loading the dryer. This is the first time she and Sheldon have been alone in a room since...since that thing that didn't happen happened. And she doesn't quite know what to say.
("Hey, so what was up with you kissing me the other day?"
"Did you enjoy announcing the news that Leonard and I had unsatisfying sex?")
He begins meticulously separating the whites from the lights from the colors. She's pretty sure he has even more categories than those, but in all the times they've done their laundry together she's never bothered to keep count.
Penny slams the dryer door shut and sticks quarters in the slots. There's something weirdly satisfying about pushing the silver quarter thingie into the machine and hearing it roar to a start.
She hops up on the unused dryer, her favorite perch during laundry time. She watches Sheldon place each pile of clothes into the washers.
The silence in the room is almost hurting her ears. She's been doing her laundry with Sheldon for a long time. Sometimes they talk and sometimes they get the job done in a comfortable silence. This silence is anything but comfortable. It feels thick and heavy between them.
"So, what's new?" She strives for a cheerful tone.
He turns his head toward her. "D-branes," he says.
"What about brains?" God, he's weird. Does he ever think about regular, boring stuff like normal people do?
"Dirichlet P-branes, Penny." He sighs as if she should know what the hell he's talking about. "In light of re-starting my research, I've been considering Polchinski's theory that D-branes are the sources of electric and magnetic Ramond-Ramond fields. It would seem that..." She pretty much tunes him out right there as he launches into a classic Sheldon speech that makes no sense whatsoever.
There's something about the neutral look on his face that starts to bother her. Penny knows that she's not supposed to acknowledge that yes, they kissed the other night. They were lying on his bed and she was comforting him in an entirely non-sexual, non-romantic kind of way and then he turned and kissed her. And she kissed him right back, although she still doesn't understand exactly why she did.
(And she enjoyed it. A whole lot. That's the weird part. She's never been attracted to Sheldon. No, seriously. Never given it any thought because being attracted to Sheldon would be like being attracted to a stapler, or maybe a houseplant. But kissing Sheldon was oddly hot. Seriously hot. Just thinking about it makes her stomach roll and her mouth water. She bit his lip that night on his bed. His full lower lip that's currently pouting and fuck, why won't her brain shut up?)
She still doesn't understand why he kissed her. Sheldon isn't susceptible to the same urges other guys have. She's pretty sure of that. And he's never given the slightest indication that he's attracted to her, or anyone else for that matter. So what made him do it in the first place? And continue to kiss her for many, many minutes afterwards?
And why is he acting like absolutely nothing happened?
Which is a totally contradictory thought, she knows. She doesn't want him to acknowledge it but she does and right now she really can't think. Maybe she has brain damage from all the peppermint schnapps.
Penny hops off the dryer and walks closer to Sheldon.
"What are you doing?" He looks faintly alarmed.
Don't say anything, she tells herself. Don't open this can of worms. You're with Leonard now and it's just not worth it to even discuss it. But she can never keep her big mouth shut. Ever.
"So, what was that the other night?"
Sheldon squints at her. "What are you talking about, Penny?"
She puts her hands on her hips. "You know very well what I'm talking about." She tries to flash him a significant look, even though she knows that Sheldon's not good at reading facial expressions. Or tones of voice. Or people, in general.
"Do you mean the fact that I brought up your sexual activities with Leonard last night at dinner? Raj and Howard informed me that it was foolish and tactless to do so."
"I'm not thrilled about it," she mutters, "but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about you kissing me. Do you remember it or have you developed amnesia?"
Sheldon fiddles with the cap on his bottle of Tide. She notices that his hands seem to be shaking and that realization floods her with an emotion she wouldn't be able to name or categorize if you put a gun to her head.
He doesn't say anything for a long moment. Finally, "I remember." His voice is so soft she can hardly hear him.
She takes two steps closer. "Why did you do it?"
The look on his face is one of pure confusion. "I don't know."
"You don't know? You hauled off and kissed me and you don't know? What kind of bullshit answer is that?" She feels her cheeks coloring and anger climbing up her spine. She's not sure why she's so angry, but she is.
"I don't know," he repeats.
"You just felt like it? You were bored and so you thought, 'I know, I'll make out with Penny today?'"
"No, I-"
She doesn't let him finish. "Or is it because you were mad at Leonard? So you thought you'd get back at him by making out with his girlfriend, huh?"
Sheldon's nostrils flare and his eyes narrow. Oh, so that's it. How fucking humiliating.
"I knew it," she says, her voice almost a hiss. She didn't let herself think about it, not consciously, but part of her always knew. "Jesus, is that what you guys do? Piss all over stuff to mark your territory? Kiss random girls to even the score with each other?"
"Penny, it's not that simple," he says.
She takes several more steps towards him and Sheldon takes an equal number backwards, until he's up against the washer. Penny marches right up to him, toe-to-toe. Her heart is thumping wildly against her ribs.
"How would you like it if I kissed you?" she says, trying her best to keep her voice even. "If I kissed you to get back at Leonard because our first time in bed together wasn't that great? How would you feel about that?" She's so close to him that she can smell the soap he used in the shower and the mint of his toothpaste.
"I wouldn't like it at all," he says.
"Yeah, I'm sure you wouldn't, but let's try this on for size." She doesn't know what she's doing or why she's doing it but she stands on tiptoe and finds herself grabbing his neck so that his face is level with hers. He's just too damn tall for his own good. "Let's see how you like this." And she kisses him.
Penny fully expects Sheldon to pull away from her, to mutter something in disgust and stomp out of the laundry room but he doesn't. She kisses him and he kisses back with all his might, his tongue venturing out to meet hers halfway.
Once she's certain he's into it, when he's making that sound again, that sound that threatens to turn her legs to grape jelly, she pulls away from him-so suddenly that their lips make a weird smacking sound as they separate.
"So," she says, "How'd you enjoy that? Enjoy being treated like a thing and not a human being?"
He doesn't say anything, just stares at her as if she's turned bright green and started speaking Martian. He rubs his neck, right where she'd grabbed him, as if it hurts.
"I figured you wouldn't have anything to say." She starts to turn, figuring she'll go upstairs and hide out until it's time for her clothes to be dry and then come back down for it once cooler heads have prevailed.
"Penny," he rasps.
Maybe it's the sound of his voice or the stunned expression on his face. Or it could be that she's still pissed as hell and feels like she has a point to prove. For all she knows, she just wants to kiss him again because, weirdly enough, he's one hell of a kisser. Who knows what goes on in her brain at six in the morning after drinking most of the liquor in her apartment? The next thing she knows, she is kissing him again, pushing him up against the washer as it churns away. Her hands wander past the layers of his shirts and find the smooth, warm skin of his back. Sheldon's mouth tastes good, so fucking good, his lips moving under hers and where the fuck did he learn to kiss like this?
This is bad, really bad. Someone could walk in at any time.
Hell, Leonard could walk in at any time.
This is hot, really hot.
She presses herself up against his body until a piece of paper wouldn't fit between them. She feels his hard-on pushing into her stomach and it's the strangest sensation because she's not sure she's ever really believed that Sheldon had a cock and now here it is, rubbing against her.
He traces the curve of her ear with the tip of his tongue. Penny shivers when his mouth finds the sensitive nerve area that runs from behind her ear to the place where her neck meets her shoulder. How the hell would Sheldon know about that nerve? He must have done his research because he works it for all its worth until she's almost begging him to stop.
She doesn't think about Leonard during any of this. He doesn't exist in this universe.
Her hands grab at his ass, small but definitely present under those ugly pants of his. She can't seem to get him close enough to her. She wonders what Sheldon would do if she unzipped his pants. If she got down on her knees, right here on this filthy laundry room floor, and took him in her mouth. If she pulled down her shorts and bent over the table. What would he do? Would he flee in horror or would he come up behind her and slide his cock deep inside her?
This is getting out of hand, she thinks, but she can't stop kissing him. And it would seem that he can't stop kissing her, either. He kisses like a man on a mission, as if he'll win a grand prize of a Toyota Camry and a trip to Hawaii if she's properly kissed when all is said and done.
Sheldon thrusts his pelvis against her, hard, and she's just about to either push him away and run like hell or truly get those pants of his off him, when she hears a long, low groan from deep in his throat. It's a sound she's never heard from him, never expected to hear in her life, but she knows that sound all too well. He's insistently pushing into her as he makes that otherworldly noise, his fingers tangled in her hair and almost pulling them out by the roots. And then it all just stops.
He staggers back, his cheeks pink.
"Did you just...you know?" For some reason she feels shy actually saying the words.
Sheldon is breathing hard. He runs one hand through his cropped brown hair. He nods, looking down at his beige pants, where a wet patch is spreading.
Oh, God. She hasn't made a guy cream his pants since after the Homecoming dance freshman year of high school.
She just made Sheldon come in his pants. In the laundry room. Of their building. Where Leonard lives. You know, her boyfriend. And Sheldon's roommate. Yeah, that Leonard.
Penny attempts to straighten her hair, which she can feel is all tangled in the back from Sheldon's fingers. Her lips feel swollen and raw and her cheeks are warm with razor burn.
One of the washers buzzes, indicating that one of Sheldon's loads is done. He straightens his spine. "I need something to wear," he says, his voice flat.
She opens the dryer and finds a pair of gray sweatpants. "These will be way too short for you but you're skinny enough." She tosses them to Sheldon.
"Watch the door for me."
"What for?"
"I need to change my pants," he says in his familiar, arrogant voice. She almost feels relieved to hear it.
She stands by the door, staring at the empty hallway. It's probably not even seven in the morning yet. Penny suddenly feels exhausted.
"All clear," Sheldon says from inside the room. She tries not to laugh when she sees him in her sweatpants, which end at mid-calf for him.
She walks to the dryer and throws the clothes in her basket. Some of her stuff is still damp but she doesn't want to wait around for it to finish drying.
Penny turns to Sheldon, the basket in her arms. "Now you know better."
He gives her one of his patented I don't understand your tricky human emotions looks.
She may have just spent the last twenty minutes kissing him and made him come in his pants, but she discovers that she's still plenty pissed off at Sheldon for kissing her to get back at Leonard.
"You know better than to use me as a pawn in your little game of chess with Leonard. I'm not a thing, got it? I'm a person, Sheldon. I have feelings. If you have issues with Leonard, you need to take them up with him."
And she stomps out of the room and up the stairs, powered all the while by her glorious and righteous indignation.
*
Penny is stuck in truly horrendous traffic on her way home from two auditions. Bumper-to-bumper for more than a half hour. She's lived in Southern California for more than five years and there's a whole lot she's gotten used to but no matter how long she lives here, she'll never grow accustomed to traffic jams. The town she grew up in had exactly one stoplight. Growing up, a traffic jam to her was getting stuck on County Road 62 behind a tractor or an Amish buggy.
The stereo in her car is broken. For a while it worked if she gave the dashboard a good whack with the heel of her hand but now even that doesn't work. So here she is, trapped in the car with her own thoughts. Which isn't a good thing at all. She needs less time to be alone with her brain, not more.
Penny consciously makes the effort not to think about Sheldon or Leonard while stuck in the car, breathing exhaust fumes. Frankly, she's sick and tired of thinking about boys. She wishes she could stop making guys the center of her entire universe. Look where it got her with Kurt. Four years with an asshole who lied to her, cheated on her and treated her like a combination servant and fuck toy. It's not that guys aren't important to her-they totally are-but there are lots of other things in her life that deserve her time and energy. Her acting "career," for example.
Sweating in the late afternoon sunshine (the air conditioning in her car stopped working more than a year ago), she thinks about the fact that she's been out here for ages and still hasn't picked up an acting job of any significance. So much for desire and hard work equaling success in her life. If wishes were horses, she'd have a stable of thoroughbreds ready for the Kentucky Derby.
Today she had two commercial auditions. At the first, the casting agent told her that she wasn't mature enough to sell baby food. At the second, she was informed that she was too mature to hawk an energy drink. What the fuck?
At the second audition today, she ran into Tania, who'd briefly worked at the Cheesecake Factory. Tania was accompanied by her "manager," some guy with an orange tan and way too much Axe body spray. While Tania was inside meeting with the casting people, the manager took Penny aside and told her that if she got a boob job and maybe a little lipo, he could get her lots of work making "adult films." Jesus Fucking Christ.
Her agent barely returns her calls anymore.
She's twenty-three years old and already feels chewed up and spit out by the bullshit that is Los Angeles and acting.
She's always been the optimistic type, stubbornly insisting that success is just around the corner, but she's rounded a lot of corners out here and there's never anything there in the end.
*
Penny shuts her front door and sighs with relief. She saw Sheldon at the mailbox and it was like nothing had ever happened. They had a completely normal conversation like two friendly neighbors. It was like a reset button had been pushed and they were back to their regular dynamic-comic books and chickens and cricket wagers, oh my.
Maybe they got it all out of their systems last night.
This thought cheers her up, which she desperately needs right now. Her acting career is in shambles, she's got $42.37 in her checking account, she's sick of the Cheesecake Factory, and her apartment looks like a traveling circus came through, tossing various items of clothing and dirty dishes as it went. There's not a lot to put her in a jolly mood.
She really should clean up, but she's just too exhausted to deal with it. Instead, she flops on the sofa with the latest issue of Cosmopolitan.
Leonard and I always go back to being friends, she thinks, wondering what Sheldon really meant when he said that at the mailboxes.
Is that what she really wants? She doesn't know. There's a large part of her that's stubborn, that doesn't want to concede defeat so early in the game. She hasn't even given Leonard half a chance. Is one disappointing time in bed truly a reason to dump him?
Nearly everyone in her life has told her to find a nice guy and she has. Leonard is a nice guy and no matter how you twist it, Sheldon is not. Interesting, brilliant, strangely generous, occasionally thoughtful, often unintentionally hilarious-Sheldon is all of those things. But "nice" is not a word she'd apply to Sheldon.
She doesn't want to think about all this right now. It's too much. She opens Cosmo, hoping that the cover story on Taylor Swift and an article on how to tone her buns with ballroom dancing will distract her from the ten thousand thoughts frantically swirling around in her brain.
Flipping through the glossy pages, she finds an article titled 5 Mucho Caliente Tips to Make Him HOT HOT HOT!!! Tip #1 makes Penny roll her eyes. Seduce him with super-sexy lingerie. Well, duh. Although, come to think of it, she doesn't own much in the way of sexy under things. Penny's more of the cotton bikinis type. Maybe if she pulls in a good tip haul on Saturday night she'll be able to justify a trip to Victoria's Secret. She wonders how Leonard would respond to a black lace garter belt and stockings. Would he be into fucking her with her high heels on? She has a pair of black patent leather shoes with four-inch heels that would be perfect.
Her mind begins to wander and the magazine page blurs before her eyes. She feels her hand creep down her body and between her legs. It feels like it's been ages since she's had a good, solid orgasm. A lot of tension has been building up lately. Time for some release.
She pulls her leggings off and closes her eyes, her fingers finding her clit. It's time to think about something hot. Something hot involving Leonard. Leonard can get her hot. There was that night with the tequila and the body shots. That was hot, so clearly he has it in him.
Penny is in the laundry room, folding her clothes. She hears footsteps and turns around. It's Leonard.
"Hey," she says. "I thought you were working late tonight."
"Came home early," he says, his voice huskier than normal.
"How come?" She sets down a pile of towels.
Leonard comes up behind her, his lips brushing against the nape of her neck. "I wanted to see you." His hands reach around to cup her breasts. Penny shivers.
"Mmm-that's nice." She leans into him, humming with pleasure as he lightly pinches her nipples through the thin cotton of her tank top.
"I want you," Leonard whispers in her ear.
"You have me," she says.
He turns her around and pushes her onto the table, right onto a pile of her neatly folded clothes. Leonard pushes her shorts and panties down and she kicks them off. This is so fucking hot. Anyone could walk into the laundry room and catch them.
He gets down on his knees and spreads her legs. "I've been thinking all day about eating you," he says. Penny tilts her head back and stifles a moan as he slips his fingers between her folds-his long, long fingers. She feels his breath on her clit.
Penny buries her hands in his short, straight hair as his tongue begins circling her clit. She doesn't understand how Sheldon knows just what to do, just how she wants him to lick her, but he does. He thrusts three fingers deep inside her while his tongue insistently flicks against her clitoris.
This is bad, really bad. Someone could walk in at any time. Hell, Leonard could walk in at any time.
She finds she doesn't fucking care one bit. She guides Sheldon with her hands, controlling the rhythm. Her orgasm surprises her when it explodes through her body. Penny collapses into a pile of Downy-scented towels as wave after wave take her over.
Penny opens her eyes.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck.
Every cell in her body is alive and thrumming with pleasure, but at the same time, the bitter taste of guilt floods her mouth. There must be something seriously wrong with her. Why can't she get Sheldon out of her damn head?
Just as soon as she's able to catch her breath and has wiggled back into her leggings, she hears a knock at her door. She knows that knock. It's Leonard.
She has no idea what to do.
"Get a nice guy," her mother says almost every time Penny talks to her on the phone.
"Can't you find yourself a nice guy?" her best friend from home always says.
"Jesus, Penny, why don't you try going out with a nice guy for a change?" Jamie tells her whenever they go out for drinks.
She jumps off the couch, straightens her hair with a shaky hand, and opens the door to Leonard.