too unschooled to the rules {kate walsh/katee sackhoff}; small talk {sheldon/penny}
So you all probably now that the porn battle is currently happening. And anyone who knows me knows that I write 10+ pieces usually. So, um, prepare to be inundated with fic. I'll be posting two-three to a post, to cut down on spam, because I want them to be archived here and not at DW. That said, some of this stuff (re: most of it) won't be my normal Grey's/Lost so be prepared for smaller fandoms. On the plus side, I'm this close to done with my epic Grey's fic. Look for that this week.
Title: Too Unschooled To The Rules
Fandom: RPF (GA/BSG)
Characters/Pairings: Kate Walsh/Katee Sackhoff
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 1,416
Author's Note: I have never really done RPF before, so, um, yeah. Popping the cherry. Also, for the prompt flying, over at the Porn Battle VIII.
Summary:So she’s here. Alone. And so is Kate, recently divorced Kate, who was a little lonely when they first met a few short hours earlier, and now is just a little forward and a lot drunk.
“So,” Kate asks, through shiny, red lips, made wet by the wine that’s dribbled down her lower lip, settling there, a tiny insignificant droplet, “you don’t actually get to fly those things right?”
They’re both drunk enough that Katee can excuse that question as something other than complete idiocy, because she’s an actor and they know all about shit like green screens and special effects (except, you know, she is an actor on a medical drama of all things, so she probably doesn’t know all that much from experience), just like she can excuse the way Kate pointed out that they’re names were, like, identical, right before she asked if Katee’s mother misspelled it on the birth certificate, adding an ‘e’ instead of an ‘i’. It’s all in good fun and too much wine in Kate’s case, too much tequila in Katee’s. “Nope. Just green screens and strategically placed cameras.”
“Strategically placed like how?” Katee can’t miss the way that Kate leans in closer as she says it, so that she can lower her voice, a sultry quality overtaking it. It’s like she’s figured out that there’s potential in that vague statement.
“Over the shoulder. Overhead.” Katee plays right into her hand with this next, the hand that was wrapped around her glass falling onto the edge of the stool she’s sitting on, leaving an inch or two of space between where her pinky finger lies and where Kate’s leg does. “In between the legs.”
Kate’s smile is somewhere between sinister and sloppy, hardly a match for Katee’s own wicked one, and Katee’s never claimed to play anything but dirty, a fact she’s making clear right here. She’s a naturally flirty person anyways, and they’re at some Emmy pre-party that she goes to every year even if the fucking Academy of Television Arts and Sciences doesn’t even seem to know their show exists; places like that have open bars for a reason, so all the non-nominees, all those pissed that their work went unnoticed again or that they can’t find work to get noticed (because with all the glitz and glamour and shiny awards, you think about those things, no matter how much you say that awards don’t matter for the other 364 or so days of the year).
Tricia used to go with her, which is really how this tradition started. It was the ten years of modeling, Katee’s fairly sure, that made the mingling, the getting all dressed up in skintight gowns, so second nature to Tricia, no matter the fact that she’d grown up on a farm and they rode motorcycles along the coast whenever the weather was nice and they had some free time. It was never really Katee’s scene, but it’s become a habit and it would take too much effort to break it.
So she’s here. Alone. And so is Kate, recently divorced Kate, who was a little lonely when they first met a few short hours earlier, and now is just a little forward and a lot drunk.
“Sounds fun.”
Katee cocks her head to the side. “I’ve had better.”
“Oh really?” Kate turns so that she’s fully facing Katee, her fingers just casually brushing against Katee’s arm. They aren’t accomplishing anything right now, or at least anything that’s going to lead anywhere new. They both sort of already know where this is going to lead; this is just merely testing the waters, checking to make sure signals aren’t being misinterpreted.
“Really,” Katee affirms, moving her hand until it finally makes contact with Kate’s leg, just above the knee where the slit of her dress begins. The skin there is smooth, a shade tanner than Katee’s own, and when Katee pulls back her hand to brush a strand of hair out of her own eyes she smells vanilla, more reminiscent of lotion than perfume. She grabs her purse, standing and pulling at the edge of her simple black dress, the old standby, and says, “Excuse me,” glancing over her shoulder once to see if Kate’s eyes are following her entrance into the ladies room that’s down a small hall, to the left. They are.
The two of them aren’t the only ones who’ve tried this trick before, maybe not even the first of the night, and so Katee is perfectly comfortable standing there pretending to fix her hair in the mirror while waiting for Kate to count to one hundred or whatever she’s going to attempt in order to avoid being obvious. There’s at least a two minute wait, and she smiles at the one patron who looks at her funny, some wavy-haired brunette that she knows vaguely from a magazine cover but couldn’t tell you the name or what she’s famous for, before she’s finally alone and she can drop the act.
“This really isn’t the most sanitary place to be doing this, you know,” Kate says, as she closes the door behind her, that smile creeping back onto her face. Katee’s positively buzzing, the way she always is when alcohol and sex mix together, but she does well at hiding it.
“Nothing in this town is,” she replies, means it too, because she’s from Oregon, not California, fuck she doesn’t even work here, or she didn’t used to, and while location was out of her control and it wasn’t her choice to shoot in Vancouver, it taught her that this city is nothing if not full of fakes, covering up the flaws and the dirt swept under the rug.
Kate clucks her tongue like she’s saying ‘right’ but not in any way that could be construed as an agreement. Katee makes nothing of it, instead shifting her attention to grabbing Kate’s arm and pulling her into the handicapped stall that no one ever uses, because this is Hollywood and don’t they just love their discrimination, and pushing her into the wall as she closes the door with one high heeled foot.
“So was the husband because you got bored, or is this because you got bored?” It’s the roundabout way of questioning her orientation, not that it really matters much, but she’s still curious. This whole thing, for her, is built out of things like curiosity and need.
“Both. Maybe.” She sighs against the stall, slips her hands underneath Katee’s short dress, hiking it up like it’s something she’s doing absentmindedly, though it certainly doesn’t feel like that when she skims her sides, moving to the delicate flesh along the line of her lacy black underwear. “I don’t know.”
“Uh-huh,” Katee replies, along the line of Kate’s jaw where she’s got her lips. “You want to - “
“Yeah,” Kate says, like she was already thinking of it, working her thumbs under the sides of that slinky pair of underwear and pulling them down her thighs. The absence of any form of reluctance tells Katee that she’s done this before, and also that she’s used to being the one who drops to her knees first. Briefly, Katee wonders if that’s how she got her own show, or if that’s how she learned to fit in when she was a newcomer among established costars.
She stops wondering when she feels Kate start moving between her legs, the hand that isn’t against the wall of the stall falling down to tousle in Kate’s hair, glad that it’s down so she doesn’t have to worry about messing it up. Actresses are touchy about their hair, their makeup, whatever, most of them. Kate strikes her as someone who’s acclimated to being that way, but reverts back to form now and then, whatever that once was, and that’s the woman she has now -- fairly easygoing, bold and just a little confused. Aren’t they all.
The flat pink of Kate’s tongue moves swirls over her clit, Katee’s teeth sinking into her lip and within the time that it takes for Katee to come, her thighs tense, hips rocking forward a bit against her will, she’s left a definite indent in her lower lip that’ll take a while to disappear. It’s the only evidence left behind, however, as Katee leans her head back and tries to regain control of her breathing, and Kate stands on legs that are much steadier than Katee’s own, despite the difference in heel height. She kisses Katee, and Katee grins against her lips, kissing her back and tasting herself on the other woman’s lips.
Katee hates these kinds of parties a little less for the rest of the night.
---
Title: Small Talk Really Is All About The Weather
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory
Characters/Pairings: Sheldon/Penny
Rating: R (really not that porny -- or at all, just for this fandom)
Word Count: 2,333
Author's Note: Never played in this sandbox either. But I probably will again. For the prompt snow, over at the Porn Battle VIII.
Summary:Spoilers for Season 2 finale. Three months later, when she hears the first signs of life in the apartment, she actually finds herself feeling something close to excitement that they're actually home.
Three months later, when she hears signs of life from the apartment across the hall, namely footsteps and what sounds like Battlestar Galactica playing on full volume, she actually finds herself feeling something close to excitement that they’re home.
Leonard answers the door on the second knock, something like exhaustion on his face before he recognizes who it is and smiles in a way that’s just short of genuine. “Penny,” he says, and Sheldon, who is in his spot on the couch, actually pauses the show, standing as he does. He faces her but doesn’t move towards her, not that she expected him to, and she hugs Leonard with much less force and, well, feeling, than she did when he was about to leave, mostly because she gets this sense that three months of distance, or quite possibly whatever happened or for that matter didn’t happen with them before he left, has done something odd to their relationship. The hug feels awkward, and it ends abruptly, throwing her off just enough that she stumbles over what to say or do next, as Leonard backs up a few steps under the cover of reaching for the glass sitting on a coaster on the coffee table.
“So how was Antarctica?” Penny finally settles on, using enthusiasm as a front for this newfound awkwardness, reassuring herself in her head that this is merely a temporary result from extended separation. They were like this before, when she first met them - although, really, Leonard’s the only one who ever changed. Sheldon is just…Sheldon; he’ll never change for anyone.
“It was good,” Leonard replies, shoving his hands in the pocket of the hoodie that he’s wearing despite the fact that it’s August in California, and no one should ever be cold. “Lots of snow.”
There is absolutely nothing in that sentence for her to run with, so she just repeats it back to him more or less, “Snow, yeah, I bet. Must be nice waking up to snow falling.”
“Actually, Penny,” Sheldon jumps right in, and Penny couldn’t be happier to hear him and his stupid interruptions, “Antarctica only gets ten centimeters of precipitation a year, on average, so we really didn’t see snow falling so much as already on the ground.”
Of course, the downside of his interruptions is that she always ends up feeling like an idiot, even though it’s not like the amount of snowfall in Antarctica is a commonly known figure, at least she doesn’t think so. “It’s nice to see you too Sheldon,” she says, with a tight smile.
---
Six-fifteen the following morning, she’s awoken by the sound of repeated knocking, always followed closely by her name.
She undoes the lock, running a hand through her messy blonde hair, and cocking her head at him as she pulls the door open. “Did you get lost?”
“Our milk has expired.” He says, no greeting, presumably because she didn’t offer up one of her own and he tends to follow her lead as far as the tone of the conversation. At least at first. It’s not an unexpected conclusion; they did just leave for three months and there is no way that milk, as well as most of the stuff in that refrigerator, is going to keep for that long. “And it’s Saturday.”
“You are aware that those two things don’t really have anything to do with each other, right?” She says, hands on hips, not a fan of putting together puzzles this early in the morning.
“Well of course they do Penny.” Sheldon replies, like she’s messing with him, and actually knows what the hell he’s talking about. She isn’t, but she can guess it has something to do with one of his ridiculous habits. It usually does. “Everyone knows that I get up at six-fifteen on Saturday mornings and have a bowl of cereal with exactly one-quarter cup of milk, before I turn on Doctor Who.”
“I must have missed the memo,” she tells him, that tight smile making a return once more.
“But there wasn’t a memo.” He says, completely unaware of her sarcasm, no surprise there.
“You want milk,” she begins, skipping right over that in favor of refocusing him in a direction that won’t lead him to decide to rectify that fact by sending out long-winded emails to everyone, excruciatingly detailing his various routines, “is that what I’m supposed to be getting from this?”
“Well what else would I want?” Sheldon asks, and she bites back a reply to that, stepping aside to let him pass. He heads straight for the refrigerator, sending a look of disgust towards the mess of laundry that sits on her couch but doesn’t nag her about it, probably for fear of missing Doctor Who. Even so, she picks up an armful of it and tosses it onto her bed in her room, aware that there’s no way she’s going back to sleep now and she’d like someplace to sit and, you know, veg, if she’s going to have to be up this early.
She drops onto her newly cleaned off couch, just in time to find him staring at her milk carton in what appears to be profound horror. “What?”
“But this is skim milk.” He states the obvious, pointing to the label like it’s personally offended him.
“Yeah,” she draws out the syllable.
“I only drink 2% milk.”
Penny stares at him, long and hard, and his mouth starts twitching at the left corner a little, like his head might just explode. “Why don’t you go buy some?”
“I don’t drive,” he reminds her, an answer for everything as per usual.
Rapidly getting the rather ugly, tiring picture of how this could potentially turn out for her, she tells him, “Well then get Leonard to drive you.”
“He isn’t awake.”
“Neither was I.”
“Yes, but you haven’t enjoyed the pleasure of my company in three months, so it isn’t as much of a problem for you.” He replies, for once giving her logic that she can potentially argue with and maybe even win.
She’ll gladly twist his words around for him. “Are you trying to say that you missed me?”
He frowns, seemingly completely confused. “I have no idea how you could have drawn that conclusion from my previous sentence.”
“Sheldon, take the skim milk. It tastes the same, it’s just better for you.”
“It does not.” He sounds exactly like a petulant child, one step away from pouting if he was the kind of person who did that, and so she gets off of the couch, taking him by the forearm and pulling him towards the door of her apartment.
“Out, Sheldon.” She drags him straight from her kitchen counter to right in front of his own door, not quite going as far as to open the door and push him into his own apartment. It probably would’ve been more effective; it definitely would’ve put an end to the conversation. Instead she ends up standing there with her hand still pressed into the skin of his wrist, feeling his pulse slow and steady underneath her thumb. She’s used to making boys’ hearts race; of course he’d be the one to defy that expectation.
“Are you upset about the snow?” He asks, suddenly, looking down at her with a slight cock of the head, maybe a frown.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on first glance. “What?”
“You seemed upset about something yesterday. Or at least what you would call upset, which by the way is not actually upset but more…put off. People who are upset generally do a lot more crying in my experience.” Trust Sheldon to take an observation that sounded even remotely caring and turn it into commentary on the misuse of words to describe feelings. Of course.
“I’m not upset about the snow.” Penny says, with a shake of the head, and she finds herself slumping against the wall next to their door. “The snow was small talk.”
“So small talk really is always about the weather,” he replies, like he just learned something new. Perhaps that’s not exactly a lesson she should teach him, if she didn’t want to hear about varying types of precipitation for the rest of her life every time their conversation died on its feet or he felt like he had to say something.
In favor of not teaching him anything else fairly incorrect, as well as in an attempt to get it off her chest some way, she says, “People make small talk when things get awkward. It was awkward yesterday.”
“Oh.” He says, unsure of what he was supposed to draw from that statement.
“It’s never awkward,” she clarifies. “And now it is. And you wouldn’t…you didn’t even notice so asking you is fairly pointless isn’t it?” Sheldon nods, at least sure of that fact. It’s still mildly dismaying, and her head hangs a little when she mumbles, “Right.”
Penny isn’t sure what she expected to happen next, with her hand still on him, the other on the door. He couldn’t just disappear inside, and she wasn’t even sure what she wanted from him. Sheldon wasn’t exactly a master communicator, or a master comforter for that matter.
What she knew she didn’t expect was this:
Sheldon’s hand curling so that he can grab a hold of hers, pulling it off of him so that he can grip her arm, his own way of regaining control of the situation, before he pulls her towards him and kisses her full on the mouth.
She’s uttering more than a few words of protest in the next few seconds, after the startled gasp she gives upon initial contact, but he’s ignoring them, like every other day. Sheldon kisses like there’s a set of instructions included with this and he’s following them to the letter, methodical, and it’s weirdly good because his tongue doesn’t end up, like, probing her tonsils, and he’s not a sloppy kisser either, so maybe he learned something, somewhere. God she hopes it wasn’t the internet or some really trashy magazine. In fact, she really doesn’t want to think about it at all.
When she stops protesting and actually goes for it, her free hand sliding around his neck, maybe something like a moan into his mouth and somehow that translates into time to back off because that’s just what he does, pulls back a few inches so that there’s space between them, and he’s actually looking her in the eyes. His gaze is startling in its intensity, and Penny tries to get her mouth working properly, figuring that she really needs to make the next move or say something or just…this is really not his area of expertise, and it is supposed to be hers. “Um,” she stammers, clears her throat, manages a fairly good impression of at least looking like she has it all together at the moment.
“Is that not what you like to do when you’re upset?” He asks, completely and totally innocent, and she knows him well enough that he couldn’t fake that if his life depended on it, which must mean he really just thought he was doing the socially accepted logical thing to do and that’s just...wrong, wrong, wrong. Where is he learning this stuff? “Because that’s what you seem to do when you’re having a bad day. Statistically there are more entrances and exits made by males during days where you can be seen crying, drinking, and yelling.”
Apparently, he’s learning it from her. Because he learns by seeing and then doing. Great. That doesn’t bode remotely well. Of course neither does the fact that he just kissed her in the hallway at six in the morning and she can’t tell whether or not she wants it to happen again or she wants to slam her door in his face and hide under the covers for at least the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
She is still upset though, for any number of reasons, mild as they are, which provides a premade excuse for her if she chooses to use it. Wrong as even considering that might be.
“You know, I think I’ve got the right kind of milk somewhere…I can look, if you want to come back and watch your Doctor Who at my place.” She really isn’t all that interested in his breakfast or in his Doctor Who, but more his company and deciding whether or not she wants to continue what they just started. Mostly his company. It has been lonely on her side of the hallway these past few months, and clearly this kissing thing is just a one-time phase that will look like a really, really bad idea in about fifteen minutes when she’s had time to wake up fully and get her bearings.
He doesn’t answer, so much as walk back over to her door and plant his feet in front of the entrance, waiting for her to let him back in. It’s the same thing.
She doesn’t in fact have the right kind of milk but she does have cereal that he’ll actually eat, so she pours it herself and flat out lies to him and he doesn’t even notice the difference when he’s glued to the TV on her couch, any advances made completely forgotten by him in the space of a few minutes. It’s a nice little out that she’s not used to getting, and she really should just take it and learn from him for once.
Yeah, that’s just what she’ll do. Water under the bridge and all that jazz.
Half an hour later, she’s learning that the methodical kisser thing kind of goes away once he gets into it, and his hands on her breasts feels just like any other guys, if just a little more restrained and a little less greedy, and that’s something that she can definitely deal with.
The rest of this? Well, the jury is still out on that.
Title: Too Unschooled To The Rules
Fandom: RPF (GA/BSG)
Characters/Pairings: Kate Walsh/Katee Sackhoff
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 1,416
Author's Note: I have never really done RPF before, so, um, yeah. Popping the cherry. Also, for the prompt flying, over at the Porn Battle VIII.
Summary:So she’s here. Alone. And so is Kate, recently divorced Kate, who was a little lonely when they first met a few short hours earlier, and now is just a little forward and a lot drunk.
“So,” Kate asks, through shiny, red lips, made wet by the wine that’s dribbled down her lower lip, settling there, a tiny insignificant droplet, “you don’t actually get to fly those things right?”
They’re both drunk enough that Katee can excuse that question as something other than complete idiocy, because she’s an actor and they know all about shit like green screens and special effects (except, you know, she is an actor on a medical drama of all things, so she probably doesn’t know all that much from experience), just like she can excuse the way Kate pointed out that they’re names were, like, identical, right before she asked if Katee’s mother misspelled it on the birth certificate, adding an ‘e’ instead of an ‘i’. It’s all in good fun and too much wine in Kate’s case, too much tequila in Katee’s. “Nope. Just green screens and strategically placed cameras.”
“Strategically placed like how?” Katee can’t miss the way that Kate leans in closer as she says it, so that she can lower her voice, a sultry quality overtaking it. It’s like she’s figured out that there’s potential in that vague statement.
“Over the shoulder. Overhead.” Katee plays right into her hand with this next, the hand that was wrapped around her glass falling onto the edge of the stool she’s sitting on, leaving an inch or two of space between where her pinky finger lies and where Kate’s leg does. “In between the legs.”
Kate’s smile is somewhere between sinister and sloppy, hardly a match for Katee’s own wicked one, and Katee’s never claimed to play anything but dirty, a fact she’s making clear right here. She’s a naturally flirty person anyways, and they’re at some Emmy pre-party that she goes to every year even if the fucking Academy of Television Arts and Sciences doesn’t even seem to know their show exists; places like that have open bars for a reason, so all the non-nominees, all those pissed that their work went unnoticed again or that they can’t find work to get noticed (because with all the glitz and glamour and shiny awards, you think about those things, no matter how much you say that awards don’t matter for the other 364 or so days of the year).
Tricia used to go with her, which is really how this tradition started. It was the ten years of modeling, Katee’s fairly sure, that made the mingling, the getting all dressed up in skintight gowns, so second nature to Tricia, no matter the fact that she’d grown up on a farm and they rode motorcycles along the coast whenever the weather was nice and they had some free time. It was never really Katee’s scene, but it’s become a habit and it would take too much effort to break it.
So she’s here. Alone. And so is Kate, recently divorced Kate, who was a little lonely when they first met a few short hours earlier, and now is just a little forward and a lot drunk.
“Sounds fun.”
Katee cocks her head to the side. “I’ve had better.”
“Oh really?” Kate turns so that she’s fully facing Katee, her fingers just casually brushing against Katee’s arm. They aren’t accomplishing anything right now, or at least anything that’s going to lead anywhere new. They both sort of already know where this is going to lead; this is just merely testing the waters, checking to make sure signals aren’t being misinterpreted.
“Really,” Katee affirms, moving her hand until it finally makes contact with Kate’s leg, just above the knee where the slit of her dress begins. The skin there is smooth, a shade tanner than Katee’s own, and when Katee pulls back her hand to brush a strand of hair out of her own eyes she smells vanilla, more reminiscent of lotion than perfume. She grabs her purse, standing and pulling at the edge of her simple black dress, the old standby, and says, “Excuse me,” glancing over her shoulder once to see if Kate’s eyes are following her entrance into the ladies room that’s down a small hall, to the left. They are.
The two of them aren’t the only ones who’ve tried this trick before, maybe not even the first of the night, and so Katee is perfectly comfortable standing there pretending to fix her hair in the mirror while waiting for Kate to count to one hundred or whatever she’s going to attempt in order to avoid being obvious. There’s at least a two minute wait, and she smiles at the one patron who looks at her funny, some wavy-haired brunette that she knows vaguely from a magazine cover but couldn’t tell you the name or what she’s famous for, before she’s finally alone and she can drop the act.
“This really isn’t the most sanitary place to be doing this, you know,” Kate says, as she closes the door behind her, that smile creeping back onto her face. Katee’s positively buzzing, the way she always is when alcohol and sex mix together, but she does well at hiding it.
“Nothing in this town is,” she replies, means it too, because she’s from Oregon, not California, fuck she doesn’t even work here, or she didn’t used to, and while location was out of her control and it wasn’t her choice to shoot in Vancouver, it taught her that this city is nothing if not full of fakes, covering up the flaws and the dirt swept under the rug.
Kate clucks her tongue like she’s saying ‘right’ but not in any way that could be construed as an agreement. Katee makes nothing of it, instead shifting her attention to grabbing Kate’s arm and pulling her into the handicapped stall that no one ever uses, because this is Hollywood and don’t they just love their discrimination, and pushing her into the wall as she closes the door with one high heeled foot.
“So was the husband because you got bored, or is this because you got bored?” It’s the roundabout way of questioning her orientation, not that it really matters much, but she’s still curious. This whole thing, for her, is built out of things like curiosity and need.
“Both. Maybe.” She sighs against the stall, slips her hands underneath Katee’s short dress, hiking it up like it’s something she’s doing absentmindedly, though it certainly doesn’t feel like that when she skims her sides, moving to the delicate flesh along the line of her lacy black underwear. “I don’t know.”
“Uh-huh,” Katee replies, along the line of Kate’s jaw where she’s got her lips. “You want to - “
“Yeah,” Kate says, like she was already thinking of it, working her thumbs under the sides of that slinky pair of underwear and pulling them down her thighs. The absence of any form of reluctance tells Katee that she’s done this before, and also that she’s used to being the one who drops to her knees first. Briefly, Katee wonders if that’s how she got her own show, or if that’s how she learned to fit in when she was a newcomer among established costars.
She stops wondering when she feels Kate start moving between her legs, the hand that isn’t against the wall of the stall falling down to tousle in Kate’s hair, glad that it’s down so she doesn’t have to worry about messing it up. Actresses are touchy about their hair, their makeup, whatever, most of them. Kate strikes her as someone who’s acclimated to being that way, but reverts back to form now and then, whatever that once was, and that’s the woman she has now -- fairly easygoing, bold and just a little confused. Aren’t they all.
The flat pink of Kate’s tongue moves swirls over her clit, Katee’s teeth sinking into her lip and within the time that it takes for Katee to come, her thighs tense, hips rocking forward a bit against her will, she’s left a definite indent in her lower lip that’ll take a while to disappear. It’s the only evidence left behind, however, as Katee leans her head back and tries to regain control of her breathing, and Kate stands on legs that are much steadier than Katee’s own, despite the difference in heel height. She kisses Katee, and Katee grins against her lips, kissing her back and tasting herself on the other woman’s lips.
Katee hates these kinds of parties a little less for the rest of the night.
---
Title: Small Talk Really Is All About The Weather
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory
Characters/Pairings: Sheldon/Penny
Rating: R (really not that porny -- or at all, just for this fandom)
Word Count: 2,333
Author's Note: Never played in this sandbox either. But I probably will again. For the prompt snow, over at the Porn Battle VIII.
Summary:Spoilers for Season 2 finale. Three months later, when she hears the first signs of life in the apartment, she actually finds herself feeling something close to excitement that they're actually home.
Three months later, when she hears signs of life from the apartment across the hall, namely footsteps and what sounds like Battlestar Galactica playing on full volume, she actually finds herself feeling something close to excitement that they’re home.
Leonard answers the door on the second knock, something like exhaustion on his face before he recognizes who it is and smiles in a way that’s just short of genuine. “Penny,” he says, and Sheldon, who is in his spot on the couch, actually pauses the show, standing as he does. He faces her but doesn’t move towards her, not that she expected him to, and she hugs Leonard with much less force and, well, feeling, than she did when he was about to leave, mostly because she gets this sense that three months of distance, or quite possibly whatever happened or for that matter didn’t happen with them before he left, has done something odd to their relationship. The hug feels awkward, and it ends abruptly, throwing her off just enough that she stumbles over what to say or do next, as Leonard backs up a few steps under the cover of reaching for the glass sitting on a coaster on the coffee table.
“So how was Antarctica?” Penny finally settles on, using enthusiasm as a front for this newfound awkwardness, reassuring herself in her head that this is merely a temporary result from extended separation. They were like this before, when she first met them - although, really, Leonard’s the only one who ever changed. Sheldon is just…Sheldon; he’ll never change for anyone.
“It was good,” Leonard replies, shoving his hands in the pocket of the hoodie that he’s wearing despite the fact that it’s August in California, and no one should ever be cold. “Lots of snow.”
There is absolutely nothing in that sentence for her to run with, so she just repeats it back to him more or less, “Snow, yeah, I bet. Must be nice waking up to snow falling.”
“Actually, Penny,” Sheldon jumps right in, and Penny couldn’t be happier to hear him and his stupid interruptions, “Antarctica only gets ten centimeters of precipitation a year, on average, so we really didn’t see snow falling so much as already on the ground.”
Of course, the downside of his interruptions is that she always ends up feeling like an idiot, even though it’s not like the amount of snowfall in Antarctica is a commonly known figure, at least she doesn’t think so. “It’s nice to see you too Sheldon,” she says, with a tight smile.
---
Six-fifteen the following morning, she’s awoken by the sound of repeated knocking, always followed closely by her name.
She undoes the lock, running a hand through her messy blonde hair, and cocking her head at him as she pulls the door open. “Did you get lost?”
“Our milk has expired.” He says, no greeting, presumably because she didn’t offer up one of her own and he tends to follow her lead as far as the tone of the conversation. At least at first. It’s not an unexpected conclusion; they did just leave for three months and there is no way that milk, as well as most of the stuff in that refrigerator, is going to keep for that long. “And it’s Saturday.”
“You are aware that those two things don’t really have anything to do with each other, right?” She says, hands on hips, not a fan of putting together puzzles this early in the morning.
“Well of course they do Penny.” Sheldon replies, like she’s messing with him, and actually knows what the hell he’s talking about. She isn’t, but she can guess it has something to do with one of his ridiculous habits. It usually does. “Everyone knows that I get up at six-fifteen on Saturday mornings and have a bowl of cereal with exactly one-quarter cup of milk, before I turn on Doctor Who.”
“I must have missed the memo,” she tells him, that tight smile making a return once more.
“But there wasn’t a memo.” He says, completely unaware of her sarcasm, no surprise there.
“You want milk,” she begins, skipping right over that in favor of refocusing him in a direction that won’t lead him to decide to rectify that fact by sending out long-winded emails to everyone, excruciatingly detailing his various routines, “is that what I’m supposed to be getting from this?”
“Well what else would I want?” Sheldon asks, and she bites back a reply to that, stepping aside to let him pass. He heads straight for the refrigerator, sending a look of disgust towards the mess of laundry that sits on her couch but doesn’t nag her about it, probably for fear of missing Doctor Who. Even so, she picks up an armful of it and tosses it onto her bed in her room, aware that there’s no way she’s going back to sleep now and she’d like someplace to sit and, you know, veg, if she’s going to have to be up this early.
She drops onto her newly cleaned off couch, just in time to find him staring at her milk carton in what appears to be profound horror. “What?”
“But this is skim milk.” He states the obvious, pointing to the label like it’s personally offended him.
“Yeah,” she draws out the syllable.
“I only drink 2% milk.”
Penny stares at him, long and hard, and his mouth starts twitching at the left corner a little, like his head might just explode. “Why don’t you go buy some?”
“I don’t drive,” he reminds her, an answer for everything as per usual.
Rapidly getting the rather ugly, tiring picture of how this could potentially turn out for her, she tells him, “Well then get Leonard to drive you.”
“He isn’t awake.”
“Neither was I.”
“Yes, but you haven’t enjoyed the pleasure of my company in three months, so it isn’t as much of a problem for you.” He replies, for once giving her logic that she can potentially argue with and maybe even win.
She’ll gladly twist his words around for him. “Are you trying to say that you missed me?”
He frowns, seemingly completely confused. “I have no idea how you could have drawn that conclusion from my previous sentence.”
“Sheldon, take the skim milk. It tastes the same, it’s just better for you.”
“It does not.” He sounds exactly like a petulant child, one step away from pouting if he was the kind of person who did that, and so she gets off of the couch, taking him by the forearm and pulling him towards the door of her apartment.
“Out, Sheldon.” She drags him straight from her kitchen counter to right in front of his own door, not quite going as far as to open the door and push him into his own apartment. It probably would’ve been more effective; it definitely would’ve put an end to the conversation. Instead she ends up standing there with her hand still pressed into the skin of his wrist, feeling his pulse slow and steady underneath her thumb. She’s used to making boys’ hearts race; of course he’d be the one to defy that expectation.
“Are you upset about the snow?” He asks, suddenly, looking down at her with a slight cock of the head, maybe a frown.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on first glance. “What?”
“You seemed upset about something yesterday. Or at least what you would call upset, which by the way is not actually upset but more…put off. People who are upset generally do a lot more crying in my experience.” Trust Sheldon to take an observation that sounded even remotely caring and turn it into commentary on the misuse of words to describe feelings. Of course.
“I’m not upset about the snow.” Penny says, with a shake of the head, and she finds herself slumping against the wall next to their door. “The snow was small talk.”
“So small talk really is always about the weather,” he replies, like he just learned something new. Perhaps that’s not exactly a lesson she should teach him, if she didn’t want to hear about varying types of precipitation for the rest of her life every time their conversation died on its feet or he felt like he had to say something.
In favor of not teaching him anything else fairly incorrect, as well as in an attempt to get it off her chest some way, she says, “People make small talk when things get awkward. It was awkward yesterday.”
“Oh.” He says, unsure of what he was supposed to draw from that statement.
“It’s never awkward,” she clarifies. “And now it is. And you wouldn’t…you didn’t even notice so asking you is fairly pointless isn’t it?” Sheldon nods, at least sure of that fact. It’s still mildly dismaying, and her head hangs a little when she mumbles, “Right.”
Penny isn’t sure what she expected to happen next, with her hand still on him, the other on the door. He couldn’t just disappear inside, and she wasn’t even sure what she wanted from him. Sheldon wasn’t exactly a master communicator, or a master comforter for that matter.
What she knew she didn’t expect was this:
Sheldon’s hand curling so that he can grab a hold of hers, pulling it off of him so that he can grip her arm, his own way of regaining control of the situation, before he pulls her towards him and kisses her full on the mouth.
She’s uttering more than a few words of protest in the next few seconds, after the startled gasp she gives upon initial contact, but he’s ignoring them, like every other day. Sheldon kisses like there’s a set of instructions included with this and he’s following them to the letter, methodical, and it’s weirdly good because his tongue doesn’t end up, like, probing her tonsils, and he’s not a sloppy kisser either, so maybe he learned something, somewhere. God she hopes it wasn’t the internet or some really trashy magazine. In fact, she really doesn’t want to think about it at all.
When she stops protesting and actually goes for it, her free hand sliding around his neck, maybe something like a moan into his mouth and somehow that translates into time to back off because that’s just what he does, pulls back a few inches so that there’s space between them, and he’s actually looking her in the eyes. His gaze is startling in its intensity, and Penny tries to get her mouth working properly, figuring that she really needs to make the next move or say something or just…this is really not his area of expertise, and it is supposed to be hers. “Um,” she stammers, clears her throat, manages a fairly good impression of at least looking like she has it all together at the moment.
“Is that not what you like to do when you’re upset?” He asks, completely and totally innocent, and she knows him well enough that he couldn’t fake that if his life depended on it, which must mean he really just thought he was doing the socially accepted logical thing to do and that’s just...wrong, wrong, wrong. Where is he learning this stuff? “Because that’s what you seem to do when you’re having a bad day. Statistically there are more entrances and exits made by males during days where you can be seen crying, drinking, and yelling.”
Apparently, he’s learning it from her. Because he learns by seeing and then doing. Great. That doesn’t bode remotely well. Of course neither does the fact that he just kissed her in the hallway at six in the morning and she can’t tell whether or not she wants it to happen again or she wants to slam her door in his face and hide under the covers for at least the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
She is still upset though, for any number of reasons, mild as they are, which provides a premade excuse for her if she chooses to use it. Wrong as even considering that might be.
“You know, I think I’ve got the right kind of milk somewhere…I can look, if you want to come back and watch your Doctor Who at my place.” She really isn’t all that interested in his breakfast or in his Doctor Who, but more his company and deciding whether or not she wants to continue what they just started. Mostly his company. It has been lonely on her side of the hallway these past few months, and clearly this kissing thing is just a one-time phase that will look like a really, really bad idea in about fifteen minutes when she’s had time to wake up fully and get her bearings.
He doesn’t answer, so much as walk back over to her door and plant his feet in front of the entrance, waiting for her to let him back in. It’s the same thing.
She doesn’t in fact have the right kind of milk but she does have cereal that he’ll actually eat, so she pours it herself and flat out lies to him and he doesn’t even notice the difference when he’s glued to the TV on her couch, any advances made completely forgotten by him in the space of a few minutes. It’s a nice little out that she’s not used to getting, and she really should just take it and learn from him for once.
Yeah, that’s just what she’ll do. Water under the bridge and all that jazz.
Half an hour later, she’s learning that the methodical kisser thing kind of goes away once he gets into it, and his hands on her breasts feels just like any other guys, if just a little more restrained and a little less greedy, and that’s something that she can definitely deal with.
The rest of this? Well, the jury is still out on that.