fic: a comedy of manners {tbbt - sheldon/penny}
Title: A Comedy Of Manners
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory
Characters/Pairings: Sheldon/Penny
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,160
Author's Note: Originally prompted at the Valentine's Day Fic Exchange. I was always late to the party and, um, rl took over for the past month so. Also, Comic Con is a tired setting but I tried to change things up a little.
Summary: Of extended morning afters, lipstick stains, and inconvenient hotel room arrangements.
Comic Con has the worst fucking timing this year.
Actually, no, that’s a lie. Comic Con always has bad timing; it’s like Christmas, it happens the same time every year and yet somehow you never quite see it coming. The year before it was because her boyfriend of all of three weeks happened to stumble upon her costume - it’s Comic Con, okay, everyone has a costume, it’s like geek Halloween but with less candy and more ridiculously long lines - the year before that it was because of the tiny little rent emergency she had, while the boys were in San Diego without her, and the year before that…well, the year before that they were all on their Arctic expedition and she was pretty much miserable for at least half of that summer.
So, really, this is just a case of especially bad timing.
Sheldon beats her to the car in the morning - because Sheldon is always on time and Penny is forever two minutes behind him - and by the time she’s got a duffel bag worth of clothes shoved in the trunk of Leonard’s car, Sheldon’s practically reciting a compare and contrast essay on three sets out routes he has printed out, numbered, and color-coded.
“If we take I-15 then we save five minutes - hello, Penny - but if we take 110 to I-5 then we save ten miles, which is certainly something we ought to consider given the recent rise in gas prices. I also have one that avoids all major highways if you’d like to take a look.”
Leonard doesn’t indicate that he does but that was rhetorical on Sheldon’s part. He hands it up front and holds the paper closer then farther away from his face, like his glasses are the problem in this equation. “This says six hours.”
“It’s historic and it avoids traffic,” Sheldon replies. He doesn’t look all that dismayed when Leonard folds the piece of paper in half and puts it in the visor, a far cry from what she probably would’ve done with it, but he does halfway meet her eyes as he says “you’re late” like he’s the one in trouble.
She gives him the tightest smile on earth and swallows around a “yeah, well” that lacks her usual bite.
Leonard looks at them in the rearview mirror, his brows furrowed like he can tell they’re both off their game but is almost afraid to ask.
Penny crosses her legs; Sheldon’s eyes do manage to take note of the inch or so her shorts ride up on her thighs when she does.
-
Not even halfway through the trip she jolts awake with her head against the window as Leonard takes a turn too fast. Her head bumps against glass and Sheldon makes a noise high in the back of his throat that rings like a siren in her head. She reaches out a hand, half gropes for his own in what is meant to be a calming gesture, only her fingers find fabric that definitely isn’t cotton, and it’s then that she finally opens her eyes.
Raj smiles back at her, nervous but seemingly pleased, and it’s his purple jacket that she’s feeling, his warm fingers under her own instead of Sheldon’s cooler, spindly ones. Sheldon sits on the other side of Raj, self-contained and otherwise quiet, and Howard mutters something about cologne to Leonard from the passenger seat. She doesn’t remember when they picked up Howard and Raj or when they apparently played a round of musical chairs.
She smoothes a hand over her hair and does her best to look alive, while Leonard murmurs a belated “sorry”.
-
They booked the hotel in late March because booking in June pretty much ensures that you will be staying at the nearest Super 8 and rooming with cockroaches. They settled on two rooms in a fairly nice (read moderately pricey) hotel and when it came down to who was going to share a room with Sheldon she didn’t exactly rush to claim that spot but she also didn’t put up a fight when everyone else looked at her.
So it was decided that her and Sheldon would take the two doubles, and Leonard, Howard and Raj would take the room with two doubles and a sofa bed (later, they will come to find this was unnecessary as Howard and Raj had no qualms about passing out half on top of each other after getting pretty drunk - but not laid - at a party on preview night).
At the time, this seemed just fine because here’s the thing: the biggest problem she should’ve possibly come across is somehow getting three strikes on her record and Sheldon giving her a combination of the silent treatment and the evil eye for the duration of the trip, which, you know, she can work with that. That should’ve been it. That should’ve been the thing to avoid.
Penny drops her stuff in the doorway of 312 and Sheldon eyes her duffel bag before gingerly stepping around it and setting his own suitcase on the bed, where it belongs she’s sure is the unspoken comment meant to accompany the dull thud the action makes. She pokes her head into the makeshift kitchen - what they need a kitchen for when they’re only here for four whole days, with most of that time being spent elsewhere, she’ll never know but it came with the room and the room came with a discount so - and reminds herself that there are three rooms and a closet that she can shut herself inside if need be, if they can’t manage to occupy the same space for a few hours a day now that she’s seen him naked or he’s seen her naked or - whatever.
That’s the problem. There has been nudity. There has been a run of all the bases straight to home. He now knows that when she said she was a big ol’ five she meant it and the sound she makes when she comes, the desperate way she clawed at him, is probably now preserved in his memory like everything else, shoved neatly and primly into a drawer marked social experiments or something else disgustingly clinical.
He knows and he’s seen and she’s stopped always looking at him as her genius neighbor who sometimes annoys her but is mostly tolerable and stopped thinking about him as the guy who’s biggest relationship was carried out mostly via webcam and hour long dinners at the Cheesecake Factory with a woman who had even less interest in romance than him - though more in sex - and started thinking of him as the guy whose hands only trembled against her thighs for a count of three and who knew how to kiss even if he wasn’t sure how to move right then.
It changes things. You don’t get to see someone like him naked, you don’t get to know what they kiss like, and then have the luxury of hitting the reset button when the sun comes up. That’s reserved for thirty-six hour benders and anonymous sex in the bathrooms of bars, men who drop their pants at the slightest hint of a promise of a warm place to sink into. Penny is familiar with this. Penny is what the spiteful call a slut and what her friends call someone comfortable with her sexuality. She knows what it’s like to pick up guys in bars and she knows what happens when you get into bed with friends.
Her and Leonard are better now. Better but not as good as before, as what they had been before the first failure, closely followed by the second. They eat dinner together and she puts on a smile and a go get them every time he finds a new girl to date, a new chance to get laid, but there are days she feels bitter and days she feels melancholy and days where she doesn’t feel anything at all. and on every single one of those days there is Sheldon doing laundry with her and nitpicking the detergent she uses or Sheldon in the apartment with takeout and the movie she’s going to force him to watch or some sci-fi series she pretends not to be interested in but secretly enjoys. Where there isn’t one there is the other now, and she doesn’t really know what she’s going to do if she has neither.
He lays out pairs of pants and neatly folded socks and announces “I’m going to take a shower” to her back and she musters up a nod and an entirely futile smile, only waiting as long as it takes for the shower to turn on to scribble down a note about hitting up the nearest bar and not to wait for her. She adds have fun and an exclamation point that’s just this side of too perfect, too enthusiastic, as an afterthought, right before she pockets her cell phone and grabs her purse.
-
Between a two and a half hour drive that turned into a near four hour drive with traffic, the time it took to find their hotel, check in, and the detour she takes to wander through some of the nearby shops, happy hour at the bar closest to their hotel has long since passed.
What she’s left with is stragglers and an atmosphere that varies depending on what area you happen to be sitting in. There are a few guys halfway out of their suits crowded into one corner of the bar, a girl that can’t be over twenty-two who doesn’t understand that no one in their right mind goes anywhere near bar nuts, a lone guy three seats down from her with a mostly untouched beer and a tour t-shirt pimping The Mountain Goats, and a group of very loudly annoyed geeks at the back table who apparently missed out on preview night tickets.
She guesses she should count herself as lucky that it’s only the loner guy who tries to talk to her, it’s just she’d be better off with the geeks - she could swear Sheldon has that exact Green Lantern t-shirt - and she’s not feeling very flirty right now, in the same jeans with a hole in the thigh that she’s been wearing since nine this morning and no makeup, unless you count chapstick and that quick sweep of mascara she performed while also trying to pull on her shoes. Not to mention Sheldon. She couldn’t fuck her way to forgetting that because they’re sharing a room and their beds are divided by roughly ten feet of off-white carpet and she doesn’t think it would work anyways.
Penny doesn’t know what she expects him to ask but “you did The Misanthrope at Knightsbridge last year, right?” definitely wasn’t one of the possibilities.
She stumbles over a “yeah” and her cheeks color like she’s had more to drink than she has and she warms to him fast, the way shallower woman do when a guy says they have a nice ass. Penny’s heard that. Heard nice ass and nice tits and all manner of things about her mouth but it gets old and it blends into nothing but white noise because the thing is Penny knows. She can see in the mirror same as anyone else can and the words seem to lack a certain weight to them. She gets told she has a nice body and what she really wants to hear is that she has a nice body of work.
It sounds stupid. There’s a chance that it is in fact stupid, but Penny grew up in a small town in a family that, for the most part, worked for where they got and then moved to the most superficial place on the planet only to immerse herself in the lives of men who carried with them more degrees and honors than most people twice their age and it’s like it’s in her DNA, to gravitate towards that mindset.
So when he tells her that he prefers Bolt’s adaption but that she played a much better Célimène than Keira Knightley did in Crimp’s version - both of which he saw live - she smiles against her will and lets him buy her a drink and tells him it’s her last night in the real world, watching his expression catch somewhere between amusement and confusion and trying not to laugh when it does. He tells her about the plays he saw in the West End when he was studying abroad and she tells him about her horrible audition for Twelfth Night and explains her departure from reality and escape into geekdom.
“You don’t seem like the type,” he says, which is funny because when she saw him and his t-shirt and his shaggy hair and tanned skin she thought surfer dude or garage band drummer, not part-time online theater critic who’s this close to teaching film at the local college.
“Yeah, well,” she shrugs, “sometimes people surprise you.”
It’s an utter cliché, and one he calls her on, but there is two hours of beer and conversation before she walks back to the hotel and calls it a night before most people have really started theirs.
-
Penny spends the hours from nine to eleven involved in a Say Yes To The Dress marathon, thanks to the hotel’s basic cable. She can’t sleep and she could use some superficiality in the absence of America’s Next Top Model, so she parks herself on the bed with the remote and texts Bernadette during commercials, flipping past the most recent addition to her contacts list - his name is Keith and he isn’t even from here but, instead, San Francisco; he isn’t in town for Comic Con either. She might text him when she gets back to Pasadena and, then, she might not. She’s waiting on this one, doesn’t want to lead him on but also doesn’t quite know what to do when she can’t even figure out her own relationship status.
By the time Sheldon gets back to the room her phone has gone silent and she’s sprawled at the foot of the bed, the eleven o’clock news doing a pre-taped tour of the convention center before cutting to an aerial view of the line outside of Hall H for the last ever Twilight panel in the morning. She absolutely doesn’t snort with laughter at the people who’ve been waiting in line since this morning because that would be mean, except she does because she’s still more buzzed than entirely sober.
She says “welcome back, soldier” before she looks at him, before she rolls onto her side in this half awkward, half provocative movement - unintended on both counts -- and his Adam’s apple bobs when he swallows and that’s when she sees that smear of red on his cheek. It’s faded, slightly, like he’s rubbed at it over the course of the evening but it’s still obvious, still this one thing out of place that wasn’t there before.
With Sheldon, it’s easy to tell. She can always tell.
“Was this a situation that involved face paint or lipstick?” She touches her hand to her own cheek, a gesture meant to add context to her question, only it winds up as a mirror to his own reflexive one. He stares at his fingers when he pulls his hand back, palm flat, and she can see from here that the red hasn’t rubbed off, that it bothers him that it hasn’t rubbed off. He hasn’t answered her, hasn’t said a word since he walked in the door, and confusion weighs heavily in the pit of her stomach, brings her to the brink of sobriety much in the same way that first blast of cold water from the showerhead can. “Are you okay?”
“There were some rather heavily made up women in incorrectly designed Wonder Woman costumes. I think Leonard left with one of them.” She braces herself for the pang of jealousy that doesn’t come and then she pushes herself up until she’s sitting on the edge of the bed, hands on her bare knees. “They were quite affectionate as well as inebriated.”
“It’ll wash off.” He narrows his eyes, doubtful, as if he’s already tried it which would explain the faded appearance. “Unless it’s that long-lasting stuff, then your best bet is makeup remover. There’s some in my bag.”
He nods but the tension remains in his shoulders. Sheldon is rigid, holds himself that way like he needs to be able to think out every single movement the way he seems to think out his words, cautious to a fault and far too concerned with control. He’s rigid on purpose but right now there’s unmistakable tension that’s holding him upright, that’s keeping him six inches from the doorway and no further and he looks the same as he did in the car. Like he understands that they’re dancing around something fragile here and one wrong step could throw everything into chaos he doesn’t want and can’t handle.
But he can grasp the weight of it all. He can wrap his head around that well enough and it’s that progress that leaves her hopeful, that moves her from the bed to where he stands, catching his wrist and leading him towards the bathroom, grabbing her makeup bag off of the dresser on the way. He follows, doesn’t flinch, because they’ve been here for a while, at a stage where grabbing and touching and prodding isn’t abnormal, and she no longer thinks when she does these things. She no longer remembers when a hug was a momentous occasion, even if the moment itself is burned into her memory and her skin, because they’ve been past that for long enough that she didn’t need to be drunk when she kissed him and he didn’t need to be coaxed into letting her.
She closes the bathroom door with her heel and fishes in her bag for makeup remover and tissues. Stares at him like this is the point where he sits down on the closed toilet lid and lets her clean him up, except he doesn’t, so she boosts herself up to sit on the edge of the sink, makes up for the height difference herself, and lets him remain standing. It’s backwards. They’re backwards. She wants the opposite of what she’s supposed to want, while he is able to wrap his head around complex ideas involving hypotheticals and the idea of multiple universes far easier than he can even begin to try to understand feelings, his own or otherwise. It makes them a little bit strange, a little bit unusual, and if people saw them walking down the street the last thing they would probably think is couple except, sometimes, Penny thinks they could be. Sometimes she thinks that the foundation they’ve built six years later is enough to stand on or at the very least try to.
Sometimes she just -
“There was no shortage of alcohol at the party,” he says, abruptly; “surely you didn’t have to go out of your way to find a bar.”
“It’s a five minute walk,” she shrugs. “And last I checked you guys went to get your comic books signed and go see that pilot screening, not to live it up in some stranger’s hotel room.”
Most of that’s true. For one, she’s been to Comic Con, she’s familiar with the in-room partying aspect of it, whether it’s the people who hold big marathons or the people who serve way too much alcohol at some impromptu get-together and end up with a pair of plastered strangers hooking up in their bathroom. For the other, Sheldon didn’t actually bring his comic books, but instead a sheet of blank labels to be signed, taken home, and then placed with - not on - the comic books because he simply has too many to lug through the halls.
“You’re done,” she says when all the red has disappeared, leaving clean skin in its wake and crumpled tissue in her hand. She tosses it in the trash, caps the remover, and somewhere in that span of time he must nod or give some signal that he’s about to walk away because he does, or tries to anyway, but the stupid, impulsive part of her brain kicks up a leg to block his path. It cuts him off mid-thigh and he clearly expects to find some approximation of a mischievous smile to be tugging at her lips when he looks back at her but it’s absent.
They’re not done.
“Penny,” he starts and she uses that leg to nudge him a little closer, enough that she can draw him in the rest of the way with her hands. There’s a good half-second between the moment he starts to cooperate with her maneuvering and the moment where their mouths meet, and it’s lucky, it’s lucky that he takes that last step forward because she forgets where she is, tries for leverage that she doesn’t have and slips a little on the edge of that porcelain sink and it’s only his thighs against her bent knees that keeps her from pitching forward, allows her to right herself.
He still makes this half surprised noise against her mouth and it’s a fight not to giggle but it’s even bigger fight not to just latch herself to him, walk them back into the bedroom and get his clothes off now now now -- turns out that buzz of hers hasn’t even come close to wearing off - and that’s the more important one so that’s where she focuses her energy. On moving with him instead of despite him.
On remembering to stop.
“Okay,” she flattens her hands against his shoulders, still a hard line of bone and muscle and tension underneath that, his hands never getting past the crook of her knee and the hesitant touch of his fingers against her side, restrained to something only slightly bolder than a graze. “We should really…deal with this. Before we spend the next four days in close proximity to each other non-stop.”
“Deal with what?”
“This,” the motion she makes with her hand more closely resembles Miss America waving to her fans than it does a gesture between the two of them. She lets her hand fall to curl around the edge of the sink and tries not to blush when she realizes he’s actually going to make her explain herself. “You and me. With the kissing and the,” she hears coitus in her head and almost chokes, finishes quickly, “sex. We should talk about that, since that’s not really something that you normally, you know, do.”
How the hell is this conversation so awkward? She doesn’t remember it ever being this awkward. Usually it’s just one two three go and off to the races. Usually there isn’t much talking besides some half-slurred i like you or that awkward morning after where you don’t know whether to cook breakfast or they are cooking breakfast and all you really want to do is guzzle down some coffee with that double dose of aspirin. The relationship part, if it ever gets that far, is something she has a tendency to fall into like a bad habit. Dinner and dancing and sex, short text messages and even shorter phone calls, and the inevitable expiration date that usually really is when things just blow up. Sometimes there is a half-shared apartment; sometimes she learns from her mistakes.
“Penny,” he says her name like he’s going to give her a lecture, like this is the beginning of one of his long, condescending speeches, and it’s a turnaround from two minutes ago when they were both just talking to fill dead air and expectations. “Just because I don’t tend to embark on relationships doesn’t mean I have no grasp on how they work.”
“You haven’t looked me straight in the eye since last Thursday.”
“Last Thursday you made an attempt at what could only very generously be called sneaking out of my room sometime after midnight, only to stumble over the coffee table and almost break a lamp, despite being overly familiar with the layout of the apartment. Nevertheless, my time with Leonard and Wolowitz has taught me that women who sneak out after sex generally do so out of regret and strongly dislike being pursued relentlessly after the fact. I was, as you would say, giving you your space.”
“Wait,” her brain is still trying to catch up, still trying to sort out the meaning from his overly clinical way of speaking. Sheldon doesn’t talk about feelings and thoughts, he talks about actions and facts. Concrete things that can’t be argued with, designed to ensure he wins arguments with relative ease. Words have meaning but, while she would’ve just stuck with that last bit, he prefers the history lesson driven by an unfaltering memory. “You thought I was bailing.”
His brow furrows, impatience and confusion fighting to take precedence. “What exactly would you have me think?”
That she was…well, she was bailing. She did a big thing badly and it freaked her out. It terrified her. It had her heading for the hills, locking herself in her apartment for the night and skipping out on dinner with the guys that next night. And that’s the thing - he’s right. She can see how that must have looked just like she can see now how his efforts at backing off were so easily misconstrued as him pushing her away, as him acting even more aloof towards her than usual.
She can see now where communication failed them miserably.
“I thought you wouldn’t - “ she stops herself, no use in rehashing a past that exists solely in her mind. Not when she knows otherwise now. He wants this and she wants this, and in storybook endings that means everything ends happily ever after as the music swells while in reality it means, at the very least, that this long weekend might not suck as badly as she thought it was going to. “This week makes a lot more sense now.”
“I tend to agree,” he concedes, fingers fluttering against her hips before they settle, arms extended, and he’s a few inches too far away for this to look natural. But that’s not the point. The point is his hands on her body, intentionally, and for purposes other than to drag her away from paying customers so he can remind her for the fifty-third time of their plans for their evening or how her presence is required on Saturday for paintball. It’s new. It’s nice.
It makes her pull him in by his bony elbows and slide a hand along his cheek right before she tilts her head up and kisses him again, except this time his tongue ends up in her mouth and this time she has little to no incentive to stop and this time she is seriously considering the bed. Or the table in the tiny little kitchen that might actually have its uses now that she thinks about it. Now that she has some perspective on the situation.
He moves closer and she slips back a little bit and then it’s his name against his lips in the way that doesn’t suggest encouragement and enjoyment so much as urgency. Thankfully, Sheldon can understand that variation in tone.
“You maybe want to take this elsewhere? Somewhere where there’s not a faucet digging into my back?”
Bed it is. They can figure out the table later.
-
In the morning, she is the only person in her bed. She is, however, not the only person on her bed.
The stretch of her legs as she rolls onto her side is hindered by the body on the edge of her bed and when she opens her eyes it’s to the back of Howard, facing away from her and talking to Raj, who clams up the second he notices she’s awake.
“Morning, Penny,” Leonard offers, from across the room, her head count coming up short. She inhales deep and smells soap and the faintest traces of mint on his pillowcase. Clean. From here she can’t see the clock but she can already tell it’s some ungodly early hour if she was able to sleep through the boys’ chatter.
“Why are you all in my bedroom?” She asks, even though the whole thing is her bedroom, really, and the kitchen is still small and guests don’t sit in the bathroom, so where else would they be? It’s just the fact that Howard’s got his butt on her bed like that’s not even a little odd and she’s pretty sure Raj is eating something that involves granola while Leonard drinks coffee from a mug and not a styrofoam cup. And she was asleep in the same room.
Life during Comic Con is strange.
Increasingly so, this year.
“There was a…girl,” Leonard kind of shrugs, like it’s no big deal and he scores with - presumably, from what Sheldon told her - hot chicks all time and he won’t probably be treasuring last night for the next month if the rest of this weekend doesn’t quite pan out.
Howard mutters something under his breath that has Raj rolling his eyes.
Whatever it is, Leonard hears it and, more importantly, he takes the bait. “I wasn’t the one who tried to pick up a girl by asking her if she was an electron.”
Translation: Howard did not get laid, therefore Howard is bitter. These are the times when she really wishes Bernadette hadn’t decided that they needed to take a break; Howard has a whole new arsenal of horrible, nerdy pickup lines and there’s nothing preventing him from using them now. She can prevent herself from hearing them though. “I don’t want to know.
( -- she will know, however, when they’re in line for the Firefly panel that is rumored to include an official announcement about another movie, and Howard turns to this girl who might be dressed up as Alice in Wonderland and says if you were an electron, I’d be a photon so I could take you to an excited state. Penny has to cover her mouth with both of her hands to keep from howling with laughter, Leonard’s shoulders are shaking with it, and Sheldon makes this tsk tsk noise that’s just this side of sighing about youth these days right before they simultaneously notice Raj is discreetly recording all of this on his cell phone. It will take Howard a third try that is not the charm before he finally puts that thing into retirement and tries to rethink his target audience and they will spend two more hours in that line before she gets to sit within a hundred feet of Captain Tightpants.)
“Where’s Sheldon?”
“Showering in anticipation of being accosted by hordes of people with questionable hygiene.” She can’t hear the shower running but there is movement, the shuffling of feet and the sound of the faucet turning on. “He said he woke up late. That’s got to be a first. What did you do to him last night?”
It’s not accusatory. There is no earthly reason why she should take it as such but her ears burn and her stomach twists funny - not painful, just strange and nervous and full of all sorts of feelings that she can’t label - and it takes effort not to bury her head in the pillows and pull the covers up over here because she’s at that point where every look Leonard gives her and every open-ended comment he makes is like a big flashing neon sign that says i know you’re sleeping with my roommate and she knows she’s paranoid but that knowledge doesn’t make those moments any less unnerving.
She runs her teeth over her bottom lip and forces herself to relax. “Oh, you know, the usual. Reality show reruns and two buck chuck always makes for an interesting night.” Half right; more like reruns and a bottle of water from the machine down the hall. “Speaking of which, I need coffee.”
Penny doesn’t even bother acknowledging the way Howard probably stares at her ass, thankfully clad in shorts and not just underwear, when she gets out of bed; she just makes a beeline for the kitchen that she suddenly finds herself thankful for.
-
Sheldon finds her before she finds the coffee creamer.
“Penny,” he says in this way that would be casual if he was waiting his turn for a go at the coffee pot or pouring himself cereal but he’s doing neither. He’s standing there, just out of sight of the doorway because nothing is private and they chose Comic Con weekend, where everyone is packed together like sardines to have conversations about feelings and fuck in hotel rooms. Because these are things that Penny does and Sheldon can be awfully inconvenient at times so it’s logical that one of those times would be now.
“I woke up to Howard on my bed,” she replies, because there was no good morning and it has not been a good morning anyway. “That’s something I’d like not to repeat. How long have they been here?”
“Long enough to make a mess,” Sheldon observes, which, not really, unless you count the fresh pot of coffee she is insanely grateful for, the packets of sweet and low that are strewn on the countertop next to an open stack of coffee filters, and a toaster that shows evidence of recent use. Sheldon probably does. “From what I understand, Leonard was attempting to avoid an awkward morning after.”
She manages an amused “boy do I understand that” before it kicks in that she is currently smack dab in the middle of her own morning after, only it’s not awkward. Or it’s awkward for reasons outside of Sheldon. And morning after generally denotes the morning after the first time you sleep together, only there was none the first time with them, there was just her leaving out their front door at one in the morning and flying under the radar for the remainder of that day. And now there’s this and she’s trying to figure out how to keep her face from ratting her out where her mouth won’t and he’s pulling his phone out of his pocket and bringing up the itinerary for the day like the significance of that statement in relation to their situation either doesn’t occur to him or doesn’t faze him.
Penny believes the former and hopes for the latter.
“We’re good, right?” She reaches around him for a towel to dry her hands off on and brushes her shoulder against his chest in the process and he merely tilts his head to get a better view of his phone. It’s the weirdest thing, how hyper aware she’s become of these little everyday things that she used to do without thinking.
He looks up long enough to spare her a cursory glance. “I don’t understand the question.”
“We’re,” she gestures between them, amends, “you and I, we’re okay. Last night didn’t, I don’t know, make things weird. Or weirder.”
“I don’t think so,” he replies, like he still doesn’t understand the question despite her attempt at rephrasing but he also doesn’t seem bothered by it. He seems relaxed but focused and that focus is split eighty-twenty, with her as the losing party. She doesn’t mind as much as she thinks she should, even if she feels this urge to check.
“Hey,” she says, to grab his attention for long enough to pull him towards the back of the kitchen, relatively safe from prying eyes -- as long as the bodies they’re attached to don’t decide to walk in on them - and kiss him. Lay one on him and wait for him to react, wait to see if he will. He does and the sigh she gives against his mouth is so full of relief it’s almost palpable.
They’re okay.
-
In line, after Alice in Wonderland pulls a look that’s more reminiscent of the Queen of Hearts -- off with his head -- she texts Bernadette and appeals to her good nature by informing her of just how desperate and pathetic Howard is without her. All she gets back is an oh dear and, last night, Penny could tell that she missed him, so there’s that.
During the panel, she takes a few pictures on her cell phone camera and there’s a moment where she contemplates sending one to Keith, to say that this is why she goes. Because she wants this. She wants the recognition and the fans and the interaction; craves it even. This is where she wants to be in five years, on that stage.
There’s just no concise way to put it, so she doesn’t, closes out the message window and reminds herself that it’s enough that she knows, maybe clearer than she did a week ago.
She knows what she wants.
-
fin.
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory
Characters/Pairings: Sheldon/Penny
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,160
Author's Note: Originally prompted at the Valentine's Day Fic Exchange. I was always late to the party and, um, rl took over for the past month so. Also, Comic Con is a tired setting but I tried to change things up a little.
Summary: Of extended morning afters, lipstick stains, and inconvenient hotel room arrangements.
Comic Con has the worst fucking timing this year.
Actually, no, that’s a lie. Comic Con always has bad timing; it’s like Christmas, it happens the same time every year and yet somehow you never quite see it coming. The year before it was because her boyfriend of all of three weeks happened to stumble upon her costume - it’s Comic Con, okay, everyone has a costume, it’s like geek Halloween but with less candy and more ridiculously long lines - the year before that it was because of the tiny little rent emergency she had, while the boys were in San Diego without her, and the year before that…well, the year before that they were all on their Arctic expedition and she was pretty much miserable for at least half of that summer.
So, really, this is just a case of especially bad timing.
Sheldon beats her to the car in the morning - because Sheldon is always on time and Penny is forever two minutes behind him - and by the time she’s got a duffel bag worth of clothes shoved in the trunk of Leonard’s car, Sheldon’s practically reciting a compare and contrast essay on three sets out routes he has printed out, numbered, and color-coded.
“If we take I-15 then we save five minutes - hello, Penny - but if we take 110 to I-5 then we save ten miles, which is certainly something we ought to consider given the recent rise in gas prices. I also have one that avoids all major highways if you’d like to take a look.”
Leonard doesn’t indicate that he does but that was rhetorical on Sheldon’s part. He hands it up front and holds the paper closer then farther away from his face, like his glasses are the problem in this equation. “This says six hours.”
“It’s historic and it avoids traffic,” Sheldon replies. He doesn’t look all that dismayed when Leonard folds the piece of paper in half and puts it in the visor, a far cry from what she probably would’ve done with it, but he does halfway meet her eyes as he says “you’re late” like he’s the one in trouble.
She gives him the tightest smile on earth and swallows around a “yeah, well” that lacks her usual bite.
Leonard looks at them in the rearview mirror, his brows furrowed like he can tell they’re both off their game but is almost afraid to ask.
Penny crosses her legs; Sheldon’s eyes do manage to take note of the inch or so her shorts ride up on her thighs when she does.
-
Not even halfway through the trip she jolts awake with her head against the window as Leonard takes a turn too fast. Her head bumps against glass and Sheldon makes a noise high in the back of his throat that rings like a siren in her head. She reaches out a hand, half gropes for his own in what is meant to be a calming gesture, only her fingers find fabric that definitely isn’t cotton, and it’s then that she finally opens her eyes.
Raj smiles back at her, nervous but seemingly pleased, and it’s his purple jacket that she’s feeling, his warm fingers under her own instead of Sheldon’s cooler, spindly ones. Sheldon sits on the other side of Raj, self-contained and otherwise quiet, and Howard mutters something about cologne to Leonard from the passenger seat. She doesn’t remember when they picked up Howard and Raj or when they apparently played a round of musical chairs.
She smoothes a hand over her hair and does her best to look alive, while Leonard murmurs a belated “sorry”.
-
They booked the hotel in late March because booking in June pretty much ensures that you will be staying at the nearest Super 8 and rooming with cockroaches. They settled on two rooms in a fairly nice (read moderately pricey) hotel and when it came down to who was going to share a room with Sheldon she didn’t exactly rush to claim that spot but she also didn’t put up a fight when everyone else looked at her.
So it was decided that her and Sheldon would take the two doubles, and Leonard, Howard and Raj would take the room with two doubles and a sofa bed (later, they will come to find this was unnecessary as Howard and Raj had no qualms about passing out half on top of each other after getting pretty drunk - but not laid - at a party on preview night).
At the time, this seemed just fine because here’s the thing: the biggest problem she should’ve possibly come across is somehow getting three strikes on her record and Sheldon giving her a combination of the silent treatment and the evil eye for the duration of the trip, which, you know, she can work with that. That should’ve been it. That should’ve been the thing to avoid.
Penny drops her stuff in the doorway of 312 and Sheldon eyes her duffel bag before gingerly stepping around it and setting his own suitcase on the bed, where it belongs she’s sure is the unspoken comment meant to accompany the dull thud the action makes. She pokes her head into the makeshift kitchen - what they need a kitchen for when they’re only here for four whole days, with most of that time being spent elsewhere, she’ll never know but it came with the room and the room came with a discount so - and reminds herself that there are three rooms and a closet that she can shut herself inside if need be, if they can’t manage to occupy the same space for a few hours a day now that she’s seen him naked or he’s seen her naked or - whatever.
That’s the problem. There has been nudity. There has been a run of all the bases straight to home. He now knows that when she said she was a big ol’ five she meant it and the sound she makes when she comes, the desperate way she clawed at him, is probably now preserved in his memory like everything else, shoved neatly and primly into a drawer marked social experiments or something else disgustingly clinical.
He knows and he’s seen and she’s stopped always looking at him as her genius neighbor who sometimes annoys her but is mostly tolerable and stopped thinking about him as the guy who’s biggest relationship was carried out mostly via webcam and hour long dinners at the Cheesecake Factory with a woman who had even less interest in romance than him - though more in sex - and started thinking of him as the guy whose hands only trembled against her thighs for a count of three and who knew how to kiss even if he wasn’t sure how to move right then.
It changes things. You don’t get to see someone like him naked, you don’t get to know what they kiss like, and then have the luxury of hitting the reset button when the sun comes up. That’s reserved for thirty-six hour benders and anonymous sex in the bathrooms of bars, men who drop their pants at the slightest hint of a promise of a warm place to sink into. Penny is familiar with this. Penny is what the spiteful call a slut and what her friends call someone comfortable with her sexuality. She knows what it’s like to pick up guys in bars and she knows what happens when you get into bed with friends.
Her and Leonard are better now. Better but not as good as before, as what they had been before the first failure, closely followed by the second. They eat dinner together and she puts on a smile and a go get them every time he finds a new girl to date, a new chance to get laid, but there are days she feels bitter and days she feels melancholy and days where she doesn’t feel anything at all. and on every single one of those days there is Sheldon doing laundry with her and nitpicking the detergent she uses or Sheldon in the apartment with takeout and the movie she’s going to force him to watch or some sci-fi series she pretends not to be interested in but secretly enjoys. Where there isn’t one there is the other now, and she doesn’t really know what she’s going to do if she has neither.
He lays out pairs of pants and neatly folded socks and announces “I’m going to take a shower” to her back and she musters up a nod and an entirely futile smile, only waiting as long as it takes for the shower to turn on to scribble down a note about hitting up the nearest bar and not to wait for her. She adds have fun and an exclamation point that’s just this side of too perfect, too enthusiastic, as an afterthought, right before she pockets her cell phone and grabs her purse.
-
Between a two and a half hour drive that turned into a near four hour drive with traffic, the time it took to find their hotel, check in, and the detour she takes to wander through some of the nearby shops, happy hour at the bar closest to their hotel has long since passed.
What she’s left with is stragglers and an atmosphere that varies depending on what area you happen to be sitting in. There are a few guys halfway out of their suits crowded into one corner of the bar, a girl that can’t be over twenty-two who doesn’t understand that no one in their right mind goes anywhere near bar nuts, a lone guy three seats down from her with a mostly untouched beer and a tour t-shirt pimping The Mountain Goats, and a group of very loudly annoyed geeks at the back table who apparently missed out on preview night tickets.
She guesses she should count herself as lucky that it’s only the loner guy who tries to talk to her, it’s just she’d be better off with the geeks - she could swear Sheldon has that exact Green Lantern t-shirt - and she’s not feeling very flirty right now, in the same jeans with a hole in the thigh that she’s been wearing since nine this morning and no makeup, unless you count chapstick and that quick sweep of mascara she performed while also trying to pull on her shoes. Not to mention Sheldon. She couldn’t fuck her way to forgetting that because they’re sharing a room and their beds are divided by roughly ten feet of off-white carpet and she doesn’t think it would work anyways.
Penny doesn’t know what she expects him to ask but “you did The Misanthrope at Knightsbridge last year, right?” definitely wasn’t one of the possibilities.
She stumbles over a “yeah” and her cheeks color like she’s had more to drink than she has and she warms to him fast, the way shallower woman do when a guy says they have a nice ass. Penny’s heard that. Heard nice ass and nice tits and all manner of things about her mouth but it gets old and it blends into nothing but white noise because the thing is Penny knows. She can see in the mirror same as anyone else can and the words seem to lack a certain weight to them. She gets told she has a nice body and what she really wants to hear is that she has a nice body of work.
It sounds stupid. There’s a chance that it is in fact stupid, but Penny grew up in a small town in a family that, for the most part, worked for where they got and then moved to the most superficial place on the planet only to immerse herself in the lives of men who carried with them more degrees and honors than most people twice their age and it’s like it’s in her DNA, to gravitate towards that mindset.
So when he tells her that he prefers Bolt’s adaption but that she played a much better Célimène than Keira Knightley did in Crimp’s version - both of which he saw live - she smiles against her will and lets him buy her a drink and tells him it’s her last night in the real world, watching his expression catch somewhere between amusement and confusion and trying not to laugh when it does. He tells her about the plays he saw in the West End when he was studying abroad and she tells him about her horrible audition for Twelfth Night and explains her departure from reality and escape into geekdom.
“You don’t seem like the type,” he says, which is funny because when she saw him and his t-shirt and his shaggy hair and tanned skin she thought surfer dude or garage band drummer, not part-time online theater critic who’s this close to teaching film at the local college.
“Yeah, well,” she shrugs, “sometimes people surprise you.”
It’s an utter cliché, and one he calls her on, but there is two hours of beer and conversation before she walks back to the hotel and calls it a night before most people have really started theirs.
-
Penny spends the hours from nine to eleven involved in a Say Yes To The Dress marathon, thanks to the hotel’s basic cable. She can’t sleep and she could use some superficiality in the absence of America’s Next Top Model, so she parks herself on the bed with the remote and texts Bernadette during commercials, flipping past the most recent addition to her contacts list - his name is Keith and he isn’t even from here but, instead, San Francisco; he isn’t in town for Comic Con either. She might text him when she gets back to Pasadena and, then, she might not. She’s waiting on this one, doesn’t want to lead him on but also doesn’t quite know what to do when she can’t even figure out her own relationship status.
By the time Sheldon gets back to the room her phone has gone silent and she’s sprawled at the foot of the bed, the eleven o’clock news doing a pre-taped tour of the convention center before cutting to an aerial view of the line outside of Hall H for the last ever Twilight panel in the morning. She absolutely doesn’t snort with laughter at the people who’ve been waiting in line since this morning because that would be mean, except she does because she’s still more buzzed than entirely sober.
She says “welcome back, soldier” before she looks at him, before she rolls onto her side in this half awkward, half provocative movement - unintended on both counts -- and his Adam’s apple bobs when he swallows and that’s when she sees that smear of red on his cheek. It’s faded, slightly, like he’s rubbed at it over the course of the evening but it’s still obvious, still this one thing out of place that wasn’t there before.
With Sheldon, it’s easy to tell. She can always tell.
“Was this a situation that involved face paint or lipstick?” She touches her hand to her own cheek, a gesture meant to add context to her question, only it winds up as a mirror to his own reflexive one. He stares at his fingers when he pulls his hand back, palm flat, and she can see from here that the red hasn’t rubbed off, that it bothers him that it hasn’t rubbed off. He hasn’t answered her, hasn’t said a word since he walked in the door, and confusion weighs heavily in the pit of her stomach, brings her to the brink of sobriety much in the same way that first blast of cold water from the showerhead can. “Are you okay?”
“There were some rather heavily made up women in incorrectly designed Wonder Woman costumes. I think Leonard left with one of them.” She braces herself for the pang of jealousy that doesn’t come and then she pushes herself up until she’s sitting on the edge of the bed, hands on her bare knees. “They were quite affectionate as well as inebriated.”
“It’ll wash off.” He narrows his eyes, doubtful, as if he’s already tried it which would explain the faded appearance. “Unless it’s that long-lasting stuff, then your best bet is makeup remover. There’s some in my bag.”
He nods but the tension remains in his shoulders. Sheldon is rigid, holds himself that way like he needs to be able to think out every single movement the way he seems to think out his words, cautious to a fault and far too concerned with control. He’s rigid on purpose but right now there’s unmistakable tension that’s holding him upright, that’s keeping him six inches from the doorway and no further and he looks the same as he did in the car. Like he understands that they’re dancing around something fragile here and one wrong step could throw everything into chaos he doesn’t want and can’t handle.
But he can grasp the weight of it all. He can wrap his head around that well enough and it’s that progress that leaves her hopeful, that moves her from the bed to where he stands, catching his wrist and leading him towards the bathroom, grabbing her makeup bag off of the dresser on the way. He follows, doesn’t flinch, because they’ve been here for a while, at a stage where grabbing and touching and prodding isn’t abnormal, and she no longer thinks when she does these things. She no longer remembers when a hug was a momentous occasion, even if the moment itself is burned into her memory and her skin, because they’ve been past that for long enough that she didn’t need to be drunk when she kissed him and he didn’t need to be coaxed into letting her.
She closes the bathroom door with her heel and fishes in her bag for makeup remover and tissues. Stares at him like this is the point where he sits down on the closed toilet lid and lets her clean him up, except he doesn’t, so she boosts herself up to sit on the edge of the sink, makes up for the height difference herself, and lets him remain standing. It’s backwards. They’re backwards. She wants the opposite of what she’s supposed to want, while he is able to wrap his head around complex ideas involving hypotheticals and the idea of multiple universes far easier than he can even begin to try to understand feelings, his own or otherwise. It makes them a little bit strange, a little bit unusual, and if people saw them walking down the street the last thing they would probably think is couple except, sometimes, Penny thinks they could be. Sometimes she thinks that the foundation they’ve built six years later is enough to stand on or at the very least try to.
Sometimes she just -
“There was no shortage of alcohol at the party,” he says, abruptly; “surely you didn’t have to go out of your way to find a bar.”
“It’s a five minute walk,” she shrugs. “And last I checked you guys went to get your comic books signed and go see that pilot screening, not to live it up in some stranger’s hotel room.”
Most of that’s true. For one, she’s been to Comic Con, she’s familiar with the in-room partying aspect of it, whether it’s the people who hold big marathons or the people who serve way too much alcohol at some impromptu get-together and end up with a pair of plastered strangers hooking up in their bathroom. For the other, Sheldon didn’t actually bring his comic books, but instead a sheet of blank labels to be signed, taken home, and then placed with - not on - the comic books because he simply has too many to lug through the halls.
“You’re done,” she says when all the red has disappeared, leaving clean skin in its wake and crumpled tissue in her hand. She tosses it in the trash, caps the remover, and somewhere in that span of time he must nod or give some signal that he’s about to walk away because he does, or tries to anyway, but the stupid, impulsive part of her brain kicks up a leg to block his path. It cuts him off mid-thigh and he clearly expects to find some approximation of a mischievous smile to be tugging at her lips when he looks back at her but it’s absent.
They’re not done.
“Penny,” he starts and she uses that leg to nudge him a little closer, enough that she can draw him in the rest of the way with her hands. There’s a good half-second between the moment he starts to cooperate with her maneuvering and the moment where their mouths meet, and it’s lucky, it’s lucky that he takes that last step forward because she forgets where she is, tries for leverage that she doesn’t have and slips a little on the edge of that porcelain sink and it’s only his thighs against her bent knees that keeps her from pitching forward, allows her to right herself.
He still makes this half surprised noise against her mouth and it’s a fight not to giggle but it’s even bigger fight not to just latch herself to him, walk them back into the bedroom and get his clothes off now now now -- turns out that buzz of hers hasn’t even come close to wearing off - and that’s the more important one so that’s where she focuses her energy. On moving with him instead of despite him.
On remembering to stop.
“Okay,” she flattens her hands against his shoulders, still a hard line of bone and muscle and tension underneath that, his hands never getting past the crook of her knee and the hesitant touch of his fingers against her side, restrained to something only slightly bolder than a graze. “We should really…deal with this. Before we spend the next four days in close proximity to each other non-stop.”
“Deal with what?”
“This,” the motion she makes with her hand more closely resembles Miss America waving to her fans than it does a gesture between the two of them. She lets her hand fall to curl around the edge of the sink and tries not to blush when she realizes he’s actually going to make her explain herself. “You and me. With the kissing and the,” she hears coitus in her head and almost chokes, finishes quickly, “sex. We should talk about that, since that’s not really something that you normally, you know, do.”
How the hell is this conversation so awkward? She doesn’t remember it ever being this awkward. Usually it’s just one two three go and off to the races. Usually there isn’t much talking besides some half-slurred i like you or that awkward morning after where you don’t know whether to cook breakfast or they are cooking breakfast and all you really want to do is guzzle down some coffee with that double dose of aspirin. The relationship part, if it ever gets that far, is something she has a tendency to fall into like a bad habit. Dinner and dancing and sex, short text messages and even shorter phone calls, and the inevitable expiration date that usually really is when things just blow up. Sometimes there is a half-shared apartment; sometimes she learns from her mistakes.
“Penny,” he says her name like he’s going to give her a lecture, like this is the beginning of one of his long, condescending speeches, and it’s a turnaround from two minutes ago when they were both just talking to fill dead air and expectations. “Just because I don’t tend to embark on relationships doesn’t mean I have no grasp on how they work.”
“You haven’t looked me straight in the eye since last Thursday.”
“Last Thursday you made an attempt at what could only very generously be called sneaking out of my room sometime after midnight, only to stumble over the coffee table and almost break a lamp, despite being overly familiar with the layout of the apartment. Nevertheless, my time with Leonard and Wolowitz has taught me that women who sneak out after sex generally do so out of regret and strongly dislike being pursued relentlessly after the fact. I was, as you would say, giving you your space.”
“Wait,” her brain is still trying to catch up, still trying to sort out the meaning from his overly clinical way of speaking. Sheldon doesn’t talk about feelings and thoughts, he talks about actions and facts. Concrete things that can’t be argued with, designed to ensure he wins arguments with relative ease. Words have meaning but, while she would’ve just stuck with that last bit, he prefers the history lesson driven by an unfaltering memory. “You thought I was bailing.”
His brow furrows, impatience and confusion fighting to take precedence. “What exactly would you have me think?”
That she was…well, she was bailing. She did a big thing badly and it freaked her out. It terrified her. It had her heading for the hills, locking herself in her apartment for the night and skipping out on dinner with the guys that next night. And that’s the thing - he’s right. She can see how that must have looked just like she can see now how his efforts at backing off were so easily misconstrued as him pushing her away, as him acting even more aloof towards her than usual.
She can see now where communication failed them miserably.
“I thought you wouldn’t - “ she stops herself, no use in rehashing a past that exists solely in her mind. Not when she knows otherwise now. He wants this and she wants this, and in storybook endings that means everything ends happily ever after as the music swells while in reality it means, at the very least, that this long weekend might not suck as badly as she thought it was going to. “This week makes a lot more sense now.”
“I tend to agree,” he concedes, fingers fluttering against her hips before they settle, arms extended, and he’s a few inches too far away for this to look natural. But that’s not the point. The point is his hands on her body, intentionally, and for purposes other than to drag her away from paying customers so he can remind her for the fifty-third time of their plans for their evening or how her presence is required on Saturday for paintball. It’s new. It’s nice.
It makes her pull him in by his bony elbows and slide a hand along his cheek right before she tilts her head up and kisses him again, except this time his tongue ends up in her mouth and this time she has little to no incentive to stop and this time she is seriously considering the bed. Or the table in the tiny little kitchen that might actually have its uses now that she thinks about it. Now that she has some perspective on the situation.
He moves closer and she slips back a little bit and then it’s his name against his lips in the way that doesn’t suggest encouragement and enjoyment so much as urgency. Thankfully, Sheldon can understand that variation in tone.
“You maybe want to take this elsewhere? Somewhere where there’s not a faucet digging into my back?”
Bed it is. They can figure out the table later.
-
In the morning, she is the only person in her bed. She is, however, not the only person on her bed.
The stretch of her legs as she rolls onto her side is hindered by the body on the edge of her bed and when she opens her eyes it’s to the back of Howard, facing away from her and talking to Raj, who clams up the second he notices she’s awake.
“Morning, Penny,” Leonard offers, from across the room, her head count coming up short. She inhales deep and smells soap and the faintest traces of mint on his pillowcase. Clean. From here she can’t see the clock but she can already tell it’s some ungodly early hour if she was able to sleep through the boys’ chatter.
“Why are you all in my bedroom?” She asks, even though the whole thing is her bedroom, really, and the kitchen is still small and guests don’t sit in the bathroom, so where else would they be? It’s just the fact that Howard’s got his butt on her bed like that’s not even a little odd and she’s pretty sure Raj is eating something that involves granola while Leonard drinks coffee from a mug and not a styrofoam cup. And she was asleep in the same room.
Life during Comic Con is strange.
Increasingly so, this year.
“There was a…girl,” Leonard kind of shrugs, like it’s no big deal and he scores with - presumably, from what Sheldon told her - hot chicks all time and he won’t probably be treasuring last night for the next month if the rest of this weekend doesn’t quite pan out.
Howard mutters something under his breath that has Raj rolling his eyes.
Whatever it is, Leonard hears it and, more importantly, he takes the bait. “I wasn’t the one who tried to pick up a girl by asking her if she was an electron.”
Translation: Howard did not get laid, therefore Howard is bitter. These are the times when she really wishes Bernadette hadn’t decided that they needed to take a break; Howard has a whole new arsenal of horrible, nerdy pickup lines and there’s nothing preventing him from using them now. She can prevent herself from hearing them though. “I don’t want to know.
( -- she will know, however, when they’re in line for the Firefly panel that is rumored to include an official announcement about another movie, and Howard turns to this girl who might be dressed up as Alice in Wonderland and says if you were an electron, I’d be a photon so I could take you to an excited state. Penny has to cover her mouth with both of her hands to keep from howling with laughter, Leonard’s shoulders are shaking with it, and Sheldon makes this tsk tsk noise that’s just this side of sighing about youth these days right before they simultaneously notice Raj is discreetly recording all of this on his cell phone. It will take Howard a third try that is not the charm before he finally puts that thing into retirement and tries to rethink his target audience and they will spend two more hours in that line before she gets to sit within a hundred feet of Captain Tightpants.)
“Where’s Sheldon?”
“Showering in anticipation of being accosted by hordes of people with questionable hygiene.” She can’t hear the shower running but there is movement, the shuffling of feet and the sound of the faucet turning on. “He said he woke up late. That’s got to be a first. What did you do to him last night?”
It’s not accusatory. There is no earthly reason why she should take it as such but her ears burn and her stomach twists funny - not painful, just strange and nervous and full of all sorts of feelings that she can’t label - and it takes effort not to bury her head in the pillows and pull the covers up over here because she’s at that point where every look Leonard gives her and every open-ended comment he makes is like a big flashing neon sign that says i know you’re sleeping with my roommate and she knows she’s paranoid but that knowledge doesn’t make those moments any less unnerving.
She runs her teeth over her bottom lip and forces herself to relax. “Oh, you know, the usual. Reality show reruns and two buck chuck always makes for an interesting night.” Half right; more like reruns and a bottle of water from the machine down the hall. “Speaking of which, I need coffee.”
Penny doesn’t even bother acknowledging the way Howard probably stares at her ass, thankfully clad in shorts and not just underwear, when she gets out of bed; she just makes a beeline for the kitchen that she suddenly finds herself thankful for.
-
Sheldon finds her before she finds the coffee creamer.
“Penny,” he says in this way that would be casual if he was waiting his turn for a go at the coffee pot or pouring himself cereal but he’s doing neither. He’s standing there, just out of sight of the doorway because nothing is private and they chose Comic Con weekend, where everyone is packed together like sardines to have conversations about feelings and fuck in hotel rooms. Because these are things that Penny does and Sheldon can be awfully inconvenient at times so it’s logical that one of those times would be now.
“I woke up to Howard on my bed,” she replies, because there was no good morning and it has not been a good morning anyway. “That’s something I’d like not to repeat. How long have they been here?”
“Long enough to make a mess,” Sheldon observes, which, not really, unless you count the fresh pot of coffee she is insanely grateful for, the packets of sweet and low that are strewn on the countertop next to an open stack of coffee filters, and a toaster that shows evidence of recent use. Sheldon probably does. “From what I understand, Leonard was attempting to avoid an awkward morning after.”
She manages an amused “boy do I understand that” before it kicks in that she is currently smack dab in the middle of her own morning after, only it’s not awkward. Or it’s awkward for reasons outside of Sheldon. And morning after generally denotes the morning after the first time you sleep together, only there was none the first time with them, there was just her leaving out their front door at one in the morning and flying under the radar for the remainder of that day. And now there’s this and she’s trying to figure out how to keep her face from ratting her out where her mouth won’t and he’s pulling his phone out of his pocket and bringing up the itinerary for the day like the significance of that statement in relation to their situation either doesn’t occur to him or doesn’t faze him.
Penny believes the former and hopes for the latter.
“We’re good, right?” She reaches around him for a towel to dry her hands off on and brushes her shoulder against his chest in the process and he merely tilts his head to get a better view of his phone. It’s the weirdest thing, how hyper aware she’s become of these little everyday things that she used to do without thinking.
He looks up long enough to spare her a cursory glance. “I don’t understand the question.”
“We’re,” she gestures between them, amends, “you and I, we’re okay. Last night didn’t, I don’t know, make things weird. Or weirder.”
“I don’t think so,” he replies, like he still doesn’t understand the question despite her attempt at rephrasing but he also doesn’t seem bothered by it. He seems relaxed but focused and that focus is split eighty-twenty, with her as the losing party. She doesn’t mind as much as she thinks she should, even if she feels this urge to check.
“Hey,” she says, to grab his attention for long enough to pull him towards the back of the kitchen, relatively safe from prying eyes -- as long as the bodies they’re attached to don’t decide to walk in on them - and kiss him. Lay one on him and wait for him to react, wait to see if he will. He does and the sigh she gives against his mouth is so full of relief it’s almost palpable.
They’re okay.
-
In line, after Alice in Wonderland pulls a look that’s more reminiscent of the Queen of Hearts -- off with his head -- she texts Bernadette and appeals to her good nature by informing her of just how desperate and pathetic Howard is without her. All she gets back is an oh dear and, last night, Penny could tell that she missed him, so there’s that.
During the panel, she takes a few pictures on her cell phone camera and there’s a moment where she contemplates sending one to Keith, to say that this is why she goes. Because she wants this. She wants the recognition and the fans and the interaction; craves it even. This is where she wants to be in five years, on that stage.
There’s just no concise way to put it, so she doesn’t, closes out the message window and reminds herself that it’s enough that she knows, maybe clearer than she did a week ago.
She knows what she wants.
-
fin.