fic; TBBT: Experiments on Gravitation.
So. I wrote The Big Bang Theory fic. This is just like The Middleman all over again where like, two people on my f-list even know/read this fandom. You guys should really defer to me on all your TV watching. um. Anyway, it's Penny/Sheldon.
title: Experiments on Gravitation.
fandom: The Big Bang Theory.
pairing: Penny/Sheldon
rating: PG-13 pushing R?
words: 4785.
disclaimer: Fiction. I don't even know any real-life scientists, so.
There are about six million risks in pointing out that Sheldon has missed anything. Evidence, facts, data, clues, doctor's appointments, it's not worth it, ever, to imply that there's something Sheldon didn't catch (unless it's sarcasm or other basic human stuff). So when Penny opens the door to her apartment to hear Leonard's voice in the stairwell and he's saying something like, "Really? You didn't notice that?" in the confused nasal tone he only uses on her and Sheldon, she just shuts the door again.
She has no way of knowing that she probably should've interrupted that conversation and saved herself like, a lot, of trouble, so she just walks back into her kitchen and has a second bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which, turns out, is the only kids' cereal with an adequate fiber content that doesn't compromise taste. Sure, she didn't know to stop the conversation in the stairs, but she knows that. Great.
Penny finds out three days later that the conversation in the stairs was about how Sheldon treats her, which is, as Leonard puts it: with something that almost resembles respect and certainly better than he has any other female in their entire friendship and that that indicates a higher level of intimacy than just friendship, especially when looked at relative to how he treats everyone else.
She's developed this filter in her brain that hears what the guys are saying and spits it out in normal-person English, so what she actually hears Leonard saying is: I told Sheldon I think he has a crush on you.
Penny just shakes her head and laughs and wonders for a second when Leonard got over her enough that he's apparently encouraging other dudes to try and date her. Not that Sheldon is now, or has ever been, a "dude," but, still.
There's not really any fallout for almost a week, although she's hyperaware of him, checking to see if there will be. Sheldon doesn't just let things go. Ever.
She spends her Thursday night with all of them, watching TV that Sheldon only laughs at in really weird places and even then it's these really bizarre little giggles that shake his chest, like he's trying to choke them back and stay quiet. She wouldn't have even noticed except Wolowitz is next to her on the other side of the couch and keeps inching toward her, driving her more and more into Sheldon's general area (not touching), so she can sort of feel the couch cushions move when he does his little laugh.
But then on Saturday, it's clear that Sheldon actually heard Leonard and wasn't just not listening because he was too busy working out problems with cats in boxes or whatever. Because on Saturday, Sheldon knocks his triple-triple knock on her door and when she opens it, he looks almost (almost) pleasantly surprised and he says, "Hello Penny," and then says nothing else. He doesn't ask her for something or give her any loaves of bread or anything else he normally does. He just looks at her.
"Hello Sheldon," and she feels bad for giving him a confused, little eyebrow raise because he gets a look she can't place on his face until she remembers Leonard said Sheldon seemed (in his own way) into it when Scully did that on The X-Files. She doesn't want to mess with him or anything.
"As you know, Saturday night is my laundry night. I'm given to understand that women are sometimes afraid of basements, so I thought I would see if you'd like to accompany me to the basement to do your laundry, so that I might protect you in the event of danger."
Both of her eyebrows go up this time and she almost says:
"I did my laundry on Wednesday."
And she almost says:
"You're going to protect ME?"
And she almost laughs.
But instead she says:
"Um, sure, Sheldon. Come on in, I just have to find my laundry."
As she walks around the living room, picking up and smelling different clothes, she watches him out of the corner of her eye and he looks like he really, really wants to say something, but he doesn't. Which is weird. He pretty much always has something to say about the state of her apartment.
He doesn't say anything though, so she does.
"Yeah, sorry about the mess, I haven't...cleaned."
"Nothing to worry about, Penny. I myself can relate to a schedule that occasionally doesn't allow for basic housekeeping tasks. Why, just the other day, I had to put the groceries away without alphabetizing the grains because I was running late for a symposium on --"
It's a little bit confusing, this not-entirely-rude Sheldon and so she cuts him off.
"OK! Got it, ready to go."
Once they're in the basement, Sheldon actually tries making small talk. And she has to give him credit, he does seem to be trying...something, at least.
He starts 14 different conversations (it's so abnormal she'd immediately started counting), but 12 of them are about comics and go nowhere. She thought they'd reached common ground on Iron Man, but it turns out, imaginary crush or no, Sheldon doesn't take kindly to her insinuation that Pepper and Tony should've just made out and gotten it over with. Something about people who only watch the movies and don't understand years of canon.
It's not until they're moving clothes to the dryer that anything actually sticks and they spend the rest of the night talking about IKEA. She likes the tables, he's figured out that there's a specific formula to where they open stores. The next one will be in Cleveland in 2011, if the economy doesn't get any worse.
When the laundry's done and she's learned the exact quantity of Swedish meatballs one would have to sell to make a profit on them at $1.99 per serving factoring in wholesale cost and shipping, she figures he's gotten whatever this is out of his system. They go back upstairs, into their own apartments and she goes to bed thinking that tomorrow things will go back to normal.
They do not go back to normal. Nevermind the fact that she spent the night dreaming about assembling a bookcase with Sheldon, by 9 a.m., her cell phone is beeping with a text message from him, waking her up anyway.
She'd forgotten he knew how to text message, but there it was, unholy and blinking on the little screen: Dear Penny, Are you awake? Sincerely, Sheldon.
Of course he addressed his texts like that. Of course.
"Dear Sheldon, No. Sincerely, Penny."
She counts all the way to 46 and puts on pants and a hoodie before she hears the knocks on the door.
"Hello, Penny."
"Sheldon, it's early. I have to work in a few hours. What gives?"
"It's come to my attention that you're not eating a proper breakfast."
"What? How did that come to your attention?"
She feels a little bit guilty about the edge in her voice, but seriously, it's early.
"I was surveying the wreckage, I mean, 'countertop,' in your apartment yesterday and of all the food detritus scattered about there and in open cupboards, not one suitable breakfast meal could be put together. In any possible combination."
"What if my breakfast food was in a closed cupboard?"
"Impossible, not one of your cupboards was closed. What was that for anyway? Some sort of feng shui thing? Because I've read several papers on --"
"No, there was like, a rat or a bug or something, I don't know, something was moving and I was looking for it and -- wait, why are you here again?"
"I thought I would invite you to our apartment for breakfast. It's my morning to cook and I've made pancakes in the shape of everyone's favorite molecules. Two-dimensional, of course."
She considers telling him she doesn't have a favorite molecule, but she's already up and someone else cooked, that's good enough for her.
"Give me 20 minutes and I'll be over."
It goes like this for the next two months. Every single day he finds some reason to visit her, but he never does anything, it never goes anywhere. He never explains what this is all about. But it's nice, having something to do, even if it's just watching Jeopardy! and driving Sheldon nuts knowing the answers to pop culture questions. ("What possible relevance could the name of Britney Spears' first single have to the measurement of intelligence?")
One Saturday night in October, her friend Lisa asks her if she wants to go out or if she's staying in to do laundry with her boyfriend and she's confused about it for an hour before she realizes Lisa meant Sheldon. She blows off laundry night to do karaoke with Lisa and realizes she feels guilty right around the time she's perusing the song selections from Fiddler on the Roof. She calls it an early night and gets home just in time to force Sheldon into watching Saturday Night Live.
Somewhere around Weekend Update, she realizes maybe they are dating, a little bit, but without sex or kissing or any real physical contact of any kind. It's like Pushing Daisies all up in here (the, ahem, scientific inaccuracies of temporary reanimation aside). She doesn't mind so much except for when she really thinks hard about it. So she doesn't.
On Nov. 12, her all-time favorite thing (strawberry Pop Tarts after a night of drinking) is replaced with a totally new and unexpected thing: Sheldon running. Or watching Sheldon run, whatever. There's no crumbly, candy-like frosting on it, sure, but watching Sheldon run is like watching someone give birth. He starts out all awkward and it's weird and maybe a little bit gross, but it morphs into something awesome.
After about 100 yards you can tell that he stops thinking about it and then his muscles and adrenaline and everything no one ever associates with Sheldon takes over and then Sheldon just looks like a normal dude. He actually looks graceful and like he's built to run, which is he, with all those long limbs (science!) and it's really neat to watch. Or maybe it's that it helps her not question herself so much, seeing him look like maybe somebody she would normally date, or someone normal period.
Unfortunately, she's only seen him run this one time and he's chasing down George Takei. Next to her on the street, Leonard watches him run, too, but doesn't seem to appreciate it. He just shakes his head and mumbles something about reassembling the Starship Enterprise and what a problem McCoy is going to be.
It doesn't occur to her until later, lying in her bed, that she maybe, sort of, checked Sheldon out a little bit. But whatever, he totally checked her out when she showed up to their superhero Halloween party in her Wonder Woman outfit. Or maybe he was checking for costume inconsistencies. Who knows anymore.
Her parents end up coming for Christmas and because she can't shake him (and doesn't want to -- at this point Sheldon is as much a part of her daily routine as her curling iron), he comes to dinner with them. She even picks a place that serves pad thai for him.
They love him and her mom keeps saying things like, "Penny's never dated a doctor before!" and "My, aren't you tall!" and Sheldon doesn't really say anything back, but he looks uncomfortable.
On the drive home from dropping her parents off at the hotel ("Trust me, Mom, it's better this way, my apartment is so tiny."), he looks at her from the passenger seat and awkwardly clears his throat.
"I know, I know, that was weird, I'm sorry."
Without any preamble, he says, "I was raised not to ever be impolite to other people's parents. It seemed rude to correct them."
"They'll figure it out eventually. Don't worry."
They spend the rest of the ride in silence and on Christmas morning, there's a gift to him from her parents under her tree. It's a Batman T-shirt. She hides the Robin one they got her and feels weird.
Her New Year's Resolution is to break out of this Sheldon haze. She's never going to get a real boyfriend running around with him all the time and so when he shows up with menus for Mediterranean Monday, she tells him she's working a double and just walks around the track at the gym instead.
She avoids him without guilt for only three days and then starts feeling awful. Leonard even comes over to talk to her about it and she can't think of anything to say except, "I have to."
When she sees him at the mailboxes a full week after New Year's, she realizes he actually looks sad. And not just sad because his routine has been interrupted, but real sad, human sad and she thinks about how different he is now than when she met him. Hell, his Christmas present to her was his spot on the couch -- that was huge. Even if it was just for the day.
In some half-formed way, she decides she'll just strike out with him. If he's banished her on his terms, maybe he won't look like someone just told him Stan Lee died.
She forwards him a YouTube video of some fat guy singing showtunes and waits for her strike. He just writes back: I had already seen this on Digg. But it is funny. Haha. Thank you."
She deliberately interrupts Wii Bowling Night six times with made up problems. But every time he just pauses the game and listens to her. He even stops Wolowitz mid-disgusting pun.
It's getting to be too much. She hasn't had a single date yet, she's too wrapped up in hurting his feelings and so it's time for the Big One.
On Thursday night, she waits until she sees Leonard come back with the food, gives it enough time that Sheldon has probably already put his plate together and brazenly strolls in the apartment, ready to take a pepperoni right off his pizza slice and eat it.
Instead she walks in to an apartment empty except for Leonard, who's standing in the kitchen pulling down dishes.
"Where is everyone?"
"Wolowitz and Raj took Sheldon to the comic book store. Penny, he's really upset. Whatever he said to you, you know he didn't mean it, that's just Sheldon. And you guys have been hanging out so much, you should be used to it by --"
"He didn't say anything. That's just it -- we've been hanging out so much I haven't done anything. I haven't bought a new outfit in months, my last haircut only cost $12, I don't even know what's going on anymore."
"What do you mean you 'don't know what's going on anymore'? You're basically dating Sheldon. Well, sort of, right?"
"Uh, NO. I mean, I guess that's sort of crossed my mind, but it's not like we, you know, do anything, jesus, Leonard, are we really having this conversation? It's SHELDON."
"Penny, I'm going to show you something, but this might be even worse than his mom's phone number. He can't know I showed you."
Before she can say anything, Leonard's at Sheldon's desk, opening the top drawer and pulling out a little black leather book.
"This is his field journal."
"His what?"
"His field journal. When he's conducting an experiment, he takes notes. You're sort of, or you were, an experiment."
She's moving toward Leonard now, hand extended for the book.
"I was what? Give me that."
Leonard flinches and looks like he just realized there was dairy in his dinner.
"I don't know, Penny, now that I think about it, maybe this isn't such a good idea."
"You started this, Leonard."
"I know, but I wasn't thinking a second ago, I just...he's been so sad. It's really scary. It's emotion or something. We didn't think he had those."
"Of course he has those! And I didn't mean started this right now, I meant started this before, when you told him he liked me."
And she's surprised herself by saying it, but Leonard looks surprised, too, and she uses the opportunity to grab the book out of his hands.
"I'm looking at this now, and if you know what's good for you, you'll let me." She makes a little lassoing gesturing with her other hand and gives him the junior rodeo look.
"All right, fine. But I'm going to say I tried to stop you. I'm on strike two."
"So he is still giving out strikes. I thought maybe he'd stopped because I couldn't seem to get one."
"Penny, yesterday I got one for 'breathing too loudly.'"
She doesn't have anything to say to that, so instead she sits down on the opposite side of the couch and opens the book.
She's never seen field notes before and hasn't used the scientific method since sixth grade science class, but she's able to piece together everything.
The book starts dated the day after Leonard told Sheldon about how he treats Penny and it goes on from there. It looks like he was testing to see if he did really like her, there are questions, notes about how much time he spends with her in one sitting, about how he feels about her on different days, in different outfits.
She was right about the Wonder Woman costume.
There's a little thing, what are they called? Pundit square? With her features and his, there are calculations and numbers and is that her bra size? Waist-to-hip ratio?
This is fucking creepy. She slams the book shut and tosses it on the table, looking at Leonard.
"I knew I shouldn't have showed you."
"No, I'm glad I know. This whole time I was just a little lab rat or something. Great, that's awesome."
"Penny, no. He stopped taking notes a long time ago. I think the last parts, I think he was using it like a diary. This is just how he processes information."
She's so angry and hurt and confused that she doesn't even hear the door open, doesn't notice Wolowitz, Raj and Sheldon trooping back into the apartment until Wolowitz calls out, "My lady!"
She looks up in time to see Sheldon looking from her to the table to Leonard and then back to her.
Raj seems to figure out that something's up and whispers in Wolowitz's ear, who immediately yells out, "We are leaving! Wait, why are we leaving? I don't want to go." But Raj is already out the door and Leonard's heading toward it, grabbing his jacket on the way, so Wolowitz follows.
Sheldon's still standing in the same spot, staring just at the table now. He doesn't say anything, although he jumps a little when Leonard slams the door behind them.
The way he looks, she can't be angry at him right now, he looks like he doesn't understand and she's never seen him look like that. Maybe Leonard's right, maybe Sheldon is just trying to process everything.
"Do you want to explain that?"
He clears his throat and puffs up to a normal Sheldon stance.
"I think it very clearly speaks for itself. I pride myself on being thorough in my observations."
"So I was an experiment?"
"Penny, you have to understand, I have no basis for male-female interactions outside a familial setting. Leonard had proposed something to me --"
"That you had a crush on me."
"That my feelings for you went beyond that of an acquaintance, beyond friendship. I had to test the validity of that theory."
She looks up at him and his face is a really pathetic mixture of apologetic, depressed and posturing. She feels herself calm down even more, she almost feels normal, this is the game, this is how they act when they're playing at it.
"And what did you find out?"
"The tests weren't extensive enough and I abandoned my research. I was just 'hanging out,' Penny."
The awkward way he says "hanging out" makes her smile and he exhales loudly.
"That's a strike, Sheldon. Breathing too loudly."
He smirks and says, "Give me the web address and I'll take your class."
She ignores him, but moves a little on the couch, giving him the OK to sit down.
"So you didn't end up with any results? Why did you stop the experiment?"
"There were aspects that I didn't have the facilities to test."
"Aspects like?"
He fidgets his fingers in his lap.
"Subject agreement and physical compatibility."
"So in Sheldon-speak that means what? Whether I was into it and whether there were butterflies?"
"I believe, yes, the colloquial term for the chemical reaction sexual stimulation produces is 'butterflies.'"
"Well, I'd hate for your research to be inconclusive. You want to finish this thing?"
"I've already said, I abandoned my research. Penny, I really did." He fumbles with his hand until it lands clumsily on her shoulder.
It's pretty wild to be relating to Sheldon like this, this is almost like some sort of weird, science-y foreplay.
"The Dr. Sheldon Cooper I know wouldn't just give up like that."
His face isn't giving anything away and she wonders if maybe she pushed it too far, maybe it's too much and he just wasn't into it or something.
"You know, I watched the same videos as everyone else in health class. Of course, I was 10, but I imagine I retained more than your average hormonal teenage male anyway. However, I'm still unclear as to what comes next."
"Uh, we're not like, fertilizing ovum or anything and --"
Screw it.
"I'm a big 'ol five, Sheldon."
"You're a wha--"
She kisses him.
His lips are chapped, but warm, and he doesn't do anything for a second, so she figures he's trying to learn and she might as well teach him something so she starts moving her mouth. She kisses his bottom lip and kisses his top lip and tilts her head to get closer.
She moves her hands to his face and that seems to be it, the crash course, because he's kissing her back now. He moves the hand on her shoulder to her neck and the other hand behind her head and then he opens his mouth a little bit.
She stops analyzing.
She slides her tongue into his mouth and Sheldon's is already moving, just a little bit, and then his tongue is in her mouth and she moves her hands off his face and down to his chest and then around to his back. His hands are moving, too, and somehow they end up lying down, maybe she pulled him a little bit, Penny on her back, Sheldon on top of her, their heads in Sheldon's spot, and she can feel muscles and bones under the fabric of his T-shirt and his hand moves down past her ass to the back of her thigh and he's hitching her leg up around him and before she can think, she's grinding up into him a little bit. Jesus.
He stops kissing her at that and looks down at her, his hair all messed up and his face all red and he looks like Sheldon after paintball or Sheldon after running after George Takei and he smells like soap and shampoo and clean and she feels him release the tension in his body and then he's pressed so close onto her that she can feel him twitching underneath his jeans and he looks embarrassed so she brings a hand up behind his head and pulls his mouth down to her again.
She totally loses track of everything after that. Somehow his hand is up inside the back of her shirt and then so is his other hand and then the clasp on her bra is undone (and she'll spend whole days after this trying to figure out how he knew how to undo a bra, but it's probably something like "a simple hook and eye clasp, Penny") and then she feels like maybe the student is surpassing the teacher here and so just as his hand is skirting around her side to come around the front, she moves away a hand from his ass around to under his belt buckle to cup him through his jeans. He makes a noise into her mouth that trails off into the door being opened --
The door being opened.
She hears something in a plastic bag hit the floor with a thud and she hears Raj make a "meep!" and then she turns her head in time with Sheldon's to see the guys standing just inside the doorway looking horrified and awed.
Sheldon lurches up, taking her with him and then they're both awkwardly half sitting up on the couch and Penny can feel her bra flapping in the back and the neck of Sheldon's shirt is all stretched out. She scrambles off of him, but thinks better of standing up, and sinks back into the couch cushions, eventually coming to rest knee-to-knee to with Sheldon, both of them, sitting almost straight up, feet flat on the floor.
It takes her a few seconds to realize no one is looking at her except Sheldon. She's looking at the guys, they're looking at him and he's looking at her.
This is one of those times that any normal person that went to college would've already experienced -- walking in on friends making out. But she's the only normal person in the room and so she's the only one with anything to draw from.
"Hey guys." And she twists around a little bit with her hands, trying to reconnect her bra, but it doesn't work. It just makes them shift their focus to her.
"Um, hey, Penny," Leonard offers.
Wolowitz is just standing there flat-out gaping and she realizes quickly just what's going on. She made out, like, a lot, with Sheldon. Sheldon.
Sure, she'd spent the better part of a year hanging out with him every. single. day., but no one really thought it'd end up like this, right? She looks over to him, to see how he's processing everything, and she remembers why she likes him so much, just in general, when he immediately looks composed and ready to handle this.
"We were just finishing up research on a theory. I was misinterpreting one of the variables, but it appears we have the solution now."
Wolowitz: still gaping.
Leonard smiles nervously, like he's going to puke, but it's OK and says, "Well, we're...sorry to have interrupted testing. I wasn't aware the apartment had been conferred lab status."
Raj nods in a really manic way, which snaps Wolowitz out of it.
"No, we most definitely are NOT sorry. Is that a love bite I spy on your neck, Penny?" and he leers.
She looks to Sheldon for something, anything, and she sees him adjust himself in his jeans and then he stands.
"Gentlemen, it's getting late and you know that I must be in bed promptly at 11, so if you'll see yourselves out."
He sounds oddly formal, even for Sheldon, but it works and Raj and Wolowitz shuffle back out of the apartment.
Leonard has stopped looking anyone in the eye, but clears his throats and strides past them and the living room to the hallway.
"Right. Bed. Uh, I'm just gonna," and he gestures to his door with his hand before disappearing inside it.
She finally pushes herself up off the couch, bra still loose in the back and stands next to Sheldon.
"Well, that was, that was really fun, Sheldon." She smiles at him, a little embarrassed, but it's him, he's embarrassing all the time and doesn't notice or care, so she's not going to either.
"I found that a pleasurable way to pass the time as well, Penny." And if he were any other guy, he'd have finished the sentence with a wink, but he's not, he's Sheldon, so he just looks at her.
"I guess that experiment's over," she bends down and picks up his notebook off the table and tosses it to him. He catches it and nods quickly, like he's shaking something off.
"Should I...well, social convention would dictate that I walk you home now?"
"It's just across the hall, Sheldon, I think I can make it."
She walks over and opens the door, smiling at him, a little exasperated, before she leaves. He looks like someone just told him there's a way to disprove gravity.
The next day she leaves a brand new black notebook on his desk.
&&&.
title: Experiments on Gravitation.
fandom: The Big Bang Theory.
pairing: Penny/Sheldon
rating: PG-13 pushing R?
words: 4785.
disclaimer: Fiction. I don't even know any real-life scientists, so.
There are about six million risks in pointing out that Sheldon has missed anything. Evidence, facts, data, clues, doctor's appointments, it's not worth it, ever, to imply that there's something Sheldon didn't catch (unless it's sarcasm or other basic human stuff). So when Penny opens the door to her apartment to hear Leonard's voice in the stairwell and he's saying something like, "Really? You didn't notice that?" in the confused nasal tone he only uses on her and Sheldon, she just shuts the door again.
She has no way of knowing that she probably should've interrupted that conversation and saved herself like, a lot, of trouble, so she just walks back into her kitchen and has a second bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which, turns out, is the only kids' cereal with an adequate fiber content that doesn't compromise taste. Sure, she didn't know to stop the conversation in the stairs, but she knows that. Great.
Penny finds out three days later that the conversation in the stairs was about how Sheldon treats her, which is, as Leonard puts it: with something that almost resembles respect and certainly better than he has any other female in their entire friendship and that that indicates a higher level of intimacy than just friendship, especially when looked at relative to how he treats everyone else.
She's developed this filter in her brain that hears what the guys are saying and spits it out in normal-person English, so what she actually hears Leonard saying is: I told Sheldon I think he has a crush on you.
Penny just shakes her head and laughs and wonders for a second when Leonard got over her enough that he's apparently encouraging other dudes to try and date her. Not that Sheldon is now, or has ever been, a "dude," but, still.
There's not really any fallout for almost a week, although she's hyperaware of him, checking to see if there will be. Sheldon doesn't just let things go. Ever.
She spends her Thursday night with all of them, watching TV that Sheldon only laughs at in really weird places and even then it's these really bizarre little giggles that shake his chest, like he's trying to choke them back and stay quiet. She wouldn't have even noticed except Wolowitz is next to her on the other side of the couch and keeps inching toward her, driving her more and more into Sheldon's general area (not touching), so she can sort of feel the couch cushions move when he does his little laugh.
But then on Saturday, it's clear that Sheldon actually heard Leonard and wasn't just not listening because he was too busy working out problems with cats in boxes or whatever. Because on Saturday, Sheldon knocks his triple-triple knock on her door and when she opens it, he looks almost (almost) pleasantly surprised and he says, "Hello Penny," and then says nothing else. He doesn't ask her for something or give her any loaves of bread or anything else he normally does. He just looks at her.
"Hello Sheldon," and she feels bad for giving him a confused, little eyebrow raise because he gets a look she can't place on his face until she remembers Leonard said Sheldon seemed (in his own way) into it when Scully did that on The X-Files. She doesn't want to mess with him or anything.
"As you know, Saturday night is my laundry night. I'm given to understand that women are sometimes afraid of basements, so I thought I would see if you'd like to accompany me to the basement to do your laundry, so that I might protect you in the event of danger."
Both of her eyebrows go up this time and she almost says:
"I did my laundry on Wednesday."
And she almost says:
"You're going to protect ME?"
And she almost laughs.
But instead she says:
"Um, sure, Sheldon. Come on in, I just have to find my laundry."
As she walks around the living room, picking up and smelling different clothes, she watches him out of the corner of her eye and he looks like he really, really wants to say something, but he doesn't. Which is weird. He pretty much always has something to say about the state of her apartment.
He doesn't say anything though, so she does.
"Yeah, sorry about the mess, I haven't...cleaned."
"Nothing to worry about, Penny. I myself can relate to a schedule that occasionally doesn't allow for basic housekeeping tasks. Why, just the other day, I had to put the groceries away without alphabetizing the grains because I was running late for a symposium on --"
It's a little bit confusing, this not-entirely-rude Sheldon and so she cuts him off.
"OK! Got it, ready to go."
Once they're in the basement, Sheldon actually tries making small talk. And she has to give him credit, he does seem to be trying...something, at least.
He starts 14 different conversations (it's so abnormal she'd immediately started counting), but 12 of them are about comics and go nowhere. She thought they'd reached common ground on Iron Man, but it turns out, imaginary crush or no, Sheldon doesn't take kindly to her insinuation that Pepper and Tony should've just made out and gotten it over with. Something about people who only watch the movies and don't understand years of canon.
It's not until they're moving clothes to the dryer that anything actually sticks and they spend the rest of the night talking about IKEA. She likes the tables, he's figured out that there's a specific formula to where they open stores. The next one will be in Cleveland in 2011, if the economy doesn't get any worse.
When the laundry's done and she's learned the exact quantity of Swedish meatballs one would have to sell to make a profit on them at $1.99 per serving factoring in wholesale cost and shipping, she figures he's gotten whatever this is out of his system. They go back upstairs, into their own apartments and she goes to bed thinking that tomorrow things will go back to normal.
They do not go back to normal. Nevermind the fact that she spent the night dreaming about assembling a bookcase with Sheldon, by 9 a.m., her cell phone is beeping with a text message from him, waking her up anyway.
She'd forgotten he knew how to text message, but there it was, unholy and blinking on the little screen: Dear Penny, Are you awake? Sincerely, Sheldon.
Of course he addressed his texts like that. Of course.
"Dear Sheldon, No. Sincerely, Penny."
She counts all the way to 46 and puts on pants and a hoodie before she hears the knocks on the door.
"Hello, Penny."
"Sheldon, it's early. I have to work in a few hours. What gives?"
"It's come to my attention that you're not eating a proper breakfast."
"What? How did that come to your attention?"
She feels a little bit guilty about the edge in her voice, but seriously, it's early.
"I was surveying the wreckage, I mean, 'countertop,' in your apartment yesterday and of all the food detritus scattered about there and in open cupboards, not one suitable breakfast meal could be put together. In any possible combination."
"What if my breakfast food was in a closed cupboard?"
"Impossible, not one of your cupboards was closed. What was that for anyway? Some sort of feng shui thing? Because I've read several papers on --"
"No, there was like, a rat or a bug or something, I don't know, something was moving and I was looking for it and -- wait, why are you here again?"
"I thought I would invite you to our apartment for breakfast. It's my morning to cook and I've made pancakes in the shape of everyone's favorite molecules. Two-dimensional, of course."
She considers telling him she doesn't have a favorite molecule, but she's already up and someone else cooked, that's good enough for her.
"Give me 20 minutes and I'll be over."
It goes like this for the next two months. Every single day he finds some reason to visit her, but he never does anything, it never goes anywhere. He never explains what this is all about. But it's nice, having something to do, even if it's just watching Jeopardy! and driving Sheldon nuts knowing the answers to pop culture questions. ("What possible relevance could the name of Britney Spears' first single have to the measurement of intelligence?")
One Saturday night in October, her friend Lisa asks her if she wants to go out or if she's staying in to do laundry with her boyfriend and she's confused about it for an hour before she realizes Lisa meant Sheldon. She blows off laundry night to do karaoke with Lisa and realizes she feels guilty right around the time she's perusing the song selections from Fiddler on the Roof. She calls it an early night and gets home just in time to force Sheldon into watching Saturday Night Live.
Somewhere around Weekend Update, she realizes maybe they are dating, a little bit, but without sex or kissing or any real physical contact of any kind. It's like Pushing Daisies all up in here (the, ahem, scientific inaccuracies of temporary reanimation aside). She doesn't mind so much except for when she really thinks hard about it. So she doesn't.
On Nov. 12, her all-time favorite thing (strawberry Pop Tarts after a night of drinking) is replaced with a totally new and unexpected thing: Sheldon running. Or watching Sheldon run, whatever. There's no crumbly, candy-like frosting on it, sure, but watching Sheldon run is like watching someone give birth. He starts out all awkward and it's weird and maybe a little bit gross, but it morphs into something awesome.
After about 100 yards you can tell that he stops thinking about it and then his muscles and adrenaline and everything no one ever associates with Sheldon takes over and then Sheldon just looks like a normal dude. He actually looks graceful and like he's built to run, which is he, with all those long limbs (science!) and it's really neat to watch. Or maybe it's that it helps her not question herself so much, seeing him look like maybe somebody she would normally date, or someone normal period.
Unfortunately, she's only seen him run this one time and he's chasing down George Takei. Next to her on the street, Leonard watches him run, too, but doesn't seem to appreciate it. He just shakes his head and mumbles something about reassembling the Starship Enterprise and what a problem McCoy is going to be.
It doesn't occur to her until later, lying in her bed, that she maybe, sort of, checked Sheldon out a little bit. But whatever, he totally checked her out when she showed up to their superhero Halloween party in her Wonder Woman outfit. Or maybe he was checking for costume inconsistencies. Who knows anymore.
Her parents end up coming for Christmas and because she can't shake him (and doesn't want to -- at this point Sheldon is as much a part of her daily routine as her curling iron), he comes to dinner with them. She even picks a place that serves pad thai for him.
They love him and her mom keeps saying things like, "Penny's never dated a doctor before!" and "My, aren't you tall!" and Sheldon doesn't really say anything back, but he looks uncomfortable.
On the drive home from dropping her parents off at the hotel ("Trust me, Mom, it's better this way, my apartment is so tiny."), he looks at her from the passenger seat and awkwardly clears his throat.
"I know, I know, that was weird, I'm sorry."
Without any preamble, he says, "I was raised not to ever be impolite to other people's parents. It seemed rude to correct them."
"They'll figure it out eventually. Don't worry."
They spend the rest of the ride in silence and on Christmas morning, there's a gift to him from her parents under her tree. It's a Batman T-shirt. She hides the Robin one they got her and feels weird.
Her New Year's Resolution is to break out of this Sheldon haze. She's never going to get a real boyfriend running around with him all the time and so when he shows up with menus for Mediterranean Monday, she tells him she's working a double and just walks around the track at the gym instead.
She avoids him without guilt for only three days and then starts feeling awful. Leonard even comes over to talk to her about it and she can't think of anything to say except, "I have to."
When she sees him at the mailboxes a full week after New Year's, she realizes he actually looks sad. And not just sad because his routine has been interrupted, but real sad, human sad and she thinks about how different he is now than when she met him. Hell, his Christmas present to her was his spot on the couch -- that was huge. Even if it was just for the day.
In some half-formed way, she decides she'll just strike out with him. If he's banished her on his terms, maybe he won't look like someone just told him Stan Lee died.
She forwards him a YouTube video of some fat guy singing showtunes and waits for her strike. He just writes back: I had already seen this on Digg. But it is funny. Haha. Thank you."
She deliberately interrupts Wii Bowling Night six times with made up problems. But every time he just pauses the game and listens to her. He even stops Wolowitz mid-disgusting pun.
It's getting to be too much. She hasn't had a single date yet, she's too wrapped up in hurting his feelings and so it's time for the Big One.
On Thursday night, she waits until she sees Leonard come back with the food, gives it enough time that Sheldon has probably already put his plate together and brazenly strolls in the apartment, ready to take a pepperoni right off his pizza slice and eat it.
Instead she walks in to an apartment empty except for Leonard, who's standing in the kitchen pulling down dishes.
"Where is everyone?"
"Wolowitz and Raj took Sheldon to the comic book store. Penny, he's really upset. Whatever he said to you, you know he didn't mean it, that's just Sheldon. And you guys have been hanging out so much, you should be used to it by --"
"He didn't say anything. That's just it -- we've been hanging out so much I haven't done anything. I haven't bought a new outfit in months, my last haircut only cost $12, I don't even know what's going on anymore."
"What do you mean you 'don't know what's going on anymore'? You're basically dating Sheldon. Well, sort of, right?"
"Uh, NO. I mean, I guess that's sort of crossed my mind, but it's not like we, you know, do anything, jesus, Leonard, are we really having this conversation? It's SHELDON."
"Penny, I'm going to show you something, but this might be even worse than his mom's phone number. He can't know I showed you."
Before she can say anything, Leonard's at Sheldon's desk, opening the top drawer and pulling out a little black leather book.
"This is his field journal."
"His what?"
"His field journal. When he's conducting an experiment, he takes notes. You're sort of, or you were, an experiment."
She's moving toward Leonard now, hand extended for the book.
"I was what? Give me that."
Leonard flinches and looks like he just realized there was dairy in his dinner.
"I don't know, Penny, now that I think about it, maybe this isn't such a good idea."
"You started this, Leonard."
"I know, but I wasn't thinking a second ago, I just...he's been so sad. It's really scary. It's emotion or something. We didn't think he had those."
"Of course he has those! And I didn't mean started this right now, I meant started this before, when you told him he liked me."
And she's surprised herself by saying it, but Leonard looks surprised, too, and she uses the opportunity to grab the book out of his hands.
"I'm looking at this now, and if you know what's good for you, you'll let me." She makes a little lassoing gesturing with her other hand and gives him the junior rodeo look.
"All right, fine. But I'm going to say I tried to stop you. I'm on strike two."
"So he is still giving out strikes. I thought maybe he'd stopped because I couldn't seem to get one."
"Penny, yesterday I got one for 'breathing too loudly.'"
She doesn't have anything to say to that, so instead she sits down on the opposite side of the couch and opens the book.
She's never seen field notes before and hasn't used the scientific method since sixth grade science class, but she's able to piece together everything.
The book starts dated the day after Leonard told Sheldon about how he treats Penny and it goes on from there. It looks like he was testing to see if he did really like her, there are questions, notes about how much time he spends with her in one sitting, about how he feels about her on different days, in different outfits.
She was right about the Wonder Woman costume.
There's a little thing, what are they called? Pundit square? With her features and his, there are calculations and numbers and is that her bra size? Waist-to-hip ratio?
This is fucking creepy. She slams the book shut and tosses it on the table, looking at Leonard.
"I knew I shouldn't have showed you."
"No, I'm glad I know. This whole time I was just a little lab rat or something. Great, that's awesome."
"Penny, no. He stopped taking notes a long time ago. I think the last parts, I think he was using it like a diary. This is just how he processes information."
She's so angry and hurt and confused that she doesn't even hear the door open, doesn't notice Wolowitz, Raj and Sheldon trooping back into the apartment until Wolowitz calls out, "My lady!"
She looks up in time to see Sheldon looking from her to the table to Leonard and then back to her.
Raj seems to figure out that something's up and whispers in Wolowitz's ear, who immediately yells out, "We are leaving! Wait, why are we leaving? I don't want to go." But Raj is already out the door and Leonard's heading toward it, grabbing his jacket on the way, so Wolowitz follows.
Sheldon's still standing in the same spot, staring just at the table now. He doesn't say anything, although he jumps a little when Leonard slams the door behind them.
The way he looks, she can't be angry at him right now, he looks like he doesn't understand and she's never seen him look like that. Maybe Leonard's right, maybe Sheldon is just trying to process everything.
"Do you want to explain that?"
He clears his throat and puffs up to a normal Sheldon stance.
"I think it very clearly speaks for itself. I pride myself on being thorough in my observations."
"So I was an experiment?"
"Penny, you have to understand, I have no basis for male-female interactions outside a familial setting. Leonard had proposed something to me --"
"That you had a crush on me."
"That my feelings for you went beyond that of an acquaintance, beyond friendship. I had to test the validity of that theory."
She looks up at him and his face is a really pathetic mixture of apologetic, depressed and posturing. She feels herself calm down even more, she almost feels normal, this is the game, this is how they act when they're playing at it.
"And what did you find out?"
"The tests weren't extensive enough and I abandoned my research. I was just 'hanging out,' Penny."
The awkward way he says "hanging out" makes her smile and he exhales loudly.
"That's a strike, Sheldon. Breathing too loudly."
He smirks and says, "Give me the web address and I'll take your class."
She ignores him, but moves a little on the couch, giving him the OK to sit down.
"So you didn't end up with any results? Why did you stop the experiment?"
"There were aspects that I didn't have the facilities to test."
"Aspects like?"
He fidgets his fingers in his lap.
"Subject agreement and physical compatibility."
"So in Sheldon-speak that means what? Whether I was into it and whether there were butterflies?"
"I believe, yes, the colloquial term for the chemical reaction sexual stimulation produces is 'butterflies.'"
"Well, I'd hate for your research to be inconclusive. You want to finish this thing?"
"I've already said, I abandoned my research. Penny, I really did." He fumbles with his hand until it lands clumsily on her shoulder.
It's pretty wild to be relating to Sheldon like this, this is almost like some sort of weird, science-y foreplay.
"The Dr. Sheldon Cooper I know wouldn't just give up like that."
His face isn't giving anything away and she wonders if maybe she pushed it too far, maybe it's too much and he just wasn't into it or something.
"You know, I watched the same videos as everyone else in health class. Of course, I was 10, but I imagine I retained more than your average hormonal teenage male anyway. However, I'm still unclear as to what comes next."
"Uh, we're not like, fertilizing ovum or anything and --"
Screw it.
"I'm a big 'ol five, Sheldon."
"You're a wha--"
She kisses him.
His lips are chapped, but warm, and he doesn't do anything for a second, so she figures he's trying to learn and she might as well teach him something so she starts moving her mouth. She kisses his bottom lip and kisses his top lip and tilts her head to get closer.
She moves her hands to his face and that seems to be it, the crash course, because he's kissing her back now. He moves the hand on her shoulder to her neck and the other hand behind her head and then he opens his mouth a little bit.
She stops analyzing.
She slides her tongue into his mouth and Sheldon's is already moving, just a little bit, and then his tongue is in her mouth and she moves her hands off his face and down to his chest and then around to his back. His hands are moving, too, and somehow they end up lying down, maybe she pulled him a little bit, Penny on her back, Sheldon on top of her, their heads in Sheldon's spot, and she can feel muscles and bones under the fabric of his T-shirt and his hand moves down past her ass to the back of her thigh and he's hitching her leg up around him and before she can think, she's grinding up into him a little bit. Jesus.
He stops kissing her at that and looks down at her, his hair all messed up and his face all red and he looks like Sheldon after paintball or Sheldon after running after George Takei and he smells like soap and shampoo and clean and she feels him release the tension in his body and then he's pressed so close onto her that she can feel him twitching underneath his jeans and he looks embarrassed so she brings a hand up behind his head and pulls his mouth down to her again.
She totally loses track of everything after that. Somehow his hand is up inside the back of her shirt and then so is his other hand and then the clasp on her bra is undone (and she'll spend whole days after this trying to figure out how he knew how to undo a bra, but it's probably something like "a simple hook and eye clasp, Penny") and then she feels like maybe the student is surpassing the teacher here and so just as his hand is skirting around her side to come around the front, she moves away a hand from his ass around to under his belt buckle to cup him through his jeans. He makes a noise into her mouth that trails off into the door being opened --
The door being opened.
She hears something in a plastic bag hit the floor with a thud and she hears Raj make a "meep!" and then she turns her head in time with Sheldon's to see the guys standing just inside the doorway looking horrified and awed.
Sheldon lurches up, taking her with him and then they're both awkwardly half sitting up on the couch and Penny can feel her bra flapping in the back and the neck of Sheldon's shirt is all stretched out. She scrambles off of him, but thinks better of standing up, and sinks back into the couch cushions, eventually coming to rest knee-to-knee to with Sheldon, both of them, sitting almost straight up, feet flat on the floor.
It takes her a few seconds to realize no one is looking at her except Sheldon. She's looking at the guys, they're looking at him and he's looking at her.
This is one of those times that any normal person that went to college would've already experienced -- walking in on friends making out. But she's the only normal person in the room and so she's the only one with anything to draw from.
"Hey guys." And she twists around a little bit with her hands, trying to reconnect her bra, but it doesn't work. It just makes them shift their focus to her.
"Um, hey, Penny," Leonard offers.
Wolowitz is just standing there flat-out gaping and she realizes quickly just what's going on. She made out, like, a lot, with Sheldon. Sheldon.
Sure, she'd spent the better part of a year hanging out with him every. single. day., but no one really thought it'd end up like this, right? She looks over to him, to see how he's processing everything, and she remembers why she likes him so much, just in general, when he immediately looks composed and ready to handle this.
"We were just finishing up research on a theory. I was misinterpreting one of the variables, but it appears we have the solution now."
Wolowitz: still gaping.
Leonard smiles nervously, like he's going to puke, but it's OK and says, "Well, we're...sorry to have interrupted testing. I wasn't aware the apartment had been conferred lab status."
Raj nods in a really manic way, which snaps Wolowitz out of it.
"No, we most definitely are NOT sorry. Is that a love bite I spy on your neck, Penny?" and he leers.
She looks to Sheldon for something, anything, and she sees him adjust himself in his jeans and then he stands.
"Gentlemen, it's getting late and you know that I must be in bed promptly at 11, so if you'll see yourselves out."
He sounds oddly formal, even for Sheldon, but it works and Raj and Wolowitz shuffle back out of the apartment.
Leonard has stopped looking anyone in the eye, but clears his throats and strides past them and the living room to the hallway.
"Right. Bed. Uh, I'm just gonna," and he gestures to his door with his hand before disappearing inside it.
She finally pushes herself up off the couch, bra still loose in the back and stands next to Sheldon.
"Well, that was, that was really fun, Sheldon." She smiles at him, a little embarrassed, but it's him, he's embarrassing all the time and doesn't notice or care, so she's not going to either.
"I found that a pleasurable way to pass the time as well, Penny." And if he were any other guy, he'd have finished the sentence with a wink, but he's not, he's Sheldon, so he just looks at her.
"I guess that experiment's over," she bends down and picks up his notebook off the table and tosses it to him. He catches it and nods quickly, like he's shaking something off.
"Should I...well, social convention would dictate that I walk you home now?"
"It's just across the hall, Sheldon, I think I can make it."
She walks over and opens the door, smiling at him, a little exasperated, before she leaves. He looks like someone just told him there's a way to disprove gravity.
The next day she leaves a brand new black notebook on his desk.
&&&.