fic; TBBT: some credit now, where credit is due.
title: some credit now, where credit is due.
fandom: TBBT.
pairing: Sheldon/Penny.
rating: PG-13, maybe slightly pushing R?
words: 2841.
spoilers: This is a sort of post ep for The Adhesive Duck Deficiency (03.08), so, that.
disclaimer: Fiction. I don't even know any real-life scientists, so.
notes: YOU GUYS. I wrote Big Bang Theory fic again. I didn't think that was going to happen! I didn't even sign up to write it for Yuletide because I was like, "Dude, you have written the same story eight times. You should stop." And then Community is so amazing, too! I don't have a lot of fandom space, I'm very single-minded! But then! kairos103 wanted me to write her a post ep ficlet for tonight and I was like !!!, I can do that! And so this is for her. And also for mordecai because she texted me after the episode aired on her coast and we had this conversation
Her: "JAMESON -- TBBT IS GOING TO MURDER YOU TONIGHT. ENJOY YOUR LAST HOURS OF LIVING."
Me: "Murder in a good way? Like while I'm having sex with Joel McHale? Or murder in a bad way like while I'm eating vegetables?"
Her: "you will see the face of god, and it's joel mchale."
And, seriosuly, she was RIGHT.
So here this is! I exercise a lot of my Leonard-caused angst from this season. Sorry!
The short list for why Penny breaks up with Leonard looks like this:
Sheldon.
The long list is much, much longer. It's got words Leonard probably doesn't even think she can spell, words like:
Instability
Incompatibility
Lack of attraction (crossed out three times in pen and once in Sharpie because what if someone found the list after she died and then she's not even there to defend herself against their accusations of shallowness? She's not gonna go down like that when she's dead.)
But for all the words on the long list, the short list actually says so much more.
If she starts at the very beginning, it's meeting the boys for the first time and, his outfit not included, being way more physically attracted to Sheldon. It's thinking she'd get drunk some night, hook up with the lanky neighbor guy scientist, and move out five awkward months later either to a big Hollywood house or back home to Nebraska.
Where it really starts is somewhere between that first day and three nights ago, making out with Sheldon in her bed, painkillers fading from the edges of her brain and, well, she didn't actually end up needing her Monday panties at all, did she?
Like, it's not that Penny thinks Sheldon's an asshole. She knows he's not.
(Leonard? Leonard's kind of an asshole. Which is probably part of what worked there.)
But Sheldon, he's just really, really set in his ways, really used to trying to put things in separate, neat, little areas. It's got to be annoying having to explain yourself in smaller words to people (to her), having to feel like you're totally different than everybody else. So when Sheldon does things like give her a hug on Christmas or screw up enough courage to actually drive her to the hospital, it's insane how much that says.
It's like, she has this one friend, and her boyfriend hated ballet and she loved it. The dude took ballet lessons and then fucking came out on stage during some ballet at the playhouse, all prance-y and everything and proposed to her. This guy was a linebacker on the high school football team and never wore anything tighter than carpenter jeans and here he comes, tippy-toeing out onto the stage in a leotard with a wedding ring.
When Sheldon drives a car for her, or touches her, or teaches her something, that's what it's like, sort of. She didn't used to let herself think about it, because she was supposed to be having something with Leonard, but, Sheldon, he's being nicer to her than any guy ever has. It doesn't seem like it -- it's, you know, proportional or on his own level or whatever, but it's there. She's not actually stupid. Or blind.
(Sometimes she wasn't even sure if he knew what he was doing, but a dude like Sheldon doesn't just do stuff without thinking about it, ever.)
If she circles back to Leonard on stuff like that, it's totally different. Leonard's out for himself, number one. He's out to get laid or get the girl or whatever comes with it for him, but she never felt like it was about her. Stuff like how he learned football to mark his territory around all her guy friends. He could've just peed in the corners or something.
Or how mean he can be to people, Sheldon, her, whoever.
She's the first to admit how grating Sheldon can be, but, again, he's not doing it to be a dick. That's just him. But Leonard, the second Sheldon gets in the way of something he wants, Leonard just turns on him. It's really awful to watch.
But she's always had that thing, that thing where some girls think they can change a guy or they'll grow to like him like that or everything will just be fine if she just gets through this beginning part. It was a combination of all three with Leonard. It was thinking they'd find common ground, or that suddenly her thing for tall dudes would just disappear because the love of her life was short, or that sex, yeah, sex, sometimes that's really bad in the beginning...right?
And while they can and did fix some of it, a lot of it was still there.
In a room at the ER, she has this conversation with Leonard:
"Leonard, I'm in the hospital. It's OK, Sheldon's with me, but I think I dislocated my shoulder."
"Should I change my name?"
"What."
"My name? I want to change it. Raj is going to be king of the rabbits by the way, oh! And Wolowitz slept with his cousin."
"LEONARD. Hospital."
"Oh my god, are you OK?"
She forgives him the first half of the conversation when he explains he ate some cookies from some hippie teacher. And that he's stoned and a total lightweight.
The second half is less easy to accept. Penny's been stoned for some important conversations in her life. Like when her childhood best friend told her she was pregnant at 16. Or when she found out her dog, Dottie, had been hit by a car. She didn't mean to be stoned for that stuff and she, like, swam through it. She understood that this stuff was serious and she better stop fucking giggling and straighten up and listen.
Leonard stops fucking giggling all right, but it's only for a few seconds and it's only long enough to say:
"Sheldon touched your boob?"
She swears at him, telling him he's missing the point and Sheldon actually really helped her out (she says that part loud enough that Sheldon, cowering behind a curtain, can hear it) and whatever, she'd just talk to him later.
Before they hang up he's back to giggling.
And all right, the boob touching thing, that was a Thing, she's not going to deny it, but maybe Leonard could've focused a little bit on something else, just for a second? Anytime somebody dislocates a part of their body, maybe that should be a priority in a very weak, wasted conversation.
But, OK, yeah. It was a Thing:
There are maybe a few moments when Penny can tell Sheldon is actually a guy. Maybe one right when they first met, a few other ones, but the boob thing, that was huge.
He's not stupid, not by a mile, and there's no way that as soon as his hand landed on her boob that he didn't know what it was. But he let his hand stay there, fucking cupping and then, when she asked about it, he massaged it.
All, "doesn't feel like an arm," and his accent and, oh man, that happened.
And she actually had to ask him to move it. Ask. That's not something somebody with no interest in girls does. And, you know what? If it was for science or something? Then there was no reason to brush her nipple with his thumb on the drawback.
She couldn't even look at him, not during any of it. The second his hand started the cupping, it was all over.
You can get through fumbling and awkwardness and lack of spark sometimes. You can figure out who likes what where or how and you can work at it. Plenty of super successful relationships get started like that. She figured her lot in life was maybe to get through it like that with Leonard.
But you can also just have a jolt right up your spine, crawling over your scalp and back down into your toes, like every part of your body is tingling and falling asleep at 100 miles an hour.
And, still sort of damp from her shower, all cold and hurt, Sheldon's long, warm hand sent a jolt.
It spins out from there.
In the car, on the way to the hospital, when she finds out he looked: that's another Thing.
(When she bites back asking him, soup tattoo aside, what he thought, that's another Thing.)
Then there's the hospital waiting room. She's flying back and forth between blinding pain in her shoulder and irritation at him and then he tries. He really, really tries. It's -- there's no other word for it -- it's creepy, but he tries. Fingers twitching inches away from her, despite having touched her naked just an hour ago, he tries. And she's so confused and anxious and how can there be glimpses of one thing, but then the wall and everything just goes back up, always, like nothing happened?
The rest of the hospital trip is a lot of blurring, punctuated by that awful cell phone conversation with Leonard, the doctor popping her shoulder back in and, at the very end, Sheldon half carrying her out to the car.
(It's not like he picked her up or anything, it's just -- she was so out of it, so loopy, he slung an arm around her waist, and wrapped hers around him and out they went, into the parking lot. He maybe touched her boob again buckling her seatbelt. Maybe. But probably.)
Driving as slow as Sheldon did, the best and worst part of the painkillers wore off as Pasadena crawled by all fuzzy out the windows. When they got home, she was just happy, happy and numb and, OK, still strung out, but also more than a little grateful for Sheldon.
So she flirted with him, just some, just a tiny bit.
And his little defense, his little Sheldon human/robot wall, shed a few tiny pebbles, and then he just gave in.
He sang Soft Kitty with her. In rounds. They sang it more times than she had fingers to count.
Then, when she said, "Will you just lay here with me?" he didn't say anything. But when she tugged on his shirt sleeve, he maneuvered behind her, all awkward limbs and lack of grace, right into the empty spot on the bed.
Maybe she was just a little bit, like, courageous-er (there is definitely a word that means what she wants, she just -- can't think of it) because of the drugs, and maybe she shouldn't have been so hard on Leonard for not being able to straighten up through his own high, but then there she was, all asking sort of inappropriate things of Sheldon.
"Can you just, like, scratch my back? Not rub it, scratch it, but lightly, like for a soft kitty --" (round 11!)
She rolled on to her side.
"My mom used to do it when I was sick because I don't like soup like you do, I mean, it's OK, but I don't know, I always just liked this bett--"
He started scratching her back.
Of all the things Penny had bought on late night infomercials, she didn't like any of them better than the Clapper. Drunk, tired, hungover, whatever, she ended up in bed without turning the lights off a lot, but then, clap!clap! and, hey, lights off.
There, with Sheldon scratching her back: clap!clap!
He stopped scratching her back when she'd clapped, but all she had to do was make one little noise and he started right back up.
(If Leonard had taken cues like that, maybe it wouldn't have taken them so long to figure out physical stuff, ahem.)
The light from the living room was still on, lighting the room just barely, all dim and sort of -- sexy. She could hear Sheldon breathing, measured and low behind her, but she could also feel it, hot and close on the back of her neck. He wasn't touching her anywhere but on the back, and then just with the very tips of his fingers, but it still felt like being swallowed in a warm bath or wrapped up in a heavy blanket. It was everywhere.
Even when she spends an entire hour thinking about it at work the next day, she can't pinpoint the exact moment he stopped scratching.
Somehow they were just laying there, in that barely-there light, on her bed.
The stuff that happened next, it was that slow, quiet, crackling, syrup kind of stuff. The stuff that makes skin feel like it's pushing away from muscle and all you ever want is to speed things up, but to make it last forever, too, because there'll be no going back once you're there.
Penny scoots back, just the tiniest bit. She's barely brushing the outline of Sheldon.
He leans forward, into her. It could just be getting more comfortable, but she knows a guy being deliberate when she sees -- feels one.
And then they're touching, they're spooning. His breath is even closer to her neck because so is his mouth -- she can feel it just around the sides of her ear, where her hair is falling down.
She edges back again, further into him, and when his hand, the one that had been resting on his side, slides down around her stomach, it's all so quiet.
This isn't sleep-spooning, this is layered, with-a-purpose spooning. It's pretty fucking hot.
She arches her neck and his lips graze just below her ear and then she's turning under his arm, toward him. She stops just short of rolling onto her other side, because her shoulder is still throbbing, but there, on her back, she's almost, like, under him, his head sort of hanging over hers.
It's weird to see Sheldon like this, in this light, with this mood, but the muscles in his jaw are working and he's blinking very, very slowly, eyes all wide and serious.
There's a second or a minute or an hour where they stay like that, electric air and noiseless swallowing and then, suddenly, without noticing who went first, they're kissing.
It's slow and easy and it's lips, then it's tongues. She tries to wind a hand up his side, but her shoulder is killing her, so she pulls him over her by hooking a leg over his.
He's half on top of her, on the good shoulder and she gets her other arm free, wrapping it around him before scratching his back a hell of a lot differently than he was scratching hers earlier. He nudges a leg in between her own and it's all so (relatively) fluid that she has the brief thought that she's hallucinating it all.
Any second now, Sheldon will say something Sheldon and she'll come crashing back to reality.
(Apparently the Sheldon thing to say in this situation is a soft, groan-like mmm when she half-grinds, half-slides her leg against him.)
He's got his hand down her Monday panties (the ones he picked out) and she's got his shirt off, biting at this amazing piece of muscle thing where his shoulder meets his neck when her cell phone goes off.
Leonard's not stoned anymore and he just realized what she'd said earlier and he's so sorry and he's on his way home right now, yes, right now, Wolowitz.
They don't go any further than that, Sheldon gets up to wash his hands and tut at the mark she left on his neck and she falls asleep before Leonard even gets home, but the damage is done.
It's not like she makes a habit of cheating on boyfriends, especially with their best friends. She's been on the other side of that and it hurts, it's shitty, worst thing in the world, and so she feels awful, she really does. But Sheldon (long, lean muscle and soap smell and oh god, back on track, back on track) or no, the thing with Leonard was going to have to end soon anyway.
(Which is something she should've realized when she lied about having to work to get out of a camping trip with him.)
When she breaks up with him, she decides against mentioning Sheldon, who's been alternately avoiding her and invading her personal space apparently totally on whims only he understands.
Leonard gets sad and then gets angry and then gets sad because he says he knew, too. He wasn't himself in the relationship and the guy he was, that guy was crazy. It doesn't make her feel any better about being so shitty, but he says he probably couldn't have kept it up for much longer either, even if he wanted to. He says something about her on a pedestal.
("I spent too much time thinking about losing you and not enough time having you," he says. Which is about the nicest, most considerate thing he's said to her in months.)
At least he realizes, she tells herself.
The Thing with Sheldon, it stays a Thing for four more months, a few more quiet make outs, a few more rounds around the bases, one or two slides home.
Then it's a Thing-thing, like a girlfriend thing. He doesn't say the words until she prompts him to, but, "extensive data supported this conclusion, Penny. I merely assumed you had reached it as well."
When he hugs her that Christmas, it's before the gifts, not after.
&&.
fandom: TBBT.
pairing: Sheldon/Penny.
rating: PG-13, maybe slightly pushing R?
words: 2841.
spoilers: This is a sort of post ep for The Adhesive Duck Deficiency (03.08), so, that.
disclaimer: Fiction. I don't even know any real-life scientists, so.
notes: YOU GUYS. I wrote Big Bang Theory fic again. I didn't think that was going to happen! I didn't even sign up to write it for Yuletide because I was like, "Dude, you have written the same story eight times. You should stop." And then Community is so amazing, too! I don't have a lot of fandom space, I'm very single-minded! But then! kairos103 wanted me to write her a post ep ficlet for tonight and I was like !!!, I can do that! And so this is for her. And also for mordecai because she texted me after the episode aired on her coast and we had this conversation
Her: "JAMESON -- TBBT IS GOING TO MURDER YOU TONIGHT. ENJOY YOUR LAST HOURS OF LIVING."
Me: "Murder in a good way? Like while I'm having sex with Joel McHale? Or murder in a bad way like while I'm eating vegetables?"
Her: "you will see the face of god, and it's joel mchale."
And, seriosuly, she was RIGHT.
So here this is! I exercise a lot of my Leonard-caused angst from this season. Sorry!
The short list for why Penny breaks up with Leonard looks like this:
Sheldon.
The long list is much, much longer. It's got words Leonard probably doesn't even think she can spell, words like:
Instability
Incompatibility
Lack of attraction (crossed out three times in pen and once in Sharpie because what if someone found the list after she died and then she's not even there to defend herself against their accusations of shallowness? She's not gonna go down like that when she's dead.)
But for all the words on the long list, the short list actually says so much more.
If she starts at the very beginning, it's meeting the boys for the first time and, his outfit not included, being way more physically attracted to Sheldon. It's thinking she'd get drunk some night, hook up with the lanky neighbor guy scientist, and move out five awkward months later either to a big Hollywood house or back home to Nebraska.
Where it really starts is somewhere between that first day and three nights ago, making out with Sheldon in her bed, painkillers fading from the edges of her brain and, well, she didn't actually end up needing her Monday panties at all, did she?
Like, it's not that Penny thinks Sheldon's an asshole. She knows he's not.
(Leonard? Leonard's kind of an asshole. Which is probably part of what worked there.)
But Sheldon, he's just really, really set in his ways, really used to trying to put things in separate, neat, little areas. It's got to be annoying having to explain yourself in smaller words to people (to her), having to feel like you're totally different than everybody else. So when Sheldon does things like give her a hug on Christmas or screw up enough courage to actually drive her to the hospital, it's insane how much that says.
It's like, she has this one friend, and her boyfriend hated ballet and she loved it. The dude took ballet lessons and then fucking came out on stage during some ballet at the playhouse, all prance-y and everything and proposed to her. This guy was a linebacker on the high school football team and never wore anything tighter than carpenter jeans and here he comes, tippy-toeing out onto the stage in a leotard with a wedding ring.
When Sheldon drives a car for her, or touches her, or teaches her something, that's what it's like, sort of. She didn't used to let herself think about it, because she was supposed to be having something with Leonard, but, Sheldon, he's being nicer to her than any guy ever has. It doesn't seem like it -- it's, you know, proportional or on his own level or whatever, but it's there. She's not actually stupid. Or blind.
(Sometimes she wasn't even sure if he knew what he was doing, but a dude like Sheldon doesn't just do stuff without thinking about it, ever.)
If she circles back to Leonard on stuff like that, it's totally different. Leonard's out for himself, number one. He's out to get laid or get the girl or whatever comes with it for him, but she never felt like it was about her. Stuff like how he learned football to mark his territory around all her guy friends. He could've just peed in the corners or something.
Or how mean he can be to people, Sheldon, her, whoever.
She's the first to admit how grating Sheldon can be, but, again, he's not doing it to be a dick. That's just him. But Leonard, the second Sheldon gets in the way of something he wants, Leonard just turns on him. It's really awful to watch.
But she's always had that thing, that thing where some girls think they can change a guy or they'll grow to like him like that or everything will just be fine if she just gets through this beginning part. It was a combination of all three with Leonard. It was thinking they'd find common ground, or that suddenly her thing for tall dudes would just disappear because the love of her life was short, or that sex, yeah, sex, sometimes that's really bad in the beginning...right?
And while they can and did fix some of it, a lot of it was still there.
In a room at the ER, she has this conversation with Leonard:
"Leonard, I'm in the hospital. It's OK, Sheldon's with me, but I think I dislocated my shoulder."
"Should I change my name?"
"What."
"My name? I want to change it. Raj is going to be king of the rabbits by the way, oh! And Wolowitz slept with his cousin."
"LEONARD. Hospital."
"Oh my god, are you OK?"
She forgives him the first half of the conversation when he explains he ate some cookies from some hippie teacher. And that he's stoned and a total lightweight.
The second half is less easy to accept. Penny's been stoned for some important conversations in her life. Like when her childhood best friend told her she was pregnant at 16. Or when she found out her dog, Dottie, had been hit by a car. She didn't mean to be stoned for that stuff and she, like, swam through it. She understood that this stuff was serious and she better stop fucking giggling and straighten up and listen.
Leonard stops fucking giggling all right, but it's only for a few seconds and it's only long enough to say:
"Sheldon touched your boob?"
She swears at him, telling him he's missing the point and Sheldon actually really helped her out (she says that part loud enough that Sheldon, cowering behind a curtain, can hear it) and whatever, she'd just talk to him later.
Before they hang up he's back to giggling.
And all right, the boob touching thing, that was a Thing, she's not going to deny it, but maybe Leonard could've focused a little bit on something else, just for a second? Anytime somebody dislocates a part of their body, maybe that should be a priority in a very weak, wasted conversation.
But, OK, yeah. It was a Thing:
There are maybe a few moments when Penny can tell Sheldon is actually a guy. Maybe one right when they first met, a few other ones, but the boob thing, that was huge.
He's not stupid, not by a mile, and there's no way that as soon as his hand landed on her boob that he didn't know what it was. But he let his hand stay there, fucking cupping and then, when she asked about it, he massaged it.
All, "doesn't feel like an arm," and his accent and, oh man, that happened.
And she actually had to ask him to move it. Ask. That's not something somebody with no interest in girls does. And, you know what? If it was for science or something? Then there was no reason to brush her nipple with his thumb on the drawback.
She couldn't even look at him, not during any of it. The second his hand started the cupping, it was all over.
You can get through fumbling and awkwardness and lack of spark sometimes. You can figure out who likes what where or how and you can work at it. Plenty of super successful relationships get started like that. She figured her lot in life was maybe to get through it like that with Leonard.
But you can also just have a jolt right up your spine, crawling over your scalp and back down into your toes, like every part of your body is tingling and falling asleep at 100 miles an hour.
And, still sort of damp from her shower, all cold and hurt, Sheldon's long, warm hand sent a jolt.
It spins out from there.
In the car, on the way to the hospital, when she finds out he looked: that's another Thing.
(When she bites back asking him, soup tattoo aside, what he thought, that's another Thing.)
Then there's the hospital waiting room. She's flying back and forth between blinding pain in her shoulder and irritation at him and then he tries. He really, really tries. It's -- there's no other word for it -- it's creepy, but he tries. Fingers twitching inches away from her, despite having touched her naked just an hour ago, he tries. And she's so confused and anxious and how can there be glimpses of one thing, but then the wall and everything just goes back up, always, like nothing happened?
The rest of the hospital trip is a lot of blurring, punctuated by that awful cell phone conversation with Leonard, the doctor popping her shoulder back in and, at the very end, Sheldon half carrying her out to the car.
(It's not like he picked her up or anything, it's just -- she was so out of it, so loopy, he slung an arm around her waist, and wrapped hers around him and out they went, into the parking lot. He maybe touched her boob again buckling her seatbelt. Maybe. But probably.)
Driving as slow as Sheldon did, the best and worst part of the painkillers wore off as Pasadena crawled by all fuzzy out the windows. When they got home, she was just happy, happy and numb and, OK, still strung out, but also more than a little grateful for Sheldon.
So she flirted with him, just some, just a tiny bit.
And his little defense, his little Sheldon human/robot wall, shed a few tiny pebbles, and then he just gave in.
He sang Soft Kitty with her. In rounds. They sang it more times than she had fingers to count.
Then, when she said, "Will you just lay here with me?" he didn't say anything. But when she tugged on his shirt sleeve, he maneuvered behind her, all awkward limbs and lack of grace, right into the empty spot on the bed.
Maybe she was just a little bit, like, courageous-er (there is definitely a word that means what she wants, she just -- can't think of it) because of the drugs, and maybe she shouldn't have been so hard on Leonard for not being able to straighten up through his own high, but then there she was, all asking sort of inappropriate things of Sheldon.
"Can you just, like, scratch my back? Not rub it, scratch it, but lightly, like for a soft kitty --" (round 11!)
She rolled on to her side.
"My mom used to do it when I was sick because I don't like soup like you do, I mean, it's OK, but I don't know, I always just liked this bett--"
He started scratching her back.
Of all the things Penny had bought on late night infomercials, she didn't like any of them better than the Clapper. Drunk, tired, hungover, whatever, she ended up in bed without turning the lights off a lot, but then, clap!clap! and, hey, lights off.
There, with Sheldon scratching her back: clap!clap!
He stopped scratching her back when she'd clapped, but all she had to do was make one little noise and he started right back up.
(If Leonard had taken cues like that, maybe it wouldn't have taken them so long to figure out physical stuff, ahem.)
The light from the living room was still on, lighting the room just barely, all dim and sort of -- sexy. She could hear Sheldon breathing, measured and low behind her, but she could also feel it, hot and close on the back of her neck. He wasn't touching her anywhere but on the back, and then just with the very tips of his fingers, but it still felt like being swallowed in a warm bath or wrapped up in a heavy blanket. It was everywhere.
Even when she spends an entire hour thinking about it at work the next day, she can't pinpoint the exact moment he stopped scratching.
Somehow they were just laying there, in that barely-there light, on her bed.
The stuff that happened next, it was that slow, quiet, crackling, syrup kind of stuff. The stuff that makes skin feel like it's pushing away from muscle and all you ever want is to speed things up, but to make it last forever, too, because there'll be no going back once you're there.
Penny scoots back, just the tiniest bit. She's barely brushing the outline of Sheldon.
He leans forward, into her. It could just be getting more comfortable, but she knows a guy being deliberate when she sees -- feels one.
And then they're touching, they're spooning. His breath is even closer to her neck because so is his mouth -- she can feel it just around the sides of her ear, where her hair is falling down.
She edges back again, further into him, and when his hand, the one that had been resting on his side, slides down around her stomach, it's all so quiet.
This isn't sleep-spooning, this is layered, with-a-purpose spooning. It's pretty fucking hot.
She arches her neck and his lips graze just below her ear and then she's turning under his arm, toward him. She stops just short of rolling onto her other side, because her shoulder is still throbbing, but there, on her back, she's almost, like, under him, his head sort of hanging over hers.
It's weird to see Sheldon like this, in this light, with this mood, but the muscles in his jaw are working and he's blinking very, very slowly, eyes all wide and serious.
There's a second or a minute or an hour where they stay like that, electric air and noiseless swallowing and then, suddenly, without noticing who went first, they're kissing.
It's slow and easy and it's lips, then it's tongues. She tries to wind a hand up his side, but her shoulder is killing her, so she pulls him over her by hooking a leg over his.
He's half on top of her, on the good shoulder and she gets her other arm free, wrapping it around him before scratching his back a hell of a lot differently than he was scratching hers earlier. He nudges a leg in between her own and it's all so (relatively) fluid that she has the brief thought that she's hallucinating it all.
Any second now, Sheldon will say something Sheldon and she'll come crashing back to reality.
(Apparently the Sheldon thing to say in this situation is a soft, groan-like mmm when she half-grinds, half-slides her leg against him.)
He's got his hand down her Monday panties (the ones he picked out) and she's got his shirt off, biting at this amazing piece of muscle thing where his shoulder meets his neck when her cell phone goes off.
Leonard's not stoned anymore and he just realized what she'd said earlier and he's so sorry and he's on his way home right now, yes, right now, Wolowitz.
They don't go any further than that, Sheldon gets up to wash his hands and tut at the mark she left on his neck and she falls asleep before Leonard even gets home, but the damage is done.
It's not like she makes a habit of cheating on boyfriends, especially with their best friends. She's been on the other side of that and it hurts, it's shitty, worst thing in the world, and so she feels awful, she really does. But Sheldon (long, lean muscle and soap smell and oh god, back on track, back on track) or no, the thing with Leonard was going to have to end soon anyway.
(Which is something she should've realized when she lied about having to work to get out of a camping trip with him.)
When she breaks up with him, she decides against mentioning Sheldon, who's been alternately avoiding her and invading her personal space apparently totally on whims only he understands.
Leonard gets sad and then gets angry and then gets sad because he says he knew, too. He wasn't himself in the relationship and the guy he was, that guy was crazy. It doesn't make her feel any better about being so shitty, but he says he probably couldn't have kept it up for much longer either, even if he wanted to. He says something about her on a pedestal.
("I spent too much time thinking about losing you and not enough time having you," he says. Which is about the nicest, most considerate thing he's said to her in months.)
At least he realizes, she tells herself.
The Thing with Sheldon, it stays a Thing for four more months, a few more quiet make outs, a few more rounds around the bases, one or two slides home.
Then it's a Thing-thing, like a girlfriend thing. He doesn't say the words until she prompts him to, but, "extensive data supported this conclusion, Penny. I merely assumed you had reached it as well."
When he hugs her that Christmas, it's before the gifts, not after.
&&.