notes: before anyone from either shipping camp strangles me, i'll spell out the plot— unrequited, one-sided s/p, eventual s/a and l/p endgame.
So you're, like, one of those Beautiful Mind genius guys or something?
He had— another, before Amy, still lurking in the recesses of his skull.
She burst into his pristine life as potent as the sunlight, blinding and unasked and unstoppable, stomping on everything she could reach and putting her feet up on the coffee table. Five foot four inch tornado. Besides that drunken grope with Beverly (Dr. Hofstadter, Leonard's mother) no woman he wasn't related to had ever touched him. The desire sort of bloomed inside his stomach and suddenly he was making all kinds of excuses to challenge her, to bring her down to where she had brought him. She wasn't intelligent, not in the academic sense he prized so highly, but she had a dominion he did not understand and he was thinking about her in the shower instead of differential equations and— it was too much. Like growing an extra limb, like waking up somewhere he hadn't known was asleep.
(The hero always peeks, he'd said; catching his first glimpse of skin and sinew and full undercurve of breast—)
it lit a fire in him, one he'd always assumed lay dormant. A small, persistent heartbeat, pulsing deep between his legs, and he didn't know what to do with it he didn't know a damn thing in this alien landscape. After spending a lifetime honing his smug mastery over desires of the flesh, it was so so very humbling to find that he could be felled by a sultry look or a hiked-up skirt. Forced into self-conscious preening by a woman leaning towards his whiteboards. In their little game of wills, she was the inevitable victor, as he wasted sleepless nights upon nights telling himself that he didn't want this, that he didn't want the contamination to his work or the contamination to his brain, that she didn't want him, that he didn't want her—
He felt a sagging and bitter relief when she chose Leonard, had eyes only for Leonard. Because then he met Amy, the sound of her voice and the way she moved her hips and God the warm slide of her hand in his, and the fire was a full-blown inferno engulfing his senses before he realized that he'd stepped off a precipice. (Homo, fuge.) He could barely come to grips with feeling that for one, much less two.
(Schrödinger's paradox— he doesn't know whether it's dead or alive, but he can't open the box and he wonders if it even matters.)