A tree. Good heavens, she expected him to climb a tree.
First she had gotten him kicked out of a highschool like some sort of teenage rebel, and then led him through the seamy underbelly of almost a quarter mile of suburbs, and now this.
The things I do for love, Sheldon thought, and clambered up after Amy to the bedroom window of her childhood, trying not to scrape his palms or fall or get eaten. (The odds of the tree being carnivorous were remote, but higher than he was comfortable with.) Amy leaned precariously across the gap and wriggled in through the window. She tumbled out of sight with a "whoop!"
Oh dear. With a bit of contortion and an acute awareness of feet and feet of nothing but air between himself and the ground - don't look down don't look down don't look down - Sheldon followed. Amy pulled him by the collar and he was dragged into the house, everything gone topsy turvy. When his inner ear started doing it's job again - thanks, inner ear - he found himself sprawled in the dark. With Amy. On a bed.
"Why are you laughing?" Sheldon asked.
"A boy climbing through my window, who would have thought? Not since Josh Greene when I was thirteen, and he was trying to get out."
Their eyes met. She had that ominous speculative look, and even if she wasn't strictly touching him, she wasn't too far off. Amy did have tragically consistent tendencies when she was under the influence of alcohol.
Sheldon tried and failed not to think about that night on her couch. Fascinating. It was years ago and had only lasted an instant, yet here he was still remembering it. That's how bad it had been. Her lips had felt very warm, maybe because it had been a cold night? Like tonight.
"Now, Amy-"
She shoved him off the bed.
"Shut up and stay down" she hissed.
There was dusty carpet in his nose and he had a good view of the old shoeboxes stacked under Amy's bed. No one tells Dr. Sheldon Cooper to shut up! He started to get up, outraged retort on his lips, and then he heard the door open.
"Amy? Is that you? Have you been taking drugs?" It was her mother.
Sheldon stayed down and shut up.
"I have not been taking drugs, Mother," Amy said. There was a pause. The light came on.
"Sneaking in after dark, that whorish color on your lips and a run in your stocking? What am I to think?" Mrs. Fowler's voice was very quiet, on the edge of tears. "You are my only daughter."
Amy sighed. "I did have a glass of punch, Mother."
Mrs. Fowler gasped softly. "Amy, you are going to end up like your cousin Georgiana."
"I am not going to end up like Georgiana, Mother."
"That is what Georgiana thought."
"Georgiana was stung to death by wild bees on a hiking trip in Belize, Mother."
"Quite."
"I went to the school reunion, and I prefer to stay here and not drive back to Glendale tonight. That is all. There is night time construction work, and you know how I feel about fluorescent orange since cousin Albert."
"Dear cousin Albert," Mrs Fowler murmured. "Well, I suppose..."
Well done Amy, Sheldon thought. Then-
"You went to your highschool reunion!?" Mrs. Fowler's voice reached an unfortunate pitch on the last syllable. "Amy, how could you show your face? Without a husband, at your age?"
"I'm sorry, Mother." Amy's voice was tiny, and all wrong. "I would like to sleep now, Mother."
"Will you be sneaking out of the window again?"
"I"ve never snuck out of the window. I snuck in because I didn't have a key and I didn't want to wake you."
"That's enough of that."
"Good night, mother."
"Hrumph." Amy's mother slammed the door behind her.
Sheldon let out the sneeze that had been tickling his nose and started to stand. The bedside lamp Amy flung at the door just missed his head.
He ducked down again. "Amy!"
"She's just so...so..." Amy grabbed an encyclopedia and threw it after the lamp.
"Have you lost the capacity for speech and regeressed to communication via the flinging of objects?"
"Yes!" Amy picked up a teddy bear, then sighed. "No. I just don't like coming back here."
She looked at the bear, then around her at the room. It was very neat, (not quite neat enough, but close) and walled in books and posters of cornfields. Amy shrugged and threw the bear at the lightswitch, and the room fell back into darkness. Only the streetlights came through the window. Sheldon didn't normally approve of the dark, but this time it felt safer.
"I don't see what you have to be sorry for. You are only a few years past the median age of a first marriage for a woman in the United States, and accounting for ethnicity, education and income quintile, why you're just plain average!"
"Great. Good to know. Thanks, Sheldon." Amy buried her face in her hands.
Upset? Was she upset? How was he supposed to have any chance at a guess if he couldn't even see her face?
Let's go with upset. Where was a hot beverage when you needed one? Maybe he should start carrying around a thermos. The world was just full of dramatic misery recently. What the devil has happened to my life?
Was she crying? Before he could make up his mind, Amy straightened, righted her glasses, brushed her hair away from her face and put her hands on her knees.
"Well, I've made a fool of myself tonight. Please don't look at me, Sheldon."
Splendid idea, he thought, but his eyes wouldn't obey. She had been crying, and there was the beginning of a bruise on her face from the fight, and she did have a run in her stocking. He couldn't have stopped looking at her if it turned him to stone.
"I..." he started to say, then managed to catch the words. Can't say that. What was he, a hippie? Sheldon hated having nothing to say. "I think you're the bravest person I've ever met."
Amy crumpled again. Definitely upset. Good call, Cooper. He was out of options.
Sheldon sighed loudly so she would be sure to notice and sat down next to her, so close he could feel the warmth of her thigh against his. He could do this, he reminded himself. He took a deep breath and did his jagged best to put his arms around her.
"Oh," she said softly, and leaned against him.
It was awful.
This wasn't his Amy. She was all wit and smarts and a scathing arched eyebrow. This was an unpleasant mess of moist. His own body felt like a pile of rusty hammers, crudely held together at the joints with catgut and cheap sparkle glue. How could she possibly want this?
Then Amy let her forehead sink against his shoulder and for a strange fragile second, it wasn't awful at all.
Well.
How 'bout that?
It was as if a particularly tricky equation had balanced, and he was in one of those blank moments when all the secrets of the universe were almost visible in the corner of his eye, before the noise rushed back in. Her hair was soft against his cheek, her shoulder fit into the crook of his elbow like a minor miracle of applied geometry, and she smelled great.
He moved or she breathed or a cloud crossed the face of the moon, and it was awful again.
Sheldon disentangled himself from the quicksand morass of his girlfriend's body and lurched to his feet and most of the way across the room.
"Yeah, that's enough of that." He couldn't do this after all.
Amy shrugged, stretched, and sprawled on her bed, shoes and all. "Nice try, Sheldon." She yawned. "Good effort." She threw her arm over her face, and then she was asleep.
"Pfft. Alcohol." Sheldon watched her sleep for a few minutes, then sat at her desk. It was dominated by an ancient blocky monitor, surrounded by old school essays - all As, naturally - a pile of yellowing paperbacks, unsharpened pencils and dusty stacks of CDs.
Above the desk, in pride of place on a long shelf, was a row of girlish doo-dads: dolls in frilly pink dresses, dainty little statuettes of fairies and unicorns, Barbies, with their terrifying giant eyes and slutty shoes. They were meticulously arranged, but Sheldon could tell they had never been played with.
Amy made a cute little sound that might have been a snore or a sob, and rolled over. Sheldon found a blanket in the closet and threw it over her, then gingerly removed her glasses. She curled up like a hedgehog. A cuddly, drunken, giant hedgehog that smelled great.
I could touch her hair again...
The thought made his skin crawl. Nope. Maybe when his nerves calmed back down. There was an even chance that would happen by Thanksgiving, if he cut down on intake of carbonated drinks.
Well, what could he do?
