There was just one tiny window in the cramped cabin, and as the hours passed, stars started to appear, framed by the rough wood. Eventually, Sheldon woke to a pale diffuse light filtering through the cabin and knew it must be morning. Somewhat reluctantly, he reached out to check if their clothes had dried. Yesterday, he had spread them out, hoping that the extremely low humidity of the frigid air would wick some of the moisture from their clothing. Everything was still damp, but they couldn't stay in this cabin much longer. Without food, their bodies would struggle to maintain core temperature. They were still in real danger. He woke Penny and explained the situation to her. She touched his face, and he pulled away, not certain he could force himself to leave if she touched him again. Instead, he rolled out of the blankets and pulled on his icy clothing as quickly as he could. Penny did the same, cursing under her breath at the glacial chill in the air. Sheldon had to shove hard against a rim of ice at the bottom of the door frame to get the cabin door open. He saw that the snow had stopped falling, and the skies were beginning to clear. Turning around, he found Penny standing close behind him.
"The snow has ceased, at least for the moment. We need to find our way back to the ski resort before the weather becomes inclement again," he said.
"Yeah, I guess so," Penny said quietly.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
She gave him an inscrutable look - although all of her expressions were difficult for him to decipher - and then suddenly rose up on her tiptoes and kissed him. Her lips were soft and yielding beneath his, and somehow it felt like their very first kiss. She pulled away slowly and searched his face, but Sheldon didn't know what she was looking for.
"All right; let's go," she said tersely and waded out into the snow.
Once they were outside, Sheldon was able to navigate using his compass and his memory of the surrounding terrain. All of their clothing was still damp, but the exertion of breaking through thigh-deep snow kept them warm. After a few hours, they finally made it back to their rented cabin. The roads had been plowed, but Penny's car was nothing more than a slight bump in the white expanse that covered the driveway. Penny groaned when she saw it. Shoveling out her car would take hours of labor, requiring energy she simply didn't possess.
They staggered into the cabin, half-frozen, hungry, and exhausted. Sheldon took charge once they were inside. He instructed Penny to go take a hot shower and then change into dry clothes. By the time she was dressed, he had already finished his own shower and had soup heating up on the stove. They sat at the rustic table, eating in silence. Penny smiled to herself at the way Sheldon's hair, still wet from his shower, curled at the nape of his neck.
"I've contacted the management of the ski resort," he said, breaking the awkward silence. "The woman I spoke to was unaware that we were still here. She wanted to charge us for an additional night until I told her that we had gotten lost and almost died of hypothermia. The end result of our conversation is that someone from the maintenance staff will be along shortly to clear the driveway of snow so we can leave."
Penny was so exhausted that she felt tears welling up in her eyes at this unexpected fortune, which lead Sheldon to ask in a panicky voice if she was ill.
"No, just tired," she replied with a wan smile. She went back to her room, crawled under the covers and was instantly asleep.
Sheldon washed their dishes before also retiring to his room, although not without an uncertain glance at Penny's door. He fell into a restless sleep and awoke hours later still feeling tired. As if by magic, the driveway and Penny's car had been cleared of snow while they slept through the afternoon. Sheldon loaded his bags into the trunk and left instructions with the management to mail his equipment back to him when they found it. That would probably take months, he thought glumly. Penny finally reappeared, pink-cheeked and yawning, and Sheldon resented her apparent ability to achieve REM state. He didn't know why he should feel this way, but ever since that they gotten back to this cabin, a figurative wall had seemed to go up between them. He was just now beginning to understand several things to which he had heard Leonard, Howard and Raj allude. He couldn't quite bring himself to think that having coitus with Penny had been a mistake, but it had left him feeling confused. Their relationship had morphed from mere friendship to something undefined, and the uncertainty made him agitated and upset.
Penny finally finished shoving her things haphazardly into her suitcase and announced she was ready to leave. The tension in the air was palpable, even to Sheldon. Earlier, when she had gone into her bedroom and shut the door behind her, he hadn't been offended. They had both been through an ordeal, and it seemed only natural that they should each seek their own bed, rather than disturb their sleep by trying to cohabit. But now Sheldon wondered if that had been the best choice. Penny seemed remote and had been unusually quiet all morning. She was driving them home now and hadn't said a word for half an hour.
Since relationships were clearly an area in which he was no expert and Penny was, he spoke up. "Is it your intention to add coitus to our routine interactions?"
Her head whipped around so fast, he was afraid that she would hyperextend the ligaments in her neck, causing the condition colloquially known as whiplash. She stared at him, wide-eyed, until he was forced to remind her loudly, "Eyes on the road!"
A corner of her mouth quirked up when he said that, but she sobered quickly. "No, sweetie, this was a one-time deal. I don't really do the 'friends with benefits' thing."
Sheldon fell silent. Her response had been rather vague, but he apprehended her meaning. Apparently, he had misinterpreted the changes in her demeanor towards him. Perhaps she had merely been expressing gratitude for his financial contributions. That thought made him uncomfortable, although he didn't know why.
As he was still trying to wrestle with these new emotional complexities, Penny switched on the radio and tuned in to a country music station. With a sigh, Sheldon gave up trying to understand her and put on his headphones to listen to one of his beloved Feynman lectures. Hours later, they hadn't talked anymore except to discuss when they should stop for gas and a bathroom break. When they pulled up in front of the apartment complex, Sheldon removed his headphones and looked over at Penny.
"So... I guess I'll see you around?" she asked with an unconvincing approximation of her usual smile.
"It would be highly improbable if I did not see you, given the proximity of our dwellings," he replied.
She fought the impulse to say anything else. He hadn't said a word about dating or liking her, just asked if they were going to keep having sex. She refused to push for some kind of declaration from him. She'd made the mistake of being clingy and needy exactly once in her life, with the very first guy she'd fallen hard for. The aftermath of that brief relationship was an experience she never wanted to repeat. So she merely nodded, got her bags out of the trunk, and walked away without looking back. Sheldon would lock up her car, she was certain, but at the moment, she didn't much care what he did. As she mounted the stairs, her annoyance was growing with every upward step she took, but whether it was aimed at Sheldon or herself, she couldn't have said. Back in her own apartment, she took another long, hot shower and crawled into bed, wrapped up snugly in her fluffiest robe.
Sheldon had indeed locked up Penny's car, muttering to himself over her apparent carelessness. By now, he was convinced that coitus had invariably damaged, perhaps ruined, their friendship. The whole weekend was beginning to seem like a disaster, from beginning to end. When he walked into the apartment, Leonard squinted up at him from the sofa where he had been watching Babylon 5, a show he knew Sheldon hated.
"So how'd it go?" Leonard asked.
"It was a catastrophe. All of my scientific equipment was lost in the blizzard," Sheldon answered tersely before disappearing into his room.
As Leonard turned back to his show, he breathed a sigh of relief. He had been concerned about Sheldon going away with Penny for the weekend, even if it seemed extremely unlikely that either of them would ever show the slightest romantic interest in each other. It was just that Leonard had always been jealous of his roommate. Sheldon was smarter, he was taller, he didn't need glasses, and he could digest dairy. Worst of all, Sheldon seemed oblivious to the attention he garnered every year from admiring grad students, although that was the part that also reassured Leonard. In all the years he had known Sheldon, he had never shown the slightest interest in any girl, no matter how obviously she flirted with him (or in any guy, and there had been a few of those, too). No, as far as he, Howard and Raj could tell, Sheldon was completely asexual. It was far more likely that Penny had spent the weekend hooking up with some big dumb jock. Leonard was jealous of the jocks too, of course, but at least he knew he couldn't compete with them. If that was Penny's type, then he didn't have a chance, and he could accept that. He would much rather pine for her from afar than see her date a smart guy who wasn't him.