One night, Sheldon woke up with a start. Peering blearily at his alarm clock, he saw it was almost three o'clock in the morning. In a moment, he understood why he had woken as he heard a muffled sob. He wondered what particular event had triggered this fresh onslaught of grief for Penny. It could be anything, he thought grimly. In the months since Leonard's death, she would at first seem to have a few good hours at a time. There were even times when she seemed to get through a day without crying, and then without warning, she would fall apart again.
After a few moments, he got up and put on his robe. Crossing the vaulted great room, he entered what he liked to think of as Penny's wing of the house. He knocked softly on her door, but there was no response. He opened the door and called her name quietly.
She sniffled and said, "Oh, Sheldon, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you."
He sat on the edge of the bed. The last few months had taught him that the best way to help Penny deal with her grief was to encourage her to talk and then listen. Fortunately, she didn't need him to say anything either comforting or profound. If that was the case, he would be completely at a loss.
After a moment, she said, "I had a nightmare. It was different than the others. Instead of watching Leonard die in the accident, I dreamed I turned into his mother."
Sheldon said nothing. He was fairly certain his recent experiences with Beverly Hofstadter would only upset Penny further.
"I guess I feel like I've lost my ability to be happy. I don't want to be a bad mother, but I just don't know how to be a good one right now," she said.
"You have very little in common with Leonard's mother," Sheldon pointed out.
"That's nice of you to say, but I've been so out of it lately," Penny said miserably. "What if I've already messed her up for life? What if she hates me?"
Sheldon considered. As much as he loathed giving advice, it seemed like she needed something to draw her out of her malaise of pity and self-doubt.
"You love your daughter, and while I do not believe in such hokum as karma or a cosmic balance, it may set your mind at ease to know that I believe you are raising Leonard's daughter with all the parental love that he always wanted." Sheldon hesitated, wanting to comment on how much time he had been spending with Leah lately. He also yearned for Penny's acknowledgement, but he couldn't say anything without the risk of making her feel worse.
She was silent for a moment, then reached over and gave him a one-armed hug. "You're right, as always. Thank you, sweetie. That was exactly what I needed to hear."
"If that is all, Penny?" he asked, already shifting to rise from the bed.
"Actually, do you think you could stay and keep me company for just a little while?" she asked plaintively.
After a long pause, he sighed and replied, "Very well." In truth, he was all too aware of the amount of bare skin revealed by her skimpy pajamas, and it made him uncomfortable in a way he didn't wish to think about. Not to mention that he felt a certain degree of self-loathing for "peeking" while Penny was still in mourning for Leonard. He had long ago discarded his idea of being a new species, Homo novus, in the face of his growing attraction to Penny. Sheldon Cooper may be many things, but he was not a hypocrite.
Gingerly, he sat back further and reclined until his head rested on the top of the headboard. He was keenly aware that this was where Leonard used to sleep, next to his wife. In the darkness, Penny reached out and grasped his hand. His traitorous reflexes betrayed him as he curled his fingers around hers. He stayed far longer than necessary, long after Penny's breathing had slipped into the slow measured cadence of sleep.
Not long after the night Sheldon had shared Penny's bed (however briefly and platonically), he began to allow his agent to book him for local speaking engagements and book signings. He told Penny that he needed the funds so he didn't have to dip into his nest egg, and there was truth enough to that statement to keep him from twitching as he said it. But more importantly, he wanted to encourage Penny to get out and start living her life again. After months of grieving, Penny was beginning to feel a little more like her old self. She could now enjoy spending time with Leah without crying or feeling guilty, and she was looking forward to resuming her old job of managing Sheldon's career.
A typical tour day would begin with Penny driving the three of them to their destination. Leah was usually well-behaved on car trips even though she was steady on her feet now and constantly finding new ways to wreak havoc. Once at their destination, Penny make sure everything was set up to Sheldon's satisfaction. Then she would leave to take Leah to a park or something else that the two of them could do together. Oddly enough, Sheldon began to feel like he was missing out on the fun. After all, very few people were willing to debate with a Nobel laureate, and even fewer could hold their own against Sheldon's brutal logic. He was surprised to realize that he would actually prefer to push Leah on the swings with Penny than try to hammer knowledge into lesser minds. Well, he had never liked teaching anyway, and the lectures, although lucrative, were all too similar to each other to provide him with much mental stimulation.
On the six-month anniversary (or mensiversary, as Sheldon insisted was the proper term) of Leonard's death, Penny realized that something had changed. She had expected to spend the day prostrate with grief. Instead, she found herself remembering some of their happier moments with a wistful smile.
In the days following, she slowly began to sort through Leonard's things, a task that she hadn't yet had the strength to face. His "toys"—the figurines, games and graphic novels—she handed over to Sheldon to either keep, give to Raj or Howard, or sell them. Leonard's books were donated to the university library. Photos and mementos from his past, before he met Penny, were boxed up. She would have to store those somewhere since she was convinced Beverly would have no interest in them. She did find a box of his old research papers. Those she sent to her mother-in-law, knowing that if Beverly valued anything of her late son's possessions, it would be his scientific endeavors. By this point, Sheldon had told her of Beverly's bizarre yet characteristic behavior at the funeral, and Penny charitably hoped that her mother-in-law had been acting that way to mask deeper feelings of grief she had been unable to express.
Penny went through the items shipped from Leonard's East Coast apartment last, planning to keep a few items as mementos and donate the rest. She approached the boxes in the basement with an uneasy premonition. There had been times when she felt that there was more to the distance between them than his all-consuming drive for recognition. As she sorted through the boxes, they seemed to contain more of the same books, toys and clothes. Most of it seemed to be items that Leonard hadn't valued as much, as if the apartment truly was just a temporary situation. Penny was ready to chide herself for her silly superstitions when she heard something crinkle in the pocket of one of Leonard's hoodies. She drew out a folded paper and opened it up to read an innocuous note. Innocuous, that is, except for the fact that it was from Allison Werner, his research partner, and was signed with a string of X's and O's. She stared at the paper, feeling numb. Slowly, she mounted the stairs. She found Sheldon and Leah watching one of those educational baby videos. Under other circumstances, she would have found it cute. This video was all about ocean animals, and Sheldon was solemnly identifying each one by its scientific name for the little girl.
"Tursiops truncatus—bottlenose dolphin... Carcharodon carcharias—great white shark," he intoned while Leah giggled and pointed at the screen, shouting, "Fih! Fih!"
"Sheldon, would you come here for a minute?" She could hear the strain in her voice. When he came near, she dragged him into the next room. She showed him the note, and he glanced at it and froze, a look of panic on his face. Dammit! she thought. She instantly perceived that Sheldon had known something about Leonard's affair and was equally furious with both her late husband and her best friend who apparently was still operating under the "bros before ho's" policy.
"Sheldon, why didn't you tell me?" she hissed angrily.
He squirmed uncomfortably. "I had no proof," he said at last. "Believe me, it was a source of tension between Leonard and myself, but I wasn't willing to risk hurting you on the basis of unsubstantiated conjecture."
Some of the tension went out of her then. She hadn't realized that Sheldon had found himself in such an impossible position. Under the circumstances, she couldn't blame him for his actions. "I... I had my suspicions. He just didn't seem to miss me very much when he was away, and he was rarely in any great hurry to get back home. I just wish..." Her voice broke, and she sniffled and blinked rapidly. "Sheldon, why wasn't I enough for him? Why couldn't I make him happy?"
He was swift to offer her a tissue (even now, he was always prepared for a sudden onslaught of tears from Penny) and ushered her to a seat before he faced her. "I have pondered that very question many times," he said as gently as he could. "My conclusion was that for Leonard, there was no such thing as too much love, too much affection, or too much coitus. There was a part of him that was broken, Penny, and no matter what you did to try to be enough for him, that part would never be satisfied. You mustn't blame yourself."
Penny nodded and gave him an indeciperable look from beneath her tear-dampened eyelashes. "If you were anybody else..." she murmured, gazing up at him with a beseeching expression.
He heard her words, but he wasn't sure what she meant. By this point, his hopelessly infatuated ego had tried many times to interpret things she said as proof of a nascent attraction to him. The more rational part of him, his id, mockingly crushed those hopes. The only solution that kept him sane was to ignore those strange little remarks she sometimes made.
He sighed. "I recognize that look. Fine, I will cuddle you on the couch, but we're watching Battlestar Galactica," he replied with a mock grumble. Cuddling was another not-quite-platonic aspect of his relationship with Penny. It had started when he had begun to take an interest in Leah, necessitating his holding her. As Penny was always very physically affectionate with her daughter, some of that spilled over into her dealings with Sheldon. Leonard's death had caused her (perhaps unfairly) to seek some of that physical touch with her best friend. And so it was that gradually, Sheldon got used to Penny curling up into the shelter of the thin lines of his body, even as he dreaded them for a very different reason than he would have done five years ago.
"I love you, Moon Pie," Penny said impishly in a girlish little voice.
His face froze into a mask. If only you meant that the way I want you to, he thought. Aloud, he merely said, "Don't call me Moon Pie. Only Meemaw is allowed to call me Moon Pie."
Over the next few months, Sheldon and Penny became closer than ever and spent almost every day together. For their own reasons, neither of them were willing to address this new intimacy between them until one day, matters came to a head. They had spent the morning at a street fair, pushing Leah along in a stroller as Penny admired the work of local artisans and purchased a few small items. Then they had lunch at an outdoor cafe and sat under an umbrella, enjoying the beautiful spring day. After Leah's afternoon nap, they took her to a park and pushed her on the swings, then sat together on a bench while she played in the sand box. After dinner at home, Leah had fallen asleep sprawled across both his and Penny's laps while they watched the latest Star Trek movie.
Sheldon had a tender expression on his face as he looked down at the toddler and brushed a brown curl out of her face. Penny was leaning her head against Sheldon's shoulder. When she saw what he was doing, she felt a great swell of love for him and leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. If all his muscles locked up, it was from shock rather than distaste, but Penny drew back almost at once.
"I'm so sorry," she said, reddening. "I didn't mean to..."
"Why did you kiss me?" Sheldon asked in a voice that sounded raw.
"It was an accident," Penny faltered.
"Tell me why," he insisted hoarsely.
"I'm sorry," she repeated, feeling almost frightened. "I guess it was just a natural reaction. We had such a nice day together. It was almost like we were a family."
"Were you thinking of Leonard?" he asked, looking away as a muscle twitched along his jaw.
Penny had never been able to get Sheldon to open up to her about what had happened with Amy all those years ago. It was clear to her now that she triggered some sort of bad memory by kissing him, and the intensity of his reaction alarmed her. In that moment, she realized just how deep her feelings for Sheldon had become, and also how any declaration of those feelings would cause a rift in their friendship. So she lied. "Yeah, I... I was just thinking about Leonard," she said.
There was a long pause while she watched the tics sweep across his face and wondered what on earth was going through his mind... that beautiful, unorthodox mind of his. Finally, he said, "Perhaps I overreacted." It was as much of an apology as she was likely to get from him. He scooped up the slumbering toddler in his arms and stood. "I'll put her to bed now," he said and walked away.
That night, Penny tossed and turned, unable to sleep. She had messed up big time. Sheldon had changed so much in the past few years that she had just forgotten his claims to be asexual. Maybe somewhere deep down inside, she was hoping he felt differently about dating and everything that went with it. Okay, to be honest, she wanted him to feel differently about her. She wiped away tears as she thought about how amazing their day had been. She wished she had more memories like that with Leonard and their daughter. But he had been gone for over a year now, and although she would always miss him, she wasn't ready to spend the rest of her life in mourning. Before Leonard's death, there had been times when she felt guilty about how close she had become to Sheldon. Now Leonard was gone. While she might be ready to think about moving on, Sheldon had made it quite clear that he had no interest in being the object of her affections. It hurt more than she wanted to admit, and the tears she shed that night were not for her late husband.