"Hi guys!"
The four sitting at the table enjoying a debate about the recent Nobel reaped by the Higgs Boson team—which, really, was Sheldon debating with the three others as he believed that his recent paper that had garnered an enormous reception left him deserving of the Nobel—turned silent and looked at the intruder.
Amy Farrah Fowler raised a hand in greeting, almost dropping her lunch tray clumsily in the process. She caught the tray before it could slip out of her grasp. Her gaze briefly skipped by Sheldon.
He felt his pulse quicken with annoyance, stuttering around this awkward encounter. Then again, he reminded himself, most encounters with the opposite sex left him vexed, moreso recently as he resided with a female.
The others kept glancing in his direction, trying to assess the situation. Social interactions were foreign to most of them.
"Heeeey, Amy," Leonard drawled, obviously uncomfortable. Each of the guys followed suit, softly tittering.
Amy rocked back and forth on her heels with a self-deprecating smile, obviously waiting for something.
Exchanging meaningful glances that held whole conversations, the gazes settled on Leonard's face.
"Why don't you sit with us, Amy?" he asked after the silent debate was settled.
She promptly plopped down next to Sheldon and said, "Thank you, Leonard. It's nice to be wanted." The tone was sharp with animosity aimed towards the man child in the group.
They all poked at their foods quietly for a few excruciating moments of thick tension that felt like swimming in bad soup.
The latest to the party was the one to break the silence, "So, I hear that you have a new roommate. And… that it's a woman."
"Correct," Sheldon dryly replied, a thread of dread piercing his otherwise unbroken personal comfort bubble.
He was not quite sure where she was taking this conversation. Most women, primal beings that they are, would find another female in her 'territory' threatening. Though he had made clear to Amy that the territory of relationship amicability between them had dissolved to nothing.
"Great!" Amy chirped, her whole face gone into a state of shock-joy that looked comical: a grimacing smile, un-plucked eyebrows arching dangerously into the shadows of her thick bifocals. Her eyes were little slits like a hissing cat as she boomed, "That's just great!"
She opened her mineral water and immediately slammed it on the table beside Sheldon. Water jumped from the bottle and managed to get nearly everyone misted, most of all Sheldon. He dropped his fork and turned an incredulous gaze to her and the strange wild, jerky movements she was in the midst of maneuvering. She speared a sausage and began sawing at it with a plastic knife, the movements getting faster and faster until she was simply stabbing the sausage.
Leonard cleared his throat as Amy inhaled deeply and loudly, breathing out her mouth and settling back into a relaxed posture. "Uh, Amy… something bothering you?"
The response was immediate and snapped. "No."
"I think Sheld—I mean, your sausage, would beg to differ," Howard said while eyeing the current state of chunked sausage.
Amy stood just as abruptly as she had sat. She leaned over the table, her finger thrust in Sheldon's face. "It isn't fair, Sheldon! We dated for four years and as soon as I ask you to move in with me, you end it because you don't know how to live with a female. Now I find out you've replaced Leonard with a blond-haired bimbo!"
"Wait, we're talking about Alex, not Penny, right?" Walowitz asked. Amy merely shot him a glare promising death if he said another word. "Saaww-ree."
Sheldon shook his head with eyes closed, hands hoisted onto hips. "Look at this. I told you spending as much time with Penny, some of her cantankerous, emotional outbursts would eventually be mirrored onto your behaviors. I don't think I have to justify my living with a female. And I believe the words I used were: 'unable to live with a girlfriend.' As Alex is not my girlfriend, it is allowable. The woman drives me crazy, in fact."
"She does?"
"Amy, she has a phD in… art history."
"Still better than Howard," Leonard murmured.
Amy's mouth opened a bit, obviously biting off a remark and put a hand on Sheldon's shoulder. "I apologize for my outburst, Sheldon. I—well, I thought she would be someone I'd have to worry about. Whew! Glad I found that out before I got really crazy!"
"This was only a little crazy?" Howard asked. His eyebrows raised high over his bulging blue eyes.
Either embarrassed or having said what she needed to say, Amy left her lunch tray and quickly jogged out of the cafeteria, eyes trained on her shoes as she left.
"Is it just me or does the thought of her going full crazy sound totally hot?" Raj remarked with a wide grin, nodding his head to the guys in almost-approval-seeking.
"No," the three others replied in unison rather sharply.
*~*~*BBT~*~*~*
Sheldon tossed his keys into the holder by the door and paused a moment as he did each time he arrived home to briefly ponder over the day's events and then assess his surroundings to make sure nothing in the roommate agreement had been broken. The current state was acceptable but there was an appalling smell in the room that he had a moment of trouble placing.
"Oh, right," he murmured to himself as he settled his messenger bag beside his office desk. He grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. "The painter restoreth. I suppose it's possible I replaced Leonard with a female Leonard, both working on previously completed masterpieces."
He sat in front of his laptop and tapped the power button. The machine purred like a happy kitten being stroked.
"Hello to you, too, Sheldon." Alex's voice startled him from behind and the water he was about to take a drink from spilled on his shirt.
"Drat! This is the second time today. It's good that I have another backup shirt." He turned his nearly blinkless stare to Alex, exited to his bedroom, carefully set the messed shirt into the dirty laundry (folded, of course, he wasn't an animal) and pulled on his last backup shirt.
When he re-entered the living room, Alex stood beside the sink, washing the paint away. She watched his arrival with her strange, intense violet gaze. It had him uncomfortable a handful of seconds later. He turned his attention to the way her hands rubbed the color away from her skin, turning the water into murky rainbow colors. There was a runaway fleck of paint in her short, side-swept blond bangs that he wanted to wipe away for her. He had to physically stop himself from doing just that.
"Don't you think you could have approached me a bit more subtly? I could have possibly hurt you."
The painter laughed, a little tinkle of noise that somehow reminded Sheldon of dancing birds—when did birds dance anyway?—and summer rain, silly but subtly sweet. The sound always garnered a smile, no matter how small, from him. His mouth twitched. Absolutely irksome.
"Subtlety is for thieves and liars," Alex replied as if she had regurgitated this line many times. "And I don't think you'd ever hurt me, Sheldon. Actually I don't think you'd even hurt a fly. Another backup shirt, you said? What happened to the first one?"
Sheldon adjusted his pants as he sunk into the cushion of his favorite spot. "Yes, an unfortunate side effect from a conundrum that I am having some trouble discerning. Hmm. As you are female, you are a primal creature lead strongly by emotions. Perhaps you can help me to understand why exactly Amy Farrah Fowler was upset with me today."
Alex clucked her tongue, a habit Sheldon had noticed resulted from her displeasure with something he had said. Her hands now worked on disinfecting her skin. She would do this three times over, as he knew she would. "Jeez, Sheldon, let's keep the insults above the belt, okay? No bringing my lady parts into your problems."
"Very well. I and the lesser of the group were eating lunch as per usual when, out of the blue, a raving, mad woman rudely butts herself into our table and proceeds to stab her food as if she were Lizzie Borden!" He became more animated as he spoke, scooting down further to the end of his couch cushion.
"What does this have to do with Amy?" Alex rested her hip against the kitchen island.
"It was Amy."
In response, her head cocked and she narrowed her eyes, disbelieving, at Sheldon. The paint flecked bang shifted; his finger twitched. "Did she say anything?"
"Yes, she went on for ages about how I have a new roommate that's a girl and how our relationship ended because I wouldn't move in with her. What do you think was upsetting her? She knows our relationship is over and that I would never find you remotely attractive."
Sheldon got the distinct feeling he had said something wrong when Alex's face distorted into something… profoundly sad, that's what it was. She hastily turned her face from his view. He wanted to stop her from looking away. He wanted her full attention when they conversed. He wanted to fix that look off her face. He wanted to get that blasted piece of paint out of her hair.
Trying to amend the situation, he added, "You know, you being an artist type."
"Right. Because I'm just a stupid, emotional, female artist that has no idea about the innerworkings of the human mind. So why ask me?" She swept her bangs from her eyes, her chin jutting out a little as she shot him a loaded look. "And Sheldon, that question is rhetorical."
Alex turned to leave the room. Sheldon stood up and shouted, "Wait!"
For a few moments, she stood stock still before taking a long breath and turning slowly back around. Her expression remained guarded as she waited.
"You have some paint in your hair. Please remove it."
She looked like a mishmash of feelings and sounded less than pleased when she grunted a loud, "Ugh!" She stomped into the bathroom to take a hot shower in which, he knew, she would wash her body and hair three times before disinfecting three times.
Now that he thought about it, she'd probably be the only other human being he would be comfortable touching as her OCD left her body arguably cleaner than his own.
He thought of the fleck of paint in her hair and the sadness that had permeated her stare.
"Idle minds live in the Devil's playground, Mom always said," he muttered. Dr. Cooper took his place before his laptop to deal with easier problems, equations, and numbers rather than intangible things like feelings and instincts.