It had not been a great party. Not quite, not for Amy.
She had danced, and drunk, and laughed, and everything was fine, for a while. Like anyone. Then midnight had arrived and there she was, alone. No one to kiss and looks of sidelong pity from every quarter. Penny's sympathetic grimace, Bernadette's you-know-you-can-do-better raised eyebrow, delivered from the embrace of their own beaus.
It was a relief when the party had wound down, but then came the inevitable coupling off as Leonard and Penny had bundled everyone too drunk to drive off to bed, and Amy was standing in the middle with nowhere to go like it was that summer camp all over again.
"Amy will just sleep in Sheldon's bed," Penny had declared when there was no other way to make the puzzle pieces fit.
That was a very bad idea, one part of her knew. On the other hand, Sheldon's bed…
I may never get another chance.
So here she was, in Sheldon's bed, wearing a borrowed pair of Leonard's shorts and a shirt from Sheldon's closet. It was one of his stupid comic book ones, and it smelled like fabric softener. Then again, Sheldon usually smelled like fabric softener too. She could lie here and pretend, for a bit.
The door opened. Amy kept her eyelids lowered and her breath shallow. Was he going to run off again? She had heard him come in, take one look at her, and then bang about the apartment like squash ball. She hadn't expected him to come back.
He tiptoed into the room and closed the door behind him. She heard the rustle of fabric as he took his windbreaker off and hung it from the door. Then the shift of the bed under her as he sat down and took off his shoes.
Amy's heart started pounding faster. Would he actually change clothes? Here? Next to her? Keep breathing, woman, she sternly ordered herself, but the thought of Sheldon pulling off his shirt was enough to make her vision black out just a tiny bit.
And if he were to take off the shirt under the first shirt…
Her imagination couldn't even venture there. Come on, Sheldon. Let's see some skin, boyfriend. She bit her lip and tried not to move, peering through her eyelashes.
No such luck. Shoes was all she was going to get, apparently. Sheldon stood, took a blanket from the closet and lay down on top of the covers.
On top of the covers, yes, but next to her. She could feel his breathing and the weight of his body deforming the mattress. Just his presence, right there, still and quiet, was comforting and thrilling all at the same time. And he can feel me, she thought.
He held out for about 40 seconds, by Amy's count.
"Ridiculous," he muttered under his breath and got up again. He grabbed books off the shelf and started stacking them across the bed, forming a teetering barricade of books, comics and toys between her side and his side. He plopped down a book about trains right in front of her face, blocking her vision completely.
He lay back down rigidly. She didn't even need to see him. She knew he would be lying ruler straight, eyes firmly closed, determined to sleep and ignore her, no doubt.
Less than thirty seconds this time, before he shifted the train book away, opening up a little gap between them. From her perspective, his faced was framed by a big plastic robot-doll and a book on manifold topologies.
He was looking at her, Amy realized with a shock. His head turned stiffly towards her, eyes wide and unblinking, full of curiosity and confusion as they roamed over her face. I'm not ever going to do better than this, she thought, and then felt slightly guilty for spying on him.
Slow as molasses, Sheldon reached through the gap in the barricade, and came this close to touching her cheek. She could feel his fingers hovering there, but he didn't quite make it.
Sheldon rolled off the bed. She heard him hit the floor on his side. "Ouchie."
She sighed and closed her eyes. He hadn't ruled out an intimate relationship, he had said. Well, that had certainly been intimate, just not quite in the way she wanted. She heard him climb back into the bed and plug up the barricade, but by then alcohol, tiredness and loneliness were doing their bit.
Amy drifted off to sleep, and so she missed Sheldon's night of sleepless agony.
He built and rebuilt the barricade. He perched over her like a gargoyle, wondering if it was the done thing to roll her out of bed. He counted sheep, but he ended up counting Amy's breaths, and that did nothing for sleep. He counted catwomen, but all the faces turned into Amy's, and that did even less. He examined her sleeping form from every direction, hoping to find some clue. A button, perhaps, some way to turn off her presence that filled the room like the smell of bread baking and made sleeping an utterly ridiculous proposal.
