"Sheldon?"
"Mm." Sheldon sat up and rubbed his eyes. Faint grey light filtered through the blinds, and it was very quiet. "Um-grm. What time is it?"
"Half past six in the morning," Amy said from the bed. "Why are you on the floor?" She was sitting up, the blanket around her shoulders - his blanket, thank you very much.
"No reason," he said, carefully looking at a point on the wall above and to the side of her left shoulder. "Sometimes, I sleep on the floor."
Sleeping on the floor, it turned out, was terrible. His back hurt, his neck was cramped, and he was shivering with the cold. But it had been the only option.
"You couldn't bear to spend a night in bed with me," Amy said.
Thank goodness she had said it! "You breathe so much! All the time!"
"So do you!"
"I'm allowed, it's my room." That made sense, completely.
"Fine!" Amy tossed off the blanket and stood up. "I'll go," she said, and suddenly her long, bare, very pale legs were right in front of his eyes.
Scandalous! He felt the heat creeping up his neck and cheeks. Ah, blushing - his cross to bear. He forced his gaze up her body, but received another shock on the way.
"That's my shirt."
Amy raised an eyebrow. "Want me to take it off?"
Yes? "No!"
This was about sex, wasn't it? He was pretty sure this was about sex. Why was everything about sex so much, all the time? Maybe there was research - it might be worth looking into, even if did mean a venture into sociology, or worse, psychology.
"Sheldon, I'm leaving." Amy informed him.
"Wait." Maybe it was better to do his own research. He had said he was working on it, hadn't he? "You'll catch a cold and your death and I will have to speak to your mother." That reminded him that he was also cold, and in pain, and really the victim here, and he shivered.
Amy hesitated, then sighed and folded those ridiculously long legs of her to sit next to him on the floor. She dragged the blanket off the bed and threw it about both of them. It was terribly musty and close, enough to make him hyperventilate just a little, but she was also warm as toast, so he decided to let the situation stand. Or sit, as the case my be.
Ever so slowly - like she thought he wouldn't notice, the sneak - Amy let her head sink onto his shoulder.
"Mmm. Nyargh," Sheldon said and twisted away. There had to be some limits, for heaven's sake.
It was almost three minutes before Amy spoke.
"Why is this so hard for you?" she asked, very quietly.
This? What was this, exactly? He didn't know how to answer that. Questions he couldn't answer were stupid questions. He was fine, thank you very much. It was everyone else that had the strange obsessions, with the touching and the hugging and again with all the sex.
He didn't turn to look at her, but he couldn't avoid seeing her legs again, and her hands, held together loosely in her lap. So much skin.
Longing, like a punch to the gut. Sheldon had never been stabbed, but he suspected he would prefer it to…to…to this. Whatever this was, this thing that would crash over him uninvited since he had met Amy. Something that wasn't him.
Yet there it was, painful as a knife. The something that he couldn't measure and couldn't count and didn't know the words for. Desire? For touch, for skin, for sex, for her?
He had never thought about being intimate with anyone, before he met her. Now, there was this, but that didn't mean it was a good idea.
"Sheldon?"
He had gotten lost in thought. Or in feeling, which was infinitely worse.
"Everyone is always so far away," he said. Somewhere on the other side of some deep chasm he could never quite see the shape of, but knew perfectly well was there. Best not to approach.
"Try," Amy suggested. "I'm right here."
Truth be told, she really was.
He supposed he could try. She was sitting crosslegged, right next to him, under the same blanket. It wasn't any effort at all to reach out and touch her bare knee.
It wasn't that he never touched people. He touched people all the time. Sometimes, it was necessary - handshakes at funerals, visits to the dentist - but this wasn't necessary, and that made all the difference.
He traced the shape of her bones under the skin and let his fingers draw some meaningless pattern, just to keep touching her. It was weird stuff, skin. Smooth but squishy, silky and moist at the same time. At least, Amy's was. She was very still, and breathing very slowly. Was that good or bad?
Sheldon took his hand back, not sure what he was supposed to do now. He looked at her face, hoping she would say something, and then he knew exactly what he was supposed to do, the information crashing into his brain as if delivered by air-drop.
Now, he was supposed to kiss her.
Problem was, Sheldon didn't kiss girls. Icky stuff, kissing. He had been above it on the playground, and that was how things had stayed.
Amy's eyes had drifted shut, eyelashes against her cheek. Her lips were parted. And he! He was leaning towards her too! Everything was happening in slow motion.
This wasn't him. Panic welled up in a blinding tide, like that time he had found a scorpion in the bathtub when he was nine. This was not something that Dr. Sheldon Lee Cooper did, so he could not do this and be Dr. Sheldon Lee Cooper, and if he wasn't that than what was point, precisely?
"There is no try!" he said.
Sheldon pushed Amy away and scrambled to his feet and then to the other side of the bed. Safe territory, with a barricade in the middle. He should have built that barricade higher. This was what came from people going in his room.
"There is no try. Yoda said that, did he," Sheldon added.
Amy was still on the floor. He could see just the top of her head. She stood up very slowly, moving like an old, weary woman. Slowly, she picked up her own clothes where she had folded them on the chair. Slowly, she bent down and picked up her shoes.
She held her stuff to her chest and looked at him. "Yoda."
"Yes. In Star Wars," Sheldon said.
"I can't do this anymore," she said.
"The Empire Strikes Back," he explained. Amy wasn't good at Star Wars, maybe she didn't understand.
"You make me feel so ugly," her voice broke, and Sheldon discovered there was something that felt worse than the stabbing sensation of longing he couldn't express after all.
Amy looked at him for a long, long moment. "Goodbye, Sheldon."
If…if he had been someone else, Sheldon knew, he might have read something in that look. But he was only himself and the gap was too wide. Someone else might have understood, and might have found words to make her stay, but he couldn't, and he didn't, and Amy walked out of his bedroom and didn't look back.
