Sheldon watched Bernadette smile to herself as she sent a text message to Howard.

"That's that taken care of," she said.

"Are you sure?" Sheldon peered over her shoulder. He didn't want to run into Howard. This was...well, this was private. "Why would he possibly want to meet you in the library?"

Bernadette looked up from the screen quickly, then adjusted her glasses with a smile. "I make a very convincing librarian. Now go talk to Amy. Shoo." She practically shoved him towards the Buckman building while she went in the opposite direction, towards the library.

"Thank you for the ride," he called after her, but Bernadette only waved and kept walking, a certain spring in her step.

There was no putting it off. Sheldon went to find the girl who, until a certain form was filled out, was still a girl who was his girlfriend.

Knock, knock, knock. Amy. The door was actually open, but there was no reason not to observe protocol. Knock, knock, knock. Amy. She looked up from where she leaned over a microscope. Knock, knock, knock. Amy. Which made the last knock redundant, strictly speaking. Huh.

"Sheldon," Amy said. "What are you doing here?"

"Well, you haven't filed the form in Appendix C." He pulled his copy of the relationship agreement out of his bag.

"Where would I file it?"

"Er..." They should have an agency for this sort of thing. He would write his congressman. "With Leonard," Sheldon decided. "He's responsible for the group's social life, formalizing it is well overdue."

Amy shook her head, but she smiled a little. "Give me the form then," she said, and held out her hand.

She looked very far away, suddenly, past stacks of hardware and a row of microscopes and bundles of cables snaking across the floor and Howard's ridiculous robot arm. It took a ridiculous amount of effort to cross some fifteen feet.

"Here," he arrived at her side, at last, and put the form in front of her.

"I don't have a pen," she said.

"Silly Amy. Here you-" he rummaged through his bag, but couldn't find one either. He definitely had one, it had just gotten buried under all that stuff Bernadette had insisted he buy when they stopped at the gas station, even though the car hadn't been out of gas at all. Well, and all the stuff he had insisted on buying after he bought the stuff Bernadette insisted on. "Just a moment." It was there somewhere.

"I'm sorry, about this morning," Amy said. "I shouldn't have gotten mad at you, and I shouldn't have pushed you into things you don't want to do."

He shrugged and blushed. A lot. "That's all right."

"It is?"

"Relationships involve the needs of two people. Apparently. Which takes compromise." Bernadette had explained that at great length.

"I don't want that. I don't want to be your compromise."

"You're not a compromise. I like you. Leonard's choice in dish washing liquid - now that's a compromise."

"I don't want intimacy to be a compromise." She touched the relationship agreement, and Sheldon remembered he was looking for a pen. "I didn't know that, when I signed this. I do now."

"That doesn't make any sense, you know," he said. "We talk about everything, we share intellectual persuits, we spend a great deal of time together, which I believe is mutually enjoyable."

"It is."

"Coitus, on the other hand, is merely the expression of a basic evolutionary drive which has nothing to do with any of the important parameters of our relationship." Sheldon found a pen.

"You're right, I suppose," Amy said.

"The don't break up with me."

She took the pen from his hand. "No."

"That doesn't make sense."

"I know. But people don't make sense."

"I make sense," Sheldon said.

The slanted look Amy gave him from under her eyebrows was unnecessarily eloquent.

Knock, knock, knock. Sheldon blinked in shock. Maybe he didn't make sense, sometimes.

People - all of them, the whole darn-tootin' lot - suddenly shifted into a slightly different focus. They were not sensible, no, not reasonable or well organized or comprehensible, but neverthelss it was as if the whole human race had become Texans, and they were chock full of things he understood, despite himself.

For a brief, staggering and extremely rare moment - maybe the first one in his life - Sheldon didn't feel weird.

Amy signed the form in Appendix C and pushed it away from her, then put the pen down firmly. Sheldon took them back. His whole body seemed to have gone slightly numb. He couldn't feel the pen in his hand.

"Well, now that you're not my girlfriend, I want to ask you something."

"All right."

"Will you be my girlfriend?"

Amy bit her lip. "No."

"That's all right, that wasn't really what I wanted to ask you."

Amy blinked. "Ok...?"

Once, a long time ago, Leonard had done the maths wrong and almost blown up the apartment. 'There is no try', Yoda had said. 'Do or do not.' So Sheldon had grabbed the smoking canister and pushed Leonard out of the elevator, without quite knowing if it was right or if it would work.

Strange, to be in such a situation again, feeling as though he must act or else something was going to blow up. So he kissed her, quick, clumsy and startlingly sweet.

"Will you be my lover?"

"Yes."