WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN: A REBOOT HOMAGE
Disclaimer: The author does not own THE BIG BANG THEORY or any of the characters. Much of the dialogue in this story is adapted directly from the 2007 pilot episode script by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady. The characters of Frank and Harry are owned by son-goku5.
- 5 -
Her shower finished, Penny had gone back to her place to change before returning to the guys' living room, where she found Leonard's and Sheldon's friends on the couch watching a video of what looked like a university lecture. Strangely, it seemed like it was being given by two people at once: a small bespectacled guy in a wheelchair would speak in a very quiet mumble, immediately followed by much clearer words from the tall young man beside him. Something about the guy in the wheelchair looked oddly familiar, though the clothes and the fuzziness of the image suggested the video was pretty old. She sat down beside Howard. "What're you guys watching?"
"Ah, that's right, I forgot, you were in the bathroom when we got here," said Howard, pausing the video. "This," he pointed at the screen, "is a 1974 lecture at MIT from the theoretical physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking; you know, before he became a—" he wobbled his lips with his finger "—crrr-EEE-pppy com-PUUU-terrrr voiiiicce." He grinned as if expecting laughter. Raj only rolled his eyes, clearly having seen the gag before.
The impression rang a bell; Penny put two and two together. "Oh, right, the wheelchair guy who invented time." She couldn't miss Howard's and Raj's simultaneous wince. Neither said anything, though, which at least put them ahead of Sheldon. "Who's the other guy?"
"That's Bernard Carr, one of his students. By this point in his life Hawking's speech had degenerated to the point only his family, close friends and students could understand him," Howard explained. "So he always had a speaker accompany him for his lectures, who'd basically translate for the audience. This lecture was one of his last, before he switched solely to written publishing."
Penny felt a lump in her throat. "Oh my God, that's so sad. That's kinda worse than the speech synthesizer thing, isn't it? You need somebody else just to talk for you . . . ."
"Well, yeah, I guess it is," said Howard, who had clearly never thought about it that way before, "but c'mon, this is Stephen Hawking; it's not like he'd have trouble getting the help. He could get physics students lined up 'round the block just to open doors for his wheelchair." He got up and went to the kitchen.
Penny looked at Raj. "So, you guys work with Leonard and Sheldon at the university?" The response she got was stranger even than Sheldon's responses had been: Raj simply froze in mid-forkful, a panic-stricken look on his face, and then glanced away as if seeking escape. Penny frowned. Maybe he hadn't understood her question. "I'm sorry, do you speak English?"
"Oh, he speaks English," said Howard, coming back over to the couch with a couple of juice boxes from the fridge. "He just can't speak to women."
"Really? Why?"
"He's kind of a nerd," said Howard, as if that should have been obvious, and offered her one of the boxes in his hand. "Juice box?"
Penny had to smile despite herself. For all Howard's over-the-top brashness, she had to admit she liked chutzpah—and she could tell there was real affection for his friend underlying his teasing. She took the juice box. "Thanks. But, you know, Sheldon and Leonard seem to be pretty big nerds, and they talk to me fine." She diplomatically left Howard off that list.
"Ah, well, that's because Sheldon considers himself above such petty things as physical sexuality, so women don't intimidate him," said Howard, dropping back down into the armchair. "And Leonard subscribes to the belief that if he just behaves like the nicest guy in the world, sooner or later some poor desperate girl is just going to throw herself at him. Myself, that sounds like the fastest way I can think of to get either friend-zoned or used, but, you know, he's gonna have to learn from his own mistakes." He turned the video back on, leant back and put his hands behind his head, while inside Penny's brain two thoughts battled for dominance: the flummoxed half of her mind wanted to say Wait, what do you mean Sheldon's above physical sexuality?!, and the outraged half wanted to grab Howard by his collar and say Look, buddy, let me tell you just how far Leonard is from being stuck in my "friend-zone"!
But before either thought could find its way out a third struck her like a splash of cold water: wasn't Howard, after all, more or less right? In the end, she had thrown herself at Leonard partly because he'd been so unselfishly nice to her at one of the worst moments of her life . . . she hadn't wanted to think of herself as "desperate" in that way, but it was uncomfortably close to the truth. And here she was again, quite frankly, exploiting that intimacy for her own convenience. Worse, even if she'd done it primarily as an excuse to lay the groundwork for another encounter, she'd still done it almost as sheer reflex, betraying just how easily the manipulation came to her and how deeply rooted the habit must have become. Was this really being fair to Leonard?
Maybe this approach had been a mistake. If Leonard did in fact get her stuff back, and she slept with him again, it really would look like she was the sort of girl who traded sex for favours, and she'd already gone too far down that road for her own peace of mind. But if she didn't sleep with him, she'd look like something even worse: the sort of girl who manipulated guys by teasing them with sex without ever following through. And if she offered to sleep with him anyway even if he didn't get her stuff back, something told her Leonard might be one of the rare guys who would actually turn such an offer down—out of self-condemnation that he didn't deserve it, if not insulted dignity at being pitied. Penny sank back into the couch, gnawing on her fingernail. When the hell had this all gotten so complicated?
It got complicated, the Nebraska part of her said acerbically, when against all odds you actually got another chance with the smartest, nicest guy you ever banged, but still decided that a full-on relationship was too much to get into, so you tried to go for "friends with benefits" without actually taking care of the friends part first. Next time, ho-bag, either take sex off the table completely or make it clear it's a totally unconnected issue—you know, like you used to do, before Kurt. Except you only ever did that when you didn't really care that much whether you saw the guy again, so you weren't risking anything, right? You think that might have something to do with all this?
Sourly, Penny told herself to shut up.
She was able to escape the rest of the Hawking lecture a few minutes later when the cable and phone guys showed up together at her place, and after juggling them so they didn't interfere with each other, she gave her parents a quick call to leave her new phone number. Unfortunately, sans TV, she had no way to test her cable connection, so for lack of anything else to do she went back to the guys' apartment, where Howard graciously (in intent, anyway, if not execution) offered to provide further entertainment.
Confusingly, however, that didn't consist of putting on music or a DVD, but of booting up one of the desktop computers and logging in to something Howard called a "MMORPG", where he then proceeded to demonstrate the various ways one could kick monster butt (or occasionally get one's own butt kicked) in some crazy fantasy world that looked like a punk-rock version of those magic ring movies everybody had been raving about a couple years ago. Weirder yet, it seemed that half this game didn't even consist of shooting or fighting stuff—Penny could get behind that—but of simply playing out ordinary daily activities, like dickering over purchases, hanging out in bars and bragging about one's past adventures. It took nearly ten minutes for Howard to finish bargaining for a new pair of magic boots, which didn't even match the rest of his character's outfit; she was half-tempted to tell him that she was pretty sure she could have gotten him his boots in half the time for half the price, before belatedly deciding not to get further drawn in.
"This is one of my favourite places to kick back after a quest," said Howard of the tavern-type place on the computer screen. Penny and Raj watched over his shoulders as his armoured hero strode through it, his war tiger at his side. "They have a great house ale."
"Wow, cool tiger," Penny said, a little too bemused to be sure if she was being sarcastic or not. How could an imaginary ale be "great"?
"Yeah, I've had him since level ten. His name is Buttons." Of course it is, Penny thought. "Anyway, if you had your own game character we could hang out, maybe go on a quest . . . ."
"Uh, sounds interesting," she temporized.
"So, you'll think about it?" said Howard hopefully.
"Oh, I don't think I'll be able to stop thinking about it," Penny assured him, clapped him on the shoulder with the best smile she could manage, and went back to the couch.
"Smooth," a high-pitched voice murmured gleefully behind her, and she started before realizing it was Raj—he must have directed the comment to Howard. She rolled her eyes. Well, Howard evidently had some people believing his patter—now all he needed was to convince an actual girl of it. She smirked to herself.
The door opened, and Leonard leaned in; he looked sweaty, flushed, and exhausted, but as their eyes met he grinned, reached inside his hoodie and whipped out a white envelope. Penny squealed in delight, ran across the living room and threw her arms around him. "Oh my God, you got it! You guys are the best!"
"Technically, what we are is the fastest," said Sheldon, who was in the hall behind Leonard and looking even more weary and worn. "And I personally would like to take credit for being the quickest-thinking, although that should be the sort of thing that would go without saying." He was leaning on a cargo dolly; when she saw her TV sitting on it, she squealed again, jumped up and down and ran into the hall to hug Sheldon with equal vigour. He stiffened in her arms as if she'd stabbed him, but she ignored that.
"You managed to get in and out before he got back after all? Good going," said Howard, sounding impressed. Raj nodded in agreement and gave the other two a thumbs-up.
"Uh . . . ." Leonard exchanged a glance with Sheldon. "Well, technically, we didn't actually get out before he got back. We simply . . . managed to avoid any unnecessary confrontations."
Penny blinked. "What are you talking about?" Then she gasped, hand flying to her mouth. "Wait—he did get back when you were still there? Holy crap, you guys didn't try to fight him, did you?!"
"I take it you missed the part where Leonard said we avoided unnecessary confrontations," said Sheldon.
"Then—how did you . . . ?" Penny gestured back and forth between them.
"Well, I can't take any credit—" Leonard began modestly.
"You're right about that," Sheldon snapped, and turned to Penny. "We currently owe your restored possessions and our bodily integrity to an altogether superior understanding of momentum and gravity, i.e. mine."
"Huh?" Penny frowned.
Sheldon huffed in exasperation. "When your ex came rampaging out of his bedroom, I helped him confront his unsorted laundry, and when he tripped over it he confronted the hardwood floor under his carpet, and lost."
Leonard gave his roommate a sour look. "Would you also like to tell Penny exactly what gave our presence away to Kurt while he was in that bedroom?"
Sheldon cleared his throat and looked at the floor. "I think that falls into the category of unnecessary details, Leonard. Let's just call this 'mission accomplished'. Now, my unscheduled muscular exertions have left me in a condition where I would like to use our shower, so if you don't mind?" He marched past Leonard, Howard and Raj into the apartment and disappeared down the hall towards the bathroom.
"Boy, you weren't kidding," Penny said to Leonard. "That guy is one serious whackadoodle." Then she saw the sudden alarm in Leonard's eyes, and a moment later stiffened in realization—of course, she and Leonard weren't supposed to have met before today, and she'd met Sheldon at the same time she'd "first" met Leonard! When would she have heard about this? Had they just given everything away? Her brain sought frantically for an explanation.
Howard's brain, unfortunately, seemed to be just as fast as the other guys', and considerably faster than hers. "Oho," he said, grinning, his eyes lighting up. "Leonard, Penny . . . is there something you two aren't telling us?"
"Uhhhh . . . ." Leonard stuttered.
"Well, uh—" Penny fumbled.
"Aha," said Howard smugly to Raj, who frowned. "I knew it." Penny's stomach sank. Crap, this guy is quick—
"Gossiped behind someone's back while fixing the shower, didn't you, Leonard?" said Howard. "How very middle school of you. Well, don't worry, Penny, complaining about Sheldon behind his back is one of our group's favourite pastimes."
—and prone to jumping in completely the wrong direction. Thank God. Penny exhaled in relief, and saw Leonard had done the same. "He's not wrong," said Leonard. Dryly, he added, "Quite frequently we don't even do it behind Sheldon's back."
"And a number of the times you think you're doing it behind my back, you're not," Sheldon called, his voice echoing from the bathroom. They all stiffened. "Just to keep you all informed."
Howard looked both sheepish and, despite himself, impressed. "Damn, he really does have Vulcan hearing," he murmured.
"Which I also told you," Sheldon called back. Leonard put his hand to his forehead. Howard shook his head. Raj raised his eyebrows and looked away awkwardly.
Penny cleared her throat and grinned. "Well, anyway, Leonard, I owe you both big time, so now that I have a little spare cash, why don't I take you and Sheldon out for dinner?" She looked at Howard and Raj and impulsively added, "Oh, heck, why don't you all come? I'm sure you guys know the restaurants in this part of town better than I do." From the corner of her eye, she caught Leonard's momentary disappointed wince before he schooled his reaction into pleasant blandness, and hastily finished as casually as she could, "And Leonard, I was hoping that maybe after dinner you could help me get my TV set up."
Leonard brightened and opened his mouth, but was cut off by Howard. "Oh, we could do that now," Howard said, patting the TV with an infuriatingly helpful smile. "Unless that's just a transparently obvious excuse to lure Leonard into your apartment later for some thank-you coitus," he added, his tone sardonic enough to imply he'd never heard anything so ridiculous in his life.
"Nobody is luring anybody anywhere for coitus, Howard!" Leonard snapped, his face beet red.
Howard's eyebrows went up. "So . . . you're available for coitus?" he said to Penny. Raj rolled his eyes at the ceiling.
Penny grimaced, her face so hot she knew she must be blushing even more than Leonard. "Not with you, Howard, and can we please stop saying 'coitus'?" she asked plaintively.
"Technically that would be coitus interruptus," called Sheldon from the bathroom. Leonard buried his face in his palms, while Penny fought the urge to either sink through the floor or burst into laughter.
Two days ago, a beautiful blonde offering to take him out to dinner—even if his friends had had to come along as part of it—would have seemed like an unbelievable blessing of good fortune to Leonard. Now he could only grit his teeth and try like heck to pretend to have a good time, rather than counting the minutes until he could get Penny alone somewhere and take her up on what he realized he was thinking of as the "real" reward. Thanks to Sheldon's ironclad rules about driving arrangements, he couldn't even enjoy having her sit up front with him; she had to sit in the back, wedged in between Howard and Raj, while Sheldon sat in the shotgun position.
He calmed himself by concentrating on the traffic as he drove. "Is Thai food okay with you, Penny?" he called back.
"Sure," said Penny cheerfully.
Of course, Sheldon spoke up. "We can't have Thai food," he objected. "We had Indian for lunch."
"So?" said Penny.
"They're both curry-based cuisines."
"So?" Penny repeated.
"They would be gastronomically redundant. I can see we're going to have to spell out everything for this girl," he said sidelong to Leonard.
Leonard caught Penny's eyes in the rear-view mirror and glanced skyward, letting the slightest grin tug at one side of his mouth. He was rewarded with a sparkling flash of green eyes and a rapid wink. With impish humour, Penny turned to her left and asked, "Any ideas, Raj?"
The astrophysicist did a credible impression of a deer in headlights: wide-eyed and frozen. Leonard wondered rather uncharitably if Raj could be persuaded to do an impression of a deer under headlights before the night was out.
"Turn left on Lake Street and head up to Colorado," Howard suggested. "I know a wonderful little sushi bar—" Oh, God, Howard, not a karaoke bar, please, not a karaoke bar "—that has karaoke."
Inwardly Leonard groaned. At least, as the designated driver, the guys couldn't get him drunk and browbeat him into attempting a song, a phenomenon they'd gleefully compared last time to listening to a manatee getting tortured. Of course, maybe Penny wouldn't—
"That sounds like fun!" Penny said happily, and gave Leonard another mischievous smile in the rear-view mirror. "Leonard? Feel like doing a duet with me?"
"Um—sure," said Leonard, before he could stop himself. Then he forced himself to add: "But I should probably warn you that musically, my performance tends to be a bit . . . substandard. At least in public."
"Oh, I'm sure your performance will be just fine," said Penny. "Just make sure you're playing the right instrument before you try hitting those high notes." Her smile was so innocently perky that for a second, Leonard genuinely wasn't sure whether she meant what he hoped she meant.
"It's karaoke, Penny," said Sheldon with a frown. "The word's derived from the Japanese terms kara, 'empty,' and okesutora, 'orchestra,' meaning music without a vocal track. No instrument playing's required. That's one of the reasons so many musically inept people like Leonard attempt it."
"I know what karaoke is, Sheldon," said Penny, sounding less cheerful now.
"If you thought it involved playing an instrument, that conclusion seems questionable."
"Well, Sheldon, a lot of people think of the voice as an instrument," said Leonard diplomatically. "Like those Tuvan throat singers you were studying for a while there." In the mirror, he saw Penny frown and open her mouth, and he shook his head at her quickly.
"Exactly," Howard chimed in. "Or this golden tunemaker right here." He tapped his own larynx, then broke into song. "'Baby, baby, don't get hooked on me-ee . . . Uh: baby, baby, don't get hooked on me, oh . . . .'" As he'd shown on previous karaoke nights, Howard actually had a pretty good voice; he might have done better impressing Penny with it if he hadn't been so clearly singing straight to her in an all-too-intentionally-meaningful way. Penny looked away and carefully hid her mouth with one hand. Leonard supposed if she was hiding laughter rather than repugnance, this evening wouldn't be all bad.
Sheldon cast a sour glance back at Howard, then lowered his voice again. "I don't know what your odds are in the world as a whole, Leonard," he muttered out of the side of his mouth, "but as far as the population of this car goes, you're a veritable Mack Daddy."
Leonard had to grin. "Never tell me the odds," he murmured back, in his best Han Solo impression. He was aware of Sheldon's narrow-eyed, quizzical look, but said nothing.
The evening did not, as it transpired, suck completely, but it had more than its share of down moments.
The first happened when Penny, already a few Cosmopolitans into her bar bill, dragged Leonard up to the stage to do a duet on "Summer Lovin'" from Grease, and Leonard was spared from humiliation only by the unpleasant discovery that she was an even worse singer than he was—she was pitchy, off-key, kept losing the song's rhythm, and was prone to giggling and audibly correcting herself whenever she tripped over a word. More disquietingly, she appeared to have absolutely no awareness of just how bad she was; her happy flush at the audience's laughter and applause really seemed like the reaction of someone who thought she'd knocked it out of the park. None of her subsequent performances was any better, even when she duetted with Howard, who at least had enough musical skill to more or less make up for her. Leonard decided to put it down to the alcohol and to hope she sang better when sober, and to hope he'd never be called on for his opinion of that singing if it turned out she didn't.
The second negative aspect of the night was Howard's repeated attempts to hit on Penny. This wouldn't have been so bad in itself—Penny simply ignored Howard's passes and flirtations until she had gotten drunk enough to genuinely no longer notice them—but Howard's visible and public strike-outs seemed to be a cue to several guys from other tables to come over and try hitting on Penny as well. Most of them were much better-looking than Leonard, a good few of them sang better, and every single one of them was taller, and while Penny never actually gave out her number or accepted any of the half-dozen date requests, she laughed, collected their phone numbers, and flirted back just as if she were nothing more than a single girl out on the town with friends. Which, Leonard had to admit, was exactly what she was, for all practical intents and purposes: implied "reward" or not, amazing one-night stand or not, he and Penny were still only the most recent of acquaintances and he had no actual claim on her loyalties whatsoever. His feelings for her were his problem, not hers. None of which stopped him from feeling more and more jealous, and gloomier and gloomier, as the night progressed.
The third drawback of the night was, perhaps inevitably, Sheldon himself. His rant last night to Penny aside, Leonard actually did enjoy his roommate's company much of the time; Sheldon could, quite frequently, be the most entertaining and fascinating friend imaginable—as long as you were talking about something you both found interesting or doing something you both liked, and you were at least somewhat able to keep up with him. Unfortunately, however, sushi at a karaoke bar with Penny didn't meet any of those criteria. As the night wore on and the restaurant got louder and louder, Sheldon's impatience with Penny's inability to follow his increasingly esoteric conversation, aggravated by his fundamental dislike of karaoke to begin with, drove him to make more and more acerbic observations about her mental capacities. Had Penny's intoxication not rendered her as oblivious to Sheldon's snark as effectively as it did to Howard's come-ons, Leonard was sinkingly aware she would probably have stormed out long ago, and that didn't bode well for how she and Sheldon might get along on a more extended basis.
At least the food was good. The fact of it being a weekday gave Leonard an excuse to suggest going home by eleven, and Penny cheerfully paid their tab without complaint. Leonard dropped off Howard first and then Raj, leaving Penny the entire back seat to stretch out in. Sheldon had taken shotgun again, and was smacking his lips dubiously as they pulled into Leonard's parking space. "I still think they were misrepresenting something there," he said for the fourth time, while Leonard shut the car off. "That unagi was not real freshwater eel. I'm not even sure it was eel at all. Oh, why did I never get around to learning Japanese properly? I'm sure I could have spared a week or two sometime."
"Sheldon, you honestly think you can learn Japanese in a week?" asked Penny.
"Oh, I recognize the linguistic difficulties," Sheldon acknowledged, climbing out of the car. "That's why I'm willing to allow the extra seven days." The three of them headed up the sidewalk and into the building. "But language is simply recognizing symbols and memorizing rules for how they interact, Penny. At the age of fifteen I was able to pick up enough German to teach a physics course in five days, when I was a visiting professor in Heidelberg."
"Seriously?" Penny turned to Leonard as they climbed the stairs. It might only be alcohol-induced wobbliness, but she had taken Leonard's arm again, which he had to admit did a great deal to improve his mood. "Leonard, is your roommate pulling my leg here?"
"No, he actually did manage to do that," Leonard acknowledged. "What he's not telling you is that German is already pretty closely related to English, which gave him a head start, and secondly that he did it by reading a whole bunch of classical physics essays which were originally published in German. Which meant that any time he tried to talk about something other than physics he tended to trip over assumptions about what new words meant—and that sometimes produced some really uncomfortable results."
"You're kidding," said Penny. "Like what?"
"Let's just say that I learned one should never answer 'yes' to the question 'Möchtest du eine Darmspülung?', unless one actually would prefer to get an enema rather than a bowl of chicken soup," said Sheldon, with a distinct air of wanting to change the subject. As they arrived at the fourth floor, he turned and nodded formally to Penny. "Thank you for the dinner, Penny."
"Aw, you're welcome, sweetie." Penny smiled warmly. "Thank you guys for getting me the money I needed to pay for it. And for getting my TV back from Kurt as well. Oh, that reminds me, Leonard—you still feel like coming in and helping me set it up?" Her inquiring expression was perfectly innocent, but she patted his chest as she asked, and as if by sheer accident her fingers drifted over the fabric of his T-shirt where it covered his nipple and exerted the slightest of pressure with a fingernail scrape. A jolt of sensation almost too sharp to be pleasurable shot down Leonard's spine into his groin, and he nearly staggered.
Sheldon frowned at Penny. "Are you really planning to watch TV this late at night, Penny? If you're starting a new work shift tomorrow, I'd recommend trying to get to sleep earlier, rather than later."
Penny's smile took on a tight, edgy look; Leonard suddenly wondered if maybe she'd noticed a lot more of Sheldon's grumpiness in the restaurant than she'd let on. "Well, Sheldon, sometimes I play late-night TV shows in the background to help me get to sleep," she said. "Just put it down to my inferior brain capacity." Oops: yep, she'd definitely noticed more than she let on.
Sheldon, by contrast, noticed absolutely nothing. "Well, as I understand young people say these days, whatever floats your boat, baby-O, right?" He turned to Leonard. "Leonard, I doubt this will take you very long given the primitive quality of Penny's equipment, but if I'm asleep when you come in, don't wake me. You already have one strike under the roommate agreement. Goodnight." He nodded, did an about face, marched into 4A and closed it; a second later, they heard the lock turn and catch.
Penny stared at the door in disbelief. "Oh, my God. Did he just lock you out?" Before he could answer, she frowned. "And what the hell's this 'roommate agreement'? And why do you have a strike?"
Leonard sighed. "Well, I could explain those things, or I could set your TV up . . . ."
Penny shook her head. "No, you know, you're right. I don't want to know. Come on in." She dug out her key and let them into her apartment.
Leonard gulped. It wasn't as bad as Kurt's place, but it was pretty clear Penny's approach to unpacking was simply to take things out of their boxes and put them down somewhere out of her immediate way; already the living room was a mess, with piles of clothes and shoes everywhere and stacks of CDs and DVDs heaped in various corners. The TV sat on a small table in front of the couch with the other media devices underneath it. Penny waved at it. "I've got an entertainment unit on order from IKEA, this is just temporary," she said. "Why don't you get started on that while I go change?"
"Gotcha," Leonard muttered, his brain clicking into tech mode despite himself. Cable box and a DVD-VCR combo—no digital video recorder yet? Well, maybe she just hadn't gotten around to it. He took off his hoodie, knelt down in front of the TV, and began untangling the connector cords as he decided which plugs to put into which jacks.
Standing in her bedroom doorway, Penny smiled as she watched Leonard finishing his task. She could tell he had found the evening less enjoyable than he'd hoped; she'd been more than a little frustrated herself, even if she'd been much better at hiding it. (Life as a woman involved a lot of knowing when not to let on how you really felt.) Not to say that the karaoke hadn't been fun, even if Leonard was, sadly, just as bad a singer as he'd warned her he was. Ah, well, at least she'd made up for him in their duet . . . and she knew he was perfectly capable of making up for his weaknesses in other, much more important ways.
Squatting down on his heels with his hoodie off, for example, and without Kurt as an overwhelming contrast, she could see there was a great deal more clean definition to Leonard's arms and shoulders than his clothes let on. And his posture, pulling his jeans tight, emphasized the tautness and cuteness of his backside; Penny had always considered herself a connoisseur of men's tushes, and Leonard had absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. She wondered if she could get him to consider contact lenses, or maybe Lasik surgery . . . on the other hand, if he stopped wearing glasses, she'd never again get to see that smoking moment last night when he'd deliberately taken them off while staring at her, that "Okay-now-I-mean-business" moment that had turned much of her insides molten. Just the memory of that moment was doing interesting things to her now.
"There we go," said Leonard as he plugged in the last cable, sounding satisfied. He put his hands on his knees, levered himself to his feet, and grabbed the converter remote from the couch. "Okey-dokey, power up—" He pressed a button; the TV came on, showing Jon Stewart. "Channel test, volume test . . . ." Leonard surfed through channels, stopped on MTV and cranked the volume up and down, then nodded again. "Okay, switching to auxiliary input—" He pressed another button, and the screen went blue and silent; white block letters in the corner said READING, then flashed to NO DISC FOUND. Leonard frowned. "Hey, Penny," he called, and turned, "can I grab one of these DVDs to—?"
His voice choked off with a gulp, his mouth open, his face red. Penny smiled at him with her best heavy-lidded look and strolled forward as if nothing was out of the ordinary. The amazing thing was, nothing was, particularly; this wasn't anything more than what she normally slept in, a comfortable pink camisole top and her white Hello Kitty pajama shorts. But Leonard was gaping at her as if she was on a catwalk in Victoria's Secret's latest. "What's that, sweetie?" she asked innocently, folding her arms beneath her breasts . . . and not coincidentally using that to push them up a little against the fabric of the top, both accentuating her cleavage and generating just enough friction to make it obvious she wasn't wearing a bra.
Leonard cleared his throat vigorously. "I, uh . . . ." he husked, and cleared his throat again. "I need a . . . DVD. To finish testing the . . . setup." Behind his glasses, his eyes had dilated, darkening almost to blackness.
"Ooohhhh," said Penny in mock comprehension. "Well, I've got plenty of them around—let's see." She revolved on one heel, finger to her lips the way she'd once seen Marilyn Monroe do it in an old poster, then exclaimed in feigned recognition. "Oh, right, any of these should do!" Deliberately facing away from Leonard, she bent at the waist in a way that pulled the Hello Kitty shorts tightly around her rear, and caused them to ride up sufficiently that it was clear she wasn't wearing panties either. The sound of his indrawn breath shot both triumph and arousal through her. She grinned to herself, picked up a DVD, spun about and handed it to him. He stared down at it; it was a volume of Sex and the City.
"There you go!" she said chirpily; then, as he stared, she arched an eyebrow at him. "Well? Aren't you going to . . . slip it in? And make sure everything works?"
Leonard closed his eyes and shook himself, clearly holding onto his control with a fingernail's grip. "Penny," he rasped. "Do you have any idea what you're doing to me right now?"
Penny nodded as if she was only just now thinking about it. "Some," she said. "Some idea." Then she stepped forward and without warning laid her hand against the front of his trousers, feeling the hardness beneath the tent that had developed there. Leonard gasped, and unable to help herself, so did she. She smiled widely. "Now I think I have a much better idea," she murmured, sliding her hand up and down and around against that pressure.
"Oh, God, Penny," Leonard moaned. "If you don't stop that I don't think I'm going to be able to control myself."
Penny leant close to him, put her lips against his ear and murmured, "Good." She let her voice drop to its huskiest register, and slid her other hand up his arm and around his shoulder. "I want you to lose control, Leonard," she whispered, pressing him against her. "I want you to forget who you think you are, and be who you were with me last night. I want you to be that amazing man who saved my ass at the worst moment of my life, and who made me come more times in one night than I came in the whole month before that. Because I promised you a reward, and I always keep my promises." She slid his zipper down, then shifted her hand to grasp the button of his jeans, working to undo it.
Leonard stiffened. Abruptly, he pushed himself backwards, one hand coming down to grip hers where it tugged at his waistband. "Penny, wait," he said, and the sudden sharp change in his voice was like a wrench being thrown into a set of bicycle gears. "Is that—is that what this is, a reward? Is that all that this is? Because I meant it last night, when I said I didn't want to be your charity case. I didn't think you wanted to be mine either."
Penny blinked at him, bewildered. "No—no, of course not! What would make you think that?!"
"Um, maybe the words 'I promised you a reward and I always keep my promises'?" Leonard stepped back, breaking their contact, and gestured angrily at the TV. "I didn't do all this just to buy another night with you, Penny!"
The ludicrousness of that sparked Penny's own temper, never far from the surface. "Oh, please, Leonard," she snarled, poking him in the chest. "You telling me you'd have gone and faced down Kurt for me if we'd only just met?! If the first time you'd seen me was standing in this apartment door?"
"I think I would have at least tried!" Leonard snapped back. "Because it would have been the nice thing to do! The right thing to do!"
"Sure, and the fact I'm hot and you're a geek wouldn't have influenced your thinking at all," Penny sneered. "Well, let me tell you something, buddy; if you think you bought anything from me, then I guess that just tells me what kind of girl you really think I am, doesn't it? I sleep with who I sleep with because I want to! Me! Not for payback, not for favours, for me!" She grabbed up her robe from the couch, flung it on, and folded her arms, glaring at him with more hurt and anger than she'd ever expected to feel this night. "And I don't need anybody who thinks I choose my partners for any other reason."
For a moment, she saw a similar hurt in his own eyes. Then his jaw tightened. "Well, Penny," Leonard said evenly, "that moral indignation would carry just a bit more force if you hadn't virtually dry-humped me in the bathroom today to get me to change my mind." He threw the DVD angrily onto the couch, stepped around her, grabbed his hoodie and zipped himself up, then went to the door. He paused there and turned; despite his clear best efforts she could see pain welling back up over his fury.
"You know, I meant it," he said, "when I told you that last night was the best night of my entire life. And I still mean it, because it's still true. I'm betting it'll probably be true when I'm old and senile. Of course, given my luck I'll probably be sharing a flat with Sheldon at some old folks' home." He shook his head, ruefully bitter. "I guess all I hoped was that . . . was that it was good enough for you that just maybe you'd want more of it for its own sake. More of—more of me."
Penny gritted her teeth, fighting desperately to hold onto her own anger through the ever-increasing urge to start crying. This hurt worse than any of the fights she'd ever had with Kurt. "I did want more of you, you asshole," she got out through the thickness in her throat. "What do you think all this was about? Didn't you get that all that 'reward' crap was just an excuse?" Unable to stop herself, tears started trickling down her cheeks. "I wanted to jump you again the first time I saw you today, Leonard. I still do. Isn't that enough?"
Leonard stared at her, mouth open. Then he swallowed. "Any other day of my life, it would have been, Penny," he said hoarsely, his eyes bright and wet as well. "But if you need an excuse before you'll let yourself jump me again, or you think I do, then maybe that says something about what kind of guy you think I am. Or what kind of relationship you want this to be. And I never thought I'd ever say this in my life, Penny, and certainly not to someone as amazing as you . . . but no. If those are the only terms you're available on, maybe it's not enough."
He turned, walked out of the door, and closed it behind him. It was not a slam at all, only a very gentle click. But it hit Penny as if he'd smacked her in the face with it. She let herself drop onto the couch, numb with shock. Jesus Christ, how the hell had this happened? What had happened? How had they gone inside of two minutes from an imminent repeat of the best sex of her life to . . . this?
Like a bubble wavering hazily up through deep water, it slowly dawned upon her that in all her life, this kind of event—a guy she wanted walking out on her—had never actually occurred before. Ever. She'd had a few breakup-causing fights in her life, but in all of them, without exception, she'd been the one who finished things, even if she hadn't started them. And the few times she'd been dumped rather than dumper, she'd almost always been just as bored or fed up as the guy was, and had been perfectly content to endure the "I Need My Space"/"We're Very Different People" speeches and part ways amicably. Even Kurt might have stepped out on her, but he had never walked out on her. Only the experience of losing a part she really wanted had ever come close to this level of pain—and even there, most times the failure was only due to not being right for the part. She had never been rejected simply for being herself; she had never had something she wanted so badly taken away from her without warning and then told it was simply and solely because she hadn't done enough—hadn't been enough—to deserve it. The experience was utterly foreign to her.
But, she thought, it must have been a painfully familiar one to Leonard. He had certainly told her enough of his past last night to make that obvious, even if he'd never complained or showed any hurt over it. And if that rejection, that humiliation and ruination of hope, had happened often enough . . . then the only sensible reaction was to learn never to hope for or expect anything, wasn't it? Which must have been why Leonard had been prepared to leave like a gentleman last night, without reward. And why he must have been so hurt by thinking tonight had been meant as nothing more than a "reward", once he'd had the chance to think through everything that implied. Being rejected was one thing. Thinking you were only being used until you got rejected must feel even worse.
She'd been right, Penny realized, through her tears. She'd screwed this up. She should have simply told Leonard straight out that she wanted him, or even just jumped him without asking, rather than trying to give them both an excuse with this "favour" crap. But everything in her, especially after Kurt, had recoiled so reflexively from that idea, from that risk and that vulnerability, that it had simply never occurred to her as an option. And now it might be too late.
She half-stood, then paused, torn between the humiliation of going after him and the misery of the empty bed waiting for her.