Author's Note:

Hello again, friends! It's been a little while. April was kind of a rough month for me and I ended up in the emergency room at one point, but I'm okay now and I'm optimistic that this month will be better.

So here's a new chapter based on The Cooper/Kripke Inversion. I hope you'll enjoy it. Thanks as always to my beta reader Stark for working with me on this. :)

Inventive

They had sat down to lunch for all of five minutes before Penny said, "I'm not supposed to tell you this but . . ." and then Amy found out exactly what was happening during Sheldon's forced collaboration with Kripke.

Penny had tried to soothe her then, after she spilled the beans about her "frequent, intense, and whimsically inventive" non-existent coitus with Sheldon, but it had only served to make her more upset. It was so typical, Penny defending Sheldon's actions once again when he didn't deserve defending. She wasn't willing to hear it and cut her off.

After lunch Amy drove back to her lab, because even though it was Friday and even though she was in emotional turmoil she couldn't in good conscience abandon her work early. Amy was a professional, after all, and she would act like it. She would keep her personal life separate, unlike some people. So she finished what needed to be done, all the while seething within.

She was driving back to her apartment now, white-knuckling the steering wheel, forcing herself to continue holding back all the hurt and rage until she was safely inside. Trying to think pragmatically about her next move instead. Vivisecting her boyfriend hadn't been on her list of things to do that weekend, but she could probably shuffle some things around and make time.

How could he do this to her? Sure, she understood the hows and whys on a basic level, Penny's story provided that much. But seriously, how could he? How could he take her deepest, most genuine wish and turn it into this? A lie, a mockery, water cooler gossip. She felt gross, tainted in some way. Didn't he understand how this would make her feel?

No, of course not. Sheldon wasn't thinking about how she would feel, and even if directly prompted to think about it he probably wouldn't be able to fathom it. She knew that. It just wasn't his nature.

Still, it wasn't fair.

Was it really so wrong for her to want to be intimate with her boyfriend? And to have him want that too?

While she had never lied about or hidden her desires for that, for him, she had also never sat him down to have a frank discussion about it either. She was too afraid. Their incredibly restrictive Relationship Agreement made it clear he was not receptive to physical expressions of any kind, much less the physical act of love. She was slowly wearing him down, so so slowly, but even just talking about sex felt like too big of a leap for them. They were still working on handholding.

But perhaps she was wrong about that. If he could talk about it to Kripke, then why not her?

Amy pulled open her door roughly and tossed her purse down, missing the chair by the entrance and leaving it half spilled on the floor. It was only then that she snapped out of her anger and back to the present moment. She had been so consumed by her thoughts, she realized she had no memory of arriving at her building or the elevator ride up to her apartment. The brain really was a remarkable thing, how it could fall back on familiar routines automatically to allow one to focus all attention on the biggest problem at hand. Remarkable and dangerous. If only that same feature wasn't also the thing that lead parents to leave their children to bake inside cars.

So she resolved to be more careful and conscious for the rest of the night. Her Friday evening stretched before her, unusually empty for once. The boys were having their video game night, Penny was working the closing shift at the Cheesecake Factory (hence why they had gotten lunch earlier), and Bernadette was also working late. When her day began Amy had been somewhat dreading this lonely time, but now she was glad to have some space. She needed to think.

There were, of course, a number of ways she could handle this.

Should she confront him directly? Show up at his next work session with Kripke and force him to maintain the lie in-person? Interrupt video game night right now and show him just how insatiable she can be?

After a good deal of consideration, a full eight hours of sleep, and a wonderfully satisfying session with Gerard assisted by some whimsically inventive fantasies (she wasn't proud of it), Amy came to an unexpected decision the following morning.

She decided to let it go.

Because, despite how displeased she was with the whole situation, she just couldn't bear to see Sheldon fail. She liked him too much. In her head, in her heart, she still had him wrapped up in her arms. She was still consoling him.

It really was only Kripke, she rationalized. Sheldon was unlikely to discuss bedroom escapades with anyone else at work and from what she understood Kripke already had a reputation for being sleazy, so hopefully any potential gossip spread by him would be automatically dismissed. No one at Caltech aside from their friends knew her anyway. And ultimately, Sheldon being willing to entertain any sort of intimacy with her was probably a good sign. A first step towards actually making it happen.

Perhaps eventually there would be a day of reckoning, but not now, not from her. For now, she would just focus on the possibilities.

End Note:

Honestly, I kind of don't know what to do with this episode. This is one of those things that probably should have been a problem in the show, but they got around it by just never mentioning it again. I find it hard to believe that Amy never found out about what happened since Penny knew, but then it seems weird that she never confronted Sheldon about it either. And then considering she ends up working at Caltech and with Kripke later, I don't know, it definitely seems like there should have been something said. This is me just trying to make some sense of it since I was randomly thinking about it again a while ago. Let me know your thoughts.