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fujiidomPairing/Character: Sheldon/Penny
Rating: MA, MA, MA! So totally MA!
Summary: Almost drowning gives Sheldon some perspective, Penny suffers through the ups and downs of Life Debt as a cultural phenomena because of this.
Spoilers: Set around mid-to-late season two
A/N: What I feel is obligatory math sex. Sorry, kiddies, way too adult again. Whoops.
Ω
It’s kind of a weird – the things she’s become thankful for and happy about, especially so many years after the fact, but Penny finds herself praising even these smallest of reasons for getting her to this place.
And, God damn, if failing high school algebra was one of them.
She remembers having flirted her way through the slightly less incomprehensible geometry course the year before and assuming that having been one of their former towel boy of a teacher’s favorites would have worked her out for the better. Turns out nearly acing a class because you were the embodiment of what he, back in high school, couldn’t get to laugh at his lame jokes and smile at his dumb math metaphors – which were nearly always about Dawson’s Creek (which still makes her cringe, in retrospect) – well, it helped her in that class, but by the next year she was stuck with a sixty year old ex-nun with a hairy upper lip. No charming that.
So, she failed and she failed miserably. She’d been clueless from the start, but being placed in a slightly more advanced class, since her previous grade had been so strong, really helped to speed up the process.
Having bombed that class so incredibly, she had been suspicious of math ever since. She took strictly remedial classes and only what few bare basics had been required for the three years of community college she’d made it through. She’d been good enough at the basic Dear Aunt Sally stuff, but beyond that it got a bit more complicated than her brain liked.
If she hadn’t been so lucky as to have spectacularly failed Mrs. Milheim’s algebra class, she may have had a better grasp on the subject as a result. She might not have refused to read her books, take notes longer than a paragraph not counting doodles, or commit to understanding whatever the hell the quadratic equation actually did.
If she’d appreciated math more in the years since that class, she may not have found the game her eight-year-old nephew had begun playing for two-thirds of the ride home from Cabrera’s with her cutely serious boyfriend so shocking and hypnotic.
“Three hundred and thirty-three divided by six!” “Fifty-five point five.”
“Four hundred, twenty six times twenty – three!” “Ten thousand, four hundred and – eighty eight.”
“Um, factor – no! – square root, square root of five hundred and twenty-nine?” “Ah, twenty-three, that’s an easy one, though. Come on, put some effort into it!”
Jeffrey’s eyes had lit up as he cracked open his text book to the back pages – the hard stuff. Not a single problem was enough. Sheldon had left with a promise from the tiny boy to learn enough of what was in there to give the physicist a shot at making the questions.
Until the second her family toured her bedroom, while her grandmother snoozed in the RV, Penny couldn’t decide which part of the interaction she was more attracted to. Twenty-eight minutes later, she was no closer to figuring it out. Brain versus heart, cage match. As the RV pulled away in the dark, she decided she didn’t really care. Or more like she called it a tie.
She couldn’t get Sheldon up the stairs fast enough. He had been screaming about stair heights and bodily harm, when she attacked him by Mrs. Vartebedian’s fern. He shut up and they ended up piggy back riding up the remaining two and a half flights.
Ω
She’d seen people do that before, though mostly just Sean Penn and Russell Crowe, but it’s so different to see someone actually do the math. Sheldon wasn’t reading a script.
If she’d been told, back then, that her disinterest in math would result in her being, one day, turned to jelly at a guy who could process long hand equations – not only without the use of but sometimes faster than her pocket calculator – leaving her three mind-shattering orgasms in and desperately trying also to shatter her (as her mind could now only think of it as) rounds of crazy sex over length of time record – she would’ve laughed and laughed and laughed.
In fact, right now she still laughed and laughed and laughed – for different reasons, though.
He had made a bizarre joke with dirty words and even though she didn’t get it, she found it hot that he was talking dirty. In his own ass backwards, “If you were X to the third, I would want to be ¼ times X to the fourth,” with something about the area under curves kind-of-way. So she laughed some more.
Between giggles and licks and gritted teeth, they had been shouting out random numbers at the top of their lungs. Random numbers to her, “simple combinatorics” to her lover.
The calculator had hit the wall after the first time a string of eight numbers flicked its answer onto the small grey screen just a split second after Sheldon groaned his own.
At some point the sun had gone down.
“Sixteen.”
“Yes,” he had her enclosed like a nut in a shell, practically.
Sweaty skin rubbing up against sweaty skin, a tangle of limbs in what he claimed to be “a variant of the prototypic lotus position,” but she knew as page one hundred and seventy-three of Cosmo. She thanked her yearly subscription, he owed Raj.
“Seven.”
He moaned, which she took as a sign that he’d heard her. She moved her mouth to his earlobe.
She had both her hands gripping his head so tightly she could feel sweat dripping down her palms and wasn’t sure if it was from his hairline or her hands, but didn’t care either way. She was reveling in the fact that he was clearly as into this as she was, unhygienic-ness by the wayside.
“Nine—,” her breath caught, “—teen.” His head and mouth went past her shoulder, latching onto the nape of her neck. He was so enormously tall.
He mumbled something incoherent against her jaw line.
“Twenty.”
She could feel where her now stringy and damp hair stuck up as he’d pushed it every which way, trying to pull her even closer into him.
She knew it couldn’t actually be possible to do so, since they were half on top of one another already, but somehow when she dug her nails into his shoulder blades it seemed like he got his wish.
“Fo—oh—ur.”
They had decided, at one point, that kneeling could maybe make their height difference a bit less obtrusive as it proved to be sometimes.
While his long, lanky legs were now tucked underneath them both and half covered by a haphazard bunching of sheets, he still had such lengthy arms and was hunched over slightly above her. So maybe it didn’t work out the way they’d planned, but his towering height didn’t even register to her, now.
And oh, God he was everywhere. She couldn’t open her eyes without seeing his flesh, or hers.
She didn’t know where he began and she ended.
They were hardly even moving – that was the craziest part. Well, one of the craziest parts.
It felt like one elongated, insanely intimate hug.
She’d had flashes of that Christmas, which seemed so long ago, remembering hazily how, then, he was so new at human interaction. Though, even then, when he’d hugged her, he’d hugged her. When Sheldon does something: he does something. Commits, goes off the deep end for it, and makes it his. Awkward at first, yes, but he had squished her hard, in gratitude, while baring every ounce of emotion he could muster.
Now, he was as bared open to her as anyone could get, she supposed. But they both got to do that, this time, and there was even more squishing involved.
“Three,” she squeaked between her nibbling.
He was literally so on top of her that he was kissing the back of her head without moving her head from where she was destroying the surface of his collarbone with her canines.
“Two.”
She heard his voice echo, through her hair and the back of her head – somewhere against the wall behind her, she guessed – as he drew out slowly between sloppy kisses and deep, measured breaths. “I believe I know where this sequence seems to be going.”
“I thought you only made,” she seized up for a second, taking a sharp intake of air, when he went back to his place at the base of her skull, “conclusions based on observations.”
“And experimentation,” he sagely mumbled. She shifted her head and the bits of hair that weren’t stuck up in weird places fell into his tilted face.
Blowing some errant hair from the side of his mouth, he shot a shiver down her spine.
She flinched backwards and that was that, she was gone. He was right behind her.
“One—nnnngggggh,” he got out. It wasn’t long before he had to roll them to their sides, collapsing with enough of his weight displaced so as not to crush Penny. He took a loud, dramatically deep breath before he finished, “Million, twenty-one thousand, four hundred,” putting the back of his hand to his forehead in exhaustion, mind finally slowing down, too, “and forty.”
They lay there, shell-shocked and motionless. Penny thought that he’d fallen asleep, or maybe she had. Everything was quiet save their bated breathing.
She didn’t even think it was her speaking, when she heard her voice – throat cracked and words dry, or something like that. Blurting out the only thought left in her head. “I never got to one, technically.”
“Hmm? Well, multiplying any factored progression by the numeral one results in the same net product,” he sounded like he wasn’t really thinking about what he was saying either. Which is ridiculous because who talks like that without thinking, but her mind wouldn’t go there until later. She could hear the smile in his words, without opening her eyes.
Clearly something he’d said many times, before. Although, probably never after a night like that. She curled up on the part of the bed not totally ruined by their numbers game. “Basic mathematics,” she sighed and finally drifted off.
They slept in a heap of arms and legs, passed out for hours.
Ω
Later, she logs onto Ticketmaster and maybe buys an extra ticket for the concert next week with money she isn't sure she even has. Maybe she gives the guys that plus her and Sheldon’s Beyonce tickets, too for the following Wednesday.
Oh, damn, they’d miss Halo night, again. What a shame.
Whatever, she wasn’t a single lady, anyway. Plus, Sheldon told her he hates Sasha Fierce.
When he’s confused by the trio’s excitement over their gifted general admission, she laughs. He continues his questions seeming genuinely curious and keeps her laughing for hours and hours and the only record they break that night is their own. Or maybe they don’t, or maybe they shatter it to bits. She loses track because she hates being the one counting and she’s never been so damn happy she sucks at math.
Ω
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 12:25 pm (UTC)damn, if Sheldon carried her on the stairs, he was seriously
hornyinterested in what Penny was proposing xDnot only did he manage to become the hero of one of Penny's nephews but also make her very
satisfiedhappy in every aspect :)great story, please continue! :D
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 05:07 pm (UTC)Yeah, I wanted to try and counteract the super not G-rated part of the story with something sweet. Like most things with Sheldon, it all comes back to children and learning.
This may or may not factor into his future (in this fic, and others). Thanks so much for reading! There's a couple of chapters left!
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 05:06 pm (UTC)I don't want this fic to end, it's so good! D:
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 05:08 pm (UTC)Aw, thanks! I'm happy you've followed it along after all of this! Just two chapters to go! I'm glad you've stuck around!
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 07:28 pm (UTC)Great chapter, although, I've very confused by the end. What about Beyonce? I'm a little slow because today is the first day of Spring Break for me and I have already shut down teh brainz. But I still loved it.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 01:49 am (UTC)If that makes sense.
It is kind of non-connected, but it's just Penny's way of saying she wants another night of the same.
And I hate math, too. This is my way of making it a little more interesting. ;) Thanks for reading!
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 11:31 pm (UTC)Math + Sheldon + Sex = Happy Penny and hot fanfic smut.
Ok, serious comment time now; I loved the sweet moment with the nephew (what is it with Sheldon and little kids that us shippers seem to like so much?) and I loved the they were saying numbers during the act and I actually laughed at his dirty joke, even though I didn't get it, so yeah, I pretty much love this chapter, but that's not exactly unexpected.
I can't believe this story only has two more chapters to go, I'm going to miss it..
no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 01:52 am (UTC)Thanks for everything else! I'm going to miss it, too. I'm happy you've followed along all this time!
no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 02:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-24 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-24 06:01 pm (UTC)Thanks for reading, let know what you think of the rest. I'm happy you're interested!