[TBBT] Ch: 21 [Unabomber Chic] (Patreon)

[A Few Days Later] [Cheesecake Factory]

[First Person POV]

I had underestimated fame.

More specifically, I'd underestimated how quickly fame could turn something as simple as buying a sandwich into a tactical operation.

That was why I was currently sitting inside the Cheesecake Factory wearing a dark hoodie with the hood pulled up, sunglasses despite being indoors, and a black face mask covering everything below my eyes.

I looked less like a musician avoiding fans and more like someone preparing to rob the Cheesecake Factory.

Penny stopped beside my table with a menu tucked beneath one arm.

She stared at me.

I stared back through the sunglasses.

Her eyes narrowed slightly. Then the corner of her mouth lifted. "Hiding from the paparazzi, or did you just rob a bank?" She asked with a little smile.

I lowered my sunglasses just enough to look at her properly. "Yesterday, I was chased through Subway by two women who had to be at least sixty."

Penny's smile widened.

"I'm serious," I continued. "One of them spotted me while I was ordering my footlong, screamed my name, and somehow that activated the other one. They followed me halfway down the block asking me to sing 'I'm Yours.'"

Penny pressed her lips together, clearly fighting laughter. "Aw, sweetie, that's kind of adorable."

"It stopped being adorable the second the one in the floral tracksuit grabbed my hood and shrieked that she’s been divorced thrice, but I make her believe in love again," I said with a sigh.

Penny immediately lost the battle and laughed loud enough that a nearby table glanced toward us.

I pointed accusingly at her. "And this morning, three teenagers chased me while I was jogging."

"Girls?"

"Yes."

Penny raised an eyebrow. "Were they cute?"

"I was running for my life, Penny. I wasn't exactly conducting a hotness inventory."

She gave me a look.

I sighed. "Two were maybe eighteen. The third one looked suspiciously younger, which introduced a whole host of legal liabilities I wasn't prepared to deal with during light cardio."

Penny covered her mouth again.

"So yes," I said, pushing my sunglasses back into place. "Apparently this is the price of fame. Wealth, adulation, screaming strangers, and the hyper-vigilant survival instincts of a hunted gazelle."

Penny looked me over slowly. "You know, the whole Unabomber-chic sunglasses and mask combo might actually be drawing more attention to you."

"That's impossible. I'm practically invisible."

A little boy walking past our table turned his head and stared directly at me.

I stared back.

He tugged on his father's sleeve. "Daddy, look, a ninja!"

Penny folded her arms.

I waited until they walked away. "Children don't count."

"Whatever you say, Ninja Karl. What can I get you?"

I opened the menu and attempted to restore some dignity. "I'd like a burger."

...

[Evening]

Later that evening, I decided I wasn't cooking.

I'd spent enough time during the day answering messages and discovering that fame had turned buying lunch into covert operations. By dinner, my patience for preparing anything more complicated than cereal had completely evaporated.

There was also the minor problem that I'd run out of meat.

I'd opened the refrigerator expecting to find something useful, stared at several vegetables, eggs, milk, juice, and enough condiments to survive a minor apocalypse, then remembered I'd finished the last of the chicken the previous night.

That settled the issue.

Dinner was happening somewhere that employed another person to cook it.

I changed into a clean shirt, grabbed my wallet and keys, locked the doors, and headed downstairs. The quiet, slightly stale air of the stairwell was a welcome relief after a day of dodging overly enthusiastic fans and feeling like a hunted gazelle. I hadn't decided where I was eating yet, but I was looking forward to a blissfully normal, anonymous walk out into the Pasadena evening to figure it out.

However, the moment my sneakers hit the fourth-floor landing, the prospect of a peaceful, low-profile exit completely vanished.

Penny stood outside her apartment with one shoulder resting against the doorframe while Leonard and Sheldon faced her from across the hall. Leonard looked relaxed enough, while Sheldon had the particular expression he wore whenever casual conversation had somehow forced him into participating against his better judgment.

Penny smiled between them. "So, did you guys do anything fun today?"

Sheldon answered immediately, completely unaware that some sentences benefited from context.

"Well, today we tried masturbating for money again."

I stopped halfway down the final step.

Penny's smile disappeared.

Her eyebrows slowly lifted while she stared at Sheldon, clearly trying to decide whether she'd misunderstood him, whether he was joking, or whether she'd accidentally moved into the most disturbing apartment building in Pasadena.

Leonard's entire body visibly tensed.

Penny blinked once. "I'm sorry, you guys did what?"

Leonard moved with impressive speed.

He unlocked the apartment door, grabbed Sheldon by the shoulder, and started pushing him through the doorway before Sheldon had the opportunity to provide whatever detailed scientific explanation was already forming behind his eyes.

"Don't listen to him," Leonard said quickly as Sheldon protested from inside the apartment. "We don't do that. Well, we do have fun. We play Boggle, we play Klingon Boggle... totally normal activities that don't involve anything remotely related to the horrific sentence Sheldon just constructed."

Sheldon twisted enough to look back at him. "Leonard, her question concerned activities performed today. Omitting the high-IQ sperm bank would be a falsification of our daily logs."

Leonard shoved him another step inside. "And that's enough logging for one day."

Penny remained outside her apartment with her arms folded, staring at Leonard with an expression that somehow combined amusement, concern, and the growing realization that living across from two physicists was going to provide far more entertainment than cable television.

Leonard finally noticed me standing near the stairs.

Relief crossed his face so quickly that I immediately knew I was about to become an emergency conversational distraction.

"Oh, thank God. Hey, Karl."

I looked at Sheldon, then Leonard, then Penny's increasingly curious expression. I slipped both hands into my pockets and asked, "Did you guys wimp out at the sperm bank again?"

Leonard's face collapsed.

Penny slowly turned toward him.

Sheldon stopped resisting Leonard's grip and looked at me with obvious satisfaction. "See? Karl grasped the context immediately."

Leonard stared at me with the hollow expression of a man watching his last chance at dignity get run over twice.

Penny's eyes widened as the truth finally settled into place. "Wait, he wasn't kidding?"

Leonard released Sheldon and rubbed both hands across his face. "It was a depository for high-IQ donors. We went, we sat in the waiting room, we left."

Sheldon straightened his shirt after Leonard's manhandling. "More accurately, I experienced an ethical conundrum. There is no guarantee our genetic material would yield offspring capable of understanding differential equations."

Penny looked between them. "So you went to a place to get paid for..." She made a hand gesture. "...that, and then you just chickened out?"

Leonard pointed toward Sheldon. "He chickened out. I was already filling out the paperwork."

Sheldon frowned. "I was exercising prudent biological caution."

I leaned against the railing while trying unsuccessfully to suppress a smile. "Nothing says 'responsible scientist' quite like fleeing a clinic because your hypothetical baby might only be smart enough to run a Fortune 500 company."

Sheldon looked directly at me. "Genetic expression is significantly more complicated than that, and you know perfectly well that intelligence isn't inherited through a deterministic single-variable mechanism."

"Which makes your little panic attack even funnier."

Penny covered her mouth, although the laughter still escaped through her fingers.

Leonard looked toward me with betrayal written across his face. "You could have just said 'Hey, guys' and kept walking."

"And miss watching you die inside? Never."

Penny finally lowered her hand, still grinning. "Okay, this building is the second weirdest place I have ever lived. The first one was the apartment where the front window was completely shattered, and I had to use a trash bag tape-job to keep the local wildlife and stray cats out of my bedroom." 

"That sounds... dangerous," I said.

"Oh, it was. Good thing I grew up on a farm and had all my shots, otherwise I'd be completely full of rabies right now," she replied.

"That is medically impossible. Once symptomatic, the rabies virus is almost universally fatal. You would be dead within two to ten days." Sheldon gave her a mildly offended look. "Furthermore, this building is structurally standard. It is the residents who display a varying spectrum of behavioral anomalies."

I nodded toward him. "And in your head, you're still the control group."

Sheldon opened his mouth.

Leonard immediately pushed him farther inside again.

"Goodnight, Sheldon."

Sheldon's voice carried back through the doorway. "It's only 7:43."

Leonard looked exhausted. "Then enjoy the remaining evening inside." He went in and closed the door to prevent Sheldon from continuing the discussion in the hallway. 

...

For several seconds after Leonard's door closed, the hallway went strangely quiet.

Penny and I were left standing across from each other while the muffled sound of Sheldon continuing to explain something about genetic probability carried faintly through their apartment. Leonard responded with something I couldn't make out, followed by the unmistakable sound of a door shutting somewhere deeper inside.

I looked at Penny.

Penny looked back at me.

Suddenly, making fun of Leonard had seemed considerably easier than whatever came next.

"Hey," I said, immediately wondering why my brain had chosen to recycle the same brilliant opening strategy I'd used when we first met.

Penny's mouth twitched with amusement. "Hey," she replied, leaning one shoulder against her doorframe while remembering our first conversation too.

I shoved my hands deeper into my pockets before a third greeting could somehow escape and destroy what remained of my dignity. "So... have you eaten yet?" I asked.

Penny shook her head and glanced toward her apartment. "I've got some leftover pasta in the fridge. I figured I'd just nuke that, put on my sweatpants, and watch Sex and the City until I get depressed about how Carrie Bradshaw affords a Manhattan brownstone on a freelancer's budget."

I smiled as the opening I'd been looking for presented itself with suspicious generosity.

"Would you say yes if I offered to rescue you from the leftover pasta? We could grab some actual dinner, maybe catch a late movie if you're still up for it," I asked, keeping my voice casual even though my heartbeat had decided we'd entered a cardiovascular stress test. 

Penny blinked, her easygoing posture freezing for a split second. A flash of genuine surprise crossed her features, her eyes darting briefly toward the fire extinguisher on the right before snapping back to me. It was as if she was taking a beat to process the sheer novelty of someone in this building just straightforwardly making a move without breaking into a nervous sweat or overthinking it.

Then, the surprise melted away, and a slow, knowing smirk spread across her face.

She pushed away from the doorframe and folded her arms, fully leaning into her natural confidence. She looked straight into my eyes and asked, "Karl Peterson, are you asking me out on a date?"

I held her gaze for a second before giving up on pretending otherwise. “Yeah... Yes. I’m asking you out.”

Her smile widened. “Then yes.”

--

AN: Yeah, yeah. I haven't forgotten about his earnings and sale records. I'll add that after 1 or 2 chs.