Chapter 68 – A Faint Sorrow
"Really?"
Every head in the living room turned at once.
Penny and Missy were standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the doorway — and from the look on their faces, they'd caught every word of Sheldon's final condition.
Penny had her hands loosely clasped in front of her, the corner of her mouth doing that thing where she was clearly fighting a smile but committed to the bit. Pure I am watching this unfold and I will not interfere energy.
Missy had her arms crossed, chin tilted up just slightly, a faint curve at the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were locked on Sheldon with the calm, patient look of someone who had all the time in the world and absolutely nowhere else to be.
I am waiting, her expression said. Explain yourself.
Missy let the silence do its work for a beat, then drawled:
"You sold me out for a single slice of Kraft cheese, Shelly. We need to have a conversation."
She stepped forward, grabbed Sheldon by the arm, and steered him firmly toward his bedroom without entertaining any discussion about it.
Sheldon attempted resistance. "Wait — I haven't finished outlining the full criteria! Given the hereditary implications, any prospective partner should also be required to pass a baseline physics assessment—"
Bang. The bedroom door shut behind them.
The living room went completely silent.
Penny walked in slowly, arms folded, her eyes moving across Leonard, Howard, and Raj like a lighthouse beam. Not one of them could hold her gaze.
She smiled — that specific Penny smile that was warm on the surface and absolutely devastating underneath — and let it settle on Leonard.
Leonard looked like a man calculating whether he could physically fit behind the couch.
"Penny, I — okay, look, we — you know how guys get sometimes. It's like a herd thing. Collective temporary insanity. Can we maybe just—"
Penny tilted her head slightly and said nothing.
Which was worse.
Leonard trailed off.
Ethan dropped onto the couch and pressed a hand to his forehead, caught somewhere between laughing and genuine disbelief at the situation he'd walked back into.
From behind Sheldon's closed door, muffled voices drifted out — the words unclear, but the tone wasn't. Missy's voice had that particular edge to it. Sheldon's carried his usual unshakeable conviction that he was the only logical person in any room.
Then—
"AHHHHH!!!"
A shriek — distinctly, unmistakably Sheldon's — cut straight through the door.
A moment later, the bedroom door drifted open.
Sheldon emerged at half-speed, one hand pressed carefully to his midsection, shuffling in the specific way that required no further explanation. His face was a portrait of suffering. He made it to the living room wall and leaned against it.
Ethan winced. The male sympathy in the room was immediate and instinctive.
Missy came out behind him, looking completely unbothered, brushing her palms together like she'd just handled a minor household task.
She glanced around at everyone — Howard slack-jawed, Raj horrified, Leonard pale, Penny biting the inside of her cheek — then settled her gaze back on Sheldon.
"All good!" she announced pleasantly. "Shelly, you want to go ahead and make your statement?"
Sheldon swallowed. Nodded carefully.
"I… officially declare that who Missy chooses to date is entirely outside my jurisdiction."
With Sheldon's self-appointed veto power thus resolved, the remaining three competitors descended into full chaos.
There were strategy sessions. A bracket drawn on the whiteboard. Rehearsed speeches delivered to the bathroom mirror. A coin flip that somehow required three rounds of adjudication.
Eventually they produced a "winner," who made his way across the hall to Penny's apartment to confess his feelings to Missy.
The result was exactly what anyone paying attention would have predicted: complete and total shutdown. His confidence returned to him in a small cardboard box, overnight shipping, sender's address: Missy Cooper, Medford, Texas.
Missy's flight back to Texas was Sunday afternoon. Ethan and Sheldon saw her out together.
She'd changed out of the dress from the night before into a bright blue-violet camisole with a peacock feather print and light wash jeans — the kind of effortlessly put-together that took zero apparent effort and somehow always landed perfectly.
She swung her backpack on and looked at Sheldon.
"Anything you want me to tell Mom?"
Sheldon answered with complete sincerity: "You may inform her that my research focus has formally shifted from bosonic string theory to heterotic string theory. She'll want to know."
"I'll tell her." Missy glanced at Ethan.
"Send her my best," he said.
Missy nodded. "I'll tell her you both said hi."
At the door, Sheldon straightened up and extended his hand with the formality of someone concluding a business meeting.
"It was satisfactory to see you. Notwithstanding the incident involving my testicles."
Missy looked at his outstretched hand. Then she opened her arms.
"Come here, Shelly."
She pulled him into a hug.
Sheldon went rigid — the classic Sheldon full-body freeze — then, after a beat that lasted just long enough to be awkward, he hugged her back. Stiffly. But genuinely.
She turned to Ethan. They hugged like two people who didn't need to make it a whole thing.
"I'm gonna miss you," Missy said.
"Me too."
She stepped back and looked at both of them.
"For the record — I brag about you guys constantly. My friends back home hear about you all the time."
Ethan smiled but said nothing.
Sheldon blinked. "You do?"
"Of course." Missy nodded. "They all know — my neighbor's a surgeon and my brother's a rocket scientist."
Sheldon stared at her. "Rocket scientist?"
"Yeah."
"I am a theoretical physicist."
Missy tilted her head with perfect, practiced innocence. "What's the difference?"
"What's the—" Sheldon's voice jumped a full register. "What is the difference?!"
Missy patted his shoulder, gave Ethan a wave, and turned toward the stairs.
"Love you, Shelly! Bye, Ethan!"
Sheldon stood in the doorway, personally offended. "Why not just tell people I operate a tollbooth? Rocket scientist — it's practically defamatory—"
Down on the street, a cab was already waiting, the driver spotting her and waving.
Before she got in, Missy turned back one last time and called up:
"Love you guys! And my brilliant rocket engineer brother!"
The cab door closed. The lights came on. It pulled away from the curb.
On the walk back upstairs, Sheldon was still quietly muttering about the professional mischaracterization.
Then he stopped on the landing.
"Wait."
Ethan glanced over.
"That kick." Sheldon's expression shifted to something approaching genuine alarm. "It won't have any lasting effect on my fertility, will it?"
Ethan looked at him for a moment, then put a hand on his shoulder.
"No. You're fine."
Sheldon turned to face him fully, with the particular intensity he reserved for topics he had decided were critical.
"Ethan. You are responsible for my physical wellbeing. Shouldn't there be some kind of examination?"
Ethan cleared his throat. Then, because it was Sheldon and this was the hill Sheldon had apparently chosen, he adopted his most clinical, matter-of-fact tone.
"Actually, Sheldon, I've been reviewing literature on male reproductive physiology recently."
Sheldon's attention sharpened immediately. He fell into step as Ethan continued with a completely straight face:
"Current research suggests that in cases of mild blunt force trauma — well within safe parameters — the body activates compensatory vascular responses. Localized blood flow increases. Tissue repair accelerates."
He paused to let that breathe.
"There's even a line of thought that periodic low-grade stimulation of that nature may enhance thermoregulatory sensitivity in the relevant tissue — which could, theoretically, have a net positive effect on spermatogonial activity."
He stopped. Delivered the conclusion with the gravity of a man reading from a peer-reviewed journal.
"In purely physiological terms, Sheldon — what Missy did may not have been a setback."
Sheldon narrowed his eyes. "Cite your sources."
Ethan considered this. Then:
"Think back. This isn't the first time something like this has happened to you." He met Sheldon's gaze. "Didn't you once mention that Paige Swanson got you in the shin during a Physics Bowl dispute? And before that — wasn't there an incident in the third grade involving a tetherball?"
Sheldon opened his mouth. Closed it.
"Would you say," Ethan continued carefully, "that your recovery time this instance felt notably faster?"
Sheldon stood very still. Ran the internal calculation.
"…Now that you mention it," he said slowly, with the cautious wonder of a man arriving at a paradigm shift, "yes. Measurably so."
He straightened up.
"So Missy and Paige have been — unintentionally — contributing to my physiological optimization this entire time?"
Ethan kept his expression perfectly neutral. "That's one way to frame it."
Sheldon exhaled — long, relieved, deeply satisfied.
"Then the appropriate response," he said with great dignity, "would be to thank them."
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