Chapter 77 – Everyone's Already Seen It
Penny cleared her throat into her fist and looked somewhere in the direction of the refrigerator.
"There was kind of a — situation. Last night. It was nothing serious."
Leonard sat up with the posture of a man who had been waiting for exactly this kind of information.
"What kind of situation? Are you hurt? Do you need to go to urgent care? Does this involve — " he glanced at Ethan " — someone in this room?"
"It was an accident, Leonard. A totally normal, boring, completely unremarkable accident. Nobody needs an ambulance."
Sheldon came back into the living room, looked at Ethan, looked at Penny, looked at the dynamic between all four people currently in his apartment, and processed it in approximately two seconds.
"I don't require the specific details," he announced, which was either considerate or self-protective depending on how you looked at it. "What I require is the restoration of morning order." He gestured with his cereal bowl. "Observationally speaking, both Ethan and Penny still need additional sleep. My recommendation: they return to Ethan's room and complete their respective sleep cycles. Leonard, you may occupy the kitchen or any secondary common area, provided you do so quietly. I will reclaim my spot and restart my morning routine from the beginning, which your collective disruption has already set back eleven minutes."
Leonard stared at him. "Why does that arrangement make sense to you?"
"Because Penny has already made a residential choice, and the most efficient path forward is to acknowledge that choice and organize the remaining variables around it."
"That's — Sheldon, that's not what happened—"
"Sheldon," Penny said, with the specific tone she reserved for moments when he'd crossed from oblivious into actively unhelpful.
Sheldon raised one hand. "I am not passing judgment. I am not requesting elaboration. I am restoring order." He pointed down the hallway. "Go finish sleeping. I need to remake my cereal."
He disappeared back into the kitchen.
Penny looked at Ethan.
Ethan spread his hands in the universal gesture of this is just Tuesday.
"Welcome to my life," he said. "You do eventually stop noticing it."
They retreated to his room, one after the other, Sheldon's organizational authority apparently more compelling than either of them had intended.
Ethan took his jacket off the back of the chair and pulled a clean t-shirt out of the drawer. He shook it out, started pulling it on.
"So," Penny said from where she'd positioned herself against the doorframe, arms folded, that particular expression on her face — the one that meant she'd been sitting on something and had decided to let it out.
The image from his dream surfaced involuntarily — the boss, the charm effect, the whole elaborate scenario his sleeping brain had apparently constructed — and Ethan found himself looking at a spot on the wall slightly to Penny's left.
"Did you," Penny said, "touch my chest last night?"
His hand slipped on the second button.
"That was a medical examination," he said, with complete dignity. "Performed under clinical necessity. The only deviation from standard procedure was the absence of gloves, which — given that it was midnight, I'd just walked in the door, and you were actively expressing concern about a potential rib fracture — I think we can agree was a reasonable concession."
Penny squinted at him. "Sure. But right now you look like a guy who's been thinking about it."
"I am not thinking about it."
"Your button is in the wrong hole."
He looked down. It was.
He fixed it without comment and decided the dignified move was silence.
Penny unfolded her arms, sat on the edge of the bed, and tilted her head. "And while we're being honest about historical events — our very first day. When you walked in on me in the shower."
"I thought it was Raj—"
"You knew it wasn't Raj," Penny said pleasantly. "Because — and I've had time to think about this — even if it genuinely had been Raj, there is absolutely no world in which you pull the shower curtain. If you think someone's in the shower, you leave. You don't investigate."
Ethan considered several responses. Rejected all of them.
"I think," he said carefully, "we could let certain historical moments remain in the past where they belong."
"Oh, I'm fine with that." Penny's smile was the smile of someone holding a card. "Except — you just said I wasn't the only one who'd seen something. That day. What did you mean by that?"
Ethan recognized, with the specific clarity of someone who has just walked off the edge of something they didn't see coming, that he'd said too much.
He couldn't exactly unsay it.
He sat down in the desk chair.
"Okay. So. You know how fast Howard is with a search engine."
Penny's smile slowed down. "...What."
"The day we all met you — you left the apartment, maybe ten minutes passed — Howard pulled up a film." Ethan kept his voice very even and neutral, the way you deliver news. "Low-budget horror. You were in it. Probably early in your career, before New York."
He paused.
"It was called Killer Ape."
The room went extremely quiet.
Penny's face ran through approximately four distinct expressions in under two seconds. The last one landed on something that was equal parts mortification and the specific helpless fury of someone confronting a thing they had successfully not thought about for a long time.
"The — " She stopped. Started again. "The what."
"Killer Ape. He found it in under ten minutes. Sent the link to the group."
Penny fell backward onto the bed.
She pulled the comforter up over her face with both hands and held it there.
From beneath it came a sound that was part groan, part suppressed scream, part something that didn't have a name.
"Oh my GOD—"
"Everyone liked it," Ethan offered. "Except Sheldon, obviously, who watched approximately forty-five seconds before declaring the premise scientifically—"
"STOP TALKING—"
"Your performance was genuinely—"
The comforter absorbed a noise that shook the pillow.
Ethan watched her lie there, face buried, the rest of her in complete unprocessed mortification, and allowed himself one private moment of amusement before recomposing.
"Penny. It was a long time ago. Nobody—"
"Do not finish that sentence with 'nobody cares' because clearly Howard cared enough to find it in ten minutes—"
"Fair point."
She surfaced just enough to look at him over the edge of the comforter, eyes just visible.
"Do you know how that movie happened?" Her voice came out slightly muffled. "I was nineteen. I had been in New York for four months. I had done one community theater production and a background role in a Verizon commercial where you can see the back of my head."
She pulled the comforter down to her chin.
"This director called my agent — I didn't even have an agent, I had a guy named Phil who worked out of a WeWork and took fifteen percent — and he said it was an 'elevated genre film with strong female characterization.'"
"It was not that."
"No," Ethan agreed.
"It was three days of running through the woods in New Jersey screaming at a guy in a gorilla suit. And then on the last day the director pulls me aside and says he needs one more scene for 'artistic completeness.' And I was twenty-two hundred dollars in credit card debt and Phil said it would help my range."
A pause that had a lot of Nebraska in it.
"Five hundred dollars, Ethan. I made five hundred dollars. And now it's apparently—" her voice achieved a pitch of genuine anguish "—a classic in this apartment."
Ethan sat with this for a moment.
"I genuinely think it's why everyone warmed up to you so fast," he said. "Full social integration, week one."
Penny put the pillow over her face.
"I need a drink," came the muffled voice from underneath it.
"It's seven in the morning."
"I know what time it is, Ethan."
He was already pulling his running gear out of the closet — the stuff he'd shoved in the back three months ago and hadn't touched since.
Penny lowered the pillow enough to watch him, still pink-faced, the movie apparently doing laps in her memory.
"Are you seriously going running? Right now? After all of this?"
"I've been eating Max's pastries at an unsustainable rate." He held up the t-shirt, checked it, pulled it on. "I did the math yesterday. Five pastries. Roughly a thousand calories. That's about seven and a half miles to break even."
He found the running shoes, knocked them together to check for anything living inside them.
"Also—" He paused, deciding whether to say this. "When I was at John's last night, I noticed I needed a break about halfway through something he was doing that he absolutely did not need a break from. And he's got at least fifteen years on me."
Penny sat up. "Who's John?"
"A patient."
"What were you doing with a patient that required physical stamina at midnight?"
"Home visit. Long story." He laced up. "The point is it was mildly humbling."
Penny examined him with the thoroughness of someone who has looked at a lot of people.
"You don't have a belly," she said. "I'm just going to go ahead and confirm that."
"I appreciate the reassurance. I'm going anyway."
She stretched her arms above her head and winced slightly — the ribs, remembering last night.
"I'd come with you, normally. I run too. But—" She pressed a hand lightly to her chest. "Still a little sore from the examination."
That shouldn't still be sore, Ethan thought. The Healing Spell had been thorough. She was almost certainly milking it slightly, which was — fair enough, honestly.
"Rain check," he said.
"Yeah." She settled back against the headboard, picking up her phone. "I usually do eight kilometers, about five-thirty pace."
"Five even," Ethan said, without thinking about it.
Penny looked up from her phone.
She looked at him with the specific expression of a woman from Omaha who has heard a thing and chosen to let it mean exactly what it sounds like it means.
"You know what, Ethan," she said, very pleasantly, "it is genuinely not always better to be faster."
Ethan opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Put on his headphones.
"I'll be back in an hour," he said, and left.
Behind him, from the bedroom, he heard Penny laugh — the real one, unguarded, the one she didn't perform.
He took the stairs two at a time and stepped out into the early morning quiet of the Pasadena street, the air still cool and carrying the smell of someone's coffee two houses down.
He put on his playlist, checked his watch, and started running.
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