"Penny, thank you so much. Without your help, I would not have been able to buy such suitable clothes," Raj thanked Penny with a warm smile as they prepared to leave the department store. He reached into his shopping bag and pulled out a separate package he'd been carrying. "This is a little gift for you. Please accept it."
Penny paused, genuinely surprised by the gesture.
She had dated many boyfriends over the years, but very few of them had ever taken the initiative to give her gifts, especially without expecting something in return or making a big show of it.
She accepted the gift happily, her fingers working to open the elegant handbag. Inside, nestled in tissue paper, was a pair of new Prada women's shoes. "Wow!" Penny's eyes widened in genuine surprise and delight.
A pair of designer shoes like these was worth at least a thousand dollars, possibly more.
The fact that Raj had given her such an expensive gift left her truly flattered and a bit overwhelmed.
"Honey, you really didn't need to give me such an expensive gift," she said, smiling with a touch of embarrassment, her cheeks flushing slightly.
"It's okay, as long as you like them," Raj replied with a sincere smile.
Penny was his first woman, after all. Not to mention a single pair of shoes—even if he could afford to buy her everything in Macy's, he would be willing to do it for her.
"Thank you, honey. You are so kind to me," Penny said warmly, leaning in to give him a spontaneous kiss. "Now let's go get something to eat, and then we'll go home. I'll reward you well."
Raj immediately understood her meaning and smiled, nodding in agreement.
After a leisurely lunch at a nearby restaurant, the two returned to Penny's apartment once again.
They spent the rest of the day lost in each other's company, enjoying their newfound intimacy.
It wasn't until the next morning, a working day, that the two were reluctantly forced to part.
Raj drove to Caltech and had just settled into his office chair when Howard knocked on the door and walked in without waiting for an answer. "Raj, where did you disappear to yesterday? I've been trying to reach you all day," he asked, his tone eager and curious.
"I'm sorry, buddy. I was with Penny yesterday," Raj replied, spreading his hands apologetically.
Although he didn't particularly want to show off, there was no point in lying about the facts.
"What?!" Howard's eyes widened in disbelief when he heard that. "You were with Penny all day?!"
"To be exact, it was one day and two nights—from Saturday night until this morning," Raj confirmed with a satisfied smile.
Thinking back on those blissful hours of intimacy, he couldn't help but let the smile linger on his face.
"Hiss..." Howard drew in a sharp breath, clearly stunned.
He really hadn't expected Raj to have such good fortune with women.
Penny, with her blonde hair and blue eyes, her curvy figure, and her sweet, infectious smile, was an absolute knockout.
Howard had met her for the first time just the other night and had been immediately smitten—love at first sight, really—but Raj had somehow managed to win her over first.
"You lucky dog," Howard couldn't help but sigh enviously. "I really shouldn't have gotten out of the car that night."
"Okay, don't be so down about it," Raj said, offering comfort with a friendly smile. "After my relationship with Penny becomes more stable, I'll ask her to introduce you to one of her friends. Maybe she can set you up with a girlfriend."
"Thank you! Thank you!" Howard exclaimed, his mood instantly brightening as if the clouds had parted. He enthusiastically grabbed Raj in a bear hug.
"Now tell me, how was it? What's she like?" he asked again in a conspiratorial whisper, leaning in closer.
Raj pushed him away gently but firmly. "Howie, if you really want to find a girlfriend, you need to stop acting so desperate and inappropriate. Women can sense that kind of thing."
"Okay, okay, you're the expert. I'll follow your lead," Howard said quickly, naturally willing to defer to someone who clearly had more success than he did.
After Howard finally left his office, Raj turned his attention back to his computer and started on his work for the day.
Raj's official position is an assistant research professor in the Caltech Department of Physics, and his current project is to study the planets in the Kuiper belt.
The Kuiper belt is a hollow disk-shaped area in the solar system near the ecliptic plane outside the orbit of Neptune, where celestial bodies are densely concentrated.
There are hundreds of thousands of tiny planets there, and Pluto, once one of the nine planets, is located among them.
The study of the Kuiper belt will help people understand the origin and evolution of the solar system, thereby deepening their understanding of the universe in which they live.
In the sitcom, Rajesh was selected by "People" magazine as one of "the 30 most noteworthy people under the age of 30 in the world" because he discovered a planet designated 2008-NQ-Sub-17 in the Kuiper belt.
He consulted relevant papers before his transmigration.
Originally, he couldn't understand them, but after reading them, his mind was muddled and confused.
But after receiving Raj's IQ, astronomy knowledge, and superhuman memory, he quickly grasped the concepts in those papers.
At the moment, he began to write the "Edgeworth-Kuiper Fragmentation Disk" paper.
This paper was jointly published in 2010 by well-known scholars Wittens Christian and Klevov Alexander V.
It proposes a new algorithm to remove the effects of bias and distance selection in known TNO populations to derive the expected parameters of the "true" EKB.
This is of great benefit to the study of the Kuiper zone. Therefore, after the paper was written, it was published by the top journal "Astronomy and Astrophysics" soon afterward, and was included by Oxford University Press, the OA Library, and the Gate of Scientific Research.
If Raj can publish this paper first, it will undoubtedly be of great help to enhance his status and popularity in the industry.
Throughout the morning, Raj was busy writing his thesis.
Although he already knew the main points of the paper, it was not easy to write a comprehensive academic paper.
He still needs to collect information, verify data, draw models, and ensure all calculations are accurate. All in all, this is very meticulous work, which cannot be completed in a week or two.
At noon, Howard invited him to the cafeteria for lunch.
There, he joined Leonard and Sheldon.
As soon as he saw him, Leonard's expression became a little stiff and uncomfortable.
"How could you do this to me?!" he confronted Raj.
"What did I do to you?" Raj was a little puzzled.
"Penny was my first favorite, why did you steal her away?" Leonard asked angrily.
"Please, she is a person and not a thing, how could I take her away? You are being a bit objectifying toward women," Raj laughed.
Leonard's momentum was hindered, and his voice immediately quieted down. "I didn't mean that, anyway, you understand it in your heart."
"I understand, but you really can't blame me for this. She invited me to her house for a drink," Raj spread his hands. "If you were me, would you refuse?"
When Howard heard this, his envious eyes lit up with excitement.
Leonard was silent for a moment.
If it were him, he would indeed not be able to refuse.
"Okay, don't be sad. There is a saying in India, 'Where there is no grass at the end of the world, why bother to love only one flower,'" Raj persuaded with a smile. "There are so many beautiful women in this world, why should you fixate on only her?"
"You have Penny now, of course you say it lightly," Leonard said sourly.
There are indeed many beautiful women, but how has he ever caught up with even one of them?
"Don't worry, we are all friends. We share the blessings and the difficulties. After my relationship with Penny is stable, I will ask her to help introduce you to her friends," Raj laughed.
"Yeah!" Leonard immediately stopped complaining and cheered happily.
"Raj, don't forget me," Howard reminded him immediately, fearing that he would be left behind.
"I'm really sad for you all." Seeing that they only talked about women, Sheldon said contemptuously.
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