Chapter 75 – Penny's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Night
By the time Ethan stepped out of John Wick's townhouse, the city had gone quiet in the specific way New York does after midnight — not silent, never actually silent, but down to its baseline hum. Distant traffic. A siren somewhere far enough away to be someone else's problem.
His legs were running on fumes.
The day had been relentless from the jump. Intensive Alzheimer's work first thing in the morning. A full afternoon of walk-ins that had demolished his plans for a quiet escape. Then Helen. Then the basement demolition project. Then standing in John Wick's destroyed living room watching a man shoulder a bulletproof bag of Continental gold coins and walk quietly back into the life he'd tried to leave.
Holy Light wasn't a perpetual motion machine. It drew from something real, and that something was currently sitting somewhere around empty.
He got back to the apartment building, climbed the stairs, and turned his key in the lock with the careful slowness of someone trying not to wake anyone up.
The living room was dark. A thin strip of light from the street came through the gap in the curtains and laid itself across the floor in a pale orange line. He dropped his keys in the little bowl by the door — the ceramic click was the loudest sound in the apartment. Shrugged his jacket off. Navigated toward the couch by memory and the ambient glow of the city through the windows.
He sat down.
"AUGH—"
He was back on his feet before the scream finished.
He'd sat on something. Something soft, warm, and very much alive that was now clutching its chest and staring at him with an expression somewhere between agony and outrage.
Ethan hit the lamp switch.
Penny was curled up on the couch — or had been — now pressed back against the armrest, one hand flat over her sternum, face scrunched.
"You sat on — my — chest—"
"Penny —" Ethan was already kneeling. "I'm so sorry — I had no idea you were there—"
"It hurts—" Her voice was tight.
"Let me check." The sleep vanished from his system immediately. Doctor mode, immediate and automatic.
Penny moved her hand away without being asked — she'd been on the receiving end of his clinical efficiency enough times to know the drill.
He placed two careful fingers just below her collarbone. "Breathe in for me. Slow."
She inhaled — winced slightly but managed it.
He worked methodically along the sternum, tracking each rib with light pressure, watching her face for the involuntary response that indicated real pain rather than residual shock.
"This spot?"
"Little bit. Yeah."
"Here?"
"No — that's fine."
"Deep breath again. All the way."
She did. The wince was smaller this time.
He sat back. "No fracture, no displacement. You've got a soft tissue bruise — it'll be sore for a day or two, but you're okay. If the pain gets worse overnight or you feel any tightness in your chest when you breathe, come find me immediately." He paused. "Actually — come find me regardless. Don't try to judge it yourself."
He'd already slipped the Healing Spell through during the examination, quiet and invisible, accelerating what her body would have done on its own over the next forty-eight hours. But she didn't need to know the mechanics.
He looked up.
She was looking back at him from approximately eight inches away, her hair loose around her face, expression somewhere between grateful and amused.
Ethan became aware of the proximity simultaneously and straightened up, creating appropriate distance.
"Sorry — physical examination requires close range. Standard protocol."
Penny smiled. "I figured bones were the only thing on your mind." She shifted upright carefully, one hand still resting lightly on her ribs. "Okay, the honest truth? I thought you'd actually broken something. I've been sitting on that couch for an hour telling myself I needed to stop whining and go to sleep, and then a full-grown man dropped on me from the dark."
"To be fair, I didn't see you."
"To be fair, it is extremely dark in here." She tested a slow breath. "It doesn't hurt nearly as much now. That was fast."
"Bodies are resilient."
"You know what's wild?" Penny looked at him with the specific expression of someone arriving at a conclusion they weren't expecting. "My chest literally cushioned the impact. Like — functionally."
Ethan nodded, matter-of-fact. "Adipose tissue is actually an underrated shock absorber. There's a real argument that it prevented a more significant injury."
Penny stared at him.
"Are you telling me," she said slowly, "that my boobs saved my life."
"In this specific instance — yes. Technically accurate."
She burst out laughing — the kind that was half exhaustion and half genuine delight — and immediately pressed her hand back to her ribs when laughing turned out to be ambitious.
"Ow — don't make me laugh—"
"Then stop laughing."
"You stop being accidentally funny—"
They both dialed it back, muffling themselves instinctively in deference to the sleeping apartment, and the leftover tension from the whole incident dissolved.
Ethan settled on the other end of the couch.
"What are you doing out here? Why aren't you in your own place?"
Penny let out a long, suffering exhale. "Okay. So. You know how I'm from Nebraska?"
"Vaguely aware, yes."
"I have this friend from back home. Christine." She said the name with the particular inflection of someone who has complicated feelings about a person and has given up simplifying them. "She called me a few days ago asking what New York was like. I told her it was great, because the bar is literally just 'not Nebraska.' She apparently heard that as an open invitation."
"She arrived this afternoon."
"And?"
"And she has been in my bedroom for four solid hours," Penny said, "going through every man she's been with in Omaha. In detail. Chronological order. Apparently the list is extensive enough to require chronological organization."
Ethan kept his expression neutral. "That sounds like a long evening."
"It gets so much better." Penny pulled the throw blanket over her knees. "She is also hand-washing what I can only describe as an aggressively optimistic lingerie collection in my bathroom sink. We're talking lace, mesh, straps—things that I think technically qualify as a suggestion of clothing rather than actual clothing."
Ethan absorbed this. "You paint a vivid picture."
"I came over here to get twenty minutes of peace. Howard was in the kitchen and they somehow started talking." She gestured expressively. "When I went back to get my phone, I found Howard and Christine in my bedroom. Together. Actively."
"You're certain."
"Ethan. I grew up on a farm." She looked at him with the steady eyes of a woman who has witnessed animal husbandry. "I know what I heard. Either they were doing what I think they were doing, or Howard somehow got trapped in some kind of mechanism and I am deeply misreading the sounds."
Ethan pressed his lips together very firmly.
"Got it," he said.
They looked at each other for one second.
Then both of them put their hands over their mouths at the same time and lost it — completely silently, shaking with the specific laughter of people who are trying very hard not to be heard, which made it worse, which made it better.
Penny wiped her eyes. "Don't — I can't — ribs —"
Ethan got himself under control with visible effort.
A moment of recovery passed.
"So you surrendered your own bedroom," he said.
"I didn't surrender it, I strategically withdrew." She looked at the tiny couch beneath her. "Also, before you ask — yes, I told Sheldon I was sleeping here, and he made me sign an informal verbal contract promising not to touch anything in his emergency preparedness kit." She paused. "He also gave me a map."
"A map."
"Highlighting which supplies are his — completely off limits — and which are yours and Leonard's, with notes about his mood-based flexibility on those. It has a legend."
Ethan put his face in his hands briefly. "Of course it does."
He straightened up and looked at her with the practical clarity of someone too tired to dance around a simple solution.
"Take my room. Actual bed, actual sleep. I'll take the couch."
Penny blinked. "I can't do that—"
"You've got a bruised chest and you've been awake way too long. Consider it the apology for the landing. The couch is fine for one night."
She hesitated — long enough that he could see her actually running through the calculus.
"Your bed," she said, casual but careful, "how big is it?"
Ethan answered with the complete transparency of a man whose brain had been running at capacity for eighteen straight hours and had no bandwidth remaining for subtext.
"Plenty of room. Probably fits three people comfortably."
Penny blinked.
"Three."
"Give or take. King-size." He yawned so extensively it briefly changed the shape of his face. "Go sleep. See you tomorrow."
He was already pulling the throw blanket over himself, relocating the couch pillow, and shutting down.
Penny stood looking at him for a moment.
Then she turned toward his room, paused at the doorway, and looked back.
"Sheldon says you shouldn't sleep with your head pointing toward the door."
One eye opened. "Why."
"Ancestral wisdom. Something about vulnerability to sneak attacks. Head away from the door — statistically safer."
The eye closed. "Noted."
Penny watched him obediently shift position, resettle, and go immediately still in the way of someone who was going to be asleep in approximately ninety seconds.
She shook her head — fond, amused, something else she didn't examine too closely — and headed for his room.
About two minutes later, the bedroom door opened again.
Penny crossed the living room in bare feet, stopped at the edge of the couch, and looked down at the lump of exhausted doctor wrapped in a decorative throw blanket.
"Ethan?"
"Mmm." Not asleep yet. Close, though.
She took a breath. Said it before she could talk herself out of it — light and casual, the way you say things when you're trying to leave yourself a way out if the answer is wrong:
"Did you want to — sleep together? I mean — the bed is big, you said—"
She stopped.
Waited.
The pause stretched two seconds. Three.
"Mm." Half a word, from somewhere near unconsciousness. "—Yeah — sure — 's fine—"
Penny's face did the thing faces do when they're trying not to show that they're pleased.
"Okay — give me a few minutes. I'll shower."
She went. The water started.
Twenty-four minutes later she came back out, hair towel-dried, wearing the oversized Cheesecake Factory t-shirt she kept at Sheldon and Leonard's for emergencies, nerves and anticipation doing a complicated little dance in her chest.
"Ethan, I—"
She stopped.
He was exactly where she'd left him.
One arm had migrated off the couch and was hanging down, knuckles resting lightly on the floor. His chest was rising and falling in the slow, even rhythm of someone in a genuinely deep sleep. His hair had gone sideways. The throw blanket was half off.
He was completely, utterly, and absolutely unconscious.
Penny stood looking at him for a long moment.
Then she laughed — quiet, private, the specific laugh of someone whose night has gone in every possible direction except the one they were aiming for.
She reached down and pulled the blanket back over him properly.
"Unbelievable," she murmured, to no one in particular. "Worst luck in the entire city."
She turned off the lamp.
The room went soft — just the warm glow of the hallway nightlight, a thin rectangle of orange falling across the couch, across the sleeping face of a man who had resurrected someone's wife and demolished a basement floor and somehow managed to accidentally defuse a moment Penny had spent twenty-four minutes in the shower working herself up to.
She went to his room, climbed into his admittedly excellent king-size bed, stared at the ceiling for approximately forty-five seconds, and then fell asleep.
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