Amy loves her hands. Next to her mind, maybe it's the next best thing she loves about herself. They're hands that have endured endless hours of training to handle delicate things. They're fragile, but also strong and nimble. The surgical gloves may not have guaranteed blemish-free skin, but the healed cuts and wounds were obvious reminders of her battle scars.

Battle scars - she has many of those, both physical and otherwise. So when she looks at her hands, she can't help but feel a little proud.

Proud as she is, there are only a few things she wanted to touch. While others experience the world by feeling, she'd just often wondered about it. She realized it becomes easy not to reach out when you've been set apart from everyone else for so long.

Also, she learned early on that touch is honest. More than words, more than anything else, touch is the sincerest form of contact. And in the few times that she allowed contact from others, they never ended well.

So where is this overwhelming need to reach out and touch Sheldon coming from?

She tried telling herself to stop.

When his hands are dangling idly on his sides. Stop.

When his cheeks lift when he grins. Stop.

When his lashes flutter from a tender glance. Stop.

This is ridiculous! She'd buried all these feelings long ago. And while she's also subject to occasional urges or yearnings, she'd long trained herself how to deal with the tension.

But every so often, her traitorous, twitching hands would shoot out without her consent. And it's for a reason that she's just recently learned to accept: To touch him is to know him. And she's always been the girl who loved to know, to learn, to discover.

She always thought of herself as logical. He doesn't like touching. So she shouldn't touch him. She should just let it go.

She can't.

It's absurd. It drives her wild sometimes. Five years and she has to resort to so many kinds of manipulations just to initiate physical contact. And she's been running out of excuses just so she can feel his skin.

Her want is so strong sometimes that she aches. She may have crossed the line on multiple occasions. But then she didn't know what hurt more… her own denials or the way he steps back and cuts his eyes at her for even trying?

She hopes she can stop. She hopes what's between them is enough.

And it doesn't help that no matter how well she handles the delicate, it could be that her hands aren't the ones meant to hold him.