Roman simply enjoyed spending time with the sunny girl who brought out his long-dormant sense of humor. It wasn't until his friends in high school started getting obsessed with girls that he even started to realize that he wasn't interested in any of them other than Penny.
Harry Davenport, his closest friend from school, knew of her existence because he had brought her to the skate park with them a few times after teaching her how to skateboard. He had been suspicious of their relationship but didn't say anything about it for a couple of years.
"You don't actually have a crush on a little kid, do you?" he asked incredulously as they ate ice cream in front of the skate park one day when they were seventeen.
"Thirteen isn't a little kid," Roman pointed out sharply. "And I do not have a crush on her."
Harry raised an eyebrow. "Dude, you've never so much as looked at another girl in the entire time I've known you but you spent the better part of three months teaching that girl to skateboard."
"Yeah, because she's my oldest friend. So what?"
"So guys don't go out of their way to spend time with a girl unless they're interested in them," he said with an air of superiority. "There's still so much you need to learn about the world of dating."
Roman closed the subject quickly because he had been shaken by those words. Penny was Penny; he had never once thought about dating her. What did Harry know?
But the thought lingered in the back of his mind every time he hung out with her over the next couple of years. He did his best to push it out of his mind because she was so much younger than him. Dating a high schooler when he was in college was a definite no-no.
Not that he even wanted to date her! He loved spending time with her but couldn't imagine kissing or handholding or any of the things his friends did with their girlfriends. At least that was what he tried to tell himself. Once the idea was in his head, it wouldn't go away. Roman was tortured by those thoughts because they could never be.
Penny thought of him as a big brother and he couldn't break her trust. He would rather be by her side forever in some capacity than freak her out and be cut out of her life completely, pathetic as it was.
She had grown into a beautiful young woman but it was her soul he had fallen in love with so many years before without ever realizing it. But he pushed those thoughts aside and tried to focus on getting through college as other women threw themselves at him and he ignored them all.
How could he date someone he didn't love? He wasn't like some of the guys he knew who took whatever was offered to them with no emotions involved.
During Penny's senior year of high school and his senior year of college, they were sitting on his front porch enjoying the sunset and eating some snickerdoodles she made when she asked him a question that shocked him to his very core.
"Roman, what kind of girls do you like?"
He was so startled that he choked on the cookie. "Why would you ask me something like that?!"
"I'm just curious," she said innocently. "I've never seen you with a girl but that doesn't mean you haven't had any girlfriends."
"…I haven't."
Her eyes widened. "Seriously? Someone as cool as you? Not possible."
"I guess I haven't met the right girl yet," Roman lied, his insides twisted with a horrible sense of irony because of who he was talking to.
Penny went quiet after that and let the matter drop. Or so he thought. At her high school graduation, she nearly gave him a heart attack by rushing at him in her cap and gown when the ceremony ended and flinging herself into his arms.
She looked up at him with a mischievous twinkle in her yellow eyes and beamed. "You know, we'll both be college students at the same time in a few months. There wouldn't be anything weird at all about us dating."
Roman completely froze, unable to process what she was saying. They had never once discussed the possibility of there being anything between them. He had kept those feelings tucked away in his heart for years.
"What are you saying?" he asked when he could finally force himself to speak, his arms still around her because he was either unwilling or unable to move them.
Penny's smile was heart-stopping when she laughed at him. "You've waited for me long enough, haven't you? I'm all yours."
That was more than enough invitation for him. Roman wasn't able to hold himself back from finally kissing her. Her parents managed to capture the moment on camera and Percy plainly said "it's about time" to their great embarrassment.
He found out later that Penny had been suspicious of his feelings for the past year and a half or so and had decided to take a gamble based on how badly he had lied about his feelings when she asked him about the kind of girl he liked.
Roman was so grateful she did. He probably never would have had the guts to potentially break the boundaries of their friendship.
They had been blissfully happy together for the past eight years with very few fights because their tastes were so similar and they knew each other so well. The only problem they couldn't seem to get past was the fact that he was ready for children and Penny wanted to focus on her career.
Roman was thirty and he wanted to be a more involved parent than his had been for the first twelve years of his life. It would be easier to do that if he was younger and still had energy to spare.