Office fic: pressed against a sea of stars
Title: pressed against a sea of stars
Author: allibabab
Rating: T
Wordcount: 3,257
Spoilers: This hasn't and won't happen, but it takes place after Cocktails.
Summary: In the end, it is never, never giving up.
A/N: This was a doozy to get out! Thanks so much to biggerdorkthanu and fireworkfiasco for all their help.
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
pressed against a sea of stars
She wakes up with headaches these days. They’re from the way she clenches her teeth while she’s sleeping, pressing her jaws together like that might slow things down, or make time pass so slowly it blurs, colors bleeding into each other, red to orange to white. She fingers the curve of her jaw and winces from the pounding at her temples. She hates to wait.
There’s been no fallout yet. When Roy blew up at the bar, she’d watched the shards of glass sprinkle to the floor, sharp and clear and broken. She’d seen something in the way that it shattered, something that rattled between her ears, things like I can’t and a silk dress and the way his stomach tightened under her fingertips. She’d run away from the memory as much as from Roy, his familiarity no longer comforting. The glass prickling into her skin might have even felt better than the way her head throbbed, like it held too much, like what she remembered was more than she was.
And yet nothing has happened. Yet, she tells herself. And you had better get to him before Roy does. He doesn’t deserve to be hurt for something that’s your fault, something that you put into motion.
She presses her heels into the floor as she leans her way out of bed, fingering the fraying edge of her t-shirt. Work is the last place she wants to go right now, but that’s an every morning groan, and she can’t tell whether the creak rising up from the ground comes from the floorboards beneath her or the joints in her legs sliding around and past each other. She’s always thought there was something weird about the way your bones don’t actually touch each other, how there has to be some cushioning. They’re strong, after all, but breakable too, if the force is right. An image sneaks into her mind of long fingers, a tie, brown hair creeping over a pressed white collar, but it’s something so familiar it falls out one ear as she makes her way to the bathroom.
She doesn’t think about Jim again that morning, except for when she makes tea, and takes a shower, and brushes her teeth, and chooses her outfit. He’s not in her head as she presses her toes down on the accelerator or feels the grooves of her steering wheel slide against her fingers, except that he is, because he always is. Her jaw aches by the time she reaches the warmth of the elevator.
She spends the day a tangled heap of sparking wires, ready to flicker at the slightest provocation. On her way to the breakroom for some tea, hoping it will calm her nerves, she manages to crash straight into Kevin and knock his candy out of his hand, colorful pieces tinkling onto the floor, the cracking sound of their collision ringing in her ears. Her throat is so tight she thinks she might choke, and the apology she mumbles to Kevin is half-hearted and faint. Dashing into the room, she watches Jim make his way across the room to Karen, bending down to say something in her ear. Oh, Pam thinks. So this isn’t it. Every time he leaves the confines of the office walls, she panics, wondering if Roy’s chosen now, today, this minute to get to him. To the tips of her fingers, to the ends of her toes, a cry pulsates, hesitating at the edges of her body. Don’t go, she wants to tell him, but there’s more than one reason she wants to say it, and the words never quite form in her mouth. She pulls on a lock of hair, hard enough that it hurts, but with the way she’s biting her lip and clenching her stomach, she doesn’t have much sensation for anything else. Things feel tight and closed around her. Sometimes she wonders if the dust from all the paper is lining the inside of her lungs and maybe that’s why she can’t fill them, maybe that’s why it hurts to breath.
She tries not to think of him, pressing her tongue to the roof of her mouth and blinking hard to clear the blurriness in her eyes, the twinge behind her nose. Use purple in your shadows, she thinks, her mind skimming over things she knows, anything to keep her from breaking here, this way, in front of everyone and him-- The purple creates depth, which creates realism. Don’t make it perfect, just make it right. You’ll know what that means when you see it.
She tucks a hand into the curve of her waist and turns, facing the blinds and the windows. Jim’s looking at her through the glass, a half-smile tucking the corners of his lips back. It’s like he always knows. She feels something lurch, heavily, and closes her eyes, turning away. Tell him, she thinks. Oh god, I need to tell him now.
She’s waiting for it when she hears the click of the handle, like it’s the safety on a gun, like it’s the grating sound of a floorboard in a horror movie, foreboding, unstoppable, inevitable. She doesn’t turn; if she did, she’d have to swing her eyes past Karen’s desk, and that inquiring look isn’t something she can stomach right now. There are things between them that Karen doesn’t--can’t--
“Pam?”
Her fingers tremble, but she fists them and swivels her upper body to face the vending machines, looking at her reflection on the glass. She can’t look at him. Not yet. “Hey, Jim.”
He takes a few steps and stands beside her, his body angled toward hers. It’s ridiculous, she knows; this whole thing is ridiculous. The man she loved is going to beat up the man she loves over her. It’s like some romance novel, and the thought makes a laugh rise in her throat, breaking up the lump she’s been trying to swallow. It’s a strange laughter, though: it makes her feel on edge, unnatural. It’s better than what she felt before, though, and she dares to dart her eyes up to look at him in the glass. If she tries, she can imagine she feels the heat from his chest emanating off him from where she stands.
“What’s going on?” he asks, tilting his head to get a glimpse of her face. “You okay?”
“Fine,” she says, nodding. “Just getting a snack.”
“Looks like you made Kevin lose his,” he jokes, but concern tinges his voice, and he won’t go away, and tellhimtellhimtellhim is repeating in her head.
Her cheeks redden. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess I’m pretty clumsy.”
“You? Clumsy?” There’s something in his eyes, like laughter and comfort and connection, and even though things are weird right now and neither one knows where they stand, it’s good and right and she wishes she had the guts to just reach up and press her lips to his, feel the ridges in his skin line up with hers. She imagines his eyes focusing on her as she responds with a breathless laugh, a gush of air that’s more a reaction to the feeling of his thumb and fingers pressing on opposite sides of her wrist than anything related to mirth. “Pam.”
“Yeah?” Her voice is high as she fumbles with her other hand for a dollar to put into the machine, anything to keep from throwing her arms around him, pressing him close, keeping him from harm. This will be her fault. Feeling something -- boldness, tenacity, hysteria, it makes no difference -- rise in her chest, building against the pressure in her throat, she grabs on to it and takes a flying leap, blurting, “I told Roy about what happened.”
His mouth closes; the words quiet on his tongue. He’s still looking at her, she knows. She feels the burn on her neck, her cheek, her chest. His voice is so close. “What do you mean?”
“I told him,” she repeats. The machine finally sucks her dollar in with a whirring sound, but now that it’s there, she doesn’t know what to buy. Staring at the glowing green outline of the numbers, she feels something sink inside her. The skin at her temple bulges with the force of her jaw, her teeth clinking like pearls on a necklace. She turns to face him, because if she doesn’t even know what to get in terms of candy, how can she ever decide what she wants for herself, for her heart, for her life with everything she’s going to have, like a terrace and an easel and maybe a fishbowl with colorful gravel and a baby and things. She needs these things and she’s going to have them, she is going to have them, and no one-- She breathes in sharply when her eyes meet his, locking on to a color that’s dark, mossy, earthy.
The pad of his thumb slips over the protruding bone in her wrist, as if to smooth it over, make it flat. “What does that mean?”
He’s playing dumb; he knows what she means. “Stop,” she says angrily, pulling her arm away, even though she’s not angry and she doesn’t want him to stop. Something’s happening here, and she doesn’t know what to make of it. She feels like the whole situation has tilted, throwing shadows on things she used to know, and with everything that’s changed and everything that hasn’t, she doesn’t know how to angle her feet to stay standing.
“Pam,” he says again, a strain of something taut and exposed in his voice, a piano string pulled too tight. “I can’t just-”
It’s her body that’s facing his now, and his that’s turned away; they’re gears in each others lives, fitting into the empty spaces between. “What?” she says, her voice low. “You can’t just what?”
“I don’t know how to do this anymore,” he says. He has his face turned away, so she watches the long line of his neck pulse with his heartbeat, a steady thump that seems to vibrate the air around her, that seems to curl up in the hollows of her clavicle and pound against the rhythm of her own heart.
“Do what,” she says, and it’s not a question. Resignation makes the words heavy and jagged, catching at her lips.
He almost smiles at the way she’s the one running in circles now rather than him, but there’s a sad sort of bitterness in the way he swallows and runs a hand down his tie, pressing it into place. They’re still hedging - they’ll always hedge - but it’s almost like they’ve made it around the corner of the bush and seen what’s on the other side. The only thing is, it’s not great or magnificent or empowering or enlightening. It’s a reflection. You can’t escape yourself.
The thought pushes words to her mouth, makes her tongue and lips move to form them. “Look,” she says, watching the way the faintest shadow of a beard shifts as he swallows again, “I don’t know. This isn’t-I don’t know what I thought this would be, but it’s not this. I can’t even--you’re not--”
He nods. “I know.”
She doesn’t say you don’t even though she wants to, even though she feels something sharp beneath her breast at the way they’re acknowledging the impossibility of all this.
He looks up at her, a flash of a different time hiding in the corners of his eyes. “I really don’t know what we do now.”
There’s a pause then where she’s supposed to agree, but something in her pushes out against her ribs, and instead she says, “I think Roy’s going to try and hurt you.”
He studies the carpet and purses his lips just a little, seeming to need a minute to think. “When did you tell him?” he asks finally.
“Almost a month ago,” she says. She watches his eyebrows shoot upward.
“That long?”
She picks at a sticker on the vending machine glass. “I didn’t really know how to… I mean, I didn’t even know if he was really going to do it.”
“And now you think he is?” he asks.
“No!” she blurts, her mouth slow to shift out of its ‘o’ position as she contemplates her words, rolling them around on her tongue. “I don’t know what he’s going to do.”
“Well, if he thinks I had something to do with why you called the wedding off, then-”
“I told him I kissed you,” she interrupts.
“That doesn’t make any…” He shrugs, biting the inside corner of his lip. She watches the flesh bulge with his movement and presses her tongue between her teeth to prevent them from crumbling, like ancient rocks under too much pressure. “Why?” he asks. It seems simple.
Because I did, she wants to say, because I love you, because, because, because.
“I thought he should know,” she says instead, and feels a fracture in her chest, like her ribs are detaching from her sternum, leaving her soft and exposed. She is butter left out in the sun, a kind of golden vulnerability. “We were trying to be honest with each other.”
“So you told him that I kissed you,” he says, watching her. His eyes are intent, and she knows why; she knows what hinges on the next breath of vibrations that comes out of her mouth.
“No,” she says quietly, her voice tight. “I told him I kissed you.”
There is a flash of something in his eyes, a bright glare, like sunlight off a rushing wave, and she feels a warmth pass over her neck, spreading down to her belly, across her hips.
“You did,” he says.
“I--I told him I did. I mean--” She hangs her head and presses her lips shut, biting back nervousness and insecurity and the hope that threatens just beneath the surface. “Yeah,” she says. “I did kiss you.”
He smiles a little as he says, “I know.” Her lips curve in response, and it almost hurts the way sugar does, so sweet it burns.
It’s a moment before she thinks to say something, feeling the words gradually reappear the same way they faded when he smiled at her, like a memory relived. She runs her teeth over her bottom lip, the solidarity of bone against her softest skin, and has to close her eyes against the sight of his pupils dilating, his gaze fixed squarely on her. She wants it, oh god, she wants it, but there are so many things in the way and they need time to press on against all this. That’s all they really need.
Time, she repeats to herself, but the air seems to thicken, getting caught in the crevices of her lungs. The word seems to dissolve on her tongue as his eyes darken, falling to watch her mouth. She wants to say it again, but the harsh sound won’t come out; things like Jim and mine and sorry, only the softest of sounds, seem to fall out from between her teeth. It’s words like hurt and can’t and past that catch at the roof of her mouth, jagged and painful and not quite truth enough to sweep along in the rush of air from her larynx.
He’s stepping away and pulling on the strings for the blinds before she really understands what’s just happened, the way everything has shifted and molded and become something new. She squeezes her eyes shut and feels a wetness on the edge of her lashes, a sort of liquid relief that what they’ve had isn’t all there is; and it hurts, it hurts so much to think of Karen watching him close the blinds, of all the ways they’ve hurt each other before, but it’s all nothing, it becomes nothing, in the way his lips press her back against the vending machine. She feels him brace himself, one hand on either side, brushing down the brightly lit buttons, a heated handprint on the glass, and his warm, solid body pressed everywhere against hers. His lips are wet and soft and more than she thinks she can bear; there is nothing and everything in the way they move against each other. They fit like a tree’s roots in the soil, like clouds in the sky, like the earth in the solar system in the galaxy in the universe and she feels a hot wash of tears trickle over her cheekbones, running into the spaces between their lips, salty and real, this is real--
A loud thunk makes her bang her head back against the glass in surprise. His cheek is pressed against her ear, his chin where her shoulder meets her neck, and she feels a rumble in her own chest as he starts to laugh.
“I hit the buttons,” he says, pulling his head back, his hands still curved around her hips, his knee pressed between hers. “I think I got you a Milky Way.”
She feels something like humor warm the back of her throat and she smiles, because even when things are wrong, there’s so much about this that is right.
“Thanks,” she says. “It’s just what I wanted.”
He tucks his thumb under the waistband of her skirt, pressing it against her hipbone. “I know.”
“I’m sure,” she says, and she hates that she feels her smile fade just a little. She’s remembering what’s still wrong here, what they owe to each other and to themselves and to Karen and she stiffens rather suddenly, pulling her hands away from the soft press of his chest.
He knows. “You know I would never,” he starts, but his voice falters and he has to begin again. “It’s just that it’s you, and I can’t--I’ve never--”
She nods and gives a soft tug on his tie to let him know she understands, that things haven’t really gone according to plan, that there’s something about the way they have and need and feel for each other that doesn’t make sense.
He presses his face close, his nose in line with hers, his breath warm on her lips. “Pam,” he says, pecking her lips softly like he can’t help himself, like he needs to believe this is really happening. “I just-what does this mean?” He pauses. “I think I need to talk to Karen.”
She can’t really speak through the lump in her throat, so she nods her head again and lets him feel the warm wetness flowing out of the corners of her eyes.
“Okay,” he whispers, his lower lip skating across hers. It takes a few minutes before he seems capable of extracting himself from her embrace, but he manages it and takes a few steps across the room, his hand closing around the handle of the door. He turns around and looks down at her, tears drying on her cheeks. His face is wet too. She’s not sure if they’re her tears or his, but she thinks it doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t really make a difference. In the end, it’s them, it’s a culmination, it’s an ending and beginning, it’s hope and loss and patience and pain, it’s precious and fragile and rare and rewarding; in the end, it is never, never giving up. She chokes a little on how much emotion is swelling within her, and then he’s smiling at her and pulling the door open.
The door clicks shut with its familiar finality, but this time she’s not so afraid.
Author: allibabab
Rating: T
Wordcount: 3,257
Spoilers: This hasn't and won't happen, but it takes place after Cocktails.
Summary: In the end, it is never, never giving up.
A/N: This was a doozy to get out! Thanks so much to biggerdorkthanu and fireworkfiasco for all their help.
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
pressed against a sea of stars
She wakes up with headaches these days. They’re from the way she clenches her teeth while she’s sleeping, pressing her jaws together like that might slow things down, or make time pass so slowly it blurs, colors bleeding into each other, red to orange to white. She fingers the curve of her jaw and winces from the pounding at her temples. She hates to wait.
There’s been no fallout yet. When Roy blew up at the bar, she’d watched the shards of glass sprinkle to the floor, sharp and clear and broken. She’d seen something in the way that it shattered, something that rattled between her ears, things like I can’t and a silk dress and the way his stomach tightened under her fingertips. She’d run away from the memory as much as from Roy, his familiarity no longer comforting. The glass prickling into her skin might have even felt better than the way her head throbbed, like it held too much, like what she remembered was more than she was.
And yet nothing has happened. Yet, she tells herself. And you had better get to him before Roy does. He doesn’t deserve to be hurt for something that’s your fault, something that you put into motion.
She presses her heels into the floor as she leans her way out of bed, fingering the fraying edge of her t-shirt. Work is the last place she wants to go right now, but that’s an every morning groan, and she can’t tell whether the creak rising up from the ground comes from the floorboards beneath her or the joints in her legs sliding around and past each other. She’s always thought there was something weird about the way your bones don’t actually touch each other, how there has to be some cushioning. They’re strong, after all, but breakable too, if the force is right. An image sneaks into her mind of long fingers, a tie, brown hair creeping over a pressed white collar, but it’s something so familiar it falls out one ear as she makes her way to the bathroom.
She doesn’t think about Jim again that morning, except for when she makes tea, and takes a shower, and brushes her teeth, and chooses her outfit. He’s not in her head as she presses her toes down on the accelerator or feels the grooves of her steering wheel slide against her fingers, except that he is, because he always is. Her jaw aches by the time she reaches the warmth of the elevator.
She spends the day a tangled heap of sparking wires, ready to flicker at the slightest provocation. On her way to the breakroom for some tea, hoping it will calm her nerves, she manages to crash straight into Kevin and knock his candy out of his hand, colorful pieces tinkling onto the floor, the cracking sound of their collision ringing in her ears. Her throat is so tight she thinks she might choke, and the apology she mumbles to Kevin is half-hearted and faint. Dashing into the room, she watches Jim make his way across the room to Karen, bending down to say something in her ear. Oh, Pam thinks. So this isn’t it. Every time he leaves the confines of the office walls, she panics, wondering if Roy’s chosen now, today, this minute to get to him. To the tips of her fingers, to the ends of her toes, a cry pulsates, hesitating at the edges of her body. Don’t go, she wants to tell him, but there’s more than one reason she wants to say it, and the words never quite form in her mouth. She pulls on a lock of hair, hard enough that it hurts, but with the way she’s biting her lip and clenching her stomach, she doesn’t have much sensation for anything else. Things feel tight and closed around her. Sometimes she wonders if the dust from all the paper is lining the inside of her lungs and maybe that’s why she can’t fill them, maybe that’s why it hurts to breath.
She tries not to think of him, pressing her tongue to the roof of her mouth and blinking hard to clear the blurriness in her eyes, the twinge behind her nose. Use purple in your shadows, she thinks, her mind skimming over things she knows, anything to keep her from breaking here, this way, in front of everyone and him-- The purple creates depth, which creates realism. Don’t make it perfect, just make it right. You’ll know what that means when you see it.
She tucks a hand into the curve of her waist and turns, facing the blinds and the windows. Jim’s looking at her through the glass, a half-smile tucking the corners of his lips back. It’s like he always knows. She feels something lurch, heavily, and closes her eyes, turning away. Tell him, she thinks. Oh god, I need to tell him now.
She’s waiting for it when she hears the click of the handle, like it’s the safety on a gun, like it’s the grating sound of a floorboard in a horror movie, foreboding, unstoppable, inevitable. She doesn’t turn; if she did, she’d have to swing her eyes past Karen’s desk, and that inquiring look isn’t something she can stomach right now. There are things between them that Karen doesn’t--can’t--
“Pam?”
Her fingers tremble, but she fists them and swivels her upper body to face the vending machines, looking at her reflection on the glass. She can’t look at him. Not yet. “Hey, Jim.”
He takes a few steps and stands beside her, his body angled toward hers. It’s ridiculous, she knows; this whole thing is ridiculous. The man she loved is going to beat up the man she loves over her. It’s like some romance novel, and the thought makes a laugh rise in her throat, breaking up the lump she’s been trying to swallow. It’s a strange laughter, though: it makes her feel on edge, unnatural. It’s better than what she felt before, though, and she dares to dart her eyes up to look at him in the glass. If she tries, she can imagine she feels the heat from his chest emanating off him from where she stands.
“What’s going on?” he asks, tilting his head to get a glimpse of her face. “You okay?”
“Fine,” she says, nodding. “Just getting a snack.”
“Looks like you made Kevin lose his,” he jokes, but concern tinges his voice, and he won’t go away, and tellhimtellhimtellhim is repeating in her head.
Her cheeks redden. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess I’m pretty clumsy.”
“You? Clumsy?” There’s something in his eyes, like laughter and comfort and connection, and even though things are weird right now and neither one knows where they stand, it’s good and right and she wishes she had the guts to just reach up and press her lips to his, feel the ridges in his skin line up with hers. She imagines his eyes focusing on her as she responds with a breathless laugh, a gush of air that’s more a reaction to the feeling of his thumb and fingers pressing on opposite sides of her wrist than anything related to mirth. “Pam.”
“Yeah?” Her voice is high as she fumbles with her other hand for a dollar to put into the machine, anything to keep from throwing her arms around him, pressing him close, keeping him from harm. This will be her fault. Feeling something -- boldness, tenacity, hysteria, it makes no difference -- rise in her chest, building against the pressure in her throat, she grabs on to it and takes a flying leap, blurting, “I told Roy about what happened.”
His mouth closes; the words quiet on his tongue. He’s still looking at her, she knows. She feels the burn on her neck, her cheek, her chest. His voice is so close. “What do you mean?”
“I told him,” she repeats. The machine finally sucks her dollar in with a whirring sound, but now that it’s there, she doesn’t know what to buy. Staring at the glowing green outline of the numbers, she feels something sink inside her. The skin at her temple bulges with the force of her jaw, her teeth clinking like pearls on a necklace. She turns to face him, because if she doesn’t even know what to get in terms of candy, how can she ever decide what she wants for herself, for her heart, for her life with everything she’s going to have, like a terrace and an easel and maybe a fishbowl with colorful gravel and a baby and things. She needs these things and she’s going to have them, she is going to have them, and no one-- She breathes in sharply when her eyes meet his, locking on to a color that’s dark, mossy, earthy.
The pad of his thumb slips over the protruding bone in her wrist, as if to smooth it over, make it flat. “What does that mean?”
He’s playing dumb; he knows what she means. “Stop,” she says angrily, pulling her arm away, even though she’s not angry and she doesn’t want him to stop. Something’s happening here, and she doesn’t know what to make of it. She feels like the whole situation has tilted, throwing shadows on things she used to know, and with everything that’s changed and everything that hasn’t, she doesn’t know how to angle her feet to stay standing.
“Pam,” he says again, a strain of something taut and exposed in his voice, a piano string pulled too tight. “I can’t just-”
It’s her body that’s facing his now, and his that’s turned away; they’re gears in each others lives, fitting into the empty spaces between. “What?” she says, her voice low. “You can’t just what?”
“I don’t know how to do this anymore,” he says. He has his face turned away, so she watches the long line of his neck pulse with his heartbeat, a steady thump that seems to vibrate the air around her, that seems to curl up in the hollows of her clavicle and pound against the rhythm of her own heart.
“Do what,” she says, and it’s not a question. Resignation makes the words heavy and jagged, catching at her lips.
He almost smiles at the way she’s the one running in circles now rather than him, but there’s a sad sort of bitterness in the way he swallows and runs a hand down his tie, pressing it into place. They’re still hedging - they’ll always hedge - but it’s almost like they’ve made it around the corner of the bush and seen what’s on the other side. The only thing is, it’s not great or magnificent or empowering or enlightening. It’s a reflection. You can’t escape yourself.
The thought pushes words to her mouth, makes her tongue and lips move to form them. “Look,” she says, watching the way the faintest shadow of a beard shifts as he swallows again, “I don’t know. This isn’t-I don’t know what I thought this would be, but it’s not this. I can’t even--you’re not--”
He nods. “I know.”
She doesn’t say you don’t even though she wants to, even though she feels something sharp beneath her breast at the way they’re acknowledging the impossibility of all this.
He looks up at her, a flash of a different time hiding in the corners of his eyes. “I really don’t know what we do now.”
There’s a pause then where she’s supposed to agree, but something in her pushes out against her ribs, and instead she says, “I think Roy’s going to try and hurt you.”
He studies the carpet and purses his lips just a little, seeming to need a minute to think. “When did you tell him?” he asks finally.
“Almost a month ago,” she says. She watches his eyebrows shoot upward.
“That long?”
She picks at a sticker on the vending machine glass. “I didn’t really know how to… I mean, I didn’t even know if he was really going to do it.”
“And now you think he is?” he asks.
“No!” she blurts, her mouth slow to shift out of its ‘o’ position as she contemplates her words, rolling them around on her tongue. “I don’t know what he’s going to do.”
“Well, if he thinks I had something to do with why you called the wedding off, then-”
“I told him I kissed you,” she interrupts.
“That doesn’t make any…” He shrugs, biting the inside corner of his lip. She watches the flesh bulge with his movement and presses her tongue between her teeth to prevent them from crumbling, like ancient rocks under too much pressure. “Why?” he asks. It seems simple.
Because I did, she wants to say, because I love you, because, because, because.
“I thought he should know,” she says instead, and feels a fracture in her chest, like her ribs are detaching from her sternum, leaving her soft and exposed. She is butter left out in the sun, a kind of golden vulnerability. “We were trying to be honest with each other.”
“So you told him that I kissed you,” he says, watching her. His eyes are intent, and she knows why; she knows what hinges on the next breath of vibrations that comes out of her mouth.
“No,” she says quietly, her voice tight. “I told him I kissed you.”
There is a flash of something in his eyes, a bright glare, like sunlight off a rushing wave, and she feels a warmth pass over her neck, spreading down to her belly, across her hips.
“You did,” he says.
“I--I told him I did. I mean--” She hangs her head and presses her lips shut, biting back nervousness and insecurity and the hope that threatens just beneath the surface. “Yeah,” she says. “I did kiss you.”
He smiles a little as he says, “I know.” Her lips curve in response, and it almost hurts the way sugar does, so sweet it burns.
It’s a moment before she thinks to say something, feeling the words gradually reappear the same way they faded when he smiled at her, like a memory relived. She runs her teeth over her bottom lip, the solidarity of bone against her softest skin, and has to close her eyes against the sight of his pupils dilating, his gaze fixed squarely on her. She wants it, oh god, she wants it, but there are so many things in the way and they need time to press on against all this. That’s all they really need.
Time, she repeats to herself, but the air seems to thicken, getting caught in the crevices of her lungs. The word seems to dissolve on her tongue as his eyes darken, falling to watch her mouth. She wants to say it again, but the harsh sound won’t come out; things like Jim and mine and sorry, only the softest of sounds, seem to fall out from between her teeth. It’s words like hurt and can’t and past that catch at the roof of her mouth, jagged and painful and not quite truth enough to sweep along in the rush of air from her larynx.
He’s stepping away and pulling on the strings for the blinds before she really understands what’s just happened, the way everything has shifted and molded and become something new. She squeezes her eyes shut and feels a wetness on the edge of her lashes, a sort of liquid relief that what they’ve had isn’t all there is; and it hurts, it hurts so much to think of Karen watching him close the blinds, of all the ways they’ve hurt each other before, but it’s all nothing, it becomes nothing, in the way his lips press her back against the vending machine. She feels him brace himself, one hand on either side, brushing down the brightly lit buttons, a heated handprint on the glass, and his warm, solid body pressed everywhere against hers. His lips are wet and soft and more than she thinks she can bear; there is nothing and everything in the way they move against each other. They fit like a tree’s roots in the soil, like clouds in the sky, like the earth in the solar system in the galaxy in the universe and she feels a hot wash of tears trickle over her cheekbones, running into the spaces between their lips, salty and real, this is real--
A loud thunk makes her bang her head back against the glass in surprise. His cheek is pressed against her ear, his chin where her shoulder meets her neck, and she feels a rumble in her own chest as he starts to laugh.
“I hit the buttons,” he says, pulling his head back, his hands still curved around her hips, his knee pressed between hers. “I think I got you a Milky Way.”
She feels something like humor warm the back of her throat and she smiles, because even when things are wrong, there’s so much about this that is right.
“Thanks,” she says. “It’s just what I wanted.”
He tucks his thumb under the waistband of her skirt, pressing it against her hipbone. “I know.”
“I’m sure,” she says, and she hates that she feels her smile fade just a little. She’s remembering what’s still wrong here, what they owe to each other and to themselves and to Karen and she stiffens rather suddenly, pulling her hands away from the soft press of his chest.
He knows. “You know I would never,” he starts, but his voice falters and he has to begin again. “It’s just that it’s you, and I can’t--I’ve never--”
She nods and gives a soft tug on his tie to let him know she understands, that things haven’t really gone according to plan, that there’s something about the way they have and need and feel for each other that doesn’t make sense.
He presses his face close, his nose in line with hers, his breath warm on her lips. “Pam,” he says, pecking her lips softly like he can’t help himself, like he needs to believe this is really happening. “I just-what does this mean?” He pauses. “I think I need to talk to Karen.”
She can’t really speak through the lump in her throat, so she nods her head again and lets him feel the warm wetness flowing out of the corners of her eyes.
“Okay,” he whispers, his lower lip skating across hers. It takes a few minutes before he seems capable of extracting himself from her embrace, but he manages it and takes a few steps across the room, his hand closing around the handle of the door. He turns around and looks down at her, tears drying on her cheeks. His face is wet too. She’s not sure if they’re her tears or his, but she thinks it doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t really make a difference. In the end, it’s them, it’s a culmination, it’s an ending and beginning, it’s hope and loss and patience and pain, it’s precious and fragile and rare and rewarding; in the end, it is never, never giving up. She chokes a little on how much emotion is swelling within her, and then he’s smiling at her and pulling the door open.
The door clicks shut with its familiar finality, but this time she’s not so afraid.