It’s funny how it happens, the dating, because it’s not the lightning bolt she expects, the sudden transition from Pam-who-knows-what-she-wants-but-not-how-to-get-it to Pam-who-has-what-she-wants-because-she-put-her-heart-on-the-line. It’s more gradual-like, with lots of stops and starts and far too many long nights spent idly tracing patterns on his palm as their co-workers surround them in Poor Richards.
When things finally start to happen (kisses soft like eyelashes in the heartbeat between songs and tingles down her spine when he looks at her that way) they just feel like business as usual and then they’re a couple with fights and family dinners and really hot make-up sex. They register with HR like it’s no big deal and when they drive in together on Monday mornings no one looks twice.
It’s February when they move in together. They run back and forth between the car and the front door with boxes in their arms, trying to keep warm and he cracks jokes about the weight of her art books and the way she writes her “t”s in thick black sharpie. She smiles and pulls an old Marywood sweatshirt over her head, then dashes out for another box.
That night they cook dinner together and she rearranges his generic twenty-something boy room. It looks the same but different with her watercolors tacked up on the walls next to his pseudo artsy framed posters and her white keds lined up next to his loafers at the foot of the bed.
They fight over little things, like the best way to load the dishwasher and what music to play low on his iPod as they’re drifting off to sleep. When they make up something soft and warm blooms low in her belly and spreads through her to the tips of her fingers. He’s always the first to apologize, his hand on her shoulder, her arm, her waist, even when she knows she’s the one acting silly…stupid.
They spend Saturday nights cuddling on the couch or at the movies. He knows what she looks like in her underwear (even the ratty pairs she’s never bothered to throw out) and that she can kill a spider, but ants freak her out. She learns that he won’t eat most fish because of the way it smells and that the guitar in the corner of their bedroom hasn’t been tuned in almost four years.
It’s not the magic she’d expected, because she’s already lived “comfortable” and she hadn’t found it to her tastes, but when he’s the one bringing milk back from the store and forgetting to remind her that she left their clean clothes in the dryer it doesn’t seem like the same thing. She starts to forget about pre-conceived notions and the way things are supposed to be, because the way things are is so much better.
Author's Chapter Notes:
This is based loosely on number 11 here and something Unfold said in a comment on my LJ last June (And Jim is so cute in his house with his sweater and his jeans and his sneakers and his generic twenty-something boy bedroom. -Erin)
Disclaimer: I own nothing. At all.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. At all.
lit_glitter is the author of 4 other stories.
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