At first she thinks that it’s an accident.

It happens all the time; hands brush unintentionally. But this isn’t a brush. It’s a caress. She can tell because when she jumps their hands don’t immediately fall apart. They don’t. Because it’s not a simple accidental brush. It’s a purposeful embrace.

She feels his fingers skim across her palm and then back again. In between those electrifying moments their palms meet for a brief second and Pam thinks that he might hold on.

But of course he doesn’t.

He’s always meeting her in the middle, waiting for her to carry them the rest of the way. It’s not until after their hands separate that she realizes that maybe he was waiting for her to grasp on, to hold his hand in hers. But it’s too late now.

She remembers feeling both of his hands slip out of hers last May. How she looked down and saw his hands slide halfway out of her grasp, then pause for just a second. How she gripped his fingers, squeezed once, and then she just let go. She just let go and watched his hands slide the rest of the way out of hers and disappear. And then he disappeared.

But thoughts of last May quickly retreat when she feels the phantom pressure of his chest against her back. He’s close. Not so close that he’s actually touching her, but close enough that she can feel him there.

She hears him let out an unsteady breath. He just pulled the door shut behind them, and she realizes that she has to move first because he’s stuck between her body and the door.

She takes a shaky, too-large step forward, and her back suddenly feels cold. She turns around nervously. He hasn’t moved from the doorway. In fact, he’s leaning back against the surface of the door casually, as if he didn’t just break up with his girlfriend in front of her. As if he didn’t just grab her hand and leave her breathless. As if his face isn’t covered in blood and developing a deep purple bruise.

She takes in a loud, unnecessary breath.

“You should… I mean, do you need help with…” her voice trails of and she motions at injured his cheek.

“Oh,” Jim says, as if he had forgotten all about the reason for their being in his house. “Yeah, no. I think I can handle it. My mom got me this ridiculously extensive first-aid kit when I first left for college. I still have it… In my bathroom, I think.”

He pushes himself off the door abruptly and moves toward what Pam guesses is his bathroom. He said he didn’t need her help, but he didn’t tell her what he expects her to do while he’s fixing himself. So she takes off her coat but leaves her sneakers on. She drapes the coat over a chair and looks absently around his living room.

It looks different from his old house. She remembers that his old house had strands of white and multicolored Christmas lights, sports posters and random art sprawling across the walls, and mismatched but comfortable-looking furniture.

Now there are no Christmas lights. There is recessed lighting and a couple of (matching) floor lamps. Maybe the sports posters were Mark’s, because the only art she sees is a couple of framed prints. He has a boxy, ancient looking television set up in one corner of the room, so she figures that Mark owned the large flat-screen she remembers. All of his furniture matches. It could be that he’s renting and the furniture came with the house. She prefers that explanation over the thought of him and Karen going furniture shopping together, but then she reminds herself that it’s okay, because that relationship is over. She thinks.

She hears the sound of running water and decides to follow the sound. She finds Jim standing in front of a bathroom sink with a half-soaked blue washcloth in his right hand and a myriad of first-aid supplies strewn across the tile countertop. She sees antiseptic in the form of wipes, tubes, and sprays. There are rolls of gauze, Band-Aids of all shapes and sizes, ace bandages, cold packs, heat packs, pain reliever, even a sling and a medical handbook.

He hasn’t noticed her yet. He focused on dabbing the blood from his face with the wet cloth. He’s working on a spot directly beneath his lower lip, and she wonders vaguely if the blood is his or Roy’s.

He catches her reflection in the mirror and jumps a little.

“Hey,” he says.

“You weren’t kidding about that first-aid kit, were you?” she quips, because it’s safe to say stupid things like that right now.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that this is also second and third aid,” he replies, finishing up his chin.

Most of his face is clean now, and the elimination of a layer of blood has revealed the full extent of the cut on his cheek. It’s not too long, but it looks jagged and painful. He tries to apply some antiseptic, the kind from the tube, and he winces—once, twice—and she winces with him.

He notices this and says, “It’s really not that bad.”

She almost laughs, because it is that bad. This whole night is something straight out of a soap opera. Her jealous ex just showed up at his house, punched him, and simultaneously ruined his relationship with another woman. She manages to hold back the laugh, but a small, pained smile steals its way onto her lips.

“Are you sure I can’t help?” she asks.

He catches her eye in the mirror. He just looks at her for a moment, like he’s trying to read her face, and she looks away uncomfortably.

“Yeah,” he says finally. “Why don’t you heat up some water for tea? The kettle’s on the stove.”

She frowns.

“I didn’t think you drank tea,” she says.

He screws the top back on the antiseptic.

“I don’t. But you look pretty shook up, and I know that you like tea when you need to relax,” he says matter-of-factly.

He’s perusing through a pile of bandages so he doesn’t see her eyes flood with tears, but she turns away nonetheless. She has to turn away. She can’t continue to look at the purple welt on his face when he just said something so selfless and so perfectly him, the old him. If she does, she’s afraid that the silent flood will transform into embarrassing sobs.

“I’m going to go change when I finish in here,” he says, and she nods without looking at him.

She slips out of the doorway and listens to the squeak of her Keds as she moves toward where she thinks the kitchen is. She guesses right, and she manages not to think of anything at all while she fills his silver kettle and replaces it on the stove. Only after she turns the dial for the burner does she become lost in her thoughts again.

She only heard the end of their fight. She had just hung up with the police and she distinctly heard Karen tell Jim, “Pam is single again. Why don’t you just go for it with her? You obviously want to.” Her stomach flipped when she heard the question, but Jim never responded. And what did the absence of a response mean? She feels like she’s being swallowed by her doubt and fear and confusion.

Once when she was in high school, Roy took her to the state fair. He talked her into going on one of those spinney rides that go up and down while they spin. She warned him that she had motion sickness, but he assured her that he would yell for the ride operator to stop things if she felt ill.

As soon as the ride started, Pam clutched the safety bar and leaned into Roy’s shoulder and pressed her eyes shut as tightly as possible. She was terrified. She was at the mercy of a rickety mechanical nightmare, being pushed and pulled and twirled, getting more nauseous and frightened with every rotation. She couldn’t open her eyes, couldn’t tell Roy that she needed it to stop. But she didn’t throw up. Not then.

When the ride ended, Roy pried her from the seat and guided her back out onto the fairway. Standing so still after the violent, uncontrollable jerking of the ride somehow made her feel shakier than before. It was then, on the solid ground of the fairway that she threw up all over Roy’s new tennis shoes.

That is exactly how she feels now. The ride is over, and now everything is still and quiet, and she somehow feels dizzier than ever. Only this time she’s not worried about throwing up. She’s worried about a number of other things.

What was going to happen when he came back out of his room? What did he expect from her? Would he be cold and distant? Would he try to play everything off as a joke? Would he ask her to leave so that he could just forget this whole night ever happened? Or, and Pam felt more dread at this prospect than any of the others, would he want to talk? Really talk.

She gasps audibly when she looks up to see him standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He’s wearing a green striped sweater and a pair of jeans. His face looks fine on one side, but the other side makes her wince sympathetically again. The cut is hidden by two butterfly Band-Aids, but the deep purple bruising peaks out from beneath it. His eye is a little swollen, the lower lid puffy and purple like his cheek.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. She can’t help herself from saying it. Her voice cracks halfway through the ‘sorry’ part.

“For what?” he asks.

It should be simple to answer, but it’s not. It’s a loaded question. She’s sorry for so much. The cut and bruise on his face, his car, his breakup. But beyond tonight…

She’s so sorry for not being brave and honest. For choosing Roy over him. But she can’t bring herself to say any of those answers, although she knows she should say them all.

She stands in the middle of his kitchen with her mouth hanging open, looking straight at him but unable to say anything. She always feels so damn useless at times like these. She feels so weak and cowardly and undeserving. Her vision grows blurry and she’s horrified to realize that tears are gathering there again. She feels one plump teardrop escape her eye and quickly swipes at it with the edge of her sleeve.

She looks down at the wet corner of her sleeve, because she can’t look at him. She doesn’t want him to show concern for her again like he did in the bathroom. She can’t handle his concern for her after everything that happened to him tonight. It just makes her realize with increasing pain and humiliation just how stupid she was to hesitate for even a second last May. How stupid she was to choose Roy over him.

She hears his socked feet padding determinedly across the linoleum floor and her heart races. She just wants to turn away, run. But all too soon she feels him near her. She refuses to look up, and hates herself when she feels two, three, four more tears fall. She lets out a shaky breath and waits for him to say something. Do something. But he doesn’t.

He just stands in front of her. She hears his breathing, deep and a little hoarse. She’s looking down, so all she sees is his feet. His figure casts a shadow over her, not because he’s looming threateningly above her. Just because he’s so tall that he’s blocking some of the light from the overhead kitchen lamp. It’s likely that only a few seconds have passed, but to Pam it feels far too long.

She expects him to touch her, maybe reach for her hand again, but he doesn’t. They just stand like that. She knows that he’s waiting for her to do something. It’s her turn. He’s too close and she’s managed to stop the tears, but she’s afraid that if she looks up and sees that bruise again she’ll lose it.

And then her reprieve comes in the form of a whistling teakettle.

“The water,” she says abruptly.

Without waiting for his response, she starts to brush past him, but he reaches out and catches her elbow. She pauses, but doesn’t look at him even now. Her eyes are focused on the steam jetting out from the spout of the teakettle. Somehow the beating of her heart sounds louder than the screaming kettle.

“We need to talk,” he says.

She feels heat rising from her chest to her neck, creeping up her cheeks. The screaming of the kettle echoes in her ears and she imagines screaming like that herself, just screaming and letting out all of the fear and regret.

She doesn’t respond. He releases her arm and she lets out a ragged breath before she makes it to the stove. She pulls the kettle off the heat and flips the burner off, and she thinks about how much she wishes that she could take herself off the fire right now. Her insides are bursting, the pressure is painful, and she can’t just talk. That would make everything better. He wants to talk, so just talk damn it. Just tell him. Why is it so hard?

She finds the cupboard with his mugs on her first try and realizes that she doesn’t have a teabag. She can’t just search through his cupboards with him standing right there. She has to ask him.

“Where do you keep your teabags?” She means for it to sound normal, but her throat is tight and it comes out as a whisper.

There is a pause and she manages to look back at him, heart still pounding. He’s still standing where she left him, frowning.

“Jim?” she says.

He lets out a little breathy laugh, and she can’t understand how or why he would laugh right now.

“Um. I just realized. I, uh, I don’t have any teabags,” he stutters. He lets out another breathy laugh, and she finds herself doing the same.

“Oh, um…” she mumbles, trying to think of something to say.

“Yeah. That totally didn’t occur to me,” he says, and he’s smiling now.

“Teabags are a vital ingredient in tea,” she says, almost teasingly. It amazes her that they’re back in comfortable territory already. She can breathe for now.

“Really?” he asks. She nods seriously. “Interesting,” he says.

They both let out those sighing chuckles again, and their eyes dart nervously from the kettle to each other and around the kitchen at random.

“I have some cocoa,” he adds.

“Cocoa, Halpert? Really?” she says, in what is now definitely a teasing tone.

“Oh yeah. The Swiss Miss kind too. I don’t go for the cheap stuff,” he says.

She smiles.

“Is it the kind with the little marshmallows?” she asks.

“Is there any other kind?”

“No other kind worth buying,” she says, grinning now.

“Are you interested?” he asks, already rummaging through a cabinet and pulling out a cylindrical tin of cocoa.

“It’s really tempting to just down a mug of hot water, but I guess I could be persuaded to add a bit of cocoa,” she replies.

She pours some of the water into her mug and puts out her hand for the tin of cocoa, but he’s not looking at her. He’s grabbing a spoon from a drawer on the other side of the kitchen. Once he finds one, he doesn’t hand over the supplies to her. Instead he stands behind her, just like he did at the front door. He pops the top off the tin and spoons two scoops of cocoa into her mug, leaning into her when he does so.

It’s not obscene. She’s had men press against her in elevators and in line at the grocery store, creeps who do that sort of thing for kicks. This is just the lightest amount of pressure on her back, feather-light contact that nonetheless makes goose bumps stand out on the back of her neck. His breath is stirring the wispy hairs by her left ear as he reaches around her and stirs the cocoa. When he abandons the spoon in her mug, she expects him to step back. Instead she feels his breath, hot against her cheek.

“We really need to talk,” he whispers into her ear.

She closes her eyes and a shudder goes through her body. She knows that he felt it. She knows that he’s aware of what he’s doing to her.

Her eyes are still closed when she responds.

“I know.”

And she knows that it’s time. She still feels the fear, but even more than that she feels an overwhelming desire to just do it. Just talk, let it out, relieve the pressure.

She’s ready.