There have always been the pauses. Little moments when he’d forget to make a joke, to pretend. That’s the game. Nothing is too much, too far, unless they forget to treat it with a slight air of contempt; the moment they take themselves seriously they falter, stutter, fall apart. When they’re laughing, it’s so easy to forget that this is wrong, that the game ends at the end of the day, that she’s marrying a man because of nostalgia and cowardice and a sense of duty that she picked up in her teenage years from books and romantic comedies.
Now the pauses are all they have. The silence pervades everything, every conversation, every lunch break when she drops coins into the machine, each clink too loud, too slow, as he sits several feet away and stares at his sandwich. Karen is usually sitting besides him, chatting, giggling, unaware of the silence that stretches between her boyfriend and Pam, leaning against the vending machine in a way that is not quite comfortable. All the noise in the world, and Pam would still feel that silence as she kneels to pick up her coke, steadying herself against the machine with one careful hand.
Sometimes, when no one notices, she eats her lunch in a stall in the ladies’ room. She hasn’t done this since grade school. In the washroom there is nothing to look at but the scratched blue paint on the back of the stall door; underneath, the paint was once a garish orange. Pam contemplates scratching words into it, composing a limerick about Michael, or maybe Dwight. But things are different than they used to be.
One morning she walks into the break room to find Jim and Karen kissing. Karen is leaning against the vending machine, surrounded by neon; her skin looks pale in comparison, tired. Jim turns, startled.
“Pam-” he says. He doesn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence. His eyes are wide, unguarded. Karen walks out of the room, her eyes staring straight ahead; she makes a point of not brushing against Pam, taking the long way around a table and giving one of the plastic chairs an extra shove. Pam leaves too, before Jim finds the words.
The rest of the day is filled with silence. She stays at her desk and plays solitaire, planning out courses of action for the card game instead of her life. She’d bought a computer for her new apartment, Fancy New Beesly, only to find herself playing more hours of solitaire at home, in the evening. It makes the time pass. Pam does a coffee run just so that she can avoid the feeling of Jim’s eyes on her and Karen’s anger, even though she inescapably spills someone’s five dollar drink all over her seat and Toby shyly orders the same drink as her only to throw it out and Michael orders a ten-word venti something or other with triple shots of espresso (she conveniently forgets the espresso, but unfortunately the placebo effect has always been strong on him).
As a result, she’s still there after five finishing up her faxes. Jim’s still there too, pretending to work; his fingers are clattering away at the keyboard mindlessly but all his attention is focused on her. It’s silent, too silent. Everyone else has left. He clears his throat and then, in one graceful, too-quick movement, swivels his chair around and walks over, leans an elbow on her desk.
“Hey,” she says. Quieter than she meant to.
“Hey,” he says, eyes averted, reaching for the jellybeans. She wanders around to his side of the desk, grabs a few for herself, and leans against the desk mutely. The edge presses into her arm; there’ll be a red mark on her arm where the corner is pressing but she can't bring herself to move.
“Sorry about what you had to see before,” he says, and then looks at her finally, “Although I’ve never been happier you weren’t Dwight.” He makes a face, and then they’re laughing breathlessly, leaning together, only half about the thought of Dwight’s expression; the other half is pure relief. The laughter begins to slow, to die, and their eyes catch, as the discomfort begin to shroud them again.
Before it can stop entirely, their mouths come together, hard. Pam isn’t sure if he kissed her or she kissed him or it was mutual, but somehow it doesn’t matter. Jim’s hands find her hips and pull her against him; he isn’t gentle like he was the other time, that night, the night she doesn’t think about. This time she realizes for the first time that is body is all angles. One hand cups her hip, the other one is on the back of her head, pulling her closer, demanding. When she begins to undo his tie and unbutton his shirt, he runs his thumb over her top button, slides it through the hole in one neat little movement; they both know this isn’t the place and it’s not the right time either and oh, fuck, it suddenly occurs to her that he has a girlfriend probably waiting at his apartment. But they can’t stop, not now, or it’ll never happen again. They’ll try to talk about it and fail miserably, they’ll look each other in the eye and agree that it’s the wrong thing to do even though they’ll both fully know that they don’t mean it.
Jim leads her over to his desk, clears papers to the side with one hand as he bites down on her lip, lifts her hips up and onto the hard surface. She doesn’t expect it and her nails grasp into his chest in surprise, but neither pulls away. His hand runs up her leg and under her skirt; she lifts her hips to let him pull down her nylons, her underwear. Her fingers claw at his belt buckle, but they’re shaking. Jim pushes her hand away and undoes it himself, his other hand still under her skirt, seemingly unable to break contact, even if only for a second. If they stop touching, they might start to think. His pants are still pooled around his ankles and her skirt is bunched around her waist, but it doesn’t matter at all. Jim’s fingers tease her thighs until she grabs his hips and pulls him forward, and then he pushes into her. She buries her face into his neck, mouth forming an ‘o’ against his shoulder, breathing in his smell. His fingers run quickly over her back, cupping, squeezing, until his grip weakens and they slow as he thrusts harder, groaning into her hair. Pam’s moaning and her teeth bite down into his shoulder (later she’ll pretend she didn’t mean to) and she urges him on, harder, fuck, yes, and comes just as he does.
She leaves her head resting limply against his chest because she doesn’t want to move it, doesn’t ever want to move from this position. But he pulls back. She almost falls forward and he snaps back towards her, steadies her with his arm.
“Whoa, Beesly. Careful there,” he smiles, and she looks up at him and smiles back. But then he goes to retrieve his shirt, flung over by the door to Michael’s office, and she dresses too.
“We should-” she says, and the last word hangs in the air. Talk. Pam’s not looking at his eyes anymore.
“Yeah,” Jim says, stretching the word out, hanging on to it for a little too long. After that, there is silence. Dwight’s bobbleheads are on his desk, still lightly bobbing from the way the desks had been moving with them. Once they wouldn’t have had to talk, only to make some sort of childish prank, laugh at their co-workers, and everything would have been fine, they’d be fine.
“This- this doesn’t change everything,” Jim says. The words now are short bursts, as if he has to force himself to choke them out. “You didn’t call, Pam. All those months.” Pam can’t think of anything to say, to do, so she stares at the floor, stretches out her leg, notes disinterestedly the run in her usually-perfect nylons. He takes a step, turns back. “You should have called.”
