The woman he’s been with for six or seven months – he doesn’t know anymore – storms out of the door with a string of violent obscenities aimed directly at him. The door violently slams behind her and he knows he’ll never see her again – maybe with the exception of some evil glares when she may periodically visit the office in the future. He never even says a word, he just stands there with a dumb look on his face, much similar to the same expression that he had worn no more than two weeks ago when the other girl spilled out all of the information that her poor, wounded heart could no longer contain anymore.

There is no doubt in his mind that at least a part of this – if not all – is because of her and those words that came flowing from her mouth in the darkness of the night. The slam of the door is still echoing through his mind and the first thing that he reaches for, the item closest to where he is standing, is his cell phone. He scrolls past Karen’s name and goes straight for “Pam Cell” and he swears in his mind that he can’t remember the last time he went this far down in his contacts. Her name had become a distant memory in his mind, and every time that she looked at him until that night, he tried to push it from his mind because he knew that his heart could not feel the same pain that it had felt a year earlier.

“Hello?” he hears a groggy voice ask as she picks up and his heart skips a beat. He opens his mouth, but he doesn’t even know what to say so he stutters an incoherent string of sounds that don’t even resemble words.

“Hello?” her voice asks again and he thinks that she’s going to hang up.

“Pam,” he said urgently. Why does he sound so urgent? He hears the phone leave her ear – how he knows, he’s not even sure but it sends a rush of brief panic through his system.

“Jim?” she asks and he doesn’t know why it makes his heart so happy, but it does.

“Can you come over?” he asks quietly, his mind still scrambled but at least he knows this is what he wants for now.

“Yeah, I guess,” she replies and his heart skips a beat suddenly realizing that it’s two in the morning, and he probably woke her with his phone call and she’s getting dressed and coming over just to see him.

“Or, you don’t have to,” he says quickly, to make it sound like the only thing in the world he wants right now to just see her.

“Oh,” she says and he can hear the disappointment in her voice through the jumbled emotions going through his head.

“No,” he says quickly, “come over.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes, I just need to get dressed,” she says.

And when he hangs up, his mind is reeling because he has no idea what he’s going to do when she gets to his place. She seems to have become an entirely different person in front of his eyes and he can’t figure out if it’s because of him or if it’s something that she’s done on her own. And when he realizes the last time that they actually had a full, meaningful conversation like the ones they used to he just feels depressed because he’s certain that she’s not that person anymore.

She knocks on his door at two thirty in the morning and he jumps up from his sofa because he’s been waiting for her to arrive in what has felt like the longest half hour of his entire life. When he opens the door she has a sleepy smile on her face, but he doesn’t return it because he’s too confused, he’s too afraid and he’s too damned scared to think of what’s going to happen next even though he knows what he wants to happen.

“Hey,” she says in her sweet voice that he first fell in love with, and although he wants to return it with a smile all that he can think about all the sudden is Karen and that’s what comes out of his mouth.

“Karen’s gone,” he says dumbly and he can’t help but notice a smile in her eyes masked by her sympathetic frown.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly as she looks at her feet, and he doesn’t know what is going on in his mind, but he yanks her inside by her thin arm and he swears he hears a crack in her elbow but he doesn’t care and she doesn’t seem to either.

He kicks the door closed with his foot and pushes her against the wall next to it and he doesn’t know what makes him do it, but he kisses her with more force and more passion than he has put into anything in the past five years. He can tell that she’s taken aback by this gesture, but he still doesn’t really care. It isn’t until she softens against his body and returns the kiss back to him that he realizes that he might be in over his head but there’s no escaping now. She bared his feelings to him and he’s already done it more than he’s felt comfortable with and he knows that it’s now or never and he can’t handle two different women angrily storming out on him in one night. Not that Pam would do that.

He still doesn’t know what he’s going to do when he starts to lead her towards his bedroom. He can feel her body tensing because she’s been here before and she knows where his bedroom is, but he pulls her along anyway. Deep down inside they both want this. He closes the door to his bedroom with his foot and she breaks the kiss and looks him in the eyes. The look in her eyes is so vulnerable, so real, so Pam and he swears that he won’t let her take advantage of him and he won’t let himself take advantage of her. He steps back to open the door again. His hand stops on the doorknob as she unbuttons her blouse and pushes it off of her shoulders and throws the shirt to the side. There she is, sitting on his bed in only her bra and a pair of light blue cotton pants that she obviously did not feel the need to change so early in the morning.

His hand falls away from the door as he stares at her nearly bare torso, unable to speak, unable to even think clearly. His mouth hangs open dumbly and she smiles as she suppresses a giggle. He walks to the edge of his bed where she is sitting and kneels in front of her and places his hand on her knees. Her smile is genuine and his is utterly uncertain. This could be it. This could make or break everything in their relationship. He knows this, he wonders if she does as well.

“I was hoping you would call me soon,” she says quietly, placing her hands over his. “I’m sorry about Karen.”

“Yeah,” he says, void of emotion.

“She told me she was leaving,” she says and almost immediately a flicker of rage pulses through his system. She knew about the end of his relationship before he did.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says, not even sure why he says it, but he knows that he means it. She simply nods, her face is happy and blank, he has no idea what is going on inside of her head and it drives him insane.

“Just kiss me again,” she says softly and she slides onto the floor so she’s kneeling in front of him. Her arms wrap around his shoulders and her fingers find their way into his hair before they even kiss. His eyes close softly as they have for the past several months while he’s been with Karen because when he closes his eyes he’s able to picture Pam attached to his lips like she was that Casino Night. He quickly realizes that he’s not with Karen right now, he’s with Pam and she’s real and in his arms and he opens his eyes so he can see her face, but it’s blurred because of how close the two of them are.

He moans softly because her bare skin is underneath his fingertips and she’s soft. He’s scared when she pulls away and she pushes at his chest when he leans in to kiss her again.

“What…” he starts to ask, but the fingers on her right hand fly to his lips to silence him and the fingers on her left hand dash to his shirt to unbutton it.

Her lips rush to meet his again and she’s yanking at his shirt, trying to get it off of his torso but she can’t. She giggles and he smiles against her lips and all I can think of is how fucking right this feels and how it is so them.

She climbs up onto his bed again and he quickly follows, kicking his jeans off because he doesn’t care at this point. They are going to do what he has wanted to do for years now and they are going to do what he has fantasized about doing on his own and while with Karen on so many different occasions.

They lie next to one another for several moments, just looking at one another. Pam tries to scan his face for something familiar and there is something there but…not quite. She kisses him softly on the lips – only their lips touching. She wants to find that fire in his eye that she knew used to be there – before Stamford, before Karen, before this entire mess happened in the first place. He cradles her face in his hand and looks into her eyes. She looks so gentle, so peaceful and it kills him that she looks so fucking perfect in his eyes. He feels stuck.

She squirms out of her pants and there she is, lying on his bed in only her skimpy, cotton underwear. He doesn’t know what to do next. Does he move his hand across her stomach, brush against the hem of her panties and then delve below? Does he kiss her more? Does he just lay here? And he decides against the latter because he’s certain that he looks like a complete fool but he doesn’t know what she likes and he doesn’t know what she’s used to. He knows that he wants to be better than the men before him. She makes the move for him when she kisses him softly again, her tongue running along his bottom lip and nudging his hand down against her stomach.

He sits up slightly and runs his mouth from the bottom line of her bra down to the hem of her panties and he feels her shiver underneath him from the touch. He knows now that there is no turning back for him. There is a familiar tingle below his beltline that he hasn’t felt in a long time and that familiar knot in his stomach that he hasn’t felt since the Casino Night when he told her that he loved her.

There is no foreplay. He finds it odd that she doesn’t want it and she doesn’t seem to care. When he slips his fingers through the sides of her panties and his fingers gently graze between her legs, he feels alive again. She feels alive again. He watches as she turns pink from head to toe and he smiles, feeling warmth returning to his body. The warmth of her.

And he’s on top of her, her arms are braced on his shoulders and her legs are wrapped tightly around the back of his. She guides him inside of her although he knows that he’s perfectly capable of guiding himself in. She moans and he swears that she winces in pain when he finds himself all the way inside of her but her nodding is just visible and her eyes are repeating yes over and over and she says his name softly. He swears that he has never, ever felt this way before.

She giggles as she squeezes him from the inside and he moans loudly and his hair drops over his eyes as his head falls forward slightly. She stretches her neck upwards and kisses him on the nose as he thrusts inside of her twice and she throws her head back, her hair falling over half of her face.

Those curls…he thinks as he balances himself on one arm, still thrusting, and wraps a finger around a long curl draped across her neck.

“Jim,” she whimpers quietly, her voice catching in her throat, her legs loosening from the back of his legs. He doesn’t notice and he keeps thrusting in and out of her, his hands on her breasts, his hands in her hair, his fingers brushing against her lips, he can’t stop touching her.

He buries his head in the crook of her neck and bites her collarbone. She cries out and he can’t tell if it’s from pain or pleasure but he doesn’t really care because it only turns him on more. He swears that he’s never been this hard in his entire life and he can’t believe that it’s taken his entire life to do this with her.

He comes the hardest that he can ever recall and he cries out her name as he does. Her response is a long sigh and he falls on top of her. Then the thoughts come pouring back into his mind and he’s in a panic again. He’s afraid that he’s used her, afraid that maybe she’s the rebound from Karen and it literally scares the hell of out him. Here he is, lying on top of the girl that he’s considered for years to be the ultimate girl of his dreams, he’s still inside of her, hard and twitching for fucks sake and all he can think of is negative things.

“Jim?” he hears her voice asking, but it sounds so distant from all of the voices in his head. “Jim?”

“Yeah? What?” he asks as he rolls off of her.

“Are you okay?” she asks tentatively, running the tips of her fingers over his bare chest. He doesn’t answer right away and when he looks at her he thinks he sees fear in her eyes. He smiles and kisses her on the cheek.

“Are you?” he asks, unsure why.

“Of course,” she replies, reflecting his confusion.

“Will you stay the night?” he asks quietly, laying an arm over her bare stomach.

“Sure,” she replies, feeling warmth radiating from her belly from his touch.

“Then I’m fine,” he says. She smiles and the fear disappears from her eyes. She rolls onto her side and nestles her head in the corner of his neck and she can swear that her heartbeat is in sync with the pulse that is beating through the large vein in his neck.

He closes his eyes and rests his head against the top of hers and breathes in deeply.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. She pulls the blanket up over their naked bodies and it isn’t until he hears her deep breaths to tell him that she has fallen asleep that he relaxes and the loud thoughts leave his mind.