Story Notes:
Spoilers through "Casino Night."
Author's Chapter Notes:
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.
It’s hard to keep your mouth shut
and harder still to make noise
He brings the same sandwich for lunch every day. She thinks it’s cute. She imagines him, standing at the counter in the morning, laying out pieces of meat on white bread with his big hands. She thinks about him putting on the orange square of cheese and the single leaf of limp lettuce, then adding the final squirt of bright yellow mustard before slicing it on the diagonal and stuffing it into a cheap sandwich baggie, the kind that doesn’t zip closed but folds over. Maybe he wipes the crumbs off the breadboard with a washrag, sweeping them into his hand before dumping them into the sink. She’s never seen a man do that before.
“You really like pastrami, huh?” she asks him one day.
“What?” he asks, his grey eyes coming focused on her, startled, like he’d never noticed her sitting next to him in the school cafeteria.
“Your sandwich,” she says, her voice going quiet with embarrassment.
“Oh.” He looks down. “My mom makes them.”
The next day he shoves his snack size bag of Fritos over to her, without a word. She takes one out and nibbles on it in silence. The salt stays on her lips, and she licks it off later.
The day after that she admires his Flyers jersey, going so far as to take a little of the loose fabric of his sleeve and rub it between her fingers as she talks, like Teen magazine told her to. He talks about hockey for the rest of the lunch period and she manages to keep up, cobbling together what she’s heard her dad and brother Nathan say around the dinner table. When he smiles she keeps looking at his teeth, white and straight, with even whiter little spots where braces have recently come off.
On Thursday he slides over a blue and white ticket to a hockey game, looking away as he does it, like it’s no big deal. Her hand closes over it, brushing but not quite touching his.
Her best friend Melissa tells her that she shouldn’t go out with him again, shouldn’t even speak to him after he leaves her in the bathroom at the game, but she smiles back at him the next day, when he catches her eye across the classroom. She’s been crushing on him for almost five months now, watching him sleep through Spanish and running little fantasies in her head about bumping into him in the hall and him helping her pick up her books. There’s a sketchbook hidden under her bed, full of charcoal profiles and little pencil shadings of his hands, although she’d die if anyone saw it, even Melissa.
They go to a movie for their next date, and afterwards when she comes out of the ladies room he’s standing there, an uncertain grin on his face, leaning against a pillar upholstered in red carpet. He kisses her when they get into his truck outside. It’s the first time she’s made out with anybody in almost two years, and his lips feel different from Damien’s. They’re fuller and softer, and he doesn’t like to use his tongue as much. Instead his big hands roam up and down her shoulders, pushing her heavy fleece jacket back, while he keeps kissing her throat where he’s pulled down her blue turtleneck. She stops him before he touches her breast, laughing a breathless little laugh and telling him she has to be home by eleven.
The movie night turns into a regular weekly thing. She meets his parents. He brings her an extra pudding cup at lunch, always tapioca. She knows that he doesn’t like them, that his mom buys the variety pack at Costco and after he’s gone through the chocolate, then the vanilla, he’s stuck with tapioca, but she doesn’t mind. She licks it off the spoon, says “mm, fish eggs,” and laughs when he grimaces, pretending to shudder.
It’s like she’s living someone else’s life, those first few months. It’s so easy to be with him, to refer to him as her “boyfriend” casually, and soon she stops waiting for him to get distant or find somebody else, the way it’s always happened to her before. The happy little bubble she’s been in of crushing on a near-stranger, just because he has nice eyes and a nice smile, turns into something remarkably solid.
Melissa stops calling her every night. She says she’s too busy with her fashion design class portfolio to talk on the phone, but they both know that it’s because Pam doesn’t want to talk about art and Friends and what college will be like anymore. Melissa picks someone else to be her partner for their Great Gatsby project, and after that they don’t even pretend to say hi in the hallways. Pam puts the pink Bongo sweatshirt that matches Melissa’s in the bag for the Goodwill, and throws away all the notes Melissa wrote her in biology last year that she had saved in her Holly Hobby trunk.
In April she lets him put his hands under her bra, and in May she lets him undo her pants, and the night school lets out for summer break she gives him an amateur hand job that leaves her wrist stiff and sore the next day. She likes the way it made her feel, though, powerful and sexy, and the way he groaned her name and kissed her when he came, spilling down the front of his boxers and leaving her hand slippery and wet.
They both have summer jobs, him in the backroom at his uncle’s store and her scooping ice cream, but in the evenings they go for long drives. She brings tapes and he lets her play whatever she wants, even the girl-rock stuff, tapping along with the beat on the steering wheel. When they have a day off together they go up to the lake and bring chips and sandwiches from the grocery store deli, wrapped in pink paper with a peppermint inside.
They talk about whatever comes into their head, work or the movies or stupid stuff, the kind of things that she used to talk about with Melissa when they’d been on the phone for three hours and her ear was red and numb and neither of them wanted to get off and do homework. He says he’s always wanted to have a cabin in the mountains, where he could take people for skiing weekends and he’d have a big screen TV and a snowmobile. She tells him about wanting to have a house with a room just full of books, with sliding ladders going up to the ceiling like in the movies. She loans him Slaughter-house Five, her favorite book that summer, but it sits on the floor of his truck until she takes it back again.
On an August picnic he brings a couple of cans of beer that he took from his dad’s fridge in the rec room. It’s more watery than the stuff her dad likes and lets her drink sometimes, so she finishes her can fast, burping a few times. They lie back and watch clouds, motionless in the still blue air. He reaches into his backpack and takes something out that crinkles. She looks at it there in his hand, and then looks in his eyes, shy but tender, and nods.
They’re seniors that fall. Every month she holds her breath until her period comes. She knows she should just go to the free clinic, but she’s worried her mom would find out and besides, she doesn’t have any girl friends to go with anymore. She thinks maybe they should stop, but then they’re back in the bed of his truck again, under the blankets after a game, and it’s so warm and his hands and kisses feel so good, after the chill air, that she lets it happen again and again. She loves the way it feels when he comes inside her, the way his eyes clench shut and he just whispers her name again and again.
For Halloween they go as Alice and the Mad Hatter. Someone puts her name in for Homecoming Queen and she comes in fourth out of fifth. She sits in the bleachers at the game in her pink taffeta dress and his letterman jacket, watching him stand on the sidelines, almost indistinguishable in the row of players. She hears Melissa giggling two seats behind her, talking with a girl with a loud voice about which player has the nicest butt. She thinks his is one of the nicest, anyhow.
She gets her college applications in, but he won’t do any. She bugs him about that for weeks, until the look on his face scares her. He only gets mad at her once in a while, usually over something about school or her nagging him, and she hates how that feels. Her grades this year aren’t so good but she gets a few acceptances, including a women’s college that she’s wanted to go since she went to her cousin’s graduation there as a little girl. She puts them all away and doesn’t tell anyone about them for a while.
In December her mother picks her up from school one day and just drives her straight to the doctor’s office, without talking. The nurse practitioner is nice, the examination uncomfortable, and she gets a year’s worth of pills. Her mother still doesn’t say anything, but when they get home she sees a flattened box on her desk, from the pregnancy test she’d taken last week, the day before her period started.
She drops her art class in the spring semester, so they can have Econ at the same time. They go off campus for lunches, usually at a little hamburger stand near the interstate. Sometimes a couple of his friends come along, but most of the time it’s just them, at their own bench with the peeling green paint, cars whizzing by behind them. He likes to hold her hand when he eats, holding his burger with the other. She wipes his face afterwards every time with a wet napkin, a little ritual that makes him smile.
In March she writes back to Marywood, accepting their scholarship. The rest of the letters she refuses by just not doing anything at all.
They go on the senior trip to New York in April, over spring break. She likes the play they see, although he falls asleep, and the day they spend wandering in the park, trying to find Strawberry Fields. They ride the ferry around the harbor, wind whipping her hair straight up, and he puts his jacket, then his arms around her. She sees Melissa standing at the other end of the boat, making out with a guy from her journalism class who always wears the same black motorcycle jacket. She half hopes Melissa will stop and look up for a moment, so she could smile a tiny smile at her, but it doesn’t happen.
He doesn’t help her move into her dorms. He says his uncle is making him work, but it’s a Sunday and she knows the store is closed. Nathan and her parents carry her boxes instead, not very many of them because she’s so close to home. She leaves her winter clothes behind, most of her stuffed animals and books, and all but one sketchbook. She almost throws away the one from junior year, full of badly-drawn profiles and hands, but keeps it in the end. Maybe it can go in their wedding scrapbook or something.
It’s weird when he comes to visit. She wants to show him the campus, but he’s always impatient, touching her, fingering the fastenings of her clothes. Her roommate goes home at weekends, so at first it’s the perfect situation. She thinks they’ll just spend every weekend in bed, taking their time like they never could before, but by October he doesn’t even spend Friday night there anymore. Their routine is the same – he comes by after her last class, they eat dinner at the cafeteria, then go back up to her room. Sometimes he stays to watch a little TV after, but usually he doesn’t lie there for more than a few minutes before he’s up and getting dressed, pushing his big feet into his work boots.
When she finally asks him why he’s in such a hurry, voice pitched low and soft, she doesn’t get the angry answer she was expecting. He just sits on the edge of the bed, jeans and socks on but no shirt, and says to the floor that he thinks maybe they should try seeing other people for just a little while, like a break. Her throat is so tight that she can’t say anything at all, and she just nods. He kisses her on the cheek.
Her brother is the one who tells her, embarrassingly. It’s the ex-girlfriend of one his friends. Pam can kind of picture her, when she thinks about it hard; short blonde hair and big boobs. Maybe on the color guard. Slutterguard is what she and Melissa used to call it, because all the girls who were too trashy to be cheerleaders ended up there, strutting around with their round butts making their short skirts flare out behind them, dropping their flags. Maybe her name is Kelly, or Jenny, or Dina. Something cute and slutty.
The next time he comes to visit she smiles the whole night until her face aches, and when he’s naked on top of her, she starts to cry. “You have to wear something,” she chokes out, “I don’t know who you’ve been with.” He gets his clothes on, fast, and doesn’t call her for three weeks.
Her first year classes are too boring to distract her; composition and communications and all the other general courses she has to take as an Undeclared. She takes long walks at night, with a little can of pepper spray in her pocket. She goes to one of the parties on her hall and gets drunk off seven wine coolers, then ends up falling asleep with her head on the toilet after throwing up red-flavored puke all night. She pokes her head into the Women’s Club on campus, then back out quickly when everyone turns to look at her. She finds a forgotten little room on the fifth floor of the library, full of maps in glass cases, and starts reading there on the weekends, working her way through the Dorothy Sayers mysteries and the Romantic poetry she always thought she should read. Wordsworth isn’t bad.
Her brother asks why she doesn’t just date someone else too. She shrugs. She can’t even begin to imagine meeting someone new.
By spring he’s tired of the experiment, she can tell. He starts spending more time with her, coming to visit during the week, staying Friday night, Saturday. She wants to ask her brother what he knows, but it’s too embarrassing. After a while she doesn’t have to ask.
Over the summer she takes a couple of art classes as electives, instead of working. She’s rusty at first, but slipping back into the mechanics of perspective and shadowing feels good. Her illustration professor shows some of her architectural sketches to the alumni newsletter committee, and next month her drawing of the new science building is on the cover. On his suggestion she sends a few things out to a local graphic design company, but she doesn’t hear back.
She declares as a Liberal Studies major, halfway through the spring semester of her sophomore year, right before the deadline. It means she gets to take lots of different classes, and then she can get a teaching certificate afterward. She’s not sure if she really wants to be a teacher, although she kind of likes the idea of herself in a long denim dress, surrounded by little children and covered in paint. It just seems better than Business, like her father wants, or Nursing, like her mother wants, or Art, which everyone agrees is a terrible idea and totally useless.
She spends hours thinking about it, flipping through the course catalogue. Sometimes she asks him what he thinks she should do, but he always just shrugs. “You can do anything you want,” he says. “You’re smart.”
He finally moves out of his parents’ place in January of her junior year. The apartment he shares with his brother and two of their friends is only a few blocks from campus, in one of the complexes filled with undergrads, and pretty soon she spends most of her time there. It’s always a mess, and the other guys like to come pound on the door and make wolf-whistles when they’re alone in his room, but it’s better than the foreign exchange student she got as a roommate in this year’s lottery, who gets up at five every morning and doesn’t seem to have done laundry all year.
A round of student teaching in her senior year pretty much convinces her that she’s on the wrong career path, which she doesn’t say to anyone. She starts putting aside money from her job as a cashier at the bookstore, instead of buying mochas and CDs with it, and watches graduation approach with a sinking dread. The ceremony is on an unseasonably cold day, and she shivers through the whole thing in her thin nylon gown, barely listening to the speakers. All around her are the cheerful, well-dressed girls from her program who loved student teaching and have crayon pictures given to them by the kids and are studying together now for their certificates or for their GREs. At the reception afterwards she hugs a few, promises to keep in touch, and then walks to where Roy and her parents are waiting.
She moves into his place without much discussion from anyone. His cousin gets him a better job working in the warehouse at a machine shop, but she feels bad living off his paycheck and splits the expenses with him. Her little savings run out at the end of the summer, just as the temp agency comes through with a data entry job at a company that makes gift store tchotchkes. She sits in her cube from six to two every day, plugging in item numbers and amounts from the handwritten sheets where retailers write out which little ceramic statues they want. Angel Wings. My Pretty Angel. So Pretty Butterfly. Butterfly Wings. Pretty Angel Butterfly.
It’s the first time she’s worked full-time for more than a summer, and after a while she feels like she’s going to crawl out of her skin. Her cube is one of a long row, attached to the windowless warehouse, and all the other girls are around her age. They have decorated cubicles, and they come in on Saturdays to pull overtime and go to each other’s baby showers and gossip about people in the other departments. She eats lunch at her desk, reading a book or checking her email, even though they’re all really nice to her. It’s just hard to believe some of them are younger than her and have been working here for three or four years already.
After a month she begins to forget she has a college degree. Nobody cares about a bachelor’s anyhow. She still sends out half-hearted resumes sometimes, if she sees something interesting in the newspaper, and she types “Pamela Beesly, B.A., Liberal Arts” at the top in Garamond, but it’s not like anyone cares, since they don’t hire her.
He quits the machine shop in November. His supervisor was an asshole, he says, and they were underpaying the market rate. Her heart sticks in her throat when she hears that, thinking over her bank account, but he says his brother knows another warehouse with an opening. He also says his brother will be cool if they’re short on the rent for a couple of months, although Jason, one of the other guys in the house, rolls his eyes when he overhears.
When they go out to dinner for their sixth anniversary the next week, she tells him she wants to move out and find their own apartment. He’s still waiting to hear back from the paper place, and he frowns at her, taking his hand out of hers.
“We can’t afford it,” he tells her. “Even if I wasn’t between jobs.”
She tells him about the time she saw Tony watching her change in the bathroom. She doesn’t mention the time she caught his brother going through her underwear drawer. He promises to start looking around.
The night he gets the new job they go out for dinner again, then end up in bed, trying to be quiet so Jason won’t hear in the next room. In the pale light, moving as softly as they can, everything turns her on – his thighs brushing hers, the muscles of his shoulders working, his breath, his slow, steady movement inside her. She reaches down to touch herself and he groans when she clenches around him. She smiles, putting her other hand to his mouth. He kisses her palm. Above her hand, his eyes are serious and tender as he looks down at her, and it seems like he’s about to say something. She catches her breath, feeling her chest go tight, but then he comes and his eyes close tightly.
The new apartment is tiny, barely more than a studio with a sleeping alcove. They could probably afford more, but she’s not sure he’ll keep this job, and she wishes she could quit hers. They spend the extra money on furniture; a better mattress than his old futon, some real bookcases, and pictures and dishes from IKEA. Her mom gives them her old silverware and a little loveseat from the back porch that just fits in their tiny living room. His dad gets them a TV at a discount. Their first night, they have sex as loudly as they want, making the new mattress creak and the new headboard bang against the wall, and the next day the guy who lives behind them avoids their eyes and doesn’t introduce himself.
Roy ends up really liking the new job. He makes friends, like always, but these guys seem nicer. They’re not all potheads, for one thing, and they don’t talk about dog racing and cockfights, like the guys at the machinist shop. He starts having regular poker and bowling and basketball nights with them, which is nice because for the first time in a long while she gets time to herself. At first she was a little nervous to be alone in the apartment, jumping at every stupid noise, but now she loves getting home and knowing there’s a long stretch of solitude ahead of her. She naps, watches the reality shows he hates on Bravo, plays with her pastels, eats store-bought salads instead of store-bought roast chickens, and dances around to stupid dance-pop CDs she has left over from high school. When he comes home she’s glad to see him, which is nice because sitting on the couch together night after night, eating pizza and watching TV, gets kind of old.
At Christmas they actually manage to fit a skinny little tree into the place, nailed to a pair of boards, and buy nice presents for their families. They eat dinner with her family, and her grandma asks him, in a loud voice, if he’s getting the milk for free. There’s a silence, during which she thinks her face will burst into flames, but he just laughs and says yes. Her mom gives her a look.
That January they get a new temp at her work. He’s the only guy in data entry. He rides his bike to work every day, and comes in wearing tight black shorts and a tight blue riding jersey that fit his long, lean body perfectly. His hair is black, wavy and shoulder-length, and his skin is a dusky olive. She keeps sneaking looks over at his cube, just across the aisle from his, and by the end of the first week she’s suffering from a full-blown crush.
It’s totally bizarre, being interested in someone else. In college her dorm and classes were full of girls, and most of the guys were super-religious or had girlfriends or whatever. She doesn’t know anything about Lucas, although she thinks he’s single. She starts wearing skirts to the office, instead of the jeans she and everyone else wears, and buys some striped button-down shirts. During the day she’s conscious, every second, of how she looks; she crosses her legs, sits up straight, plays with her hair, tries not to make weird faces. She isn’t sure he ever looks her way but it feels like it, like his gaze is on her at all times.
She thinks about Lucas at home, sometimes. She tries hard to make sure it’s never in bed, but sometimes at night she can’t help but imagine his hands, his lips. What it would be like to sleep with someone else. Once she gets herself off imagining having sex with him in the men’s bathroom, and she can’t look at him all the next day.
One day Lucas asks to borrow her cell phone. When he hands it back it smells faintly of his cologne, the spicy, clean scent he sprays to cover the smell of bicycle sweat. She hears two of the girls talking about how cute he is. A third girl snorts, saying his legs are too hairy. It’s true, but they’re muscular, and she always sneaks a peek over before he pulls on the khakis he keeps in his cube. Another time he comes up while she’s at the vending machine, deciding between Fritos and Doritos. He smiles, in a way that makes her heart jump, and she tells him to go ahead. He buys a packet of unsalted sunflower seeds, his hip casually bumping hers as he moves towards the machine, and she looks at him, startled. He smiles again, bigger. She doesn’t say anything, just feels her face go hot as she looks away.
She confesses her thing about Lucas to her mom at lunch one day. Her mom just smiles and tells her about a cute guy she used to work with at the blood bank, when she was first married, who would always find a way to brush his elbow against her breasts when they were standing together at the counter filling out paperwork. She feels a little better, knowing that.
A few weeks later Lucas asks her if she wants to grab a burrito down at the lunch truck, and she shakes her head no. She knows it will be better if he just stays in her head. He quits not too long after that, and some girl younger than her takes over the empty cube.
In the spring, a receptionist job opens up at the paper place. She listens to Roy tell her about it over dinner, then shrugs, unsure. She agrees that it would be nice to quit typing in numbers all day, and not to have to go into work at six. He points out that it would be nice to have benefits, even though the dental plan is really bad and hardly covers anything. She doesn’t say that she’s not sure she wants to work with him all day and come home to him too, and that she’ll miss her afternoons with Oprah and naps and doodling. It’s a pay raise, though, and it’s not like she likes her temp job, so she goes in for the interview.
They hire her fast. Interview in the morning, and by the end of the day the manager is calling her telling her that he’d like to welcome her to the family. Roy has said the guy is kind of weird, but that he hasn’t been a manager for very long so maybe he’s just getting his feet wet.
She hates the first day of new jobs, and this one is no different. A barrage of people to memorize, all-new programs and routines that she’s just going to have to learn through making mistakes, and she has to answer phones, which she hasn’t done since she worked at the hall office in the dorms her sophomore year. The old receptionist isn’t there to train her, so she just starts digging into the various files around her desk, trying to get a handle on things.
The manager makes a big deal out of introducing her to everyone at lunch, and they play a really uncomfortable icebreaking game. She wishes Roy would come up, but he and the other guys are going to the bar on the corner instead, so she just grits her teeth and tries to remember that the redhead has been married twice and the blonde likes cats and the old lady plays the saxophone, when she has to recite back all the facts at the end of the game.
By the end of the second day she’s able to relax a little and look around the office without being scrutinized. Sales is right near her desk, which seems stupid because they’re always talking and sometimes it’s hard to hear people when she’s on the phone. Accounting is on the other side of her partition, and quality control is by the lunch room. The office supplies are by the conference room. HR and some other people are through the kitchen hallway, and she hasn’t actually met most of the people back there yet.
It’s kind of scary to realize that she’s the receptionist for them all, and that she’s supposed to know names and departments and how things work when she hasn’t even got the desk extensions memorized yet. She writes out a list in colored pencils, with little drawings next to the names to help her remember. A cat, a mini crossword puzzle, a saxophone. After the first week she crosses out the wedding rings next to the redhead’s extension and draws a little bottle instead.
When she comes in on Monday of her second week, there’s some guy sitting at the empty sales desk. She remembers them mentioning that one of the salesman was up in New York for training last week. He’s on the phone when she gets in, so she sneaks a few peeks at him while she’s putting her purse and coat away. It only takes a second for her to realize he’s terribly, devastatingly cute, and her breath catches, the way it used to when Lucas was around. She turns her back and starts working on her computer, just opening some files and checking her Outlook calendar even though she knows there aren’t any meetings today, trying to make her stupid heart slow down. Behind her, she hears him hang up, and she turns in her chair.
“Hey,” he says, leaning on the counter. “You’re not Laura.”
“Shhh,” she says, deadpan. “I’m in disguise.”
He looks startled for a second, and then grins, a smile that feels like trouble.
Every day he spends fifteen or twenty minutes in the morning hanging over her desk. They bullshit each other, making jokes about their weekends, finding things they have in common. He wanders by on his breaks, too, and she wonders if they’re going to get busted for talking too much; her manager at the bookstore was always getting on her case for chatting all the time. But no one seems to notice what anyone else does around here, so she just keeps on talking.
She can’t remember the last time she made a new friend. She likes most of the guys that Roy knows, and some of their girlfriends are nice when they all barbeque together or go up to the lake, but they’re not really her friends. There were some nice girls in her classes in college, but with Roy always there to hang out with and her family so close, it was hard to make herself do those little social things, like asking people out for coffee or to study groups. Now she gets to make all the dorky jokes that her family used to make around the dinner table, stupid puns and little trashtalking digs, and Jim comes right back at her. She loans him a book, he loans her a CD. It’s a pretty great week, all told, and the nagging bad feeling she’s had about the job starts to evaporate.
Friday he asks if she wants to get lunch at Poor Richard’s, just as he’s getting ready to go out. She knows a lot of people go there, and figures it’s probably a group thing. Roy is working through lunch on a big shipping push, so she smiles and gets her purse.
He offers to drive, in his crappy little two-door Volkswagen Fox. The black seatbelt is hot, and the AC doesn’t work, but he drives like a normal person, instead of rolling through stop signs and cutting people off. He even stops to let some people jaywalk, waving them on with a smile. It’s kind of dark in the pub, and not very crowded. He goes straight to a booth in the back by the videogames and away from the blaring jukebox. It’s a four-person booth, and when she looks around she doesn’t see anyone else from work there. Her heart beats a little faster.
Even after all their fantastic conversations this last week, finding out they liked so many of the same things and had the same dorky sense of humor, it’s still a shock to be sitting right across the table from him, closed into the little booth. She’s acutely aware that his long legs take up a lot of room and pulls her own in, trying not to brush his knee with hers. He smiles at the waitress when she hands him their laminated menus, then turns back to Pam, still smiling that megawatt smile. She drops her eyes quickly to the menu.
It’s just a work lunch at a pub she tells herself, deciding between salads. It’s not like he asked you out to dinner at a real restaurant or something.
Her head is buzzing, though, as she tries to sort it out. If he thinks it’s a date, it must be her fault. She hasn’t mentioned Roy, figuring Jim must know how she got the job. But then, Roy’s never come upstairs, and they drive their own cars so he can work overtime if he wants. If it is a date, Roy is going to be so mad at her. He’s going to think she did it on purpose. Who goes on a date by accident?
Jim asks if she wants to split some fries and she looks up at him briefly, shaking her head no. She’s probably worrying about nothing. It’s stupid of her to assume that he’s interested in her, when he probably knows she has a boyfriend. He probably has a girlfriend he hasn’t mentioned; he’s way too cute to be single. He probably takes all the new receptionists out for lunch, she thinks fiercely, although she knows Laura was like fifty. It’s all her fault for getting another stupid work crush on a guy who just wants to be her friend.
She swallows hard when she thinks that. There’s her real problem. If she were out with some gross guy she just wanted to be friends with, she wouldn’t have a problem making sure he knew they weren’t on a date. She probably wouldn’t have even gone in the first place. But now that she’s here, and worried about what he thinks, doesn’t it mean that some part of her wanted it to be a date?
The waitress is back, asking if they’re ready. Pam looks up, orders the chef salad, and looks away. He gets a patty melt. When the waitress leaves, Pam makes herself meet his eyes and smile.
They pick up the thread of their conversation easily, slipping back into their usual jokes. She realizes what she’s been doing is flirting, and curls her toes inside her shoes. She thinks of Lucas, the guy at her mom’s work. It’s OK for her to have a harmless little work flirtation, right? Everybody likes to flirt. Sometimes she flirts with Roy’s friends when they’ve been drinking out at the lake, just teasing them or making suggestive little jokes. Nobody takes it too far.
It’s fine only if everyone’s on the same page, she thinks as their food arrives. Only when no one expects anything more.
She spears a piece of lettuce. He digs into his burger. They eat in silence for a moment. He gets a sly look, and reaches across to sneak a piece of chicken off her plate. She smiles and slaps his hand by instinct, and he smiles back. She blushes, shocked at herself.
“So, do you have exciting weekend plans?” he asks, before taking another bite of his burger.
“Yeah,” she answers, looking straight at him, heart in her throat. “Uh, my boyfriend and I are going to repaint the living room, I think. The paint looks like crap in there.”
He stops chewing for just a second, then finishes up the bite and swallows. She thinks his cheeks are a little flushed, and he doesn’t look at her.
“Fun city. Uh, what color do you think you’re going with?”
“Oh, hot pink, definitely,” she says. “I want something that matches my Malibu Barbie Beach House. That’s kind of the focal point of the room.”
He smiles, and that’s that.
When they get back Roy is actually out in the parking lot, throwing a tennis ball against the wall with his supervisor. He comes over and gives her a kiss on the forehead, and she introduces him to Jim, thankful that this isn’t how Jim found out about him. They talk about guy stuff for a minute, and then Jim says he needs to head back upstairs.
Once he’s gone, Roy gives her a funny look.
“You guys went to lunch together?” he asks.
“Just at Poor Richard’s. I didn’t spend too much,” she says, willfully misunderstanding.
“It was just you and him?”
“Yeah,” she says, crossing her arms. “We were having lunch.”
“Did he ask you to go?”
“Yeah,” she says. “So what? He was just being nice. Not every guy wants to get into my pants. He’s my friend.”
“You like him?”
She uncrosses her arms and puts her hands up in the air, stopping him. “Roy, I am not having this conversation. It was just lunch. I can have lunch with people, even guys, and I don’t have to ask you for permission, OK?”
Roy’s supervisor is still there, standing by the warehouse door and looking uncomfortable. Roy turns to him.
“Hey, Darryl, is this guy cool? Is he like, a womanizer?”
“I don’t really know him,” Darryl says, shaking his head. “He works upstairs. But I don’t know man, he seems cool. I wouldn’t worry.” He meets her eyes over Roy’s shoulder, and she gives him a brief look of gratitude.
“I’m going back to work now,” she says in a cold voice. “I’ll see you at six.”
When she gets upstairs Jim is on the phone, but he gives her a little smile. She smiles back and sits down, staring at her desk.
She shouldn’t have yelled at Roy, and she knows she only got so upset because he wasn’t far off. If he’d seen her up here, flirting with Jim all week, he would have had something to really be angry about. She wishes Roy was the kind of guy she could just explain this to, about how she likes having someone to flirt with but it doesn’t have to mean anything, but she doesn’t think that conversation would go over very well.
Roy comes upstairs on his afternoon break. “Hey babe,” he says quietly. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
She looks quickly over at the manager’s office, but the blinds are closed. She gets up and follows him out to the hall.
“I am so sorry,” Roy says. He puts his hands on her shoulders. “I was being a jerk, OK? I just – it’s not like you ever go out for lunch with guys, you know? You barely see anyone but your mom. It was weird.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Come on, Pam, I said I was sorry. Please?”
“I see people,” she says to the floor.
”What?”
“I see people. Not just my mom.”
“Yeah, sure,” Roy says, shaking his head. “Just, not guys.”
“Can I see guys?” she asks sarcastically. “I mean, will you let me?”
“Come on, you can hang out with anyone you want,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s cool if you want to be friends with whoever.”
How generous, she thinks, but when she looks at him he seems really sincere. He’s always doing this, having a fit over something and then being sorry later, and she knows he’s trying hard not to be like his dad, who never let his mom do anything without asking him first.
She sighs, and slides her arms around his waist, resting her head against his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he says again.
”I know,” she says.
“I know you’re not going to cheat on me. You’re not that kind of girl.”
Pam wonders, suddenly, if that girl cheated on him, Kelly-Jenny-Dina-whoever from the colorguard, but she’s never asked him about her before and now isn’t exactly the best time to bring it up. She seemed like that kind of girl, though.
Things don’t change much at work, after that. She thinks Jim will stop coming by, now that he knows she’s not single, but he acts just the same, joking like always, buying her a soda from the machine. She wonders if that means he was never into her the way she thought he was. He doesn’t really flirt with any of the other women in the office, although he’s really nice to all of them. Maybe it’s just that she’s the youngest, and that her desk is right next to his.
Her mom stops in one day to drop something off, and Pam wishes she could introduce her around, but almost everyone is in a meeting. Her parents are moving to Philadelphia for her dad’s job, so there goes her last chance for an outside female opinion on the Jim thing. Instead she shows her mom how she reorganized the memo filing system and takes her down to the warehouse.
They move into a new place in May, a house with two bedrooms and closer to work. It has a little backyard with patchy grass and one tree and a cracked concrete patio. They have to buy new furniture to fill it all up, which they can’t afford just yet, so their loveseat and beat-up Salvation Army recliner look lonely in the big living room, and the one nightstand makes the bedroom look cockeyed. She asks if they can go to IKEA or Pier One on their next paycheck, but Roy just kind of makes a face and shakes his head.
He proposes the next week, when they’re sitting out on their back porch after her birthday dinner. It catches her by surprise; she always thought he’d take her to a restaurant or the mountains and make a big fuss. Instead he just says her name, real low and husky, and when she looks at him he’s holding a little open box. She reaches out a shaky hand and takes it from him, not touching the ring yet. It’s small but pretty, with a sort of heart-shaped diamond.
“Is it better than a new couch?” he asks, and she breaks into a big smile.
He almost drops the ring, wrestling it out of its cushion, and it just fits. He admits he snuck her class ring out of her jewelry box and took it to the store with him. She holds her hand out to admire it, and even though her nails are chipped and ragged from moving boxes, it looks good.
She feels totally weird mentioning it at work the next day, but the new girl Kelly notices her ring right away and announces it to everyone. She’s already learned to dread attracting Michael’s attention, and he comes over, makes some sort of weird speech about marriage and commitments and how an office is like a family where the manager is the father and the receptionist like the mother, and then says they’re all going out to lunch. As she’s getting her keys out of her purse Jim walks by and gives her a thumbs-up and a smile.
Her mom throws them an engagement party, a week before the move to Philadelphia. The old house looks strange, half its furniture missing and boxes stacked up in all the bedrooms. Pam feels even stranger than that, suddenly being the focus of everyone’s attention. It’s weird, the way an engaged couple are everybody’s property, how everyone wants a piece of them. She can imagine how the next year will go, with all the suggestions and complaints and advice from all their relatives, all the people they’ll have to accommodate. She hates knowing that people will nitpick the invitations, the dress, the food, all the more so because she does it to other people at their weddings.
They get a nice toaster out of it, though, and some new bath towels and other stuff her mom let people know they needed. It’s not the worst thing in the world.
Roy doesn’t want to set a date yet, since his friend at the Veteran’s Hall hasn’t gotten back to him about availability. They agree that next spring would be nice. Her mom subscribes her to three different bridal magazines and she starts filling up a binder with clippings of dresses she knows she can’t afford, floral arrangements she likes, elegant cakes and frothy little favor settings. She starts doodling, putting colors together and making up bridesmaid dresses. It’ll have to be her cousin Maggie, and Roy’s sisters, and maybe one other girl if she can think of one, since they’ll have so many groomsmen. She thinks, fleetingly, of calling Melissa, but she doesn’t.
Summer comes. She decides she wants pale celadon green and white for their colors. Maybe a garden ceremony, in April so the budding leaves will match. In July Roy’s brother buys him a used waverunner, and they go up to the lake almost every weekend. She gets so sunburned that all the skin peels off her nose and freckles dot her cheeks and arms. She has to wear sweaters that chafe her skin at work, though, because the one time she wore a sleeveless shirt to give her red shoulders some relief, Michael’s head practically twisted off his neck every time he walked by. Jim raised an eyebrow the third time it happened, then leaned forward and pressed on her shoulder with one finger, to make a white spot come up. She grabbed his finger and dropped it fast, the blush on her skin matching her shoulders.
She attends her first Dundies awards ceremony in the fall, which she didn’t believe Roy about last year. She gets an award for Sexiest Hair, and immediately cuts her hair above her shoulders that weekend.
For Halloween they have one of the office parties she’s come to know by now. Everyone tries to avoid looking at Michael, wearing a blue dress onto which he’s dribbled Elmer’s glue. She takes her third drink into the break room, where she shares a bucket of candy corn with Jim, wearing the kind of arrow-through-the-head thing Steve Martin used to have. He reaches over and flicks the cheesy halo she bought yesterday at the grocery store, covered in gold glitter and trimmed with fake marabou. A few flakes of glitter rain down on her hair and face.
At Thanksgiving in Philadelphia, her dad asks Roy when they’re going to set a date. Roy shrugs, makes a joke, and reaches for another biscuit. Her dad doesn’t smile. Afterwards in the kitchen her mother asks Pam about it and she shrugs too, saying they’re thinking next fall. Secretly, she thinks she’s enjoying daydreaming more than she’ll enjoy the actual planning.
They use their Christmas bonuses to buy a second waverunner, which sits in the driveway under a blue tarp waiting for summer. She thinks afterward that maybe they should have put the money into their account for the wedding, but now Roy says that even with a discount, the Vet’s is going to be pretty expensive and they might have to wait a little longer.
Michael throws a really embarrassing party on her one-year employment anniversary, with a cake and streamers and everything. She celebrates, privately, by moving her computer so she faces out into the rest of the office, because she’s tired of everyone sneaking up on her when she’s typing. She doesn’t really admit to herself that it makes it easier to chat with Jim when he stops by, although she notices her neck aches less at the end of the day.
Roy starts talking about getting married in the winter, in a lodge somewhere after it snows. She finds a picture in the spring issue of Modern Bride of a dress with heavy red embroidery all along the chapel-length train, and adds it to her binder. Maggie would look really good in a red sheath dress, she thinks. They could find a rustic lodge, the kind with lots of wood paneling and metal chandeliers, and hang holly and evergreens everywhere. The groomsmen could put red flowers in their buttonholes, and she could have a big waterfall bouquet of deep red roses with little white flowers.
Roy comes home one day with season lift tickets to Montage Mountain, which the grocery store was selling at a discount with 24-packs of Coors. “Now we can go up to the mountains whenever,” he says. “We don’t have to get married up there.”
It’s fun having two waverunners this summer, even if Roy’s brother borrows hers half the time because it’s faster than his old one. She likes lying out on the astroturf-covered platform in the middle of the lake, watching the boats and jet skis zip around. She’s been going to the gym more this year, as per her usual New Year’s resolution, and she finally feels good in a bikini. Going to the gym after work makes her feel like she’s accomplished at least one thing, after a day full of idiot people calling with stupid questions, and endless typing and faxing and all the little tasks Michael doesn’t really know how to do or want to do and pawns off on her.
Still, by the following winter she’s stopped going. Cold weather makes her want to run straight home to curl up with Roy to watch football and eat pizza, instead of coming home late and having a salad or a bowl of Special K. Her body gets softer, and she actually feels good about that. Work is starting to make her hard. She can feel it in her face, during the day, and feel it in the little wrinkles that her perpetual frowns are starting to leave on her forehead. After a year and a half her patience with Michael is nil, and she can’t do the sweet voice she used to, nodding her head and agreeing with whatever he says. She has to work hard to bite her tongue now, swallowing sharp remarks and mean jokes that never used to come naturally to her before. She hates how that makes her feel, like some cranky old lady. Like some cranky receptionist who’s been working for the company for a million years and answers the phone in a bored smoker’s croak and never smiles.
She thinks Jim notices. He always seems to come by her desk just when she’s had the most frustrating conversation with Michael, and sometimes she can see him smiling over Michael’s shoulder, smirking in sympathy. Once when she really does yell at Michael, because he jams up the fax machine and implies it’s because she doesn’t maintain it, Jim comes up and says something smooth and calming to Michael, then takes her by the elbow out into the hall. They ride the elevator down in silence and walk out to the parking lot, covered now with autumn frost. She rages for a few minutes, kicking at the dumpster, while he watches her, leaning up against the wall.
“I feel like such a bitch,” she says, after her fury passes. She’s scuffed up her shoe. She sighs, and leans against the wall next to him. “Like I don’t want to be the person I’m turning into.”
“You’re not a bitch,” he says.
“I’m apparently the fax machine maintenance girl now. God, I don’t even know how the fax machine works. I just know you can’t run staples through it!”
“There are kindergarteners who know that,” he says. “Kindergarteners in Nigeria.”
“I don’t want to be like this,” she says again. “Mean. I get upset about stuff at work that I don’t even care about. Sometimes I wish it was 1955 and I could just be a housewife.”
“Well, you can live that dream,” he says. “When’s the wedding date again?”
“Next summer,” she says automatically, even though they haven’t talked about it in a while.
That night she doodles a few ideas for a blue and white wedding at the back pages of her wedding scrapbook, which is getting full now. A ceremony by the lake would be nice. One of those square fondant-iced cakes in Tiffany blue icing. Her wedding magazine subscriptions have run out and she doesn’t have any clippings to add, so she puts her scrapbook away.
Winter seems a little harder this year, even though she used to love it as a kid. Holidays just aren’t the same now that she’s grown up, and waiting for presents has been eclipsed by having to give presents. They make three big shopping pushes, wasting hours at strip malls going from store to store, and spend more than they can afford. Both sets of parents want to see them, so they drive to Philadelphia on Christmas Eve to stay the night, and drive back the next morning for dinner with his family, fighting traffic the whole way. Their presents go over well enough, but she privately resolves not to spend so much time next year picking something out for his dad, who barely looks at the book she went to four different stores to find.
When the holidays are over winter seems worse than ever, just three months of cold and snow and nothing to look forward to. She actually goes to church with his mom on a couple of Sundays, at her suggestion, and while the music is pretty she feels just like she did as a little girl going to friends’ churches – empty and bored. After three weeks she makes some excuse and they don’t talk about it again.
She starts trying to fix up the backyard in spring. They go to Home Depot on the weekend and buy a truck full of colorful annuals in plastic six-packs, and long redwood planters and big bags of soil. Roy complains but he ends up enjoying it, and after a while they spend their weekends weeding and buying new plants to replace the ones that die because they don’t really know much about gardening. He talks about planting vegetables next year, and she buys a few tomato plants that he helps her to stake out. They get a cheap little picnic table with an umbrella and a few plastic chairs, and suddenly the yard looks like it belongs to a real house, not one that’s still a little too big for them and their secondhand furniture. As the evenings get warmer they sit out there together, a few citronella candles on the table, and eat dinner. She even gets him to pick out some recipes from the books her mom gave her, and for a few weeks in April they cook all the time, chicken and fish and fresh produce, before slipping back into canned soup and pastas again.
At dinner on her twenty-fifth birthday she brings up the topic of the wedding, quietly, as she twists her ring. He doesn’t say anything in return, just keeps eating, and she hopes he’s not going to get mad here, in a crowded restaurant.
“Next year?” he says after a long silence. “It’s just – you know, we spent a lot of money on the house and the yard this year, and since they laid off three guys at work, I’m totally under the gun.”
“Yeah,” she says.
That night, for the first time in years, she thinks about what life would be like without Roy. She’d have to move out; neither of them could afford the house on their own. She’d have to get a place by herself for the first time, or live with some strange roommate, or crash on her parents’ couch in their Philadelphia townhouse and quit her job. She’d have no one who shares their nine years of jokes and stories, no one who’s supposed to love her and care about her no matter what. She’d have to date, for the first time ever. She tries to imagine herself in a bar, with her hair up and lots of makeup on, waiting for someone to buy her a drink. She tries to imagine going to bed with someone else, being naked, hoping he knows what she likes. The idea is so depressing that she curls around Roy as he sleeps, pressing against his bare, familiar back.
A couple of people quit that summer, one from HR and one from quality control. Nobody gets hired to replace them, which isn’t the first sign they’ve had that the company is struggling, but one of the more ominous ones. Toby’s wife leaves him in July and for a few months they pretty much have no HR department, because everyone just gives him a weak smile and looks away as soon as possible when they see him coming, usually in yesterday’s clothes and with a week’s worth of beard. She wonders if they’d replace her if she quit; sometimes she thinks Michael and a particularly bright chimpanzee could do just as well.
She asks Roy if maybe some work people could come along to the lake one weekend, meaning Jim and maybe Kelly, but he thinks she means his work friends, so she ends up staying home while they go without her. It would have been weird, she realizes. They don’t do stuff outside of work, and besides, it would be really embarrassing to wear her bathing suit around work people. Michael suggests an office pool party in August, but she talks him out of it, fast.
She can’t talk him out of another Dundies awards, though, and she could just kill him when he gives out that stupid Longest Engagement award for the second year running. Then Roy gets up to accept the award, and it’s him she wants to kill, for acting like it’s some big joke. They have a big fight about it when they get home. The award ends up thrown in the backyard, where it lands in a planter full of dead marigolds they forgot to water over the summer. He apologizes later that night, crawling under the blankets where she’s curled up in an angry ball, and then he goes down on her until she can’t see straight. She hates the way he pulls her legs apart, certain she’ll acquiesce, and she hates herself for responding, for loving the way he feels against her. In the morning the fight is just a dull memory, like an old bruise.
By Thanksgiving everyone at the office is cranky and stressed, trying to keep up while desperately short-staffed. Corporate won’t give them any info about the company’s situation, and the rumors fly wildly. Jim comes by to tell her that he has it on excellent authority that Dunder Mifflin is going to get out of the paper business entirely and start selling pet rocks, which makes her smile more than she has in weeks.
Jim brings a date to the office Christmas party, which is kind of weird. She’s really young, maybe not even out of college yet, and it’s probably the three thousand photocopies of her boobs that she makes after winning at Quarters that prompt Toby’s memo about no alcohol at corporate functions the next week. Pam teases Jim about her for weeks afterwards, and keeps a stack of the photocopies for future torture. He doesn’t joke back, though, just gets really red and embarrassed, and eventually she shreds the copies.
Roy tells her at New Year’s that he wants to get married in the fall. He tells her this right before midnight at Darryl’s party after shotgunning four beers in a row, but she decides to hold him to it anyhow. The next morning she uses up the last few pages in her wedding notebook to sketch new ideas. Gold and green looks like the Green Bay packers. Gold and red were their high school colors. She draws a ridiculous outfit, a lime green miniskirt with a striped hot pink halter top, then rips the page out and throws it away. After a moment she starts to rip up the rest of the notebook too – the pale celadon A-line dresses, the red sheaths, the short blue dresses, the pictures of cakes and flowers and receptions she’s pasted in, everything. When she’s finished there’s rainbow confetti all over her bed, showing bows and blossoms and body parts, and she gets up and vacuums until there’s nothing left at all.
Chapter End Notes:
Thanks to: Pretty much all my Office-obsessed LJ friends, for the discussions about Pam and Jim in the summer of 2006 that sparked off much of the story. And to Obsession_Inc who let me throw a few ideas at her at the eleventh hour and helped me via some inspired ranting.
