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He’s been trying to laugh it off. It, in this case, referring to everything it seems. That little, quiet laugh. He lets it out sometimes just to relieve the pressure. It makes him feel lighter for a moment. He’s able to get through the next hour.

Laughing it off, though, has its drawbacks, its complications. Sometimes there’s nothing to laugh at, no reason for a nice, clipped laugh under his breath. It gets harder to think of excuses for it, reasons to justify it. Phyllis starts to look at him like he’s losing his mind. He thinks he might be.

On a Wednesday evening, an evening following a day in which he’d managed to fuck up more than twice with her- it was easy now with the wedding so soon and the tension building to impossible heights- he chuckled as he closed the top drawer on his desk and stood up to leave. She wasn’t talking to him, that classic silent treatment that sent him dizzy with want for her voice, those dulcet syllables that fell on his skin, the way her mouth rounded out vowels, how her tongue hardened consonants. But he was laughing.

When he looks into the lens of that camera, he laughs. When they ask him those questions (“How are you feeling with the wedding coming up so quickly?” “Do you think you’ll tell her before she goes through with it?” “You do realize she’s bat shit crazy about you, too, don’t you?”), he laughs. When she asks him at lunch what he thinks of the napkins she picked out because Roy had seemed completely indifferent to them, he laughs. When he looks at himself in the mirror- pretending he even has the balls to tell her how he feels- he laughs.  

The night they turn the warehouse into a casino, it’s nothing like Vegas, despite its best efforts, but he still entertains the idea of getting drunk and marrying her before Roy has the chance. He’d laugh at the altar, she’d laugh too. He thinks it would probably be hard to kiss her with all that laughing, but he’d manage somehow.

He laughs in the bathroom with that quiet roar of people coming through the door and he can still hear her, over the crowd, cheering herself as she wins another game of roulette. He’s laughing to be sure he can’t hear the smacking kiss that Roy gives her. He’s laughing because things are so unfunny right then that he can’t help but think it is sort of funny. How pathetic the whole situation is. Him and her. Her and Roy. A month until she’s gone forever. A month until, he’s pretty sure, he disappears completely. Ha ha, he thinks.

Across a poker table, she’s all smiles and light, eyes wide and shining, cheeks pink and stretched over bone as she smiles. He pretends it’s an accident when the toe of his right shoe brushes a little against her calf afterwards when she buys him a drink as a consolation prize and they’re sitting at a table together. It’s just that he wants to tell her he thinks she’s beautiful and he can’t very well say it out loud. She hasn’t been taught this particular language of theirs though, so he just laughs and she just laughs, scooting her chair out a little to give him more leg room.

After Jan’s, “Have you told anybody?” he sits in his car and tries to imagine a life without her there. And even though he knows there were years and years and years before they met, so much time when he didn’t even know she existed, it’s still hard to even think about more than a weekend’s worth of time apart. It’s hard to conjure up that time before as some sort of preparation for the time to come. It’s a sad realization he comes to; his life begins and ends with her. Which isn’t even really a hyperbole. He laughs when he thinks about it. He’d walked into that office 25 and still a kid, confused and uncertain, completely directionless. But then she’d been in front of him and he’s pretty sure he grew up for good when she first smiled at him and his entire being seemed to make sense for once. His laughter sounds muted when it reaches the upholstered ceiling of the car.

It’s not a decision he actually makes. It slips out of his mouth like a reflex, like there’s nothing else he could possibly say to her in that moment. He wants to blame the lights in the parking lot for how they fall across her face. He wants to blame Roy for leaving her there in that dress and that skin on a night like this one. He wants to blame the Scranton Business Park for coming up with the bright idea of hosting a night full of bets, risks, high stakes. All or nothing. He wants to blame her for curling her hair like that and being there and not going home with Roy. But he can’t blame anyone. And so when he says it, “I’m in love with you,” the laughter rises up in the back of his throat. Because, really, he’s standing here in this stupid sweater his mom bought him having just realized that his entire life basically is standing right here in front of him and it’s about to tell him that it doesn’t want a thing to do with him, that it’s got other plans. He swallows the laugh though, just in case she says something else. Just in case.

The just in case doesn’t happen though and so he’s walking away from her, his shoes scuffling along the pavement, the sound of it hollowed and echoing. Her words have implications she doesn’t want to dwell on, but he does anyway. Or, really, he’s focusing on the shaky intake of air before she’d spoken the words, that hesitation. He finds himself leaned up against the dumpster behind the building, trying to keep himself from spilling out completely. He feels relieved but heartsick. He’s almost positive he’s going to actually throw up so he bends over, his hands on his knees, and waits for it. It doesn’t come though and he slides down so he’s sitting on the ground, laughing again to the point of hysteria because this is what’s come of the last three years.

When he hears the distant sound of clicking heels slowly getting closer to him, he turns his head to see her. She stops a few feet away, her face twisted in confusion at the sight of him laughing by the dumpster. It gets worse when she’s standing there though. He can’t keep himself together and he isn’t sure if he’s just laughing so hard he’s crying or what, but when she shakes her head as if summoning some sort of courage, he stops altogether and watches her. “Um, before?” She hooks a thumb over her shoulder like maybe he wouldn’t remember just seven minutes ago. Then, after several failed attempts, “I was wrong.”

“Wrong?” The question isn’t accusatory or even really a question. It’s a statement with a question mark, his head tucking down towards his chest as he looks up at her. “Wrong,” he says it again, without the question mark, the laughter creeping back into his voice again as he pushes himself up off the ground but not taking any steps towards her. And she’s nodding, shrugging her shoulders. She looks terrified, shaking a little, knees wobbling; she takes a tiny step towards him and then another and then she’s close enough that he can smell the faint scent of her sparingly applied perfume.

“I was wrong about that whole misinterpreting thing. I don’t know where that came from, I just-” And he’s still laughing when he presses his mouth against hers, catching her words on his own tongue. When he backs her up against the cold metal of the dumpster, his mouth never leaving hers. When she pulls him by the belt buckles, his hips against hers. When her engagement ring clangs against the side of that dumpster a little too loudly, but not loud enough to stop him now.

He pulls his mouth from hers just barely, enough to breathe a little, enough to get out a shaky, “Yeah?” Though he isn’t sure what he’s asking her to confirm, just knows he needs to hear her acknowledge that this is happening right now, that she wants it as much as he does. With her nose pressed into his face still, she nods and says, “Yeah.” And though her voice sounds like glass about to shatter, she laughs against his cheek before she kisses him, makes him feel lighter for a moment.



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