Author's Chapter Notes:
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It’s when he smiles at her on Monday morning. Not the usual, slow morning smile, but a different smile. It’s like he has a secret. That’s when she knows it’s coming. That’s when she sees big plans in his eyes, the future mapped out already without her knowing about it. That’s when she realizes he’s gotten too far ahead and she’s still dragging behind, out of breath as she tries to catch up.
She’s terrified the whole week. Nervous whenever he opens his mouth to say anything. Flinching whenever he reaches into his pocket, his jacket, his desk drawer. Shaking whenever he walks up to her desk with that secret, big plans look in his eyes again.
Lunches become stilted, awkward. She brings up nothing but light topics about coworkers and television. She stays away from talking about Them or anything more than two days in the future.
Car rides home are filled with tense silences. But she thinks maybe they’re only tense to her because he seems fine, happy, blissful. He keeps grinning at her at stoplights. He keeps resting his hand on the gear shift and reaching out to grab loosely onto her fingers. She realizes these are all things he normally does, but they’re different now, weighted with this anticipation like dread in her stomach.
And it’s on Friday night that he’s got that other look in his eyes, sort of dark and thoughtful. The look that speaks of desire and love and those big things she won’t admit she’s still sometimes frightened of because she thought she learned them when she was younger, but they weren’t like this at all.
They’re in her kitchen, cleaning up after dinner. He’s got a dishtowel slung over his shoulder as he washes their plates. She leans against the counter and watches his hands work. She tries to focus all of her attention of his wrists and his sleeves pushed up around his forearms. She thinks it might distract her, because his skin usually does. But it doesn’t help because his hands are covered in dishwater and she starts to imagine them in a sink that belongs to both of them with a wedding band set up on the window sill and her throat gets tight.
He’s been cleaning the same plate for three minutes now but he isn’t really paying attention to it anyway. His eyes look glassy and unfocused as he stares at the water running out of the faucet, moving the dishtowel around aimlessly on the plate.
“Hey,” she says gently, her hand on his arm. She makes sure it’s not shaking too much. “I think that one’s clean.”
He blinks, bringing himself out of whatever reverie he was in, and looks down at the plate like he just realized it was there. “Oh, yeah, I guess I spaced out.”
“Yeah,” she says, leaning back against the counter, chewing her lip. “You’ve been doing that a lot this week.”
He smiles at her, but it’s sort of halfhearted like he’s holding back. “Have I?”
She nods and takes in a deep breath before saying, “What’s on your mind?”
He shakes his head and she hates the feeling she gets in her stomach when she knows that he’s lying to her. It’s worse now when she knows why he’s lying to her. “Nothing. Just tired, I guess,” he finally says, setting the plate on the dish rack and turning the water off.
“Okay,” she says and pushes off of the counter. She moves behind him and presses her hands flat between his shoulder blades, hoping if she can’t see his face she’ll be able to focus on just being with him. He leans back a little into her touch and laughs low in his belly. She presses her face into his back, breathes him in, says, “Let’s go to bed.”
And they’re in her bedroom, quietly undressing on opposite sides of the room. Some nights they undress each other. Some nights they can’t even remember how they got undressed. And some nights they just undress themselves and it’s those nights that really thrill her. Because it’s habit, it’s comfort. She can stand in her bra and underwear and talk to him about plans for the weekend without her skin flushing and without her hands shaking. He can stand there in his boxers and she might not even think about his skin. But she does and she knows he’s thinking about hers.
But tonight, the quiet is different, filled with something charged. They aren’t talking casually. She isn’t shimmying out of her skirt and crawling onto the bed to watch him unbutton his shirt with a half grin painted on her face. He isn’t laughing about something that happened at work or talking about a movie he thought they could see that weekend. He’s just standing there by the dark window, slowly undoing the buttons and looking at his fingers. And she’s standing in her bra and skirt, trying to breathe steadily.
She slides her skirt down her legs and sits on the edge of the bed in her underwear while he undoes his belt. When he’s down to just his boxer briefs, he sits next to her, sliding his hand into hers. The room is full of nothing but the sound of their breath and his skin sliding against hers. She turns her head towards him slowly and he just barely catches her mouth with his.
His forehead rests against hers and he says, “I don’t want to wait anymore.” His eyes are closed when she looks at him. His face is too close anyway, he’s just a blur of unfocused features. He continues, “What I mean is- I’ve tried to be with other women and I couldn’t. They weren’t you. I don’t want to be with anyone else. Ever.” His breath is warm on her face and she’s sure she’s going to cry if he doesn’t open his eyes or maybe she’ll cry either way.
He pulls his head back and looks at her and then down at her hand and his hand and says, “I know it hasn’t been that long, but-”
His eyebrows pull together and she takes in a breath and holds it thinking this is it, this is how it’s going to happen.
His eyes run up her body, over her skin, and then meet her eyes again. He says, “Jesus, Pam, I want to marry you.”
And then she does cry. She’d hoped for silent tears, but they come out with a sob instead. He doesn’t seem jarred by the sound of it or the way her face twists up. His hand just moves to her bare stomach where it lies flat on her waist and pulls her against him. She cries against his shoulder, cries even harder at how he doesn’t even ask why, cries harder still when he just starts telling her he loves her over and over against her hair.
She finally takes her face from the crook of his neck and kisses him once before saying, “Jim-”
But before she can get anything out he’s standing up and moving across the room. She watches him pick his pants up from the floor and reach into the pocket. He has a ring and she feels sick to her stomach and she can’t breathe and she wishes he would slow down for even a second for her.
He sits back down next to her and opens the square box. The ring shines and shakes in his hand. She can’t say anything and he looks up at her and says, “Pam?”
For a moment, she wants to say yes, she wants to have him shakily slide the ring onto her finger, she wants to see how he smiles when he tries to kiss her after. But she can’t. She looks at the ring and sees Roy and the past and all those things she hasn’t quite shaken yet. She sees regret and all the time she hasn’t had yet.
She looks back at him and sees the recognition in his face, his mouth falling slack and his jaw clenching. It’s the second time she’s done this to him and it hurts.
He snaps the box shut and says, “Right.”
“Jim, no. It’s not-”
He starts to turn away from her, but she grabs his hand before he can stand up. When he looks at her, his face is blank and she doesn’t know what to do with that. He’s upset, but he isn’t showing it. She hates even more the feeling she gets in her stomach when he lies to her like this. He’s turned stoic and she wishes he would just look how he feels even if she knows it’ll shatter her.
He rubs his nose with the back of his hand and looks up, shrugging, “No, no. It’s okay.”
“It obviously isn’t,” she says, gripping his hand hard. “Please don’t pretend that it is.”
“What do you want me to say?” His voice surprises her, low and rough.
“Nothing. I just want you to listen to me for a second.” She moves her hand up his arm, moving along his shoulder and his back. She tries not to think about how beautiful he looks in the faded light of bedroom lamps. “You have to know by now that I love you and I want to marry you. I do. Just- Not now, though. Not right now. I’m not ready to be engaged again. I’m learning so much about myself and life and everything. I don’t want to lose that yet.”
He nods, “Okay.”
But it isn’t still and they get in bed without undressing any further and she lays awake for three hours thinking about how he hadn’t said he loved her back and he hadn’t kissed her goodnight. When she tries to get close to him, he rolls over so he’s almost on the edge of the bed, as far from her as possible. She just hopes he can’t hear her crying against her pillow.
In the morning, he isn’t there. It’s the first morning in weeks that he hasn’t woken her up before the alarm. And now there’s just the buzzing of her clock greeting her and a torn piece of yellow legal pad paper on his pillow that says, I don’t want to hold you back. I’m sorry.
unfold is the author of 102 other stories.
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