He had never stopped wondering about her. People think that once you love someone, you understand everything about them; he thinks maybe it's the other way around. This perfect balance between loving and being loved is foreign to him, and some days he doesn't know how to deal with it. These are the early days of their relationship, where every word and action is underlined with fragility- we could be wrong.
Sometimes he's convinced that his senses are falling apart one by one, sure that one person cannot see and hear and feel all of these things without some level of insanity. He thinks his eyes are failing him when he stumbles into his kitchen one Thursday at some ungodly hour of the morning and she's there- the woman of his dreams- standing at his stove, making him breakfast, naked except for a bedsheet tied loosely over the curve of her hips. He thinks he might be going deaf when he hears her say that she loves him in a voice full of honesty, and when she breathes out his name as she arches underneath him he decides that insanity is a small price to pay for this. He's sure his sense of touch is leaving him when she pulls him into her, searing through the darkness like some shooting star, magnificant and beautiful and powerful and he knows he could never love anyone but her.
---
She has this habit of waking up in the middle of the night. She's always been a light sleeper, and lately she's been afraid to sleep at all, mostly afraid that she'll wake up and things won't be the same beautiful way they were. It used to be that she could creep out of the bed she and Roy shared and read or paint or watch some worthless Lifetime movie, but Jim seems to have a sense of where she is and when she leaves and she doesn't want to wake him up, so she stays in bed. These are her moments of privacy, laying in the darkness of their room at some early hour of the morning. He always sleeps on his side. She likes to trace the contours of the ribs visible beneath his flesh, and it reminds her of every beautiful painting she has ever made and every beautiful dream she has ever dreamt.
Some night she wakes him up, hungry for his skin on hers. He never complains about these interruptions, only takes her into his arms and leads her to a place they have shared only with each other. She tries to memorize the feeling of him as he moves around her, on her, inside her, all at once a piece of her and she a piece of him. She fits herself to him, exploring every nook and crevice until she knows every part of the man she was destined for, the man that makes her the woman she has always wanted to be. She realizes that there is always something new to him.
But most nights she doesn't wake him, only watches him for a while before she tucks herself in to him, picking up his heavy arm and draping it over her hip. Sometimes he stirrs in his sleep and pulls her closer to him, and she burrows happily into his embrace, listening to the beating of his heart and feeling his warm breath on her scalp.
---
There are things she does that drive him insane, like how she's meticulously organized and how she's sometimes more careless than he ever thought she could be. Once, she burned her arm leaning on a hot stovetop, and he cursed and cried all the way to the hospital because he knows he will never be able to protect her from herself.
She takes care of him more often than he takes care of her. His tendancy towards overreaction is swallowed by her composure; she jokes with him that if there were ever a fire, he'd be running circles in panic while she reached for the extinguisher. He feigns hurt but secretly thinks she's absolutely right, and he wonders if she'll be the one comforting him while she gives birth to his children. There is never a situation she doesn't have a solution for. She is his friend and his lover and his companion, and he has never wondered if he made the right choice with her. There could never be anyone else.
---
Sometimes she thinks about all the time she wasted on other men before him. There's so many days they'll never have, and she loathes how she's the sort of person to think about the ends rather than the beginnings. She thinks that when she dies she'll know she didn't have as much time to love him as she should have. He doesn't think that way- he tells her that being with other people made them better for each other. She can tell he really believes it. She's not sure.
He is every sort of beautiful. She loves to watch him in the moments he thinks no one is looking; when he's faxing something at work or washing the dishes at his apartment (their apartment, mostly) or sleeping in on Sunday morning, gathered up in sheets and sweat and love. Her artistic mind traces every shape of him- the way he walks, how his hands move when he's excited, the curve of his spine under her hands when he bends his tall frame to meet her lips. The last one is her favorite.
---
Sometimes people ask him if he knew from the beginning that she was the one for him. It's an easier question than it should be, but he always knew. Maybe not consciously at first, but something in him stirred when he met her. She was the piece he had always missed, the quietness to calm his loudness, the happiness to infuse his sometimes-melancholoy demeanor, the natural beauty to bring back together the parts of himself that he had lost. He loved her, and that was enough to glue himself to the sticking place, to be strong for every moment she was weak and loving for every moment she was unsure.
Some people think he knew far before she did, but he knows the truth. She just fought it longer, doubted it more strongly. He looks at the art she made back then, and he sees the pieces of them in every painting. He sees the things inside of her that neither of them can name, things that are dark and light and terrifying and comforting and not quite ready to be spoken yet. He knows they have time for that. They have time to keep loving each other.
They will keep learning how.
Story Notes:
This is my first shot at Jim/Pam fanfic-- hope you enjoy! They're far too cute for me to stay quiet about them for long.
Author's Chapter Notes:
If I owned The Office, Jim would have proposed two seasons ago ;). No copryright infringement intended.
josephine is the author of 3 other stories.
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