When Jim meets Karen, he knows, instantly, she’s the girl he’ll go out with at Dunder-Mifflin Stamford. Actually, his first precise thought about her is, This is the perfectly great girl I’ll take out on a few dates, then break up with her in some fucked-up way, all for the horrendous crime of being not Pam, but he’s been trying really hard to avoid these brutal honesties, because they really don’t help with his mental state. He’s not succeeding.
When he shakes hands with Karen, he barely pays attention to her firm handshake, her professional pantsuit. She’s extremely pretty, gorgeous even, but any idiot could tell that, and he doesn’t feel himself overpowered by his attraction to her like he did with a certain red-haired receptionist. Instead, his eyes zone in on the hollow of Karen’s neck, where she’s got a little charm necklace, a whale’s tail.
Pam wore charm necklaces too. He thought about them sometimes, when he wasn’t thinking about her eyes or her laugh or her curves or the other myriad of things about her that haunted him constantly. He wondered if Roy bought the necklaces for her; he imagined kissing her neck in his fantasies, his lips briefly pressing on the chain as she trembled under him. The charm on Pam’s necklace was a butterfly, or sometimes a dove, and Jim thought the change to Karen’s charm was appropriate. For just a few moments on casino night, when he kissed her, it had been like he was floating on air or flying. Then, with a simple nod of the head, he’d come crashing down fast, plunged underwater. He was desperate now, and drowning.
**
In November, two Fridays before the merger, Karen invites herself to Jim’s apartment. It all happens when he finds himself leaving work at the same time as her. He hasn’t exactly been avoiding Karen, but ever since they both gave the okay to Jan concerning the transfer, she’s been looking at him pretty significantly. Jim suspects, but hopes that she’s not, transferring because of him. He’d seen firsthand how transferring for personal reasons didn’t help anything, plus he’d come to think of Karen as this pretty damn cool girl, and transferring just so she could be with a dork like him strikes him as slightly pathetic and against her personality.
“Hey, Halpert,” she says in her throaty voice as she catches him by the elevator. “All packed up yet?”
“Uh, no.” He lets out a brief laugh. “Actually, I haven’t started.” To put his new life into boxes and send it back to his old would be total defeat, but he didn’t think Karen could quite understand what he meant by that.
“Slacker.” She smiles at him, close-mouthed. “You know, I never actually saw your apartment...” Jim has to stop himself from cringing. It’s not that he doesn’t like Karen; he’d have to be blind and deaf to not feel some attraction to her, with her beauty and her wit. He just can’t explain to her that he can’t ever love her the way he loves this shy little receptionist, back at Scranton, still sitting behind the desk after all these months, like she’s been waiting for him. Except it’s blatantly obvious she hasn’t been.
Karen interrupts his thoughts again. “So, can I...come over or something?” Jim felt his breath catch in his throat. A gorgeous, smart girl was practically falling into his lap. He should have snapped her up, feeling thrilled along the way. Instead, he felt almost nauseous. He fell silent, and was that way for the rest of the elevator ride down. After about two seconds, Karen snarled, “Forget about it, I guess,” and crossed her arms, exhaling hard.
In the ten-floors-down ride, Jim did not much but think (and adjust his bag once). He thought of the way he’d touched Pam’s tongue with his for just an instant and she tasted like old red wine, about how she was sad and hopeful and distant all at once when they broke apart. He thinks of her, alone, in Scranton, for the first time in her life. He wondered if Roy was trying to get her back, and figured he probably was, because Jim, too, has lost her once and can’t imagine not trying to fight for her. He wonders if she ever thought of him, and thought, no, she didn’t. One phone call and a few innocuous e-mails didn’t make up for almost six months of no communication, of the wounds that still pulsated on what seemed to be his very heart. That’s when he made up his mind.
“Karen.” The doors open on the lobby, and she turns around with an I’m-not-impressed look on her face. Karen had gradually gotten warmer toward him, but he missed the old her, the one that rolled her eyes whenever he volunteered to help Josh. Two weeks into his time at Stamford, he’d passed by the conference room when she was having a one-on-one interview, and he’d heard her saying something demeaning, yet still kind of funny, about him. That’s the first time he’d thought Karen’s cool, because she’d seen through his obvious big-professional-Assistant-Regional-Manager-guy bullshit. Maybe he only liked girls he could never, ever have. “Sure. Come over. I’ll make dinner.”
Karen smiled that close-mouthed smile again, the one that made him nervous because it seemed just an inch predatory or possessive. “Awesome.” The delicate chain around her neck catches the light and reminds him and he thinks, shit, bad idea, Jim.
**
The second Jim shuts the door, before he even locks it, Karen basically mauls him. Even though something else of his is, well, rising, nervousness bubbles up from his feet. It’s not performance pressure, either. He wasn’t aware there was this much sexual tension between them. Did Karen think there was? As she practically rips off his tie and shirt, she’s moaning into his mouth, pushing her tongue in. It’s frenzied and hot and totally flattering, but all Jim can think of is the night of the fundraiser, soft lips under his, his hands sliding slowly along satin, the utter quiet interrupted by only the small noises they made with their mouths.
They fuck on the floor of his living room, surrounded by his still-unused cardboard boxes, while the light streams in through his window, illuminating her shape. This is real. Jim can’t escape. He thinks it should be sexy, having sex on his floor in the middle of the day with a gorgeous woman on top of him. Instead, it’s almost a little sad. He can hear a car alarm outside. The carpet is scratchy and uncomfortable against his sweaty back, thighs, and ass. He doesn’t even know if he’s pleasing her until she releases a muffled, “Shit, Jim, yes,” into his neck, and he feels her clench around him. She kisses him, hard, as she comes. He’s actually a little impressed with himself, and more relieved than he likes to admit, because he knows he’ll forever be a fucking selfish asshole to women that aren’t Pam, and right now he can’t imagine using his mouth, his tongue.
The only thing Karen’s still wearing is her necklace. She’d daintily removed her watch, even; it was the only thing she’d done gently this entire time. The whale tail dangled in front of his face, almost mocking him. No matter how much he stares at it, it won’t change to a tiny butterfly or dove. He closes his eyes and grips her hips, willing them to be curvier, her breasts bigger, her skin pale, her hair bushy and unruly instead of sleek. It almost works. When he comes, he feels her charm necklace bouncing against his nose. He moans heavily, forcing his lips to stay shut. If they’re not, he’d say something he wouldn’t want to.
**
“These are so... dinky,” Pam says to Jim, standing up by her dresser. She’s holding up two necklaces, one with a dove and one with a unicorn charm. “Maybe I should stop wearing them?” She lowers her hand to her neck, zips the butterfly along its chain. “This one too...”
“Nah.” He’s standing behind her, and he puts his hands on her sides and turns her around so she faces him. He puts his hand on her clavicle, so his fingers are against the front of her neck, the heel of his palm on the chain of her necklace. “I always thought they were kind of sexy.”
“Jim. You’re ridiculous. My mom got them for me at the beginning of high school, along with all these terrible glitter hair clips.” She laughs. “Everything about me was not sexy for the past five years. This hair was not sexy.”
“It certainly was.” Jim moves his hands from her chest and runs them up and down her slides, making the hem of her shirt rise and fall slightly. She’s wearing an old sleeping shirt of hers that hangs to her knees, those tiny hoops at her ears, her butterfly necklace – and that’s it, Jim knows from the experience of about half an hour ago.
“Well,” Pam says. “I’ve been thinking about changing my hair for a while now. I’m just bored with it, you know?” She grins at him. “You keep calling me out on how unpredictable I am now, anyway.” From the merger of Scranton and Stamford until May, he’d never seen a real, ecstatically happy grin on her face, save her few triumphs with art during that time. Now, though, she smiled at him on a daily basis, and Jim almost had to remind himself that he didn’t have to be heartbroken over her any more. It’s a sleepy Sunday morning in June, less than a month since their first date, but it was already like they had been together... forever; he thought that might seem scary or worse, boring and routine, but it never did.
“You can do whatever you want,” he murmured into her ear, lazily drifting his fingers along the top of her thighs. She bites her lip, and Jim feels her arch her hips forward, aching to have his fingers inside her. “You know I’ll love your hair and your necklaces. In the end, it’s you that matters, Beesly.”
He goes home that day around three because they’re still trying to keep their relationship a secret; they both want to shout it to the world, obviously, but they don’t want Michael Scott to be the one to do so. On Monday, she comes in to work, and Jim does a double take. She’s got her hair in big loose curls, and she’s wearing a bright button-down that he could swear had previously served as a cardigan. She goes behind her desk, almost sauntering – oh wow, that’s for my benefit – Jim’s amazed for about the millionth time, and has to think of Michael’s coffee breath to stop himself from getting very, very hard at his desk, where he can see Dwight in his peripheral vision, for God’s sake. Pam just does those sort of things to him.
She looks at him very purposefully and gently touches her hand to her neck, and Jim remembers his own hand there, his mouth, later on, when his hands had moved to her bare hips. A sly smile spreads across his face when he realizes she’s, indeed, still wearing the gold chain with its butterfly charm. He thinks it’s the best piece of jewelry in the world, quite frankly. No, he amends that thought. The small velvet box he’s currently hiding in a shoebox in his closet, that’s got the best piece of jewelry in the world. It’s not anywhere near the time for that yet, but it’s there, and it’s almost a miracle.
A year ago, when he’d just started at Stamford, his dreams were haunted by terrible things, flocks of light blue-purple butterflies and doves, the beating of their wings sounding an awful lot like I can’t. It had been a long, weird, and incredibly tough year, and he hadn’t acted admirably terribly often. But he’d more than survived, and sometimes he had to touch her, even at work, just to make sure it was all still happening. That day, at lunch, he pauses as he stands behind her while she sits at a table, and gently presses the pad of one of his fingers to the clasp of her necklace. She turned her neck and head toward him, smiled up, confirming without words that it was still real; it was always going to be real. They were here.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Oh, the things I write instead of the chapter of "Six Dunder-Mifflin Men..." that I haven't written yet...
Chapter End Notes:
So apparently I write angst way better than fluff. I don't own The Office.
bigtunette is the author of 7 other stories.
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