Katy and Jim go out for drinks every few weeks, but don’t go on their first real date until a unseasonably hot Saturday in May. She tells him she likes Italian food and he makes sure to take her to La Trattoria, a fairly nice pizza and pasta place. “Oh, do you know Cugino’s? It’s really good. It’s over in Dunmore? I should have told you about it,” she asks, as they walk to their table.
“No, actually.” Mentally, he berates himself.
“Too bad.” She gives him this giant, radiant grin that he can’t help but return. “Next time.” He’s somewhat bolstered by the fact that she thinks he’s charming enough to get a next time.
Eventually, the talk turns to jobs. “So, do you like selling purses?” Jim thinks this is the lamest possible question anyone has ever asked anyone else throughout history.
Katy shrugs. “Not really,” she responds, looking around her in a manner that’s a little paranoid and giggling, as if she’s afraid the waiters at La Trattoria are going to tell her she can’t work as a purse girl anymore because she just said that. “Do you like selling... paper?” He can tell she forgot for a second.
“Not really.” He’s got a big purposeful smile on his face.
“Then why are you still there?” Jim was taken aback. That’s not fair, he hadn’t asked her that!
Nevertheless, he shrugs. “I’m only 26,” he replied as best as he could. “I’m good at sales, I just don’t want to do it forever.” How strange it was that he’d never had this conversation with Pam, but he was having it with Katy. Everything he said was true to some point, but it’s what he was leaving out that made him a filthy liar. His entire life remained one big sin of omission.
They go for a walk in a nearby park after dinner at her request, but don’t talk much. Even though night’s firmly set over the park, the waxy tree leaves only catching light from the lampposts, it’s still almost too hot to be doing anything but sitting in front of an air conditioner. Jim feels the sweat perching, threatening to roll down the back of his neck, and it isn’t pleasant.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Katy finally says.
“I’m just kinda tired,” he replies. “It’s been a busy day.” He woke up at 12:30 and watched Arrested Development on DVD until the date.
“Sure.” She reaches for his hand. Hers is smooth and cool, and of course his are completely rough, practically snagging against her skin. “I had a really good time. Next time you call me, don’t make it a month and a half from now, okay?”
He laughs at that, in the way he does whenever someone hits a bullseye on the less appealing aspects of his personality. It makes it less uncomfortable, means he doesn’t have to face up to it. “Definitely.” When too many seconds have ticked by, he thinks he should have said I had a good time too, but he didn’t. Instead, she reaches up and pecks him on the lips, and Jim tastes salt on her, probably because of the sweat, but she hardly repulses him. Her hair falls in front of his eyes and he can feel it on his cheeks, and it’s soft and so red. He tries to think about it on the way home, as he drives with the air conditioning in his car cranked up, but in his mind her hair crimps into curls, and maybe isn’t so soft (though he wouldn’t know; he’s never touched Pam’s hair, for terrifically obvious reasons).
When he gets home, he’s glad Mark is sleeping over at Heather’s. He turns on the air conditioning in his room, turns it all the way down to sixty degrees, peels off his jeans and button-down shirt, and crawls into his bed, on top of his striped covers. It’s not quite 11 PM. He stares up at nothing for what seems like a long time, hearing the occasional car drive by outside, the lights playing over his bedroom ceiling whenever one does.
He’d been in love with Pam for almost three years, and there was something about the summers that made him own up to this and want to change it. It reminded him of the few times he went to the smoking sections in bars, when he tried to concentrate on what happened around him and the girl he was talking to, but all he could pay attention to was the way the smoke got stuck in his eyes, nose, throat. He felt hotter with it trailing around him. He went home with no telephone numbers or anything, but the smell of cigarettes lingered in his hair, on his clothes, in his bedsheets. It was inescapable. Sure, he could throw his clothes and bedding in the laundry and wash his hair, but just when he was least expecting it, he’d just get this whiff of cigarettes.
Katy was progress. Really, she was, even though Jim knows that he asked her out because she almost looks like what Pam would if she’d realize how incredibly gorgeous she was. He certainly wasn’t repulsed by Katy. So what, he didn’t instantly love her? Relationships were supposed to be work. “Dammit,” he said out loud, to nothing but his room. His thoughts did this dance almost every day, where he thought of countless ways to get over Pam while attempting to ignore his heart throbbing, feeling like cannon blasts in his skull: it’s a useless effort because you aren’t ever going to get over her. She’s it. He was a guy; he wasn’t supposed to be thinking like that, period. God, he was such a sap.
He finally drops off to sleep, at who knows what hour. He’s drawn the blankets over him, because it’s actually cold in his tiny room with the air conditioning on full blast and he’s only in a t-shirt and boxers. He has that reoccurring dream, or rather nightmare, wherein the camera crews come back and Paul and Jen, the heads of filming, cheerfully tell him they’ll no longer need the confessional interviews because they’ve got magical cameras that can read minds.
*****
Pam spends a lot of time at the house on the lake that summer, with Roy and Kenny and Denise. Roy rolls his eyes at her when, every day, she painstakingly slathers on sunscreen and stays on the dock reading mediocre books made for beach lit as opposed to going out on the WaveRunners. One day, she forgets the sunscreen, and, like she knew would happen, she burns the one exact shade of red that clashes with her hair. Roy pokes her sunburnt shoulder the next night and laughs, and she has to grit her teeth against the yelp that’s her automatic response as she watches the mark of his pointer finger go from white to near-red again.
With every long weekend she takes off work, or even the occasional week, she feels the slightest bite of guilt. Even with the extra funding from the documentary, Dunder-Mifflin is not in a great position right now. There’s constant talk of downsizing and mergers and downsizing in mergers, and taking this much time off can’t look good for performance reviews (not that Michael’s ever have anything to do with, you know, her job). She pictures Ryan or Kelly trying to figure out the phone system, which is remarkably complicated. She knows, whenever she gets back, she’ll have a torrent of voice mails.
Most of all, she thinks about Jim, far more than she’d like to. If something funny happens, she catalogues it away in her memory to tell him when she gets back. When her sunburn finally heals and she has sex with Roy, runs this demented little fantasy in her head. She’s Katy, which means she looks like herself, but prettier, sexier, more confident. Confidence is what she needs. Of course, the part of the fantasy that really worries her is that if she’s Katy, then the body on top of her must be Jim’s. This is dangerous, almost incredibly so. In the past, she’s thought he was attractive, of course, how could she not, but that wasn’t really that weird. It’s quite another thing to imagine his hands splayed over her breasts, his breath panting hot against her ear, him inside her. She dismisses it, eventually, as some crazy summer thing brought on by the heat. Everyone had “summer flings,” right? Being with Roy, she never got the chance. This was a summer... mental fling. The wording seems so incredibly stupid, but she needed some excuse, and Roy wanted to be fucking Katy anyway, so maybe it all evens out.
Within a month of when the cameras come back, Mindy, one of the camera people, begs Pam to tell her what’s up with Katy and Jim, because Jim won’t talk about it to the crew. Pam doesn’t want to tell them, either, but nevertheless she starts blabbering, something about how Jim and Katy met at the office, because if she really stops to think about what she’s saying, she’ll have to confront everything. “I’m sorry,” she sputters, eventually. “I feel like I’m talking really loud. Am I talking really loud?” Suddenly, it feels very, very warm in that conference room. It’s late September, in perpetually cold-ass, rainy Scranton, but weather.com still says it’s seventy degrees, and it feels even warmer. She tells that to Jim when he asks, and he looks over his shoulder once, slyly, like he knows this heat wave isn’t ever going to break.
Story Notes:
It's summer, and I've gotta trek 30 city blocks every day. Blah. Of course, this inspired fanfiction...
Author's Chapter Notes:
As always, I don't own The Office. Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start...
