* * *
Thursday
He’s sleeping now, but I woke up early and haven’t been able to fall back under. Still, for close to an hour I kept my eyes closed and listened to him breathe, lulled by the steady rhythm of his chest rising and falling against my back, his arm a warm weight wrapped loosely around my waist.
It's six weeks ago today that he came back from New York and burst into the conference room to ask me out. Six weeks since the second time he kissed me. Five weeks since the first time he spent the night with me. Four weeks since we’d spent a night apart.
It’s still a little strange, I’ll confess. Amazing, yes, but still with an element of the unreal about it. Two months ago we’d barely been speaking, and now he has a key to my apartment, a toothbrush in my bathroom, half a dozen changes of clothing in my closet and dresser. At the same time, there’s something so comfortable and ordinary about it, like we’ve been together for years.
We got home late from watching fireworks last night and didn’t go to bed until well after midnight. We’re both taking a long weekend, and tonight I have a surprise for him, something I’ve wanted to do with him since the first time I experienced it last summer. I think he’ll like it.
I start to carefully ease out from under his arm, thinking I’ll load a few things into the car before he wakes up, but his grip on me tightens immediately and he pulls me back. “Going somewhere?” he murmurs, his voice thick and gravelly with sleep, lips warm on the back of my neck.
I can do it later.
* * *
Jim was not good with surprises, I was discovering. The skeptical look he’d given me when I told him to get onto eastbound 307 had turned into a steady barrage of questions as we headed into the countryside. “Pam, just admit that you meant to say 380. It’s not a big deal.”
“I am not lost, okay?” I repeated impatiently, for what must have been the twentieth time. “Just drive. I’ll tell you when to get off.”
“You don’t have to get me out in the middle of nowhere to do that,” he murmured, using his low-pitched sexy-voice as he cast a suggestive glance over at me. I started to roll my eyes but then our eyes met; only for a moment, but my throat suddenly went dry and I felt a flush heat my cheeks.
He smirked, turning his attention back to the road. Making me blush had become one of his favorite new games. “It’s really dark out here,” he complained.
“That’s the idea,” I muttered.
“What?”
“I said, it’s only a couple more miles.”
“To what? There’s nothing out here.” He glanced at me suspiciously. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you.”
“You’re onto me.” I sighed and tapped my fingertips against the thermos I held in my lap, giving him a rueful smile. “I poisoned the hot chocolate.”
“You said that was peppermint schnapps!”
I grinned.
“Seriously, what are you wanting to show me?” he pouted. “It’s kind of late for a trip to the lake, don’t you think? Or—wait, I got it. Midnight fishing.”
“Just…okay, slow down, it’s coming up,” I breathed, relieved. “Right past this road, see right there, there’s a little turnoff. Pull over.”
He squinted at the pulloff in disbelief. “Here? Seriously?”
I gave him a look. “Don’t you trust me?”
He lifted a skeptical eyebrow but said nothing as he put the car in park and turned off the headlights, turning in his seat to face me. “Yes,” he said decisively.
I smiled and nodded. “Good. Now pop the trunk.”
His eyes widened in horror. “Oh my God, you are going to kill me.”
I shook my head with a sigh. “Jim, we’re out in the country at eleven-thirty at night. Obviously there’s only one thing we could be doing.”
He glanced into the back seat, then back at me, and his smile widened.
I had to bite back a grin at what he was obviously thinking. Although that wasn’t such a bad idea, either. “Stargazing,” I said patiently.
“Stargazing,” he repeated, staring at me for so long I began to wonder if this was a terrible idea. Then he chuckled low under his breath, a slow smile coming back to his face. “That’s… very cool.”
Was he mocking me? Hard to say. Yes. “You won’t be sorry,” I promised, reaching for the door handle. “Help me set up the chairs.”
* * *
“Shooting star,” he pointed. “Make a wish.”
Ten thousand more nights like this one.
“Admit it, this was a good idea,” I said.
“This was a great idea.” Jim tapped his mug against mine. “I have to admit I never really pegged you for a night owl, Beesly.”
“Yeah, ’cause I’m so cheerful in the morning,” I deadpanned.
His teeth flashed in a ghostly grin as he scooted his director’s chair closer to mine so our thighs were pressed together. “How did you ever discover this place? We’re literally in the middle of nowhere.”
“Actually we’re just a couple of miles outside Tooley Corners.” I sipped my snuggler and cradled the mug in both hands, grateful for its heat. It had been warm the past few days, but it was chilly out here away from the city.
“Cold?” Without waiting for an answer he pulled the blanket up over my chest and slung his arm around my shoulders, bending to nuzzle my neck. “So, what now?” he murmured.
“Now we gaze at stars, Jim. That’s why they call it stargazing.” I elbowed him lightly, smiling up at him in the darkness. “You’ve never done this before?”
“Nope.” He squeezed my shoulders as he settled deeper into his chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “So. What are we looking at.”
“Hmm.” I stared up for a few minutes, then pointed vaguely to the east. “ ‘Well, there’s Gabby, the small… and annoying,’ ” I quoted.
He smiled appreciatively. “Oh, I see it. That big shiny one there?”
I grinned. How wonderful it was to always be understood. “That’s the moon.”
He kept smiling as he looked down at me, studying me with that soft, fond expression I used to catch only in brief unguarded moments. I switched my mug to my left hand and pointed into the southwestern sky. “You see that very bright star, shining steady?”
“Yes.”
“That is Jupiter.”
“Really.” He tilted his head a little, considering. “You sure? I think it’s Venus.”
“Shut it,” I said sternly, handing him the binoculars, “and look.”
“Can I see the Great Red Spot?” he mocked, pulling his arm back to bring the binoculars up to his face. “I don’t—wait.” He fiddled with the focus knob, frowning a little as he peered up into the sky. “What am I supposed to—oh holy crap, look at that! Moons?” He let out a surprised laugh, full of wonder. “Wow! I’d think you’d need a telescope…” He trailed off, staring up at the sky with his mouth hanging open a little.
“Nope, just an ordinary pair of binoculars.” I grinned, impressed and delighted by his enthusiasm.
“You have to see this!” He handed the binoculars back to me, his expression so excited and rapt I wanted to kiss him. “Look!” he insisted.
Adorable. I took them back, laughing at him a little under my breath as I aimed skyward. I’d done this a few times last year, but there was something awe-inspiring all over again about sharing it with Jim, seeing it through his eyes for the first time; our biggest planet and its four largest moons, alien worlds all circling our same sun. It made me feel small and insignificant and unique, all at once. “Pretty amazing, hmm?” I murmured.
His arm circled my shoulders again. “Oh yeah,” he breathed against my neck. “Since when are you into astronomy?”
I cast a chiding glance at him over my shoulder. “I have a lot of interests, Jim. I don’t just doodle on steno pads and watch Law and Order reruns.”
His eyebrows shot up in clear disbelief. “Oh, I think you do.” He grinned when I laughed, but his smile faded a little and he pressed, “Seriously, when did you turn into Ellie Arroway?”
I brought the binoculars down but couldn’t quite get myself to look at him. “Just…last summer, it was something I got interested in.”
Jim stiffened just a little, his arm tightening around my shoulders. “Yeah?” he asked lightly.
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “All right, then. Right underneath Jupiter…you see that bright red star?”
He squinted. “Red?”
“Yeah. Reddish. Orangish.”
“Okay…” He nodded. “Got it.”
“That is Antares. And see, that’s Scorpio… those three stars that kind of fan out—those are the pincers—and see how it wraps around to make the tail?” I traced the pattern in the air with my finger but when I looked back at him, he was looking at me, not the sky. “You’re not listening.”
“I am! Antares. Scorpio.” He smiled apologetically.
“Jim.”
“Sorry. Guess I’d rather look at you.” He kissed the top of my head and dutifully returned his gaze to the sky. “You were saying.”
“Shooting star!” We pointed to it at the same time, but I turned to him first. “Make a wish.”
His expression softened as our eyes held for a long moment. It was pretty clear what his wish was.
* * *
“We’re gonna get arrested,” I gasped, tearing my lips from his and sitting back on his thighs. We were in the passenger seat, which we’d extended all the way down but it was still pretty cramped, and I bumped my head on the roof as I tried to straighten up.
His eyes snapped open and he stared up at me blankly for a second. “What? No, nobody’s coming.” He slipped his hand into my hair and pulled me back down to kiss me again, sliding his other hand under my shirt, fingers splaying over my back, pressing me down against him.
Still, I couldn’t relax or shake the feeling we were about to get caught like a couple of teenagers. I thought he’d be angry when I pulled back again, but he just studied me for a moment with a searching expression and then sighed, wrapping his arm around me and pulling me down to lie on top of him. He kissed my forehead and I felt his fingers in my hair and I thought about how pissed Roy would’ve been if I’d tried to stop halfway like this.
Jim’s not Roy, and that’s a very, very good thing.
“How many times have you come here?” he asked idly, twirling a curl of my hair around his thumb.
“A few.”
“Last summer.” His voice was soft, full of questions he wouldn’t ask.
“Yeah.” I sighed. “Dwight was going on about how it’s important to slaughter your pigs at the right time of the moon or the bacon will shrink up to nothing when you cook it. And I was, um, gonna pull a prank on him,” I admitted, “so I was looking up stuff about meteors and how celestial events have been considered omens, and there was an article about a meteor shower at the end of July. So I went for a drive to find a dark place and I ended up here.”
“By yourself? In the middle of nowhere? Are you crazy?” he exclaimed. “What if something happened?”
I shrugged. “I have a phone. I can change a tire.”
He frowned. “Yeah, but what if you, you know…there’s a lot of scary people in the world, Pam.”
That thought had, in fact, occurred to me the first time I drove out here. But I was sick of fear and excessive caution ruling my decisions, so I trusted the map and kept going. I was feeling brave then. I thought I was brave about a lot of things that summer, but it turned out my courage kind of came and went. There hadn’t been enough for me to call him, tell him how much I missed him.
“Well, like you said, it’s the middle of nowhere,” I pointed out.
“A great place to hide a body,” he said darkly.
“Anyway,” I continued, talking over him, “I ended up signing up for weekly updates from Space.com. It turns out Dwight actually knows a lot about constellations and lunar cycles.”
“Hmm,” he murmured musingly. “How are we going to use that against him?”
“I told him you can see the space station go by every day at exactly three-seventeen in the morning. He did it for a week before he called me on it,” I grinned.
He pressed his lips together in one of those admiring smiles, shaking his head a little as he gazed down at me. Then he shifted his shoulder, wincing a little. “Ready to go back?”
I slid back over to straddle his waist. “Let’s…finish what we started,” I suggested, bending down to kiss him.
His eyes went wide. “You’re just full of surprises, miss Beesly.”
I grinned, feeling bold and brave again. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me yet, Jim Halpert.”
He smiled. “Yet,” he echoed softly.
* * *
Author's Chapter Notes:
So at the last minute I got a completely different idea for this chapter and rewrote the whole thing. This version is much better, I think.
Takes place in the summer after the Job.
Enjoy!
Takes place in the summer after the Job.
Enjoy!
Chapter End Notes:
It's good they're talking again, yes?
Two more to go. Thanks for reading! As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Extra points to those who caught the Shrek and Contact references. :)
Two more to go. Thanks for reading! As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Extra points to those who caught the Shrek and Contact references. :)
