{Middles}

It happens in the parking lot.

There’s pavement under her feet, tiny cracks emanating away from her and she wonders if it’s because the world just shook and she was too distracted to notice. Sky cold above her and cement hard beneath and there’s a familiarity to this, like déjà vu but in repeat and she feels like she should know what to say.

There should be some script after all these takes. But Pam can tell from the blankness in the space between her tongue and her gut where words come from that she has no answers and she has not exit strategy and it’s happening all over again but she can’t stop it.

Pam opens her mouth to speak.



{Beginnings}

It’s a perfectly ordinary Thursday, the clock ticking a dry beat around in an endless loop because tomorrow will be just the same; time drags on when it’s most inconvenient. Her coffee break had been wasted already and lay worthlessly dead in the kitchen, so all she can do is pray that lunch comes quickly.

She’s getting sick of being clairvoyant. It’s not as if she can see the future per say, not like she knows when the rain will come or the world will end or she’s going to die, but when you live the same days in repeat it’s difficult not to know what will happen next.

More of the same. It becomes her mantra and makes her ache like growing pains.

Yes, the unexpected arrives on an indistinct Thursday. If she would have guessed, she would have thought that such a thing would come tied in a bow or baked in a pie. But instead, her reality does a flip-flop in a quiet breath. The water dings its readiness in the office kitchen’s microwave, she dunks her teabag into the water and…

Oh.

Karen reaches around her for the cream to pour in her coffee and Pam inhales. It’s a silent revelation, this scent that carries itself in on oxygen and permeates her brain; Karen’s hair smells amazing. It’s not as if she makes a habit of smelling other women’s hair, other than that one time in college before she dropped out and that was completely on accident as well. She feels immature at the thought, like a hormone-sick teenager drunk on sex and the newness of skin on skin, but she pulls the scent deeper, commits it to memory without really meaning to. She breathes out once the door swings shut behind Karen but the recollection remains.

Whenever Pam sees her after that, all she can think is coconut.

-

It takes her nearly a week to figure out that Karen is watching her.

She’d become so attuned to Jim’s eyes luring hers from the desk in front of reception – as if his pupils were saying can you come out and play with me? – that she doesn’t register that tingling sensation of being watched. She knew many of her coworkers stared: Creed in his creepy old man way, Michael in an odd combination of child-like need and horny want, Phyllis with a motherly concern.

But Karen… well, they hadn’t exactly gotten along from the start, for obvious reasons. So when her eyes float up haphazardly one day over her monitor, she jumps when she’s met with chocolate brown and olive eyelids draped with long lashes. They both look away quickly, ashamed to be caught, but still.

She knows.

-

Pam wonders sometimes. What it would have been like if Karen had been the sales-person to greet her that morning so many years ago, long dark hair instead of floppy brown.

Karen would have been new then, just moved from Stamford and her family and college. Karen would have asked where the good bars were (she seems like the type), asked her about the shiny bangle on her finger (because from what Pam’s seen Karen isn’t one to let details like that slip). They would have bonded over Michael’s insanity.

People would have made jokes, hassled Karen about her pants suits and no BS demeanor. Yet they could have joked about it over coffee and tea (respectively), brushing aside the jealously she was expected to feel.

Maybe Karen would have been young and reckless enough then to pull a few pranks with her. Jim goofed off because he didn’t see this as his career, merely a placeholder. If she’d caught Karen before she got so committed, so serious, it could have been her convincing Dwight the cylons were going to attack because she’d seen the red lights in the sky.

She thinks they would have been best friends even if it had been Karen instead of Jim. But maybes don’t get her anywhere.

-

The work day is coming to a close, the computer monitors flickering its final blinks before bed, and she still hasn’t said a word. It seems the days go by differently now that a gnawing sensation grips her, as if something is slipping away with the passage of time. Her and Karen keep their distance; there isn’t animosity there, just awkwardness and apprehension. Pam has never been good at making the first move.

So the words tumble from her lips, vowels and consonants jumbling into a mess that she hopes resembles something like-

“Do you want to go see a movie?”

Karen pauses by the coat rack, her shoulders tensing in preparation for an unseen battle. But she turns and there’s only smiles there; the only indication that it’s something more than two coworkers sitting in the dark facing the same direction is her quick flicker of eyes to the desk a few feet from them. Pam doesn’t need to follow her sight; she knows it’s empty. Just like it has been for the past 54 days. (Not that she’s counting. But the timer started approximately four seconds after the last piece of his goodbye party cake was devoured and she can hear it ticking, always.)

It’s steady eyes again, dark and warm but there’s warning there. She can’t quite figure out for what.

“Sure. Sounds good.”

-

Pam picks something silly and stupid because she figures that at the end of the day at least they have laughter in common.

When they reach the counter at the concession stand they begin speaking at the same time, a remnant of the awkwardness neither want to admit. Pam gets her Snow Caps and they decide to share a soda. Cherry coke, no ice, two straws.

The theater is already dark when they slip in, two minutes late (but that’s the consequence of rash decisions), and they find two seats together at the very back on the end. Pam catches the blue light bounced off the crown of Karen’s hair from the projector in the little box above them, watching in rapt fascination at the play of it along her sleek black locks. But Karen’s sitting next to her again before she can really memorize it and she’s left feeling inexplicably disappointed.

It’s in the dark that she first feels it.

An electric tingling, as if the skin of her arm sharing a seat rest with Karen’s is vibrating with the intensity. Pam catches Karen’s glance out of the corner of her eye, and there’s understanding there. This isn’t just one-sided.

Karen’s knuckle touches the very back of Pam’s palm, dragging across her skin slowly. Utterly purposeful. Her breath catches and her finger twists to catch the sensation to keep it safe, but Karen’s hand retreats slightly, always keeping an eyelash’s distance between them. Pam turns her palm over slowly, letting the back of her hand rest gently against scratchy fabric of the seat rest. Karen traces her love line like it’s a road to somewhere exotic on a map.

She’s reminded of someone else (someone she tries not to think about because it nearly splits her in two as one half runs to chase after him) and how last time their positions had been reversed. Maybe in more ways than one.

The lights of the movie theater flicker back on as the credits begin to roll on screen, and Pam blinks at the suddenness of movement in the seats below. She’d almost forgotten that they weren’t alone here. Karen stretches her arms long in front of her, the tendons in her hands tightening like ropes beneath the skin. When she turns back, Pam pretends to yawn to hide the delicate creeping of blood to the round of her cheeks.

“That was… interesting.” Karen remarks as she stands, a taste of amusement flowing almost unnoticeably under her words.

“Yeah,” Pam replies in a daze and hesitantly follows Karen to the aisle, not sure whether they’re talking about the movie or something else.

-

She watches the bounce of her screen saver absent-mindedly as it drifts and collides with the physical edge of her monitor. Her mind is somewhere else, tucked inside a universe of hazy, vibrant images smudged with intensity, of warm skin and dimmed lights floating in the void above.

Something draws her eyes upward (magnetic fields shimmer around her in an endless cloud of positive and negative) and catches the corner of Karen’s mouth, the guarded narrow of her eyes and a shock of heat slams into her chest.

Pam can feel her face light, slow and steady, and she watches Karen’s mouth respond in kind, her tongue caught just barely between her teeth. Her world suddenly revolves around white enamel and finding out if her skin tastes like coffee too and she knows things just got complicated.

(As if they ever really weren’t.)

-

It’s another one of Michael’s work functions that aren’t really work functions, because besides the setting (the warehouse again, of course) it has nothing to do with work and there’s nothing functioning about it. He’d announced last week that if France wanted to be un-American then we would just have to show them that we could be French even better than they could. No one had had the heart to tell him that he’d been reading an old newspaper and the freedom fries fiasco was three years ago.

Pam nibbles on a fry as she glances around at the French flags hung (unintentionally or not) upside down around the warehouse. Michael insists on making everyone say “wee” after every sentence, then giggles immaturely each time. She skips over the stale French bread and the very questionable meat conglomeration at the buffet. She hasn’t decided whether the fact that it’s Michael makes it more or less likely to be frog legs.

She makes her way back to the corner next to a lopsided picture of a poodle, letting her arm rest just slightly against Karen’s.

They lean against the wall carefully casual, and it reminds her of conversations by her locker that always ended in Roy carrying her books for her to class, half-lidded eyes and giggles hidden inside bitten cheeks.

“Is it always like this?”

Karen revolves her body a quarter-turn, resting her temple against the wall. Pam does the same and she feels like they should be telling secrets or playing truth-or-dare from the hunched protectiveness of their shoulders.

“It depends on how cooperative Angela is. Michael never really has enough follow-through to pull something like this off on his own.”

There’s a pause and they can hear someone butchering a French accent.

“Before you ask, no, it doesn’t get better.” And Pam had meant it as a joke, but suddenly Karen’s looking at her like she’d said something else entirely and she’s not sure this is the right place for those kind of looks.

Karen takes another sip of her wine, but by “sip” she means “gulp” because half the glass in gone when she lowers it. She brings it to her chest like she’s protecting its contents, and Pam tries not to follow her tongue with her eyes as it sweeps her upper lip to catch the excess.

“Nice beret,” Karen chuckles throatily and she blushes, letting her chin fall and her sight to trace the meeting of the floor and the wall. “But I think you’re supposed to wear it like this.”

Her hand comes up and skews it to the side just so, outlining the pillowy edge with her finger. She pauses for just a moment before tracing her finger down the side of Pam’s face, her burgundy fingernail appearing like temptation incarnate at the outskirts of her periphery. Pam takes in a shaky breath, her thoughts still a cumulus congestus cloud in the updraft of her mind. But Karen’s hand falls suddenly and she lurches against the loss of contact, growing cold and chapped in the absence of her heat.

“Umm…” is all that comes to mind, and she would bang her head against the hard wall at the stupidity of that response if she didn’t think it would hinder her chances of arriving at a suitable comeback.

“Can I talk to you for a second?”

She should have seen it coming, but instead Pam nods dumbly, soles tapping obediently against the concrete floor as Karen leads to the parking lot.

Her meticulously chosen ballet flats – because she’s never been one of those girls, with the cute shoes that draw compliments, but she’s trying it on for size – pad softly against the pavement. She’s thinking how she should really go back to Target and get some more while they’re still on sale, when Karen turns toward her suddenly.

Karen cracks her knuckles at her waist, and Pam gets the feeling that it’s a nervous habit she’s never seen before because she’s never witnessed a nervous Karen. Before that has time to register and the dread to drag her down, Karen’s speaking and –

“I think I’m in love with you. And I realize that sounds like the lyrics to a David Cassidy song but I don’t think that should detract from the point. That I’m in love with you. Because I’m pretty sure you feel it too.”

Karen had never seemed like a rambler. But maybe that’s just another thing that she’d learn if she knew her better, after she’d had time to take in her ups and downs and side-to-sides. The idea that there’s some other Karen and the prospect of discovering her bit by bit leaves her with a vague fuzzy warmth. She forgets for a moment the ramifications of yes’s and no’s and I can’ts, about the conscientiously documented history of this spot, and lets herself simply breathe the same air.

She opens her mouth to speak.



{Ends}


“I-“

Karen’s answering smile is sad even in her silence, and she takes a tiny step backwards that feels like a million miles.

“I get it. You’re not ready, or whatever. That’s fine.”

She huffs a humorless laugh to herself and turns to go. Pam’s eyes widen in panic, her hands flailing out to catch her, to stop this scene from playing out the same way.

“Wait.”

Their eyes meet and it’s full there, full of possibility and hope and something new that she can’t define. Her arm snakes around Karen’s waist, testing waters that she hadn’t dared to swim in when she touched her toes to the edge before. Their foreheads press together and her hand cups her neck, pressing five measured fingers against the flesh there. Firsts taste green and Pam steadies her voice with a sigh.

“I can.”

And just like that, her life stops being an encore.