Story Notes:
This response to the Pam's Quirks challenge came to me last night.
Not my characters; no copyright infringement intended. Just having fun.
Not my characters; no copyright infringement intended. Just having fun.
Author's Chapter Notes:
One of these incidents is a true story. To protect the innocent, I'm not gonna say which one. :)
-
Pam’s kind of a slob. Of all the things he’s imagined about her, this discovery is the most surprising. She hates putting things away. Her clothes are always draped over the backs of chairs. Jim cringes at the cavalier way she leaves DVDs stacked on top of the TV without returning them to their cases. Coffee cups and water glasses are left everywhere but the kitchen sink. He finds them in the bedroom, the bathroom, one time even in the storage closet out on his balcony, leftover from when they were putting his tree back last Christmas.
It’s amusing, mostly, and Jim kind of likes that she’s comfortable spreading out her things in his space, but when he actually has to pull over and gather up the glasses that are rattling around in the back of his car, he barks out “Jesus Christ!” in genuine irritation and realizes he’s going to have to say something. Her messiness is becoming less of a quirk and more of an…issue. And it’s dangerous, besides. What if a glass rolled under the brake? It could kill them both. Although at the moment, it’s just him. But still. It’s his duty, really, to bring this to her attention.
He has to knock on her door with his foot because he’s bearing an armload of glasses, CDs, her blue cardigan, an empty Tupperware container, and two library books. He smirks in satisfaction when she utters, “Oh!” and her face turns pink with embarrassment, and he thinks she mutters, “Sorry,” but he can’t be sure because even though she immediately moves to help him she won’t quite meet his eyes. “Here, let me—can I…?” she falters, reaching up uncertainly, waiting for him to direct her so she won’t upset the delicate balance he’s managed to achieve.
“Take these,” he says, a little more brusquely than he’d intended, nodding at the precariously stacked glasses he’s gripping with his right thumb and first two fingers. She nods and reaches underneath to take them by the base, brushing his hand lightly with her fingertips as she eases them out of his grasp.
“Sorry,” she says sheepishly, daring to meet his eyes.
Her voice is soft and nervous, and his irritation evaporates at her expression, already chastised and guilty before he’s even had the chance to scold her properly. The reprimand he rehearsed on the way up to her apartment dies on his lips and he can’t help smiling a little as he shakes his head, clucks his tongue teasingly. “What have you been drinking out of?” he grins. “I think all your cups and glasses are in my car.”
She grins back at him. “I still have bowls,” she says, throwing a saucy smile over her shoulder as she heads to the kitchen. He laughs and follows her to the sink, where she cautiously removes the other two glasses from his left hand and holds out her arm for him to drape her sweater across it. “I’ll try to be better,” she promises, stretching up on her toes to kiss his cheek.
He doubts it, but he decides he doesn’t really care. So she’s messy. Paradoxically, she’s weirdly neurotic about things being clean, and not only in her own place. She’s scrubbed out his refrigerator and waxed his kitchen floor and actually used a toothbrush to clean the grout in his bathtub. He figures it’s a unique sort of balance. Besides, it’s not like he’s a paragon of neatness himself.
* * * *
At first he thinks maybe she just has a thing about clean floors. The first time he looked under her sink for dishwasher soap, he discovered an array of assorted bottles of foam carpet cleaner, spot stain remover, and upholstery shampoo. It takes him less than a week to realize this is because she spills everything she touches. Tea, sloshing over the rim of her mug, burns her hand and dribbles onto the carpet. A bottle of beer set down too hard on the coffee table foams up and overflows. There’s still a faint stain of cabernet sauvignon on the middle cushion of his sofa, souvenir of the scary movie they watched on their sixth date. She’d screamed and clutched onto his arm and the other half of the spill is now a permanent vermilion stain high on the left thigh of his favorite jeans. Her blushing effort to dab at his crotch with a towel remains one of his fondest memories of their first weeks together.
“You missed a spot,” he teased, gesturing to his inseam.
Her cheeks flamed even brighter and he immediately felt like an ass for embarrassing her, but it was only a beat before she returned his grin, sliding her palm across his thigh and boldly pressing the back of her hand against the bulge between his legs. “Mmm. Big spot,” she agreed, eyes twinkling. “You should probably take these off now, so I can…treat it properly.”
Her ability to surprise him is a constant source of delight and amazement.
* * * *
She has a hundred and more little quirks he could never possibly have imagined from their years together in the office, and with each revelation, he falls in love with her a little more. Every Tuesday, without fail, she makes macaroni and cheese for dinner. She never has less than three kinds of shampoo in her shower. She can only fall asleep on her left side, and she sets the alarm thirty minutes early so she can hit the snooze three times.
He knows she’s used to spending a lot of time alone—even when she was with Roy, she was alone a lot—and he discovers early on that she uses the TV for company. Trouble is, she’s hardly ever actually watching it or even in the same room, so it’s always a little louder than he’d prefer—unless they’re watching “one of your car-chase movies,” as she calls them, nose wrinkled in disdain, in which case she turns it down so the action sequences are at a normal volume but the dialogue is impossible to understand.
But what amuses him most is that she’s shockingly clumsy. She declares it completely unjust that Jim can move his long lanky frame with such grace while she’s forever falling down, bumping into things, stumbling over her own feet. She’s banged her shin on the coffee table and stubbed her toe on the footboard of the bed and whacked her knee getting out of his car more times than he can count. He used to wonder if Roy was ever rough with her; now he knows her bruises have always been of her own making.
They’re watching a rerun of House, and her head is in his lap and she’s starting to nod off as his fingers comb gently through her hair, pausing occasionally to rub massaging circles over the back of her neck. She smiles without opening her eyes as he pushes down the strap of her tank top and trails his fingers over her smooth skin, stopping abruptly at the fresh bruise on her shoulderblade. “What happened?” he asks softly, circling the irregular purplish stain with his thumbnail.
Her eyes snap open, her expression turning from sleepily content to embarrassed in a blink. “Nothing.”
“Tell me,” he murmurs, lifting the strap of her shirt back over her shoulder to cover it up.
“I just—really, it’s not a big deal,” she says shortly, struggling to sit up.
His immediate thought is that it must be something worse than one of her typical mishaps to make her so defensive. “Pam,” he says, gently, holding her down with just the barest pressure to her shoulders. “What’s wrong?”
She gives up and flops back into his lap, a flush coloring her cheeks as she finally meets his eyes. “Promise you won’t laugh,” she says sternly.
Jim nods solemnly.
“You know the revolving doors at the post office?” she says meekly.
He’s already grinning. She gives him a death glare until he can rearrange his face into something more suitably sympathetic. Clearing her throat, she continues.
“My coat got snagged, and it hit me before I could get out of the way.” She stares at him for a long, challenging moment.
He’s trying not to break, but the visual of her getting caught in a revolving door, coupled with the defiant way she’s sticking her chin out at him, is too much and in less than ten seconds he’s shaking with silent laughter.
“Oh shut up,” she groans, and he wraps his arms around her and pulls her up into a kiss. “Such a klutz,” he murmurs, and maybe she should be insulted but there’s so much affection in his tone that she slips her arms around his waist and buries her face into his chest, grinning where he can’t see her. But he feels her shoulders tremble as she stifles her giggling, and he loves that they can laugh at each other.
They’ll always laugh at each other.
-
Chapter End Notes:
I'm calling this complete, but if inspiration strikes, I might add another chapter with Pam discovering Jim's quirks. No promises, though. :)
