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Author's Chapter Notes:
My take on the Jim/Karen scenario. Really love her character, so I wanted to do her justice in this fic. Do leave feedback.

 

Disclaimer: Don’t. Own. Nothin’. ‘Cept. This. Fic.

She likes confrontation.

Not in an off-putting, aggressive way. But she just doesn’t shy away from it when it needs to happen. And it’s fucking awesome because it really is so much better than letting things boil beneath the surface until they dissolve into little pieces of sorrow that preserve in half-lives wedged in open sores all over his spirit.

She hates indecisiveness.

He discovered this a week in. Some sales call gone awry – he’d long since learned to cut his losses with those. But she was fierce. Not ferocious, but firm. And he appreciated the change when she muttered some innocuous profanity under her breath, so unlike the usual blank stares and uncomfortable side glances he’d gotten used to over the years.

She likes to smirk.

Sometime in October they’d discovered Andy’s special pet peeve. Eight dollars down – one for each time Randy Andy (her choice; he’d pitched “Jumbo Shrimp” but was judiciously overruled in a quick game of Rochambeau) jumped from his carefully-warmed seat – he learned his lesson. And she stowed her hot-water bag away, snickering surreptitiously as he took out his wallet.

She hates flowers.

She’d given him a speech – something about conservation of nature and the hubris of man – and he remembered long enough to instead bring her a potted plant on their first date. She laughed the entire car ride to Buca di Beppo. So when she brushed the tips of her fingers over the orchid at their table, he smiled and kept her secret.

She likes Mondays.

Because it’s supposed to suck, everyone gets cut a little slack the first day back. Even though she only likes it because everyone hates it enough to make it work. It works. She loves having some predetermined scapegoat to blame when they fight over the little inanities of life that they could never remember in full detail afterwards. So does he.

She hates his beige shirt.

It’s the only one she won’t touch in the mornings when she traipses down to the kitchen to microwave a waffle. And he’s happy because on good days, he has something to wear that didn’t once smell like syrup and burnt plastic.

She likes him.

And it’s a fucking relief because he’s finally been chosen by someone who is too good for him. And he thinks she says “love,” but he can’t even think about that when he’s just…bewildered at how quickly it stopped hurting. Hell, he can’t even summon her face when she’s busy popping the buttons off his one good shirt.

She hates packing.

So maybe that’s too strong a word. But he imagines she’s got a lot more to lose than the two small boxes of binders and paper clips and unsharpened pencils. Especially as she spends weekends shopping for an apartment in Scranton before finally settling on a tiny studio ten minutes away from the battlefield. He thinks about asking her to just live with him – it sounds right – but the words never quite resonate in his heart as they do in his mind. And he spends days wondering what the hell his heart has to do with it.

She likes her.

It makes sense because they’re nothing alike and yet ever the same. And he doesn’t know why it scares him, because he’s fucking happy, damn it. But all the same, he can feel her sense his hesitation now, and he touches her less because he suddenly remembers what it’s like to hurt when he can’t touch…something. And it’s December before he can admit that all those half-lives of unfinished sorrows and confrontations-gone-awry…are crushing him in a way that feels like eternity. And as he glides his hands over an old, stained T-shirt, he suddenly remembers what it’s like to love something because it’s flawed, because it’s flawed and yet still offers happiness that is completely, overwhelmingly perfect. And he knows he loves that fucking shirt because he’ll never forget her rubbing a wet paper towel against the mustard stain. And…he loves her.

She hates him now.



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