It’s Friday 24th, the end of the penultimate week of May. It’s very early morning, like *really* early, when the light of the early dawn creeps in through the translucent fabric of the voile curtains in Pam’s bedroom, enough that they can see each other’s features, but not enough that they can make out every detail. They’ve been officially dating for over one week.
Jim told himself that he wouldn’t rush her and would be the most gentlemanly man in the history of gentlemen. Pam told herself she simply needed to feel Karen was no longer in her rear-view mirror before she put out.
Last night, Pam decided she’d had enough of Jim’s gentlemanly conduct, a series of fairly chaste but ever increasingly intense make-out sessions, usually instigated by Pam, at the end of evenings having dinners in restaurants they wouldn’t usually visit, trips to art galleries, cinemas, and flea markets. The making out was in Jim’s car, on Pam’s sofa, and one time in a secluded section of the Davis Trail at Nay Aug park. Last night, Pam concluded that she was finally driving along on the freeway with no cars behind her.
Last night, they finally slept together.
The word “sleep” is an ill-advised definition, considering the lack of it they’ve had overnight. They’ve been too busy talking, too busy making love, to waste much of the night on slumber. They’ve dozed a bit here and there, but most of the time, too buzzed on love to reach true insentience. Right now, in that hazy place between sleep and alertness, they are merely enjoying each other with no qualifier. Oxytocin is the most generous of drugs in the right hands.
She is running her fingers over what is now his five-A.M. shadow from the previous day, his stubble scraping against her fingers in a pleasing manner, stimulating every nerve in her fingertips. She can feel every prickle, count every individual hair, if she concentrates hard. And she is concentrating very hard.
Sometimes she sticks her tongue out a little when she’s concentrating, like when she’s drawing – it starts poking out a little between her teeth in that same way as when she’s laughing - genuinely laughing, rather than the sympathetic chuckle she gives Michael on occasion in a weak moment when she feels bad for his appalling jokes; and then slides out to touch her top lip, almost speculatively. She’s doing it now as she’s stroking Jim’s cheek, eyes locked with his, the corners of her eyes crinkled with her beaming smile that matches his own. He’s watched her do that for years, always wondering what her tongue would feel like against his when they kissed, how it would feel lapping against his skin. He’s mesmerised, not only from the glorious sensation of her caressing his face in the way that she is, and the fact that she is here in bed with him in the first place; but where exactly that tongue has been in the last seven hours and what exactly it’s capable of (it turns out she’s very talented at quite a few things). She can turn him to jello with little effort other than a gentle nibble of his earlobe or a lustful confession into his ear, let alone some of the other places it’s visited.
He runs his fingers through her hair, the curls wrapping themselves around his fingers of their own accord. He loves that she’s stopped wearing her barrette in the last week. It felt like a part of her past that held her back. He’d imagined the softness, like down feather. The first time he kissed her, in the office, his hands didn’t make it that far. They held her physical form for those precious few moments, but stayed firmly around her middle, caressing only her back through the satin of her dress. Now he has access to everything, but arguably - and he has had this conversation with himself multiple times in the quiet moments when he is alone in the break room, or driving to her apartment: the tacit permission to stroke her hair is the greatest of all the gifts she’s given him in the last week. Everything he imagined and hoped was surpassed by the reality of the first time, at their end of their first date, on her doorstep, when he slipped his hands into her hair when they kissed goodnight.
He envelops the slim, delicate hand that is running her fingertips over his jaw with his own, and she sighs contentedly as she feels the gentle strength of his palms guiding her. She loves his hands. They are large enough to span her waist, cup her breasts, cradle her ass. They have touched and stroked her everywhere imaginable in the last few hours and it’s not even close to enough to satisfy her curiosity or her libido. It likely never will be. She always wondered how those hands would feel against her skin. Now she truly knows, she’s not sharing that secret with anyone. This is hers now and no-one else’s. Not Katy’s, not Karen’s. They got a shadow of what he can offer. She has the true prize.
What Pam doesn’t know is that she already has a shiny half-carat engagement ring sitting in Jim’s sock drawer that he bought after a successful sales call yesterday. When Jim is still holding her hand against his face as she reaches to kiss him again, he’s smiling to himself that in a few months that ring will be on her finger. He’s waiting for the right time. That’s his secret for now.
In about an hour, Pam’s alarm will go off. With reluctance, they will get up, share the best shower they’ve both ever had, even though the water will be lukewarm by the time they’ve finished; before dressing and leaving for work separately, parting with another scorching kiss. They will share private looks and jokes and longing all day until they drive to Jim’s apartment where they will spend the weekend mostly in bed repeating the activities of last night. The polite and patient dates of week one will be replaced by making up for lost time in weeks two, three and four, before settling down somewhere in the middle.
They’ll have about eight weeks before the returning camera crew blows their cover to their future public audience within a day of returning, although it will be an innocuous kiss on the cheek that will raise the ire of Toby and alert their colleagues much sooner.
For now though, they will enjoy the joy of their new relationship unencumbered by interference. Just them. In the small light. In Pam’s bed.
