~~~~~

When I walk through the door on Monday evening, the apartment smells like cumin and bell peppers. Jim steps out of the kitchen to greet me, a Corona in each hand and a big smile on his face. He hands me one, juice from the lime wedge crammed in the bottle's mouth running down the side, kisses me, and says, "Hola."

"Wow. Hola." I step out of my shoes and, at the same time, manage to stuff the lime all the way into the bottle with my thumb. "What's for dinner?" I take a drink.

"Fajitas and fancy rice out of a box. I got home earlier than I thought I would, so," he gestures with his bottle, "I got ambitious. Hope you don't mind."

"Of course not."

We're still new at this, still at the point where meddling in each other's lives and kitchens feels like a good idea until you have to admit what you're doing. It has only been a month and a half since he came back from the city without Karen, and this is the first weekend we've been apart since then. He was in Jersey, attending his cousin's bachelor party and visiting his aunt. We had talked about my going along and spending the evening he was out with her. I've never met her, and I wasn't sure what I'd say to her without Jim there. I couldn't picture it, so I said I'd just stay home for the weekend and he didn't press the issue.

He left work before lunch on Friday, after coming up with some weird excuse to get me alone so he could kiss me goodbye. I tried to scold him and remind him of our rule, but he just said "I love you" and kissed me again, stepping back until I was against the stairwell wall. I pressed a copy of my apartment key into his palm and told him to come to my place when he got back. He said something about momentous occasions while he threaded the key onto the ring that held his others.

I step into my bedroom to change out of my work clothes and Jim heads back into the kitchen. I yell, "How was your weekend?" down the hall.

"Good. Busy."

When I join him, he's adding a foil package of tortillas to the already-set table. "How's your family?"

Another smile, another kiss, and we sit down together. "Everyone's good, except maybe David. I bet he's still hung over."

"What did you do to him?"

"Hey, I was just along for the ride. It was all his best man." He reaches for the sour cream. "He actually did shots out of a stripper's cleavage."

"What?"

"Advances in stripper technology! It's like this test tube they put between their -" his cheeks color, "and kind of shove themselves in your face." He presses his upper arms into his sides and leans forward.

"Wait. Your face or, like, one's face?"

He won't quite look at me. I've only been dating the man for a month or so, but I've been his friend for years, and avoiding eye contact is his big tell. He buys himself some time with a forkful of rice. Still chewing, he says, "Jack Daniels, unfortunately."

I can't quite close my mouth. "You did a shot out of a stripper's cleavage." I keep my voice flat and dry.

"Her name was Lauren and David sent her after me. She's a philosophy major at Rutgers. 19. Nice girl." He shrugs.

"You made friends with the stripper whose cleavage you did a shot out of."

"Like I said, she was nice. I think I talked to her more than I talked to the guys I went with. I like my cousin, but his friends are a little too Jersey for me."

He's trying to change the subject, but I'm not having it. "Please tell me someone got a picture of this."

"No cameras in the club."

"Dammit."

He's finished his first fajita and is constructing another. Casually, he says, "If you'd like, we could dramatically reenact it later."

"Unfortunately, my sequined thong is at the cleaner's."

He smirks at me. "So what did you do this weekend?"

"A shot out of a stripper's cleavage." I concentrate on my plate so I don't laugh.

"Shut up."

I roll my eyes and relent. "I pretty much just stayed in. Watched tv, read, drew a little. I missed you." It's another one of those moments where I wonder if admitting it is too much, but I say it, anyway.

"I missed you, too." The only sounds are the slosh of the beer in the bottom of his bottle and the scrape of my fork before he adds, "Carla says hi, by the way."

"I hope she wasn't offended that I didn't come."

"No. She thinks you're shy." He tries to say 'shy" with a Jersey accent, but it doesn't come out quite right.

"A little, maybe. I just didn't know what to say to her."

"Oh, God. She'd do all the talking, show you baby pictures, humiliate me while I wasn't there to defend myself."

"I probably should have gone, then."

He made the meal, so I clear the table before joining him on the couch. We watch tv and play with each others' hands and, eventually, just sitting there turns into kissing, and kissing turns into him pressing me back onto the couch cushions and giving me one of his looks where everything he's thinking and wanting is right on his face. We still have to sneak up on sex about half of the time. His being away for a couple of days seems to have given a bit of our awkwardness a chance to come back, that funny we-really-do-this-together feeling. He's on top of me, up on his elbows, and holding my face lightly with both hands while we kiss. I can feel how hard he is, so I reach for the button on his jeans, wanting to touch him. I'm pulling his zipper down when he stops me. "Hey, are you -"

I'm confused for a second, hazy from his kisses and my plans, before I figure out how to complete his sentence. "Oh, no. It hasn't come yet."

Like digging around in each other's kitchens and copping to how hard three and a half days apart was, biological reality is still new, too. Thanks to Dwight's freaky little chart, I'm pretty sure that, if he was paying attention, Jim has been aware of when I get my period for quite a while. But the first time I got it when we were dating, two weeks in, he spent fifteen minutes or pressing me for information before taking me out to get me a milkshake and then using his big, lovely, warm hands like heating pads between my hipbones while I sat between his legs and leaned against his chest. It felt so good it brought tears to my eyes.

He pulls his head a little further away. "I thought it was supposed to be this weekend."

I shrug and finish unzipping his jeans. "A couple of days off is no big deal. It's not unusual for me."

"You sure?" There's a small crease between his brows.

I'm sliding my hand into his jeans and down the front of his boxer shorts, which makes him a teeny bit crosseyed for a second. He twitches against my palm and I smile. "I am totally sure. And you're talking too much."

We end up making love on the couch, slow and clumsy and holding onto each other more than normal (I love, by the way, that we have a "normal"), because the cushions aren't cooperating and my leg keeps slipping off, but it feels too good to stop long enough to move. And, anyway, he looks so beautiful and distracted that I don't want to suggest it. I stare at him, touching his hair and his cheek, and he smiles at me and lightly bites the end of my nose. I swallow my giggle when he alters the angle of my hips with a less-than-gentle push of his pelvis. I think he says "aha" under his breath, but he's suddenly got his hand between us, making soft circles with his thumb, and I'm having a very hard time concentrating on anything else. We say "You feel so good" at the same time, and I think about calling jinx. He's got me trapped under the weight of this dragging pace he's found and I can't speak voluntarily while he's carefully adding to the warm, soft roundness that's building below my belly button. He abruptly feels a little deeper, a little larger and that roundness pops like a water balloon, sliding everywhere under my skin. I hear myself make a loud, happy noise.

Before I'm completely back, I'm pushing up on his chest and half-leading, half-dragging him down to the floor with me. I grab a pillow for his head and straddle his hips, sliding him back inside of me. It changes the angle and the way that he breathes. I come again, using my own hand, trying not to be self-conscious about the view he must have. His wide eyes tell me that I shouldn't worry about it too much. I know he's close when he grabs my hips, holding me down while he presses up, chasing the sensation. He says "Oh my-," his back arches, and his eyes go blank for a second. A few seconds later, he rubs his face with his hand, his eyes focusing again, and says "I really did miss you." He pulls me down into his arms.

I untangle our limbs and help him up from the floor. He kisses my back and touches my hip and I wobble to the bathroom. I clean myself up and, even though I was expecting it, there's no blood on the washcloth. He's waiting for me in bed. I don't mention it and he doesn't ask.

~~~~~

~~~~~

Friday comes fast. Pam is worrying herself into knots too tight for me to undo. As the day is winding down, I find her engrossed in the results of a Google search for "pregnancy symptoms." I nearly knock over her half-empty mug of decaf tea in a rush to grab her mouse, saying "bad idea" under my breath as I close the browser window. She looks up at me with half of a smile on her face. Thank God no one notices and thank God it was me and not Kelly or Michael or Angela or anyone else, really, who walked around the corner of her desk to use the fax machine. I squeeze her hand, forget why I was back there in the first place, and walk back to my desk, feeling dizzy.

After work, without discussing it, we drop off my car, I get a change of clothes, and we go to her apartment. She takes off her shoes and walks down the hall to her bedroom, glancing over her shoulder to see if I'm following. I sit on the bed and watch her take off her clothes. I'm staring because I'm allowed to and because I've rediscovered my former addiction to memorizing everything about her. There's so much more I'm permitted to know now, and, this week, so much more to wonder about. She unbuttons her shirt and leaves it on and hanging open while she unzips her skirt and steps out of it, along with her tights. She lets her shirt fall from her shoulders and unhooks her bra. I know that she doesn't look any different, but it seems like she should. I look at her curves and the soft rise below her navel that I love to kiss. She pulls on a pair of flannel pants, then slips a tank top over her head. She stands in the middle of her bedroom floor for a moment, her face turned to her side. She sighs, looks at me, and, finally, there are tears in her eyes. "I'm going to go get a test tomorrow morning."

I offer her my hand and a kiss. She settles back against her pillow, hugging her knees to her chest, and I sit, crosslegged, in the middle of the bed. "Do you want me to come?"

"No, I'll go. Can you wait here?"

"Of course."

She uses the heel of her hand to wipe away a tear. "I'm really sorry about this."

"You have no reason to be sorry. We did this together." I'm not sure if I want to accept blame or credit by saying this.

"Has this ever happened to you before?" Her voice is wet and thin, but she has stopped crying as quickly as she started.

"Yeah. Twice." About a month after the first and only time we had sex, my high school girlfriend threw up for three days straight. It was food poisoning, but she told her mother what she suspected, which meant inter-parental phone calls and a multi-part lecture from my father on my "responsibilities." And then there was Karen, who cried large, furious tears when she told me she had skipped a period. "You?"

"Uh-huh. False alarms."

"Yeah, me, too."

"What happened?"

I loosen my tie and unbutton my shirt while I tell her about high school. Somehow, while doing an impression of my father's attempts to give me the condom talk, I actually manage to make her laugh. It doesn't last long, though, because I also tell her about Karen, trying to move quickly through the story. I conclude by saying, "She wasn't happy about it." In actuality, she said something about "ruining her life," and it felt like she'd slapped me. I don't tell Pam that part.

She is tracing the stripes on her pajama pants with her pinkie finger and nodding, even though I've stopped talking. Suddenly, she lifts her head and says, "Would you have been happy if she was pregnant?"

I don't even have to think about it. "No, but, you know. We would have dealt with it somehow."

~~~~~

The conversation moves in directions I don't expect, but I follow wherever she leads.

Her voice is very quiet. "Why were you with Karen?"

We haven't talked about this yet, and I always assumed it would be me to start it, so, initially, all I can say is "oh." I'm not sure which answer to give. I feel like I have a few to choose from. "Uh, she was nice. She's smart. Pretty. It was fun for a while."

Pam nods. "Watching you with her was really hard." I wait for her to continue because I still don't know what to say. "I didn't understand what you were doing."

"Dating. Trying to move on, I guess."

She's playing with her toes. "Did you love her?"

I answer slowly. "Sometimes."

I can hear her swallow. "Did she love you?"

"Yeah. She said she did."

She won't look at me. She's hooking her index finger around her big toe over and over. "Did you say it back?"

"No. I told her I wasn't ready."

There is a long pause. "Were you with her because of me?" She's not being cruel and she's not yelling, but she is asking the question that I'm sure she's been circling.

Again, I don't have to think. "Kind of. Yes."

She deflates a little and leans back into the pillow. "I was ready when you came back, you know. It took some time, but I was."

"And I wasn't." I was, in a word, terrified of her when I came back. It was all I could do to walk through the front door every morning. I didn't know how to act around her, how to find safe footing, or if I even wanted to.

~~~~~

We've been sitting there for an hour, my leg has fallen asleep, and I have the sudden, anxious urge to move, so I stand up and finish undressing. I've got my back turned, but I can feel her staring at me. I get back on the bed, wearing just my boxers and undershirt. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Continue."

She tilts her head. "It bugged you when Karen would put you through this. I don't want to do that."

"This isn't the same. None of it. At all." I cannot be emphatic enough about this.

"How is this different?"

I roll my eyes and recite, "Yes, I think I can get over Pam. No, I don't fantasize about her anymore. It really wasn't a big deal when we kissed." I think of the weary, miserable hours I spent misleading that poor woman and am relieved all over again that I finally ended it. I'm also slightly disgusted with myself.

"Why did you lie to her?"

I laugh quietly and look down at my lap. "I was doing a lot of lying then. Why leave Karen out of the fun?"

~~~~~

I'm sitting next to Pam, leaning against what has become my pillow. We're no longer looking at one another, but I've got my knees crossed, pressing my foot into the soft flesh of her calf. The sun is going down, filling the room with warm pinkish-orange light. "I think you know this already, but I've been in love with you for years. I didn't handle it very well a lot of the time." I've started to tell her this before, during our first week together, but I want her to know more now.

"What do you mean?"

"There were days when you were all I could think about, even if I didn't really want to." I should probably be saying weeks, maybe even months, but I don't. It's just too humiliating.

"Tell me."

"It was weird. I kept turning it over and over in my head, like the way I felt about you was a problem I could fix. The worst part was being pretty sure that you felt the same way, because there was no way to get you to admit it without interfering in your engagement."

"But you did."

"Yeah, I kind of lost it that night. I swear I wasn't planning on doing that, it just happened."

"And then you left."

"I did."

"That sucked." Out of the corner of my eye, I see her glance at me, but we both keep looking forward.

"You told me no."

"It was like a month before my wedding. I needed time. You didn't give me enough time." She rolls her leg so it presses harder, apologetically, into my foot. Her voice is very quiet. "I loved you, too. So much. I don't think you'll ever get how impossible that was."

~~~~~

"If I had promised you that I'd wait while you broke off your engagement, would it have changed your answer that night?"

The Chinese food has arrived, forcing me to put my pants back on long enough to pay the stoned college kid who delivered it, and we've shifted to the bedroom floor, turned on a light. We're passing the boxes back and forth, not bothering with plates.

She thinks about it for a few seconds, staring at the lo mein she has wrapped around her fork. My chopstick lessons have yet to take. "I don't know," she says, slowly.

"I've thought about it. I don't think it would have. Remember at the bar? I said that I think this is the only way this could have happened?" She nods. "I believe that. If I would have told you that I'd wait, you still would have said no. I don't know what it felt like to be you, you're right, but I do understand that I scared the hell out of you and I know you like to hold still when you're scared." I almost offer up the horrible week we've spent as evidence; me occasionally suggesting trips to Rite Aid, Pam saying that "it'll be fine," but it doesn't seem like the best idea.

"I don't -" she cuts herself off and sits silently for a moment. I wait. "I guess there's no point in wondering, is there? This is how it happened."

"It is." But I disagree. If there's no point in wondering, I've wasted countless hours of my life. But that's my problem, not hers, and it illustrates one of the ways in which we're very, very different people, one of the ways in which I hope we'll annoy the hell out of each other for the rest of our lives.

~~~~~

When I return from taking the carryout boxes away, she turns the light off again. A nearby streetlight traces the outline of her form. She's got her back to me, busying herself with arranging pillows, smoothing the blankets. She starts speaking as soon as I walk into the room.

"I just -" she pauses, regroups, "watching you with Karen made me angry sometimes." She lets her arms hang at her sides. I'm standing a foot or two behind her, wanting to touch her. "Okay, this is really awful, but I was pissed off at you because I thought you were using Karen to, like, hide from me? And I thought that was really mean. I didn't get why you couldn't be honest." She turns, sits down, and looks up at me.

"And that," my tone is too harsh, but I'm not feeling inclined to do anything about it, "is what watching you with Roy was like."

My eyes adjust to the dark. Her lips part in surprise. I raise my eyebrows, helpless in the face of fact. "I was with Roy for years."

"I know," I'm forcing myself to be a little quieter, "but you know you were lying to yourself, just like I did. And when you got back together with him for a while?" I don't go on.

"That was a big mistake. And I am really sorry that he tried to hit you."

"I know. It's not your fault. Please don't apologize for him."

"I'm just really sorry. Really."

"I am, too."

I don't think either of us is talking about Roy.

~~~~~

Pam is propped up against every pillow on the bed, looking regal in the light of the little candle she's dug out of her nightstand drawer, and I'm laying at her feet, on my side. She laughs and shakes her head. "That was not making out."

I scoff at her statement. "There was tongue, was there not?"

"There was."

I shrug. "Making out."

"Oh, no. No. We were standing up. It has to be more - involved."

"I would have given anything that night to get more involved with you."

"Jim." She sounds embarrassed. It makes my stomach twist.

"I'm not kidding. I didn't want to stop."

"When we were kissing? I was trying to remember if the conference room door had a lock. It was this bizarre, really fast thought. There and gone before I could really even think it."

"You're depraved." She reaches out and nudges my stomach with one toe in retaliation. "And it does. A lot of my fantasies about you involve the lock on that door." Her jaw drops, even though I haven't told her the parts that would really surprise her. "But I never even thought about the conference room. I wanted to take you home with me, take you to bed. But that was really nothing new." Even though I've done just that about fifty times now, it's still kind of weird to say it out loud.

She's grinning wildly. "That would have been so wrong." She doesn't mean a word she's saying.

"And fucking incredible."

She laughs out a breath. "Yeah, it would have been." Clearly, I'm not the only one who's thought about this. I wonder how demented it makes me that I want to see her in that dress again, just to know if it would be painful, exciting, or some dangerous combination of the two.

"But, really, I knew it wasn't going to happen. It's just what I wanted. I thought about it after, like there was something else I could have done to make you admit it."

"I needed time. More time."

"And, in our own stupid, emotionally stunted way, we did manage to give you some time. A whole year."

"And here we are."

"Here we are."

~~~~~

She's lying with the back of her head on my chest, her feet up on the pillows. We're both looking up at the ceiling. "We're okay, right?"

I nod and rest my hand on her side, fitting my fingers between her ribs. "Some things need saying."

~~~~~

"What are we going to do?"

"Well, you're going to go buy a test in the morning and then we'll see." I am pleased with how level-headed I sound when I feel like I could burst from anxiety.

Her head leaves my chest and she props herself up on her palms. "But what if I am?" As I'm moving to sit where I can see her face, she adds, "would I, uh, keep it? Could we do that?"

"If you wanted to, yes."

"What do you want?"

I wrap her legs around my hips and take her hands. She slides into my lap and I kiss her. "It's your body. I have an opinion, but you get the first vote."

"What's your opinion?"

I smile and shake my head. "Would you want to keep it?"

Her answer is barely more than a whisper. She looks scared. "Yeah."

"Well, okay. Then you'd keep it."

"But what would you want?"

As we're having this conversation, her ring is in my messenger bag, laying twenty-five feet away in the hall. I could go get it right now. Because I am a tragically impatient person, I've started thinking semi-seriously about when I could give it to her, but I never imagined this. It's an easy thing to picture, though, and I see myself wearing a wedding band and holding a small bundle in a fuzzy blanket. It's a surprisingly welcome, pleasant thought to have. "I'd want you to keep it." She lets out a breath.

"Really?"

"Yes."

"That kind of makes this less scary and more scary at the same time."

"I know what you mean." I take a deep breath and touch her cheek. "You know where we're going here, right?"

She takes a long time to answer me, her eyes moving quickly as she studies my face. "I do."

I want to say 'exactly,' but I don't want to joke the gravity of this away. "So this is just admitting it." She nods and gives me a shaky smile. It's the first one I've seen reach her eyes since Monday.

~~~~~

I'm kissing her with the intention of pursuing what logically follows from the two of us kissing on her bed, but, me being, well, me, I think about it for a split second too long. In that tiny moment, it finally hits me that that she might actually be pregnant and, holy shit, if she is, it's mine. I was watching her prepare to marry another man a little more than a year ago. I was barely speaking to her three months ago. It seems impossible.

This epiphany, unfortunately, turns me into a giant coward on the spot and leads to a ten-minute round of "Are you sure/Are you comfortable/Should we really," until Pam whispers and coaxes me out of the rest of my clothes. I'm aware that I'm treating her like she's made out of glass, taking everything terribly slow, but she seems to be okay with that. I keep saying "I love you" like I want to make sure that she really knows, like there might be some doubt. It feels like hours pass before I push myself inside of her and, even then, I go so slowly that she digs her heel into my back, laughs, and says, "this is torture."

I know I'm a romantic sap, but it's amazing and different, it really is. I can feel her in my skull, the soles of my feet, and everywhere in between. The stress and the strangeness of the evening has leaked over into the way we're touching each other, moving together. I won't let her look away when she comes and her eyes are a pretty mess of worry and pleasure. I want to see it. I want her to know that I see it and that it's okay. I rest my forehead against hers and hold still while she catches her breath, tilting my head to kiss her cheeks. I'm too keyed-up and anxious, so, once the first teasing hint of my orgasm gets its hooks in me, I can't stop it. I pull her up to sit in my lap again, and come with my face buried in her shoulder.

~~~~~

I'm still weak in the knees when I walk down the hall to the bathroom. I flip on the light, turn on the water, and, as I reach for the soap, I notice that I have blood under the first three fingernails on my right hand. Maybe I've had too many sad, distant relationships with women, but it's surprisingly intimate. I stand there and stare at my hand for a moment before I wash it away.

Pam is on her side in the middle of the bed, her spine a beautiful curve. The sheets and pillows have been kicked to the floor. I pause in the doorway before I pick up a pillow and say, "I think you got your period."

"Oh!" She sits up quickly, looking at me and then down at the sheets. "I'll be right back."

I'm pulling the sheets back onto the bed when I hear her call, "I did!" from the bathroom. She sounds close to laughing.

Pam comes back into the room a few minutes later and climbs into bed with me. She says, "Congratulations on your third false alarm."

"Thank you."

"Sorry if I freaked you out." Her hand brushes my arm.

"Don't worry about it."

"I was picturing throwing up and getting huge and telling everyone at work -" She covers her face with her hands. "God."

"I would have held your hair and distracted Michael every time he tried to touch your stomach."

She turns away from me and fits her back into my front. I wrap my arms around her. "There's noble and then there's masochistic."

"Yes, well," I kiss her hair and relax into the mattress.

We're quiet. I slip my hand just below the waistband of her underwear and press my palm there. She sighs and puts her hand over mine before she rolls over again and looks at me. It's dark but I can see her face, her eyes. "You know, it's stupid, but I would have been happy, really happy..." she closes her eyes.

"Me, too."

I know she hasn't slept well for days, as I haven't either. She's already dozing. She mumbles, "that's the scary part."

We fall asleep like that, face to face.

~~~~~