Each month, every menstruating woman dreads that time when life seems to end…or at the very least, comes to a halt for five to seven days. Pam Beesly was experiencing one of those days today and she was quite miserable.
She’d had the brilliant idea to go off of her birth control pills after her breakup with Roy. After all, it was a needless expense if she wasn’t having sex and besides, she needed that extra money to put towards the rent at her fancy new apartment (as Jim liked to refer to it). Now, she was paying for it with excruciating cramps like nothing she’d ever experienced before.
It should have dawned on her, since she usually had ungodly heavy periods in high school with cramps that would disable a person on morphine, that the cramps wouldn’t magically disappear over the years. Her attendance record had reflected this flaw in her anatomy as she missed no less than one day per month…two if she was having an exceptionally bad month. As soon as she started becoming sexually active with Roy during her senior year of high school, she had gone on the Pill. The relief to her tummy had been almost immediate. Nine years of oral contraception made one develop amnesia about ovarian pain.
Entering the office had been no simple feat. The Super-Plus tampon she had inserted only an hour earlier was beginning to leak down the braided cotton string and into her white cotton panties. She cursed herself silently for not bringing a spare pair. Guess I know what errands I’ll be running on my lunch hour, she surmised. Thankfully, she was wearing a black skirt and it had only soaked into the panties. She’d be able to muddle through until the uncomfortable warm wetness dried and crusted, but it was going to be a bitch to explain to people in the office why she had to take a bathroom break every 60 minutes…and they always asked.
The bathroom was nearly deserted this early in the morning, so she took the opportunity to stash a few tampons in the cabinet near the sink. She hated trying to use those doggone vending machines. They always ended up eating her quarters or the twisty knob got stuck halfway before depositing the wrong item, usually a pad that either barely qualified as a pantiliner or was so thick that she felt like she had a large hand towel bunched between her legs. And they never, ever had those protective wings, so you could count on messing up both side of your “period panties” as well.
She quickly changed her tampon and rushed back to her desk with her purse before anyone saw her. Once, Kevin saw her exiting the bathroom with her purse and he just gave this knowing look to her. It was the kind of look that made her feel like she was wearing a bright red shirt with gleaming white letters that announced “I’m menstruating!” That sort of humiliation was just too much to bear…not that she was ever the champion of confident behavior to begin with.
“Morning, Ms. Beesly,” the typical morning greeting chirped from the lips of Jim I-wanna-lick-chocolate-off-your-masculine-body-you-manly-man-you Halpert. Whoa, where’d that come from? Pam wondered as she watched him absently thump his fingers across her desk in his usual fashion and settled into his swivel chair. She noted that his hair was unusually flippy today. That meant that Karen would be hanging around his desk far too much and trying to smooth it with her hand at every passing. It really annoyed Pam when she did that. It thrilled her, however, when he’d flip it back up as soon as she walked away. Those were the days when they were having their weekly tiff. Of course lately, those tiffs were coming with more frequency and she had to work hard to stifle a grin every time one occurred.
Like a trained dog, Karen came ‘wagging’ over to Jim as soon as she’d hung up her coat on the rack and whispered something in his ear. Pam counted a full five seconds before she was smoothing the back of his hair into submission. She swore one day Karen was going to lick her hand like those moms at Walmart always did when their child’s cowlick wouldn’t lay down. That would be the day that the jig would be up and they would find Pam dead on the floor from laughing herself beyond hysteria.
Jim’s neck looked annoyed (and yes, Jim’s neck did emote) and Karen hadn’t made it two inches from him before he was violently flipping his hair back into place. Pam barely got her head below the desk before she started laughing silently, her head in her hands. A tiny snort emitting from her to give her stealthiness away.
Jim cleared his throat overdramatically and waited for Pam’s head to peer over the edge of her desk. As her frizzy curls raised slowly and cautiously, she noticed that Jim was uncomfortably (okay, so maybe not that uncomfortably) close. His arms were covered by the annoying sleeves, but his slender fingers still knew how to work a jellybean between them. For a millisecond, her mind drifted off to what those nimble fingers could do with other jellybean sized parts of her…but Jim’s mock icy stare snapped her into reality.
“What?” she blinked innocently, hoping to prey upon his better judgment than to tease her. She should have known better.
“Something you find funny, Beesly?” he replied with his trademark smirk. It was all she could do to keep from walking up there and wiping (kissing) that smirk right off his cocky little face. But she didn’t dare…not today anyway.
“Nope,” she squeaked, face flushing pink with embarrassment….well, as pink as she could when all the blood was rushing to her genitals. “Just a private joke.”
His eyebrow raised, cluing her in that he was not buying her story, but wouldn’t call her on it right now. “Mm-hmm…well, any time you feel like sharing said ‘joke’, I’d be interested to hear it.” And with another cocky grin, he spun around and moseyed on back to his desk to continue updating his MySpace page. Crisis averted….for now.
