Pam shares one dance with Roy, and it passes slowly. They’re close and they kiss; it reminds her of why she screamed in joy earlier that night when he re-proposed (what a stupid term), why she accepted his proposal in the first place. He can care, when he wants to, tries to, she pushes him to. He’s not a bad guy, far from one.
“Babe,” he says, when the band’s done playing their slow song, cueing up “Zoot Suit Riot” in its place, “I’m gonna go get a beer. Okay?”
“Okay.” He kisses her again, and Pam tries not to think of how this is the most he’s kissed her in months. She despises thoughts like that, because they call into question the very things she’s built her life on. But several minutes pass, and even with the time she allows him for the line at the bar, she can tell he’s not coming back. Total strangers keep giving her big smiles as they pass her by, and yet she’s utterly alone. She thinks she should go outside. It’d wake her up, because right now the alcohol she drank is like a full-body hug. She’s not drunk, but she’s fairly tipsy.
Outside, the cold and the brackish smell of the water sting her skin and nose, but it’s a little delicious, almost dangerous after how comfortable inside was, completely warm and with bland music playing, curled up against a fiancé she’d been with for almost ten years. A little down the ship’s deck, she can see Michael, a crumpled hat at his feet, hands bound to the safety railing with plastic ties. The sides of her mouth expand slightly, both in the tiny satisfaction of seeing her ass of an idiot boss confined out here, and because, deep down, she loves him, in her own twisted way. She feels like his mom, a lot of the time. In his own twisted way, he loves her, cares for her, protects her, maybe more so than anyone else in the office. Except...
“Hiya, Michael.”
“Hey Pam.” Pam has to blink hard, because he actually called her by name, and he’s looking at her in this way she can’t define. Inquisitive, maybe. “Captain Jack is so... stupid, gah.”
“He’s jealous that he’ll never make a speech as great as yours.” Obviously, she’s joking, but she smiles a little more, and he smiles back. “Um, have you seen Jim, by the way? I wanted to thank him for his speech.” It occurred to Pam that maybe Jim and Katy had snuck off to an engine room somewhere to have sex. She hadn’t seen either of them around for a while. Her stomach squirms so hard at that thought, it’s practically a cramp. She blames the alcohol.
“Yeah, he went around there somewhere.” Michael jerks his head to the right, the secluded part of the deck, that strange look in his eye growing larger. Pam ignores it, tells Michael thanks, and walks toward where he indicated.
Jim’s out much further, in an isolated corner, leaning like a backslash, hands gripping the bar hard. She thinks he looks really fucking sexy like that, and doesn’t even find the need to dismiss that thought in a panic. She’s engaged for real now, with a wedding date. This is nothing. “Jim.” He turns his head toward her, not moving his head. She puts a big grin on her face, and she has to force that, because there’s something terribly, indefinably melancholy in his hazel eyes. “I just wanted to say thank you, for your speech.”
“You already did,” he responds, after a beat, and finally moves from his leaning position, standing next to the railing. As an artist, Pam always notes that his body is all straight lines and sharp angles.
“I only nodded.”
“It was enough.” He quirks his head to the left, and looks at her just like that, and Pam finds herself almost bowled over by some sort of emotional current that ricochets throughout her body. That look is the one from before, when they stood on the deck alone, staring at each other, and somehow her mind had been blank and racing with a million things at once. She couldn’t believe this was happening, that they were in the middle of having one of those moments, like in some silly romantic comedy, where they said nothing but communicated everything.
Mostly, she just thought, kiss me, you moron; you ditch your ditz girlfriend and I’ll ditch my meathead fiancé once we get off this boat and we’ll both ditch Dunder-Mifflin together. God, we can start a whole new life together. But it wasn’t ever that easy. There were obligations and payments to be made and, as ever, the fucking cameras. When she didn’t think she could go another second without kissing him, she’d blurted out, “I’m cold,” although her arms felt tingly with heat, and scurried back inside. They’re in the middle of that deadly moment again, only even more charged.
He’s the one to speak, this time. “I want to –” His voice is like if gravel was edible. She hesitates for just a second, then walks closer to him. Her face is burning and her hands won’t stay still; she’s amazed she can still walk. This has gone beyond fantasizing, long and pointed stares, pecking him on the lips when she’s obliterated-drunk. The air out here has made her the opposite of drunk, beyond sober. She hears nothing but her careful footsteps, their breathing and the way it’s hitching in both their throats.
She’s the one to make the move, she makes sure of that. She’ll take all of the blame for him, gratefully. Cautiously, she presses one hand over his heart, which sounds almost like a hummingbird it’s going so fast. She slides it up to his cheek, uses her other hand to brush through his hair. Things she should be thinking, like Roy or even Katy aren’t even in the back of her mind, and she knows they’re on the same page. “Room, please,” is all she can murmur, apparently reduced to one-syllable words, slightly tilting her head to indicate a door near them, as his hands come down on her arms.
It’s hardly a second later and they are inside, and the walls of the room are metal, she can tell that much in the dark. Jim crushes her to him, and oh God, it’s like there’s a fucking tent pole in his pants. His hands run down her back and she can tell, nothing’s going to happen unless she gives the okay. “Kiss me,” she more breathes than says, and she feels his head move in, their lips mash together. It’s not neat, and they wheeze into each others’ mouths, heavy. His arms are across her back like a fence and she’s nipping at his lip. Sometimes their teeth clack together, sending a shock through her whole body, and she has to gasp a “sorry.”
His hands lower to where her shirt and skirt meet and he frees her button-down shirt, plunging his hand under it, up over her stomach. She shudders over and over; she doesn’t think she’s ever had so many nerve endings as she does right now. She thinks of the way his arm had gripped her so hard when he’d scooped her up at the dojo, and how that wide band under her breasts had practically burned for the next few days, had caused her to divert her eyes whenever she talked to him.
“Touch me,” she pants against his mouth. “Make me –” and she can’t quite say come, and she feels ridiculous, because here she is, a grown woman already far across the very specific lines set up by her engagement, and she still can’t say come. Still, he must know what she means, because his hand starts to travel downward, reach behind her back, pull the zipper down on her skirt, agonizingly slowly. She detaches from his mouth to trail her head down as far as she can, marking kisses along his neck and chest.
She shimmies out of her skirt, letting it fall to the floor, and he tugs down her pantyhose to her mid-thighs and steps away from her, to take her in, for a second. Jim’s eyes are huge, like he can’t quite believe this is real. “Tell me to stop and I’ll stop,” he mutters, but at the same time he touches her again, at the hips, slips his thumbs up under her boring navy blue underwear and just keeps them there.
“No, don’t.” Her voice sounds gritty and foreign. Roy never, ever got her to feel this palpable, almost pathetic need to be filled by any part of him. Jim pulls her underwear down to meet her pantyhose, rubs along her outside.
“You’re wet,” he says, not in a growly I’m-so-sexy voice he could use, but in a totally surprised voice, like he’s shocked he could do that to her.
“I kn – ohhh!” The sentence comes out unintentionally as he crooks a finger into her, presses his thumb carefully elsewhere. It feels like her body collapsed into just that one spot. She links her arms around his back and pulls herself against him. Pam kisses her way along his neck, and he’s surprisingly calm, much more so than she, as he keeps his fingers moving in the most deliberate pattern. She can feel his cock, practically threatening to rip through his trousers, and she can feel his breath, trembling. It’s like all her brain waves have turned to empty static as she almost doubles over against his chest.
“Oh God, I’m coming,” she gasps, ragged, some minutes (seconds? hours?), later, all embarrassment gone from her mind. She almost wishes she wasn’t on the edge, because she just wants him to keep doing this forever. “Oh!” and she’s gripping the back of his neck hard, making strangled, embarrassing noises, almost like a wounded animal. Jim’s kissing her, then, and she’s letting all those noises go into his mouth; Pam feels them vibrating against his lips.
Her whimpering noises eventually trail off, and there’s a few too many beats of silence. Carefully, Jim withdraws his fingers, wipes them against his pants, almost too gently, considering what just happened. When he brushes his hands on his pants it only reminds Pam of the bulge at the front, and she smiles at him, carefully. “I can’t not –” she starts, then falls silent again, because who could think of what to say in this situation.
“No, it’s...” He purses his lips, nods his head. “It’s totally fine. That was a freebie.” He opens his mouth a little, runs his tongue over his teeth. Pam’s not going to ever be able to look at his mouth again without remembering the way it moved over hers, as giant stabs of pleasure radiated out from her center. “That was a mistake. Really.” He looks at her, and his eyes are still burning with his own very distinct hazel. “These things happen, let’s just pretend it never did.”
Pam wants to refute everything he’s saying. It wasn’t fine, it had practically uprooted her whole life. She didn’t want it to be a freebie, and she almost cringed at the image of Jim jerking off, or worse, Katy’s mouth on Jim’s dick, later on that night. It wasn’t a mistake, she initiated it. Things of this magnitude didn’t just happen in her life, and she didn’t want to pretend like it never had. But, because she’s terrified of what would happen if she gives him any answer other than what she actually does say, she whispers, “Okay.” She fixes her clothes; the skirt has wrinkles that don’t go away no matter how much she brushes her hands over them. “I’ll see you back at the dock,” she chokes out as she leaves.
She emerges into the cold, a nasty slap of a wake-up call after how hot it was inside whatever room they’d been in. She swears they’d steamed up the windows, like ridiculous teenagers making out in a car. It’s snowing, but just a little. The flakes instantly turn into drops of moisture on her skin, mixing with the sweat. It takes her a very long time to walk back to Michael. She tells herself she’s walking slowly so as to not slip on the slick surface of the floor of the boat, but she knows better.
“D’ja find Jimbo?” he asks. Pam wishes she had something to cut Michael loose, because it’s incredibly sad that he’s out here all alone and no one cares enough to get him out of the snow. It's dark and lonely. She feels big fat tears welling up in her eyes, pathetically enough, but everything seems like an insurmountable tragedy, right now.
“Yeah.” That’s all she says, but she forces a wide smile. She expects something like that was a long thank you in response from him, but either he’s too humiliated to offer any of his usual wisdom, or he can just tell. Pam likes to think it’s the latter. She heads back inside, where Roy’s waiting, and tells him she was in the bathroom. It’s both funny and terrible that she doesn’t think she wronged him much.
When they finally pull to shore again, it’s well past 2 AM and mostly everyone’s been napping on the boat on-and-off for the past three hours. They’re groggy and cranky, and no one really bothers to say goodbye to anyone else as they crawl into cars, though Michael does a victory lap through the parking lot to celebrate being free from the safety rail at last. The snow is heavy, now, and every little puff of cold air reminds Pam of Jim’s breath on her neck, even though his breath was so hot it practically threatened to turn into a solid.
She feels a hand on her coat. “Hey, Pam.” She practically has a heart attack when she turns around to see who it is, because it’s Katy. “This is awkward, but can I get a ride back to the office with you and Roy? I think Jim kind of ditched me.” All Pam can do is nod, and scan the parking lot for Jim. She thinks she sees him at the far end, with the snow perching at the tips of his hair, but he’s not exactly rushing over to talk to her, and it could just be a shadow anyway.
No one talks in the truck on the way home, the only noises those of the wheels crunching the newly fallen snow and, if she listens closely enough, the snow itself falling and sticking against the windshield, then falling off. Both Pam and Roy are so tired when they get home that they collapse in a messy heap on the sofa. They don’t even kiss before they fall asleep, and Pam sleeps until 1:30 in the afternoon the next day; she hasn’t done that since she was in college.
Jim and Pam don’t talk at all on Monday when they get back, or Tuesday. Pam panics every day, because she knew this would happen if they ever ripped down their platonic boundaries. She looks at him at his desk and sees his face set in concentration on the boat, trying to make her come, the sort of grim satisfaction when he’d done so. On Wednesday, though, he comes up to her desk, spends several very precise moments digging through her jellybeans. He’s telling her to say something, but she just can’t. Thank God, though, because he does. “You’re not stocking the tangerine ones?” he whines, and she feels the boundaries set up again. It’s safe.
“Well, a certain tangerine-lover in the office hasn’t been visiting my desk much these past few days,” she whines right back, and for just a second his eyes flicker in fear that she’s getting too personal, but she grins up at him. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.
On Thursday, the whole stupid thing with Michael’s foot happens. When he calls her from the hospital, cheerfully proclaiming, “Dunder-Mifflin, this is Jim!” she wants to dance with glee of her own. The tone of his voice showed her that they were back to totally normal after less than a week. Maybe nothing had happened, and it was all just some sick fantasy of hers. She’s able to tell herself that for four months, trying to let wedding plans consume her mind. It works fine.
That night in May, though, her lies, and his, catch up to her, and it’s like a repeat of bad television. She lies to his face, saying horrible things she can’t ever unsay like misinterpreted and can’t, and he cries, he fucking cries. After Jim walks away from her, she goes upstairs, because she has to call someone. She almost blindly dials numbers into the phone on Jim’s desk, and before long, she finds her telling the sordid story to her mom, including how she got fingered, at a “motivational retreat” on a booze cruise, by a man that was not her fiancé, minutes after he finally set a date for the wedding. To Pam’s surprise and gratitude, her mom barely reacts.
“Are you still going to marry Roy?” is the last in a flurry of questions.
Pam swallows, hard. “Yeah, I think I am.” She hears her unshed tears in the five words and knows she’s still lying to herself. Her head’s just barely raised, and she sees another figure come into the office. It’s Jim, not exactly totally hunched over, but walking like all pride, all spark, has been drained out of him. Every step is an effort. She remembers herself after their encounter on the ship. “I have to go,” she blurts out, in the middle of something her mom’s starting to say.
“Okay. Call me back when you can.”
“I will.” Then, Jim’s in front of her, too in front of her, preventing her from looking off to the sides to pretend this isn’t happening. “Listen, Jim –” and she can't imagine what she could possibly say but then they’re kissing for the third time in less than a year. It’s not quick and innocent like the Dundies, or crazed and sexual like on the cruise. It’s this perfect slow burn, in the goddamn office. It’s a little funny, a little sad that all these big moments in her life take place in the most mundane places. With Jim, though, right now, she can’t even pretend to resist and she keeps her lips attached to his, raises her hands and grips the collar of his sweater in practically a vice grip, like he’s her safety rail, except she’s falling, falling, falling.
Story Notes:
Because there wasn't enough angst in "Booze Cruise" already. I don't own The Office.
Chapter End Notes:
I... have no idea where that came from.
bigtunette is the author of 7 other stories.
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