When she leaves the conference room, he is sitting at his desk pretending to look up pricing information or client files or who knows what on his computer, but she knows as well as he does that whatever information is on his computer screen is not registering with him in any way.
She bites the insides of her cheeks to keep the smile from spreading across her face, then decides she doesn’t care and lets her lips stretch upward and outward, until her cheeks and eyes feel warm, and she knows she is doing that thing she’s heard of but never really done before, at least not until he closed the door of the conference room -- glowing.
She’s not actually looking at him at this point; she’s actually very specifically not looking at him, but he feels her smiling and not looking, and so he looks, and she feels, and then they are looking at each other, and there are thousands of words, only a few of which really matter, between them, unspoken and said in their eyes and their lips and the silence and the look.
And then, of course, the cameras are there, and this is all a little too new to share, so the spell is broken. She knows it’s only temporary, though, and so does he, and he knows she knows, and she knows he knows, so it’s okay. She hurries to her desk, her eyes on the floor, her cheeks still warm, and he turns back to his computer, his lips still stretching upward at the corners, and when she sits down in her chair, the back of his neck is slightly pink.
A few minutes later, he decides the cameras be damned and he is at her desk, leaning on his elbows the way he hasn’t done in way, way too long.
“So,” he begins in a low voice, nimbly plucking a jelly bean from the dish and all but tossing it into his mouth, “I know technically I’m supposed to do the planning for the evening, but it would kind of suck if I took you somewhere you hated, so…anywhere you feel like going?”
She feels her cheeks and lips stretching again, and she’s grinning, and it’s something she hasn’t really done in so long, she’s almost afraid she’s going to pull a muscle.
“Um, how about Chick’s?” she suggests. “We can just meet over there after we leave here, you know, less…”
“Pressure?” he finishes, and his tone is almost, no, not almost, is, teasing.
She blushes.
“Yeah. Yes. Pressure.”
He leans in closer and locks eyes with her and she feels giddy. “I think I can handle pressure,” he informs her in confidential tones. “How about you, Beesly. Can you handle pressure?”
She wants to laugh and cry at the same time, because this is so brand new but at the same time, it’s so them.
“Bring it on, Halpert.”
But when she answers the door of her fancy new apartment in the fancy new dove gray chiffon dress she bought because she liked her way the skirt floats and swishes around her calves, and because she was hoping she would have some reason to actually wear it, and because buying a black dress for no real reason still felt like too much, even if she was Fancy and New, he is casually dressed in jeans and a blue and white striped shirt, untucked, the sleeves rolled and pushed to the elbows and a gray t-shirt visible beneath the open top two buttons.
She blushes, and he thinks the pink of her cheeks looks even more beautiful than normal against the soft gray of her dress.
“Um…” she begins.
“You look beautiful,” he tells her, and hands her a stargazer lily, just one stem. “Lose the dress.”
They both realize as soon as the words are out of his mouth what he’s said, and her pink cheeks are now nearly magenta and so are his, and they’re both pressing their lips together at the preposterousness of the moment, trying not to laugh, when they realize that it’s just them, no coworkers, no cameras, so they let it burst out, and God, it feels good.
“Aren’t you supposed to save that line until after you buy me dinner, Halpert?” she queries, her eyes twinkling. She inhales the sweet smell of the flower in her hand and thinks that it’s perfect, not too much and not too little, although she wouldn’t have noticed if he’d shown up empty handed.
But he wasn’t going to show up empty handed. Not for this.
“Sorry,” he says, still blushing. “Change of plans.”
She raises an eyebrow, loving that they’re allowed to be playful again. There are things to be said between them, serious moments that will be decidedly less blushy, that will give way to hearts racing in a different way, but that will happen in its time, and for right now she wants to enjoy this…sparkle…that’s happening.
“Couldn’t take the pressure after all?” she teases.
He raises an eyebrow, meeting her eyes and her challenge.
“Oh, I can take it,” he informs her, his voice low and she feels it at the base of her spine, “I just thought…not really in the mood to be waited on tonight, you know?”
She thinks about having to hear specials and being asked questions about her dining satisfaction by someone who couldn’t actually care less, and yes, yes, she does know.
She nods. “So?”
“I thought we could pick up some things at Doma and take them to the park,” he says, and she smiles because she really likes this plan. “It’s pretty warm out. That sound okay?”
She’s still smiling. “That sounds perfect. I’ll go change.”
She hands him the lily. “Will you put this in water for me? There’s a vase in the cabinet over the stove.” She nods toward the kitchen area of her open plan living room. “And thank you. They’re my favorite.”
He nods. “I remember,” he says. “You told Phyllis, when she was talking about her irises.”
That had been more than four years ago, and she can’t believe he remembers, and she realizes, again, just how much this all is, and she wants to go to him and kiss him, but she doesn’t, because in this moment, it’s sweeter not to.
So she smiles at him, with lips and eyes, instead, and he smiles back, because they can’t not.
“I’ll go change,” she says. “Just give me two minutes.”
He waves his hand. “Take your time.”
There’s a short hallway from the living room, with two doors across from each other. She enters the door on the left and closes it. The other one, he deduces, must be the bathroom.
Alone in her space, he looks around. The walls are cream-colored and there’s a watercolor framed above the sofa, painted in pale blues and purples and oranges and greens. It’s abstract and smudgy, dreamy, and he hopes it’s one of hers.
The sofa is gray, nearly the same shade as the dress she’d had on, and there are small pillows scattered on it in bright green and blue and yellow, the rich colors signifying, he knows, a statement that she is not going to be satisfied to simply blend into the woodwork anymore.
His woodwork, he knows, is very different from most people’s.
The TV is in view of the sofa, and he wonders what movie she last watched.
There are two tall bookshelves, filling a corner and displaying a combination of books, DVD’s, photo frames, and other sundry accessories. In another corner, a section of the hardwood floor is covered with a drop cloth and there is an easel set up with a small table of painting supplies next to it. A canvas sits on the easel and he wants to go and look, but he thinks that might be an invasion of privacy, so he doesn’t.
This is the thought he’s having when she emerges from her bedroom, now dressed in jeans and, feeling inspired, or daring, or hopeful, or perhaps all three, the red blouse that had hung in her closet, untouched, since that one day she had put it on at work, when he was 146 miles away.
He realizes he’s still holding the flower.
“Sorry,” he says sheepishly. “I was just…” He gestures lamely around the room.
She smiles again (she’s been doing a lot of that in the past several hours) because she likes how he looks in her space and she likes how her space looks with him in it, and takes the stem from him.
“I got it.”
She sees him looking toward the easel and she knows he won’t ask.
“It’s okay,” she tells him, nodding toward the corner. “You can look.”
He goes to look as she fills up a vase. The picture is only partially done, in charcoal, but he can make out the shape of a young woman, curled up on an oversized chair. There’s a window behind her, with what look like tree branches. The lines indicating the girl’s hair are straight, not wavy, so he knows it’s not a self portrait.
“Is this your sister?” he asks, and she nods.
“Yeah,” she says, walking over to stand next to him. “We were at our parents’ house. It was storming out and she fell asleep in this old chair that my mom’s had forever. The sky was all gray and you could hear the wind and the branches whipping around, and Penny was just so…quiet. So pretty.”
“You’re so pretty,” he says, his voice low and almost gravelly, and Christ, he thinks he sounds like the love interest in a bad teen soap opera - “Party of My So-Called Creek Slayer” or something.
“Um, charcoal?” he asks dumbly, and she suppresses a giggle.
“Yeah.”
He nods. “I remember having to use charcoal in art class in high school,” he says. “I hated it. The sound. It hurt my ears.”
She gapes at him, her eyes bright. “Thank you,” she exclaims. “Any time I use it I have to have my headphones on and the music blasting. The other people in my art class look at me like I’m nuts, but that sound is just… ugh.”
A mutual hatred of the sound of charcoal on paper is not a sign of compatibility, he knows, but it’s just one more thing that tells him, that makes him know, that he’s just where he’s supposed to be.
“Yeah,” he agrees. He nods toward the door. “You hungry?”
“Starving,” she says, moving to retrieve her bag from its spot on the breakfast bar.
He watches her and for a second, he imagines her in the morning, sitting on one of the stools, rumpled and beautiful in an oversized t-shirt, eating corn flakes with a sliced banana, drinking tea and reading the arts section of the newspaper.
“You really are such a pretty girl,” he says before he realizes he’s saying it, and this time it doesn’t sound like a line.
She blushes in appreciation, but not embarrassment. Well, maybe a little. She’s still learning to take compliments.
“Thank you,” she says simply.
They look at each other and don’t say anything and it might just be the best silence ever.
He breaks it first.
“Ready?” he asks.
She nods. “Ready.”
Story Notes:
I know I'm breaking a bit of a rule by starting a new story when I still have one left unfinished, but this just came to me and I had to get it down. The hardest part was actually naming it, but I thought the simple but gorgeous song by Dave Barnes and when I went here http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/d/dave_barnes/on_a_night_like_this.html, I found a Jim/Pam video and it seemed like fate. I'm not entirely sure where this is going to go next; I'll just have to listen to what the story tells me.
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended. I own nothing and no one. Rating may change for future chapters.
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended. I own nothing and no one. Rating may change for future chapters.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Chapter title is a line from "Under Pressure," by Queen and David Bowie. It's relevant both to the chapter and to the fact that I heard "Ice Ice Baby," which blatantly rips off the intro chords, earlier today. As always, your thoughts are deeply valued and appreciated.
Chapter End Notes:
I've always wanted to end a story with the exchange of "Ready?"/"Ready," and thought about just making this a one shot, but I think this one is calling to be continued. Do you agree?
Track: "Under Pressure," Queen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a01QQZyl-_I
Track: "Under Pressure," Queen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a01QQZyl-_I
