Leave You Traveling
Happy Birthday acciofirebolt!
Title: Leave You Traveling
Author: twirls
Pairing: Pam/Jim
Rating: K+
Words: 2,641
Disclaimer: No money, no ownership.
Summary: After the fourth year of filming, it becomes clear to Pam that the documentary is never going to air.
After the fourth year of filming, it becomes clear to Pam that the documentary is never going to air.
"What are you still doing here?" she asks Pete the sound guy one morning, when they end up on a shared break.
He takes a long drag of his cigarette and shrugs.
"I don't know. Maybe in twenty years we can sell it to the History Channel."
"The Ancient Art of Paper Selling? Episode 23: Receptionism?"
He snorts gracelessly, rubbing his hand across his chin to cover a grin.
For a moment, Pam is reminded of someone else. She feels her smile come undone, exhales long and slow. Pete stubs out his cigarette on the edge of the curb. They watch it lie there, getting soggy. Then Pete slaps his hands on his thighs and stands up.
"That's my break," he says. "See you inside."
"Yeah, okay."
Pam stays outside for a few minutes longer. That stupid cigarette butt. She can't help it - makes a face, picks it up, carries it to the dumpster, throws it away. Ten years with Roy plus an endless barrage of Don't Litter campaigns on late-night television have her conditioned. Yes, she watches late night television. She's just that classy.
Some nights, during especially stupid episodes of cop shows, Pam pays even less attention than usual, just thinking about all the other people who are watching with her. Probably the drug addicts and the sociopaths, she decides. Maybe other people too, she doesn't think. Maybe people who move to Stamford without even an email. Maybe people who used to smile so broad it swallowed their face. Maybe people -
It's a moot point now, though, isn't it?
She wipes her hands on her skirt and turns to go back inside.
Somehow, in the time she's been gone, Michael has received three faxes. None of them are relevant. The Scranton branch is doing worse than usual, which she would not have thought possible a year ago, but sometimes life surprises you like that. There's no way Michael could be interested in a Hawaiian vacation, not even for $599 + tax, all inclusive. The remaining two faxes are advertising life-insurance policies, and even after the Korean Adoption Fiasco of 2006, he's still not supporting anyone, thank God.
Feeling sad about Michael's life inevitably leads Pam to feeling sad about her own. It's not a good place to be on a Tuesday morning. Sometimes Pam imagines what her life would be like if.
There are a lot of ifs. Pam's played this game since before she can remember (Mom and Dad don't divorce, she doesn't switch schools in the middle of eighth grade, Michael doesn't say that thing to Jan, Dwight loses his spud gun.) Today's is “Dunder Mifflin never existed.” It's an old favorite, one she used to save for only the worst Tuesdays. Lately, though, it's become a Monday through Wednesday go-to. She imagines smoking ruins instead, zombies nibbling on broken asphalt. She imagines that, instead, it's a burger joint, a maximum security prison, a retirement home, a hospital. Stanley's face pops into her mind, a paper nurse's hat wedged on top of his curls.
“I am bored. Help,” she writes on a post-it, curling the letters like it's eighth grade English class. She could write the great American novel on post-its, really. Paste them all across the walls, a massive, ambitious project. The paper crumples quietly and lands on the dirty patch of the carpet by the bin.
“Do you miss him?” Toby asks at lunch a month later.
Her eyes go to her fingernails, rough edged and unpainted. Does she miss him?
“No,” she says, tugging at a nail with her thumb. She smiles. It won't go all the way. “It's been two years.”
“Yeah.” Toby nods and spears a piece of lettuce with his plastic fork. “Hey, I was wondering -”
Phyllis walks in and puts something in the microwave. Toby stops talking. Pam picks at her nail and thinks. It's nice talking to Toby. He's a good person for secrets, she thinks.
“I miss him sometimes,” she says, once Phyllis has left and the whole break room smells like last night's lasagna. “In the mornings when it's cold, and on Christmas.”
Toby looks sad, but she can't tell if he's sad sad, or just Toby sad.
“He has this huge family. We'd go up on Christmas. I miss that.”
Toby's eyebrows furrow.
“You and Jim spent Christmas together?”
Pam's head jerks up so fast it's embarrassing.
“What?” she says. “No, Roy.” She's even more embarrassed to be flustered, after all this time.
“Yeah, sorry. I shouldn't've -” Toby tosses his plastic fork into his plastic container and slides them off the table into the waste basket. “Bye, Pam.”
“Bye, Toby!” She waves. It's stupid - he's just going back to his desk. She looks down at her soda can and flicks the tab. The sound is thin and strange in the quiet of the break room. “Yeah,” she whispers to her Coke. “Yeah, I do.”
The thing about ditching your fiance after ten years and then having your best friend move to Connecticut and then having to get a new apartment all by yourself and buying a footstool at American Home Furnishings and crying as you open the box because you used to have another body to reach things and now you've got this footstool that's actually so ugly you end up giving it away the next week and just climbing onto the sink to get your nice dishes - well, the thing about all that, is that it makes you feel sort of invincible. And sort of broken at first, but then, well, sometimes, invincible.
And that would make a great lead-in to what could be episode twenty four of the History Channel's 2030 special on American offices at the start of the century. But it's also, in a less public sort of way, how Pam ends up being customer of the year at Binky's Books on the corner of Pittson Avenue.
The problem with Binky's Books is that it sounds like a cover for a porn shop. It's not, really. In fact, it's pretty much exactly the same as the Borders across the street, just run by locals and with a huge wooden table by the magazines instead of a formal cafe. It's not a porn shop at all. It doesn't even carry trashy romances. Pam finds herself spending a lot more time than she ever would have imagined defending Binky's Books.
It still sounds enough like a porn shop that when Pam first floats the idea of starting a book club there, Angela rejects the invitation on the spot.
Pam is used to Angela thinking of her as Pam Beesly, the Office's Second Greatest Whore, but the Binky comment moves her to number one for a whole week. She was just trying to be nice. It doesn't help that she's been wearing new shoes and experimenting with different hair do's. Pam feels weird, bumping Kelly out of the spot for the first time since Meredith wore a tube top to the Christmas party, but it only lasts a week. There's a week of extra dirty stares and Dwight throwing away her yogurt at lunch. Every day, Pam fishes out the plastic container and washes it off in the sink. Then Kelly comes in one morning wearing a new kind of lip gloss and hoop earrings, and Pam breathes a sigh of relief.
Not being a porn store, Binky's is full of real, almost normal people who are unsurprisingly interested in books. After having several long conversations with strangers in the A through L section of Fiction, Pam decides it's time to organize this into something involving baked goods and chairs.
After an excruciatingly long Wednesday, Pam prints out a flyer on Scarlet #5 Dunder Mifflin paper. She uses some of her white colored pencils to sketch the Binky's table with a stack of books piled to the edge of the page. Soon she starts getting calls, and enough emails to her work account that Michael keeps dropping hints that he wants to be invited to “The -whisper whisper- Par-tay.” Pam signs up for Gmail and things go more smoothly from there.
They start out with the usual book clubbish books, but Al, an accountant who takes every opportunity to remind them that he grew up in New York City, suggests a book by Kerouac (“a friend and fellow countryman”), and Susan, a college student taking a semester off, brings in Flatland. It's not long before Oprah's list lies in the dust behind their literary wheels.
On a masochistic whim, Pam suggests the author of some books she remembers Toby borrowing from Jim in his first few months at work, before he spent all his time screwing with Dwight. She gets the guy's name wrong at first, but Al corrects her. Infinite Jest is too huge to even contemplate, so they settle on a book of short stories. Pam likes them, but they're a little self-conscious.
It's great, really, getting to say things like that out loud.
“I thought it was a little too self-conscious,” she says, passing the plate of scones to the elderly woman on her right.
“I liked it,” says Susan from across the table, twirling the end of a long blond braid.
“I dunno,” Al hums. “I think I agree with Pam.”
“Thanks so much for picking the book, Pam. It was a lot of fun to read. You're very good at this.” Mrs. Friary is always unnecessarily positive and friendly, but Pam blushes anyway.
For a strange and embarrassing moment, she looks around for the cameras. It would just be nice to document this, is all. Two months into being the head of a successful book club, she's still not used to the idea of being in charge of anything. Yet here she is. Mrs. Friary, an ex-librarian, has said she's “good at this.”
She's still not entirely sure what “this” is, but she thinks, maybe, just maybe, brushing crumbs off the table afterwards, stacking chairs against the magazine rack, that she could be starting to figure it out.
It's a Thursday when she sees him in the last place she'd expect. She's at Binky's after work, in the infamous A through L of Fiction, looking for a new book to read, not for the club, just for herself. She's humming quietly. Last Saturday everyone except Al, who had to work, went to the cineplex to see a dramatization of a book they'd read. It was an okay movie, but now the main theme is stuck in her head. She's crouched down to read the spines of the books on the bottom shelf and she can feel the wool of her skirt sliding up her legs. She tugs it down distractedly and reaches for a dark paperback.
Pam opens to the first page and lets herself rock back on her heels as her legs fold under until she's sitting cross-legged on the floor. It's been a long day. Michael was somehow under the impression that it was Chinese New Years and he made everyone eat their food on the floor (despite Dwight's factual protests), and provided mandatory chopsticks. It was a mess, figuratively and literally, and now she's tired and just wants to read a book. This one's apparently about a road trip and she's sucked in from the first sentence.
It's not until the second paragraph that Pam notices the surface she's been leaning against is not the bookcase. She tips her head back and looks up.
“Hi,” he says.
There's an intake of breath and it's like her limbs have stopped working entirely, but somehow she's standing up, her skirt bunched and clinging to her thighs, and the space is so small between the shelves that she has to hold onto him, or maybe he's steadying her, keeping her upright. Their faces are too close and the air between is hazy and thick, and her hair - her whole body it feels like - is fully of static electricity and buzzing like a halo. When he reaches out to touch her face, there's a crack and she flinches back.
Then they're laughing and clutching each other and she feels herself fall back into being Pam again.
“So,” they say at the same time.
It's so surreal, standing with a part of her old life in the middle of her new one. This is Binky's for God's sake. Binky's! Next to his left shoulder is the book Susan picked out for the second week in February. She can hear the ding of cash registers as the employees, who all know her name, ring up purchases. Something about being here, in her world, makes Pam feel especially brave.
She stares at him. He's got his head down and his eyes won't meet hers. His hands are in his pockets again. She puts her own hands on the cotton of his shirt, just above his belt. His breathing slows but he still won't look up. She takes a breath.
“I hate you for leaving,” she says.
His head snaps up and finally, finally, she catches his eye. There's a moment where everything stops, or maybe where everything gets really fast all of a sudden. He stares at her and it swallows her up, that look.
Then his hands are in her hair and she's back against the book case and it's poking into her spine. Her hands fist in his shirt and she melts against him. His lips are on hers and he's holding her steady to keep the angle, even as she twists her back, trying to get away from the shelf. After some squirming, she succeeds in turning him so now she's the one pushing him. Either he's tall enough that the shelf isn't an issue, or he's too engrossed in what he's doing to notice the uncomfortable surface. Much better. She pushes up on her toes to reach him and moves her hands up his chest to his shoulders until her arms can wind around his neck. When her thumbs graze the back of his skull he makes a noise at the back of his throat that she doesn't think she's ever heard before.
Then there's a noise she definitely has heard before. Pam turns, her hands sliding down Jim's shirt, which has come part of the way untucked. The sound comes again, a cross between a cough and a tut.
“Oh, uh,” says Pam, cleverly utilizing the vocabulary of a person who has spent long hours among the company of good books.
“I thought I'd find you here,” Angela says. “I was almost ready to change my mind about joining your book club, even in this -” she glances around disapprovingly, “establishment.”
“Book club?” says Jim, his hands still absently tracing lines across Pam's back.
Angela rolls right over him.
“But clearly, clearly, this is exactly the den of sin I had imagined it would be.”
“No,” says Pam, hurriedly, going into automatic Binky-defending mode. “Binky's isn't a porn store! It just sounds like one because, well, really, that's not important. See, look - ” Pam reaches behind her at random. “Jane Austen!”
“Jane Austen was a very loose woman, Pam,” says Angela. “Have you read Northanger Abbey?”
“No,” Pam has to admit. “I haven't.”
“Sex, all of it. Sex and flirtation.” Angela turns to leave. She spins on her heel, just as she's almost out the door. “Hello, Jim," she sniffs. "I hope you enjoy your debauchery.”
“Shit,” sighs Pam. “I'm going to be at the top of the list for another month.”
Then Jim's fingers thread through hers and she thinks maybe she doesn't mind.
Title: Leave You Traveling
Author: twirls
Pairing: Pam/Jim
Rating: K+
Words: 2,641
Disclaimer: No money, no ownership.
Summary: After the fourth year of filming, it becomes clear to Pam that the documentary is never going to air.
After the fourth year of filming, it becomes clear to Pam that the documentary is never going to air.
"What are you still doing here?" she asks Pete the sound guy one morning, when they end up on a shared break.
He takes a long drag of his cigarette and shrugs.
"I don't know. Maybe in twenty years we can sell it to the History Channel."
"The Ancient Art of Paper Selling? Episode 23: Receptionism?"
He snorts gracelessly, rubbing his hand across his chin to cover a grin.
For a moment, Pam is reminded of someone else. She feels her smile come undone, exhales long and slow. Pete stubs out his cigarette on the edge of the curb. They watch it lie there, getting soggy. Then Pete slaps his hands on his thighs and stands up.
"That's my break," he says. "See you inside."
"Yeah, okay."
Pam stays outside for a few minutes longer. That stupid cigarette butt. She can't help it - makes a face, picks it up, carries it to the dumpster, throws it away. Ten years with Roy plus an endless barrage of Don't Litter campaigns on late-night television have her conditioned. Yes, she watches late night television. She's just that classy.
Some nights, during especially stupid episodes of cop shows, Pam pays even less attention than usual, just thinking about all the other people who are watching with her. Probably the drug addicts and the sociopaths, she decides. Maybe other people too, she doesn't think. Maybe people who move to Stamford without even an email. Maybe people who used to smile so broad it swallowed their face. Maybe people -
It's a moot point now, though, isn't it?
She wipes her hands on her skirt and turns to go back inside.
Somehow, in the time she's been gone, Michael has received three faxes. None of them are relevant. The Scranton branch is doing worse than usual, which she would not have thought possible a year ago, but sometimes life surprises you like that. There's no way Michael could be interested in a Hawaiian vacation, not even for $599 + tax, all inclusive. The remaining two faxes are advertising life-insurance policies, and even after the Korean Adoption Fiasco of 2006, he's still not supporting anyone, thank God.
Feeling sad about Michael's life inevitably leads Pam to feeling sad about her own. It's not a good place to be on a Tuesday morning. Sometimes Pam imagines what her life would be like if.
There are a lot of ifs. Pam's played this game since before she can remember (Mom and Dad don't divorce, she doesn't switch schools in the middle of eighth grade, Michael doesn't say that thing to Jan, Dwight loses his spud gun.) Today's is “Dunder Mifflin never existed.” It's an old favorite, one she used to save for only the worst Tuesdays. Lately, though, it's become a Monday through Wednesday go-to. She imagines smoking ruins instead, zombies nibbling on broken asphalt. She imagines that, instead, it's a burger joint, a maximum security prison, a retirement home, a hospital. Stanley's face pops into her mind, a paper nurse's hat wedged on top of his curls.
“I am bored. Help,” she writes on a post-it, curling the letters like it's eighth grade English class. She could write the great American novel on post-its, really. Paste them all across the walls, a massive, ambitious project. The paper crumples quietly and lands on the dirty patch of the carpet by the bin.
“Do you miss him?” Toby asks at lunch a month later.
Her eyes go to her fingernails, rough edged and unpainted. Does she miss him?
“No,” she says, tugging at a nail with her thumb. She smiles. It won't go all the way. “It's been two years.”
“Yeah.” Toby nods and spears a piece of lettuce with his plastic fork. “Hey, I was wondering -”
Phyllis walks in and puts something in the microwave. Toby stops talking. Pam picks at her nail and thinks. It's nice talking to Toby. He's a good person for secrets, she thinks.
“I miss him sometimes,” she says, once Phyllis has left and the whole break room smells like last night's lasagna. “In the mornings when it's cold, and on Christmas.”
Toby looks sad, but she can't tell if he's sad sad, or just Toby sad.
“He has this huge family. We'd go up on Christmas. I miss that.”
Toby's eyebrows furrow.
“You and Jim spent Christmas together?”
Pam's head jerks up so fast it's embarrassing.
“What?” she says. “No, Roy.” She's even more embarrassed to be flustered, after all this time.
“Yeah, sorry. I shouldn't've -” Toby tosses his plastic fork into his plastic container and slides them off the table into the waste basket. “Bye, Pam.”
“Bye, Toby!” She waves. It's stupid - he's just going back to his desk. She looks down at her soda can and flicks the tab. The sound is thin and strange in the quiet of the break room. “Yeah,” she whispers to her Coke. “Yeah, I do.”
The thing about ditching your fiance after ten years and then having your best friend move to Connecticut and then having to get a new apartment all by yourself and buying a footstool at American Home Furnishings and crying as you open the box because you used to have another body to reach things and now you've got this footstool that's actually so ugly you end up giving it away the next week and just climbing onto the sink to get your nice dishes - well, the thing about all that, is that it makes you feel sort of invincible. And sort of broken at first, but then, well, sometimes, invincible.
And that would make a great lead-in to what could be episode twenty four of the History Channel's 2030 special on American offices at the start of the century. But it's also, in a less public sort of way, how Pam ends up being customer of the year at Binky's Books on the corner of Pittson Avenue.
The problem with Binky's Books is that it sounds like a cover for a porn shop. It's not, really. In fact, it's pretty much exactly the same as the Borders across the street, just run by locals and with a huge wooden table by the magazines instead of a formal cafe. It's not a porn shop at all. It doesn't even carry trashy romances. Pam finds herself spending a lot more time than she ever would have imagined defending Binky's Books.
It still sounds enough like a porn shop that when Pam first floats the idea of starting a book club there, Angela rejects the invitation on the spot.
Pam is used to Angela thinking of her as Pam Beesly, the Office's Second Greatest Whore, but the Binky comment moves her to number one for a whole week. She was just trying to be nice. It doesn't help that she's been wearing new shoes and experimenting with different hair do's. Pam feels weird, bumping Kelly out of the spot for the first time since Meredith wore a tube top to the Christmas party, but it only lasts a week. There's a week of extra dirty stares and Dwight throwing away her yogurt at lunch. Every day, Pam fishes out the plastic container and washes it off in the sink. Then Kelly comes in one morning wearing a new kind of lip gloss and hoop earrings, and Pam breathes a sigh of relief.
Not being a porn store, Binky's is full of real, almost normal people who are unsurprisingly interested in books. After having several long conversations with strangers in the A through L section of Fiction, Pam decides it's time to organize this into something involving baked goods and chairs.
After an excruciatingly long Wednesday, Pam prints out a flyer on Scarlet #5 Dunder Mifflin paper. She uses some of her white colored pencils to sketch the Binky's table with a stack of books piled to the edge of the page. Soon she starts getting calls, and enough emails to her work account that Michael keeps dropping hints that he wants to be invited to “The -whisper whisper- Par-tay.” Pam signs up for Gmail and things go more smoothly from there.
They start out with the usual book clubbish books, but Al, an accountant who takes every opportunity to remind them that he grew up in New York City, suggests a book by Kerouac (“a friend and fellow countryman”), and Susan, a college student taking a semester off, brings in Flatland. It's not long before Oprah's list lies in the dust behind their literary wheels.
On a masochistic whim, Pam suggests the author of some books she remembers Toby borrowing from Jim in his first few months at work, before he spent all his time screwing with Dwight. She gets the guy's name wrong at first, but Al corrects her. Infinite Jest is too huge to even contemplate, so they settle on a book of short stories. Pam likes them, but they're a little self-conscious.
It's great, really, getting to say things like that out loud.
“I thought it was a little too self-conscious,” she says, passing the plate of scones to the elderly woman on her right.
“I liked it,” says Susan from across the table, twirling the end of a long blond braid.
“I dunno,” Al hums. “I think I agree with Pam.”
“Thanks so much for picking the book, Pam. It was a lot of fun to read. You're very good at this.” Mrs. Friary is always unnecessarily positive and friendly, but Pam blushes anyway.
For a strange and embarrassing moment, she looks around for the cameras. It would just be nice to document this, is all. Two months into being the head of a successful book club, she's still not used to the idea of being in charge of anything. Yet here she is. Mrs. Friary, an ex-librarian, has said she's “good at this.”
She's still not entirely sure what “this” is, but she thinks, maybe, just maybe, brushing crumbs off the table afterwards, stacking chairs against the magazine rack, that she could be starting to figure it out.
It's a Thursday when she sees him in the last place she'd expect. She's at Binky's after work, in the infamous A through L of Fiction, looking for a new book to read, not for the club, just for herself. She's humming quietly. Last Saturday everyone except Al, who had to work, went to the cineplex to see a dramatization of a book they'd read. It was an okay movie, but now the main theme is stuck in her head. She's crouched down to read the spines of the books on the bottom shelf and she can feel the wool of her skirt sliding up her legs. She tugs it down distractedly and reaches for a dark paperback.
Pam opens to the first page and lets herself rock back on her heels as her legs fold under until she's sitting cross-legged on the floor. It's been a long day. Michael was somehow under the impression that it was Chinese New Years and he made everyone eat their food on the floor (despite Dwight's factual protests), and provided mandatory chopsticks. It was a mess, figuratively and literally, and now she's tired and just wants to read a book. This one's apparently about a road trip and she's sucked in from the first sentence.
It's not until the second paragraph that Pam notices the surface she's been leaning against is not the bookcase. She tips her head back and looks up.
“Hi,” he says.
There's an intake of breath and it's like her limbs have stopped working entirely, but somehow she's standing up, her skirt bunched and clinging to her thighs, and the space is so small between the shelves that she has to hold onto him, or maybe he's steadying her, keeping her upright. Their faces are too close and the air between is hazy and thick, and her hair - her whole body it feels like - is fully of static electricity and buzzing like a halo. When he reaches out to touch her face, there's a crack and she flinches back.
Then they're laughing and clutching each other and she feels herself fall back into being Pam again.
“So,” they say at the same time.
It's so surreal, standing with a part of her old life in the middle of her new one. This is Binky's for God's sake. Binky's! Next to his left shoulder is the book Susan picked out for the second week in February. She can hear the ding of cash registers as the employees, who all know her name, ring up purchases. Something about being here, in her world, makes Pam feel especially brave.
She stares at him. He's got his head down and his eyes won't meet hers. His hands are in his pockets again. She puts her own hands on the cotton of his shirt, just above his belt. His breathing slows but he still won't look up. She takes a breath.
“I hate you for leaving,” she says.
His head snaps up and finally, finally, she catches his eye. There's a moment where everything stops, or maybe where everything gets really fast all of a sudden. He stares at her and it swallows her up, that look.
Then his hands are in her hair and she's back against the book case and it's poking into her spine. Her hands fist in his shirt and she melts against him. His lips are on hers and he's holding her steady to keep the angle, even as she twists her back, trying to get away from the shelf. After some squirming, she succeeds in turning him so now she's the one pushing him. Either he's tall enough that the shelf isn't an issue, or he's too engrossed in what he's doing to notice the uncomfortable surface. Much better. She pushes up on her toes to reach him and moves her hands up his chest to his shoulders until her arms can wind around his neck. When her thumbs graze the back of his skull he makes a noise at the back of his throat that she doesn't think she's ever heard before.
Then there's a noise she definitely has heard before. Pam turns, her hands sliding down Jim's shirt, which has come part of the way untucked. The sound comes again, a cross between a cough and a tut.
“Oh, uh,” says Pam, cleverly utilizing the vocabulary of a person who has spent long hours among the company of good books.
“I thought I'd find you here,” Angela says. “I was almost ready to change my mind about joining your book club, even in this -” she glances around disapprovingly, “establishment.”
“Book club?” says Jim, his hands still absently tracing lines across Pam's back.
Angela rolls right over him.
“But clearly, clearly, this is exactly the den of sin I had imagined it would be.”
“No,” says Pam, hurriedly, going into automatic Binky-defending mode. “Binky's isn't a porn store! It just sounds like one because, well, really, that's not important. See, look - ” Pam reaches behind her at random. “Jane Austen!”
“Jane Austen was a very loose woman, Pam,” says Angela. “Have you read Northanger Abbey?”
“No,” Pam has to admit. “I haven't.”
“Sex, all of it. Sex and flirtation.” Angela turns to leave. She spins on her heel, just as she's almost out the door. “Hello, Jim," she sniffs. "I hope you enjoy your debauchery.”
“Shit,” sighs Pam. “I'm going to be at the top of the list for another month.”
Then Jim's fingers thread through hers and she thinks maybe she doesn't mind.