Everything Changes and Nothing Changes (Pam, Jim/Pam) NC-17
Title: Everything Changes and Nothing Changes
Author: rainquenched
Pairing(s)/Characters: Pam, Jim/Pam
Rating: NC-17
Summary: The first night is weird and exciting. The next night her heart is crushed.
Spoilers: The nights before and after "The Merger"
The first night is weird and exciting. Pam goes home that night with a thrill crawling up her spine, her heart beating so hard that she’s sure Phyllis can hear it on the elevator ride down. Michael had said three words about him that day, words that made her knees jump and the cameras push in on her face.
Jim’s coming back.
When she gets home, the apartment is dark and cold and empty as usual, but instead of feeling gray inside, she starts to feel lit up. Maybe not so alone. She drops her purse on the floor and takes a couple of deep breaths and thinks about dinner for a second before re-remembering that oh my God, he’s coming back. She feels like she’s being hit by lightning bolts repeatedly, like she has to keep re-remembering because she can’t believe. She can’t define what this feeling is because it’s too brilliant for her to understand. She wonders what he looks like now and tries hard to remember his smile. It’s been five months since she’s seen him, and one since she’s talked with him. She sinks down on the couch and considers crying, but holds it in and starts rolling down her stockings.
After an hour, being alone inside her apartment is making her restless. She tries calling her mother three times, but hangs up each time after the first ring. For some reason she can’t share this moment with anyone. She feels too opened up right now. But being alone inside this small place with only her thoughts about him and tomorrow is making her hands shake. She tries eating dinner that she can‘t taste, she tries taking a shower. She tries watching television and none of it works, because her mind keeps wandering back. Memories start, memories that make her feel a little less ashamed to work at Dunder Mifflin (because he was there - he is there again).
“God, I feel like I’m in seventh grade,” she whispers next to the flicker of the TV.
---
Her hair is heavy and wet against her back, making a dark stain on her t-shirt, and she flips it over one shoulder and twists it. She presses the pencil down on the sketch pad hard and starts with harsh lines, something she usually doesn’t do. She feels a little bit bolder tonight. She works on a rough sketch of what she can remember of his face and his form. She remembers his laugh in her ear, his fingers biting into her waist, the hunch of his shoulders, the curves of his back and the peaks of his shoulder blades through his dress shirt. She draws him with his hands shoved into his pockets, and none of the lines are straight because her hands are too nervous.
She stops before it’s completely done and scrutinizes it, biting her nails and twisting her head at different angles to see it every which way. She leaves the sketchpad open on her dining room table and tries to forget about it. She wonders if he’s ready to forgive her for what she’s done, or if she’ll even have the courage to apologize for rejecting him. How will they be now? Briefly, she considers if he even has a girlfriend, or if he’ll completely hate her.
She wanders to the bathroom and stares at herself. She needs to change, for him. She needs to be different. She is different, but she needs to let him know. She gently untwists her damp hair from its place at her shoulder and pulls out the hairdryer and curling iron that her mother bought her two years ago, things that she’s never considered using before. Roy had always told her that she was fine and didn‘t need to change. But she wants this to be different. Somehow she wants to compensate for that pretty Pam in the shiny blue dress that kissed Jim, then let go of his hands and refused to look him in the eye. The Pam that nodded toward him when he walked out of Dunder Mifflin for the last time, instead of actually saying goodbye or telling him how much she needed him. She threw away that blue dress after she told Roy ‘no’ for the first time in their relationship, last spring.
It takes her two hours to do her hair, and it’s nothing too drastic, but she feels good about it. She realizes that she has no makeup except for chapstick, which she’s sure doesn’t even count. It’s nine o’clock and she drives to Walgreens and spends a half an hour there, finally grabbing random things because she feels self-conscious, though there’s no one in the store except the old woman at the cash register.
She spends an hour doing her makeup, only to wipe it off in ten minutes. She feels satisfaction burgeoning in her heart, satisfaction that Jim will look at her and think that she’s changed and love her immediately. He’ll somehow implicitly forgive her and they can forget everything and just start over. He’ll ask her out for coffee, or maybe she’ll ask him, and by the next night he’ll be kissing her like he did on that casino night.
It’s midnight before she’s in bed, but she still can‘t sleep. She keeps running her mind over all the plans for tomorrow, making sure to get up very early so she can get everything done and be one of the first to get to the office. She doesn’t know when he’s coming tomorrow, and she has to make sure she’s there to meet him.
The darkness is too dark, and she can feel her pupils constricting and expanding - trying to adjust - so she closes her eyes. She sees his face, one of the last times that she saw him, when he was crying and he said that he loved her. She made him cry, and that makes her heart feel like it’s bending, folding in on itself. She imagines what his heart must have felt like. She’s going to repair it, she’s going to make it better.
She lets herself think about the kiss, something she tried so hard for a long time to ignore. This time she thinks maybe it’s okay to think about, though, maybe even fantasize a little. The way his hair felt against her fingers, the rough stubble underneath her palm. His lips, moist and mashed against hers. His arms, grasping her around her waist so that their bones and flesh were pressed together. What would it feel like to go further than that? To feel naked bone and flesh pressed together? She had thought about it before, but never really let herself acknowledge it.
She feels the heat start, desperate and low inside her belly. Before she knows it, her fingers are creeping between her thighs but it’s really his fingers and it’s okay to think about it now because he’s coming back tomorrow. She doesn’t have to move on or deny.
His eyes would be bright in the darkness, maybe catching some dim light from the street lamps outside of her window. He would pull off her pajamas and place his palm between her thighs. She would skip her fingers along his back, over the prickling shoulder blades and the bumpy spine. He would laugh because he’s ticklish and bend down to kiss her.
He would cup her face and kiss her chin, and her chest, and her lower stomach. And she would feel his hair underneath her fingers again, her fingers would grasp it when he’s making her shoulders shake and her breath come out in short bursts. She would feel his stubble too, against her thighs, but he wouldn’t finish her off with his mouth between her legs.
She would try to keep quiet when he pushes inside of her, and he would whisper to her that she has to be quiet because her landlady might hear and she would want to laugh, but she can’t because it feels too good when he starts moving.
The sounds he would make would turn her on, maybe more than anything else. His breath would push into her ear, and she would clutch his shoulders desperately, wanting him to go faster but not being able to say so. He would push his face into the pillow beside her head and bite it, and she would move upward to make him go faster, and he would.
When she finally starts to come she would let out desperate sounds because she has no control over herself, and he would kiss her and whisper, “do it, do it,” over and over again and she is doing it and it feels right.
She opens her eyes and she’s alone, and her breath is coming back, and her chest is settling down. She doesn’t feel the guilt she usually feels when she thinks about him. She feels relief and stillness, like a lot of pressure has been released.
She lets a few tears escape now, and she can’t pinpoint why she’s crying. Probably out of happiness, or being in love or nostalgia. The nervousness has finally left her body, though, and she can sleep now.
-------------------------------------------------
The next night, her heart is crushed. She drives home slowly and stares into the blinking headlights of cars off in the distance. The heater is off and she’s cold, but doesn’t turn it on to conserve gas. She forgot her gloves at work and her hands are freezing.
She has art class that night, and drives straight to the high school where it’s being held. She’s almost an hour early, but she can’t go back to that empty, colorless apartment. She can’t face her loneliness. Now she knows what it feels like to be held at the mercy of someone else, to be Jim.
The guy in her art class who likes her is there early too. She doesn’t remember his name. He comes up to her with a wide smile. He‘s short and has brown eyes and a crooked smile. It’s not that she doesn’t like him, but they don’t click and he tries too hard to impress her. He doesn’t seem to understand that she’s worn out and in love with someone else. Who is with someone else.
“Hey, Pam - you’re here early.” He puts on this saccharine tone to his voice that repulses her more than usual and she can hardly keep her voice steady enough to talk to him.
“Yeah.”
“So, how’d you do with last week’s assignment? You know, the male form? Who’d you choose?”
“Oh, I…” she pauses for a second and thinks about the shaky sketch lying out in her dining room. “I didn’t do it. I lost my sketchbook.” She lies, and stares at the floor while he moves closer to her in what he must think is a subtle manner.
“Well, don’t worry, I’ll let you borrow some sheets from my sketchbook.” He winks at her, actually winks, and she feels her stomach churn.
“Hey, um,” he clears his throat a little and get this impatient stance and she knows what’s coming but still isn’t prepared for it. “Listen, do you wanna go out sometime? Do you like sea food? Because I know that Cooper’s has a special on Tuesdays…”
“No.” It comes out before she can stop it, because she’s running on autopilot and not really thinking about being polite. She sees this look in his eye and the last thing she needs is for someone else to be let down tonight, so she tries to be more gentle. “I’m-I’m in love with someone else.” The words come out awkwardly because the phrase is awkward. It should be ‘I’m with someone else’, or ‘I have a boyfriend’, or ‘I’m involved’. But she’s doing her best not to lie. She’s been doing enough lying lately (we’re friends, we’ll always be friends).
“I’m sorry.” A weak smile crosses her face. “It’s just - it’s been a really bad day.”
He waits for a second, tapping his fingers against the wooden counter. “Well, we have like thirty minutes - do you wanna talk about it?”
His openness and genuineness take her by surprise, and she says ‘sure’ without thinking it over.
“I’m Alex, by the way,” he says with a knowing smile. She smiles back, hot embarrassment creeping into her cheeks, and wonders how he knew that she forgot.
---
That night is one of the strangest of Pam’s life. The dynamic around her has changed, and she feels changed too, even though it‘s only been a day. She gets back to the apartment complex and everything feels so alien that she almost forgets what door she’s supposed to unlock.
She opened up to a near-stranger tonight, instead of talking to her parents. Jim is there, but he’s not. He’s not the same old Jim, and she’s not the same old Pam and things are so different. Still aching, but not that same old ache.
Alex had asked her if she really felt that Jim didn’t care, or didn’t love her anymore, or even hated her - and she said no. He told her to keep trying, that if they’re working together, then there’s no escape, and eventually things will resurface and heal - or at the very least, there will be closure.
Pam had hugged him tightly, in the vestibule of that high school, and wondered how it was that someone she had seen as repulsive could be so generous and wise.
Maybe she has changed, but she thinks that it’s a good thing, and that eventually both she and Jim will have to look at each other and acknowledge the weird feeling that’s coloring their chemistry, and fix it.
So she goes back into her bathroom that night, wipes off her makeup and prepares to do it all again tomorrow - to show him that she’s different.
Author: rainquenched
Pairing(s)/Characters: Pam, Jim/Pam
Rating: NC-17
Summary: The first night is weird and exciting. The next night her heart is crushed.
Spoilers: The nights before and after "The Merger"
The first night is weird and exciting. Pam goes home that night with a thrill crawling up her spine, her heart beating so hard that she’s sure Phyllis can hear it on the elevator ride down. Michael had said three words about him that day, words that made her knees jump and the cameras push in on her face.
Jim’s coming back.
When she gets home, the apartment is dark and cold and empty as usual, but instead of feeling gray inside, she starts to feel lit up. Maybe not so alone. She drops her purse on the floor and takes a couple of deep breaths and thinks about dinner for a second before re-remembering that oh my God, he’s coming back. She feels like she’s being hit by lightning bolts repeatedly, like she has to keep re-remembering because she can’t believe. She can’t define what this feeling is because it’s too brilliant for her to understand. She wonders what he looks like now and tries hard to remember his smile. It’s been five months since she’s seen him, and one since she’s talked with him. She sinks down on the couch and considers crying, but holds it in and starts rolling down her stockings.
After an hour, being alone inside her apartment is making her restless. She tries calling her mother three times, but hangs up each time after the first ring. For some reason she can’t share this moment with anyone. She feels too opened up right now. But being alone inside this small place with only her thoughts about him and tomorrow is making her hands shake. She tries eating dinner that she can‘t taste, she tries taking a shower. She tries watching television and none of it works, because her mind keeps wandering back. Memories start, memories that make her feel a little less ashamed to work at Dunder Mifflin (because he was there - he is there again).
“God, I feel like I’m in seventh grade,” she whispers next to the flicker of the TV.
---
Her hair is heavy and wet against her back, making a dark stain on her t-shirt, and she flips it over one shoulder and twists it. She presses the pencil down on the sketch pad hard and starts with harsh lines, something she usually doesn’t do. She feels a little bit bolder tonight. She works on a rough sketch of what she can remember of his face and his form. She remembers his laugh in her ear, his fingers biting into her waist, the hunch of his shoulders, the curves of his back and the peaks of his shoulder blades through his dress shirt. She draws him with his hands shoved into his pockets, and none of the lines are straight because her hands are too nervous.
She stops before it’s completely done and scrutinizes it, biting her nails and twisting her head at different angles to see it every which way. She leaves the sketchpad open on her dining room table and tries to forget about it. She wonders if he’s ready to forgive her for what she’s done, or if she’ll even have the courage to apologize for rejecting him. How will they be now? Briefly, she considers if he even has a girlfriend, or if he’ll completely hate her.
She wanders to the bathroom and stares at herself. She needs to change, for him. She needs to be different. She is different, but she needs to let him know. She gently untwists her damp hair from its place at her shoulder and pulls out the hairdryer and curling iron that her mother bought her two years ago, things that she’s never considered using before. Roy had always told her that she was fine and didn‘t need to change. But she wants this to be different. Somehow she wants to compensate for that pretty Pam in the shiny blue dress that kissed Jim, then let go of his hands and refused to look him in the eye. The Pam that nodded toward him when he walked out of Dunder Mifflin for the last time, instead of actually saying goodbye or telling him how much she needed him. She threw away that blue dress after she told Roy ‘no’ for the first time in their relationship, last spring.
It takes her two hours to do her hair, and it’s nothing too drastic, but she feels good about it. She realizes that she has no makeup except for chapstick, which she’s sure doesn’t even count. It’s nine o’clock and she drives to Walgreens and spends a half an hour there, finally grabbing random things because she feels self-conscious, though there’s no one in the store except the old woman at the cash register.
She spends an hour doing her makeup, only to wipe it off in ten minutes. She feels satisfaction burgeoning in her heart, satisfaction that Jim will look at her and think that she’s changed and love her immediately. He’ll somehow implicitly forgive her and they can forget everything and just start over. He’ll ask her out for coffee, or maybe she’ll ask him, and by the next night he’ll be kissing her like he did on that casino night.
It’s midnight before she’s in bed, but she still can‘t sleep. She keeps running her mind over all the plans for tomorrow, making sure to get up very early so she can get everything done and be one of the first to get to the office. She doesn’t know when he’s coming tomorrow, and she has to make sure she’s there to meet him.
The darkness is too dark, and she can feel her pupils constricting and expanding - trying to adjust - so she closes her eyes. She sees his face, one of the last times that she saw him, when he was crying and he said that he loved her. She made him cry, and that makes her heart feel like it’s bending, folding in on itself. She imagines what his heart must have felt like. She’s going to repair it, she’s going to make it better.
She lets herself think about the kiss, something she tried so hard for a long time to ignore. This time she thinks maybe it’s okay to think about, though, maybe even fantasize a little. The way his hair felt against her fingers, the rough stubble underneath her palm. His lips, moist and mashed against hers. His arms, grasping her around her waist so that their bones and flesh were pressed together. What would it feel like to go further than that? To feel naked bone and flesh pressed together? She had thought about it before, but never really let herself acknowledge it.
She feels the heat start, desperate and low inside her belly. Before she knows it, her fingers are creeping between her thighs but it’s really his fingers and it’s okay to think about it now because he’s coming back tomorrow. She doesn’t have to move on or deny.
His eyes would be bright in the darkness, maybe catching some dim light from the street lamps outside of her window. He would pull off her pajamas and place his palm between her thighs. She would skip her fingers along his back, over the prickling shoulder blades and the bumpy spine. He would laugh because he’s ticklish and bend down to kiss her.
He would cup her face and kiss her chin, and her chest, and her lower stomach. And she would feel his hair underneath her fingers again, her fingers would grasp it when he’s making her shoulders shake and her breath come out in short bursts. She would feel his stubble too, against her thighs, but he wouldn’t finish her off with his mouth between her legs.
She would try to keep quiet when he pushes inside of her, and he would whisper to her that she has to be quiet because her landlady might hear and she would want to laugh, but she can’t because it feels too good when he starts moving.
The sounds he would make would turn her on, maybe more than anything else. His breath would push into her ear, and she would clutch his shoulders desperately, wanting him to go faster but not being able to say so. He would push his face into the pillow beside her head and bite it, and she would move upward to make him go faster, and he would.
When she finally starts to come she would let out desperate sounds because she has no control over herself, and he would kiss her and whisper, “do it, do it,” over and over again and she is doing it and it feels right.
She opens her eyes and she’s alone, and her breath is coming back, and her chest is settling down. She doesn’t feel the guilt she usually feels when she thinks about him. She feels relief and stillness, like a lot of pressure has been released.
She lets a few tears escape now, and she can’t pinpoint why she’s crying. Probably out of happiness, or being in love or nostalgia. The nervousness has finally left her body, though, and she can sleep now.
-------------------------------------------------
The next night, her heart is crushed. She drives home slowly and stares into the blinking headlights of cars off in the distance. The heater is off and she’s cold, but doesn’t turn it on to conserve gas. She forgot her gloves at work and her hands are freezing.
She has art class that night, and drives straight to the high school where it’s being held. She’s almost an hour early, but she can’t go back to that empty, colorless apartment. She can’t face her loneliness. Now she knows what it feels like to be held at the mercy of someone else, to be Jim.
The guy in her art class who likes her is there early too. She doesn’t remember his name. He comes up to her with a wide smile. He‘s short and has brown eyes and a crooked smile. It’s not that she doesn’t like him, but they don’t click and he tries too hard to impress her. He doesn’t seem to understand that she’s worn out and in love with someone else. Who is with someone else.
“Hey, Pam - you’re here early.” He puts on this saccharine tone to his voice that repulses her more than usual and she can hardly keep her voice steady enough to talk to him.
“Yeah.”
“So, how’d you do with last week’s assignment? You know, the male form? Who’d you choose?”
“Oh, I…” she pauses for a second and thinks about the shaky sketch lying out in her dining room. “I didn’t do it. I lost my sketchbook.” She lies, and stares at the floor while he moves closer to her in what he must think is a subtle manner.
“Well, don’t worry, I’ll let you borrow some sheets from my sketchbook.” He winks at her, actually winks, and she feels her stomach churn.
“Hey, um,” he clears his throat a little and get this impatient stance and she knows what’s coming but still isn’t prepared for it. “Listen, do you wanna go out sometime? Do you like sea food? Because I know that Cooper’s has a special on Tuesdays…”
“No.” It comes out before she can stop it, because she’s running on autopilot and not really thinking about being polite. She sees this look in his eye and the last thing she needs is for someone else to be let down tonight, so she tries to be more gentle. “I’m-I’m in love with someone else.” The words come out awkwardly because the phrase is awkward. It should be ‘I’m with someone else’, or ‘I have a boyfriend’, or ‘I’m involved’. But she’s doing her best not to lie. She’s been doing enough lying lately (we’re friends, we’ll always be friends).
“I’m sorry.” A weak smile crosses her face. “It’s just - it’s been a really bad day.”
He waits for a second, tapping his fingers against the wooden counter. “Well, we have like thirty minutes - do you wanna talk about it?”
His openness and genuineness take her by surprise, and she says ‘sure’ without thinking it over.
“I’m Alex, by the way,” he says with a knowing smile. She smiles back, hot embarrassment creeping into her cheeks, and wonders how he knew that she forgot.
---
That night is one of the strangest of Pam’s life. The dynamic around her has changed, and she feels changed too, even though it‘s only been a day. She gets back to the apartment complex and everything feels so alien that she almost forgets what door she’s supposed to unlock.
She opened up to a near-stranger tonight, instead of talking to her parents. Jim is there, but he’s not. He’s not the same old Jim, and she’s not the same old Pam and things are so different. Still aching, but not that same old ache.
Alex had asked her if she really felt that Jim didn’t care, or didn’t love her anymore, or even hated her - and she said no. He told her to keep trying, that if they’re working together, then there’s no escape, and eventually things will resurface and heal - or at the very least, there will be closure.
Pam had hugged him tightly, in the vestibule of that high school, and wondered how it was that someone she had seen as repulsive could be so generous and wise.
Maybe she has changed, but she thinks that it’s a good thing, and that eventually both she and Jim will have to look at each other and acknowledge the weird feeling that’s coloring their chemistry, and fix it.
So she goes back into her bathroom that night, wipes off her makeup and prepares to do it all again tomorrow - to show him that she’s different.