He makes a big show of putting his money in the soda machine and pressing the button for the Coke, not allowed to speak until the soda is in her delicate hands. If he was anyone else, he highly doubts that he would play along with this childhood game, but he is who he is, madly in love with an engaged woman. The alternative to playing along is going back to his desk and doing work and that is far less appealing then watching her giddily await her soda.

So when the machine informs him that they are sold out of Coke, the choice to continue with this ruse is an easy decision to make. He knows that she is fiercely competitive and unlikely to back down. He knows that she’ll do everything in her power to get him to break and speak. But he also knows that this means they will interact far more than they usually do (which is already the bulk of their day) and any extra time he can spend with her is well worth not being able to speak for the day. He makes a show of disappointment for the camera, acting like this is bothering him, but deep down inside, he’s eagerly anticipating being the focus of Pam’s attention for the day.

He manages to zone out Kelly’s rambling, despite Pam’s insistence that he finish his conversation. And when Pam tries to trip him up with his story about a family member who got mixed up in the world of drugs, he thinks on his feet, pulling out the fake tears. At this point, he is pretty sure there is nothing that Pam can say or do that would make him talk. He is not going to lose this one.

It seems like they are always having these silly little competitions and an outsider would be surprised by how often he loses to her. Sometimes she legitimately beats him, like the time Michael took the whole office to play miniature golf. Somehow the two of them managed to break off from the rest group and she beat him fair and square. It came down to the last hole and when she sunk a hole-in-one, he didn’t hear the end of it for months. He saved the pencil she used to record their scores on that day and then later included in her Christmas gift.

Then there are the times when he lets her win just so he can see her gloat. On most people, gloating in unattractive, but not when Pam does it. When she does it, it’s adorable. That’s why on the day the two of them organized the Office Olympics, he let her beat him at Schrute Ball, or Skeet Schrueting, or whatever name they had come up with for throwing random objects in Dwight’s coffee mug. He was an avid basketball player and such an activity was easy for him, but he couldn’t help but let her have it, blaming his near misses on Stanley breathing too heavy or the flow of air from the vents in the ceiling.

If he’s being completely honest with himself, he’s tired of losing. Tired of losing to her at these silly games they play and tired of slowly losing her. June 10th is fast approaching and after that, the small glimmer of hope he has of being something more with her is gone. He’s sure that once she is Mrs. Roy Anderson, the dynamic between the two of them will change, but knows that is something he can’t handle. As a result, he’s been perusing the classifieds and online job sites for something new, but never takes the leap of actually applying. He figures the optimist in him will stick around until the big day just to make sure it actually happens. He wouldn’t want to risk leaving and then have the wedding be cancelled.

He watches Dwight walking around with what he is pretty sure is a coffee cup full of his own urine and so badly wants to draw him into something, but remains resolute in not letting her win this one.

It’s when they are alone in the kitchen that he starts to feel himself break. It had started out innocently enough, but escalated quickly. He’s not sure if it’s the pressure of not being able to talk to her all day or how adorable she looks when she is at her most competitive, but it’s out of his control now and he is completely inside of his own head, struggling with all he wants to tell her.

“What?” she asks him with a hint of mischief in her eyes. He shakes his head in response.

“Did you want to tell me something,” she continues, “You look like you want to tell me something.”

He shakes her off again, but his resolve is starting to crack. He wants to speak, to tell her how adorable she is when she is like this. Or maybe he’ll just lean across the table and kiss her. Technically he wouldn’t be breaking the rules in doing that.

“You look like you have something really important to say and you just [i]can’t[/i] for some reason,” she continues to egg him on.

He smiles at her now, careful to keep up the guise that this is all in good fun, but he’s thinking now of [i]the reason[/i] he can’t tell her all the things he feels for her. His eye catches a glint of light off that reason, a small diamond on her left hand from a man who could never love her the way he does, the way he could if given the chance.

“Come on, you can tell me. Jim, you can tell me anything,” she continues and this is his undoing. The smile leaves his face and he looks down, knowing that if he looks her in the eyes, he’s going to lay it all out there. He allows himself just a peek at her face and he notices her expression has changed from playful to serious and in his heart he knows she knows what he’s thinking.

He raises his eyes to meet hers fully, trying to convey without words what is going on in his head. However, he knows that even if she can tell with just a simple look what he is feeling, she will never acknowledge it unless it’s out there in a way that cannot be ignored. He knows this is his chance and it may be the last one he gets before June 10th arrives. He opens his mouth to speak but stops himself when thoughts of Roy’s fist connecting with his face invade his mind. She pushes her chair out announcing that she has to get back to work and he sees his chance slipping away.

“I’m in love with you.”

Jim watches as Pam hovers perfectly still over her chair, half standing, half sitting. It is like his confession has stopped time completely and she is stuck like that until the spell is broken. His vision is locked on her face, but she cannot bring herself to look him in the eye. Slowly, she lowers herself back into her seat with her eyes trained on the table. He wonders if he should say something, but what would he say? He already put it all out there, the ball is in her court now.

Slowly, she lifts her head and begins to laugh. It’s a nervous laugh at first but as the seconds tick by, it turns into a full belly laugh. Her head is thrown back and her eyes are closed. She is laughing so hard, he begins to notice tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. Eventually, her laughter begins to die down to point where she is able to form words.

“Very funny, Jim,” she manages while still giggling, “You can’t say outlandish things just to get out of jinx. What did you think, you’d say something crazy and I would forget? You talked before buying me a coke, I win!”

He knows she knows it wasn’t a joke to get out of this silly game. Her tone is lighthearted, but her face is serious. He has seen this look from her before, on several occasions, when he has accidentally crossed the invisible line between friendship and something more. But, before he has always been able to brush it off or reel it back and they are able to go back to pretending that it didn’t happen and there is nothing more than friendship between the two of them. It’s not a look of annoyance or anger, but of fear. A fear, he suspects, of having to confront this thing, whatever it is, head on. This is how he knows she feels the same way he does. If there were no feelings there, she wouldn’t be so afraid to confront them, he suspects.

“I, umm, I,” Pam is the first to speak, “I have to get back to work. I still want my coke, Halpert, don’t forget.”

With that, she hastily gets up from the table and leaves the kitchen. Jim doesn’t move from his chair. He runs his fingers through his hair several times and rubs the back of his neck. He takes a few minutes to compose himself enough to go back out there and attempt to sell paper. “What have I done?” he asks himself.

They don’t speak the rest of the day. She will glance up on occasion, trying to catch his eye. She needs reassurance that what she said was true. That he was just trying to get out of their game, but the reassurance never comes. He won’t look at her, and he is actually working, something she hardly sees him do. He has been on the phone all afternoon closing sales and making cold calls. When he leaves for the night, he gently taps on her desk and whispers “Goodnight, Pam,” on his way out. He is already out the door before she is able to speak.

Roy comes upstairs to get her a few moments later and she quietly rides home with him. She thinks he is rambling on about something stupid Lonny did today, but she is not paying attention at all. She is in a fog, still trying to process what happened today. What did happen today? She retreated before she could really give him any time to explain. I’m in love with you. There really isn’t any need for him to explain any further.

Roy’s voice snaps her temporarily out of her haze, “So, I said to him, ‘Dude, you can’t use the bailer that way,’ and he stopped,” Roy was finishing his story as they pulled into the driveway, “So, anyway, what’s for dinner?”

“Huh?” Pam managed, “Oh, I took out some chicken earlier, I’m just going to bake it.”

“Chicken again, huh?” Roy does little to hide his disappointment, “Well, I’ll let you get to that. I’ll be in front of the TV with my beer.”

Pam starts preparing their dinner almost on auto-pilot. Cooking dinner is the last thing she wants to do right now, but if she doesn’t, no one will and then she will have to listen to Roy complain about how hungry he is. God forbid he picks up on the fact that she’s not feeling herself tonight and actually offer to get some takeout or better yet, cook her a meal.

She’s seasoning the chicken when her mind drifts to a day a few weeks ago. She had woken up with an awful cold. Her nose was stuffed up and red, she was coughing, her throat was sore and raw, and she ached all over. Either Roy hadn’t noticed or he didn’t care because when she told him she was going to call out sick he told her not to waste a day for no reason. She figured she must have been over reacting and that he was right, deciding to go to work anyway.

Jim had noticed as soon as he walked into the office that she wasn’t feeling well and after some good natured teasing about her red nose, he attempted to talk her into leaving for the day. “It would be silly to waste a day off for no reason,” she had told him. “It’s not a waste of a day off when you’re this sick, Pam,” he reasoned, “You should be home taking swigs of Nyquil and sleeping all day.” He had been unsuccessful in convincing her to go home. Around 10 o’clock he had told her he was using his 15 minute break to run a quick errand. He came back with a bag from Wegmans, handing it to her. Inside there was a bottle of Dayquil, a bag of cough drops, a box of tissues, a box of her favorite flavored tea bags, and a large container of hot, store made chicken noodle soup. She looked up at him, a question in her eye, but before she could thank him, he spoke, “If you’re going to be stubborn and stay here like this, you’re going to need some supplies.”

She had thought that day about what a great friend Jim had been to use his own time and money to do something so thoughtful for her. There had been countless times when Jim had done something similar for her over the years and she had always chalked it up to him being a good friend, convincing herself that he would do the same for anyone. She knows now that he was doing those things out of love, not just friendship.

She thought hard, trying to remember a time when Roy had been so thoughtful and came up with nothing. The sound of Roy yelling at the television snaps her from her thoughts. She glances down at the chicken she is preparing, noticing that in her daydreaming she has managed to way over season it and effectively ruin it. She throws the raw chicken in the garbage can and heads to the bedroom. She can’t possibly eat now anyway. She curls up on the bed and retrieves her sketchbook from her nightstand and begins to sketch. She is about halfway done with a sketch of her bedside lamp when Roy enters the room.

“Hey, babe,” his voice booms, “What happened to dinner?”

She knows to expect this from him, but she can’t help but feel angry at him.

“I just need some time to relax,” she tells him, “Just give me a few minutes to draw and I’ll figure something out.”

“Well, it’s getting late, and I’m getting hungry,” her persists, “So why don’t you put your silly book away and make me some dinner?”

She is beyond angry now. He is always doing this, brushing off her artistic pursuits as “silly” or “stupid.” She can’t help but think of Jim again. He had always been the biggest fan of her art, sometimes believing in her more than she did herself. One day he had brought in a flier about a contest for local artists, encouraging her to enter. In the end, she had decided against it after Roy had brushed it off, much like he did when she had the opportunity for the graphic design internship. She will never forget the hurt in Jim’s eyes on both of those occasions.

She has all the evidence she needs that Jim wasn’t joking when he told her he was in love with her. He’s always in touch with what is going on with her, he’s attentive and supportive and everything that Roy hasn’t been the last few years. If she’s being completely honest with herself, she had unknowingly slowly fallen in love with Jim over the past few years and allowed him to fill in the gaps where her relationship with Roy had been lacking.

“Roy,” it comes out barely a whisper, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”