Pam yawned. It was a slow day in the office. Twenty games of FreeCell, another ten of standard Windows solitaire, and now three of Minesweeper were all she had to show for six hours of sitting in front of her computer. No phone calls. No copies. Not even a patented Michael Scott “emergency” for her to solve by pulling out the crayons and construction paper she always kept hidden under the lip of her desk (right next to Dwight’s nunchucks that he thought she didn’t know about). Nothing.

She tapped her fingers on the desk. The day had started so promisingly, too: oh, not promising of actual productivity, but Michael had bounced into the office excitedly, even on time for once, telling her that a new salesman was supposed to start today and they had to get everything ready. In the first thirty minutes of the workday, she’d helped him set up the VCR in his office (“no, Pam, the break room isn’t a sufficiently intimate setting. Why are you looking at me like that?”) and for the first hour after that he had been bouncing in and out of the reception area looking for “Jimbo” to come by. He’d had her call his number three times, but no one picked up and the voicemail box was full. When it had gradually appeared that he wasn’t coming, though, Michael had retreated into his office and—to her shock, awe, and amazement—actually buckled down to work, apparently as a cure for his disappointment, leaving her alone to do…well, nothing, actually, but it was a nice change from his usual demeanor.

Hm, maybe she should make sure people disappointed him more often.

But no, Michael wasn’t likely to react to disappointment the same way twice. Certainly not the same productive way twice. So if she engineered another disappointment, it was almost certain that she’d spend the whole day fending off his frantic energy, rather than getting time to herself like today. She should just accept this day as a gift, a boring but nonetheless pleasant gift, and resign herself to whatever tomorrow might bring.

It would have been nice to have someone else in the office, though, she thought. Someone to sit across from Dwight and draw some of his fire, maybe—although today even Dwight had been more normal than usual, taking his cue from his boss’s unusual quietude. Maybe the new guy would be someone she could be friends with. She hadn’t really had a friend in the office since…well, ever. She’d tried with Meredith, but the only way she’d been able to keep up with her drinking had been to slip Roy half her drinks, and that had backfired when he’d gotten sloppy drunk and wanted to “do it” in the bathroom stall. While she was pooping. They hadn’t gone out much after that. Phyllis was like a mother figure, but the kind of mother (quite unlike her own) who had strange-but-high expectations and was equally likely to randomly scold her for wearing a top that was too revealing (when really, it didn’t even expose her throat, let alone her breasts) or bake her an unprompted tray of cookies. Better to keep her at arms length. And Kelly…well, Kelly was technically her friend, but everyone, even the temp, knew that Kelly was best in small doses. Very small. Angela was out, as were the various men in the office: too weird, too creepy, too shy.

Well, there was Roy, of course, but for all he was her fiancé, he wasn’t really her friend. They’d never had that kind of relationship, even growing up. They were comfortable together, of course, and the sex wasn’t bad, and she was happy. Dammit, she was. But she wasn’t going to go crying on his shoulder if something went wrong, or anything, and God forbid she try to make small talk while the game was on. And his friends…well, Darryl wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t her friend, and the rest of them were on the same no-fly list as her own male colleagues.

It would have been nice to have a friend. Her first thought was to say that if this guy was willing to work for Michael Scott he was probably in the same bucket as all the rest, but then he hadn’t shown up, and that boded well for his sanity and general friend-possibility, except that (Catch-22 alert!) if he never showed up for work wasn’t ever going to be her friend, was he? And anyway, there was no reason to think he’d even want to be her friend. She was plain, boring, yawny Pam, and even if there was a cool, not creepy, normal person in the office they’d probably have cool, not creepy, normal friends of their own and not want to spend their time with a coworker.

It was really a shame Dwight had gotten the IT guy to uninstall the pinball game they used to have on these computers. “Unethical depiction of gambling” my ass, she thought, then snorted at the fact that she’d been reduced to mental cursing by the boring nature of the day. Fortunately no one seemed to notice the snort—the last thing she needed was a harangue from Dwight about “distracting behavior” or another lecture from evil-mom-Phyllis about ladylike behavior. Not that Phyllis herself was super ladylike, but sometimes these things seemed to trigger in her—maybe as self-protection from Angela.

And here was Michael, about to make her life hell…or not, as he shrugged on his coat and headed out the door with a surprisingly subdued “bye Pam.” She glanced at the clock and realized with a shock that it was 4:58, and indeed the exodus had begun: Stanley out the door as soon as Michael cleared it, then Kevin, Kelly, and the rest. Even Toby, who often stayed late to finish confidential paperwork without other people lingering over his shoulder, was out the door by 5:07.

But not Pam.

No, Pam was waiting for Roy Anderson to remember he had a fiancé and come up the stairs from the warehouse to get her, since they carpooled every day from the house they lived in. Like they had for the past three years. And yet, once again, Roy was not here as the clock ticked over to 5:15, then 5:20. Pam had a sinking feeling in her stomach, and crossed over to the window, peeking out of the blinds to discover that, yes, once again, Roy’s truck was not where he’d left it this morning when they pulled in (shockingly) on time.

Roy had left her.

Again.

Just as she was about to pick up the receiver and call home (hoping against hope that she wouldn’t then be immediately dialing Poor Richard’s to actually find him), the phone rang for the first time that day.

“Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam.”

“Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam.”

Shit, Jim Halpert thought. Shit shit shit shit shit. No one was supposed to be there. That was the plan. Wait until after 5pm (not hard, given that he’d spent the whole day running around trying desperately to figure out where his sister Larissa had gone when she disappeared from her college dorm, only to find out she’d been in the library with her phone dead the whole time. Mom and Dad needed to learn how to chill—and apparently, so did he). Let everyone who worked at the place he was supposed to be starting at today leave (he didn’t think this would take very long: his impression of Michael Scott as a boss was that it was probably a struggle to wait for the clock to hit five, but hey a job was a job). Call in, leave voicemail pretending to be extremely sick, promise to come in tomorrow (thank God for “twenty-four-hour flu”), show up tomorrow and trust that Michael wasn’t organized enough to be mad at him. Done and done.

But no, apparently someone was there, still answering the phones at 5:30.

Someone who was still waiting for him to respond. And since he couldn’t be sure when she’d leave, he probably couldn’t count on just calling back and leaving a voicemail either. He cleared his throat.

“Uh, hi. This is Jim Halpert?” He cursed himself for making it a question, then cursed again when he realized he hadn’t managed to make himself sound sick in the slightest—and this being a real person, she’d probably notice if he dropped his voice an octave and started suddenly sniffling next time he spoke.

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I caught that, Jim.” He heard a ghost of a laugh in the voice, which wrapped itself in a little tendril around his brain stem and whispered “interesting.” She’d apparently heard him cursing, but it (hopefully) amused her rather than distressing her.

“Uh…” Since when was he this tongue-tied? He was Jim Halpert, bullshitter extraordinaire. He’d once convinced his parents that the tooth fairy’s going rate at his school was $5 a tooth. He’d gotten out of a course requirement at the University of Scranton by pretending he already spoke French—and passed the oral exam. He’d even made his new boss think he was actually excited about selling paper. He could do anything. So why couldn’t he lie to this woman on the phone? “I was rather hoping you hadn’t heard that.”

“Heard what?” That ghost of a laugh was now well on its way to reincarnation, and he was beginning to think that maybe that ought to be his goal from now on. “What can I do for you, Jim Halpert?” He liked hearing her say his name. Which was weird, given that they’d only exchanged about ten words, at least three of which were him blindly cursing.

“I, uh, was supposed to start work there today.”

“Oh, you’re Jimbo!” The laugh was now alive, awake, and doing cartwheels down the street. “I was wondering where you’d got to.”

“Yeah, about that…”

“Do you want me to tell Michael you were sick?” She paused, and he spent the pause wondering how it was that she instinctively knew what he’d been planning to say, but dismissed the thought as absurd. Everyone calls in sick. It didn’t require much of a leap. “Or I could just say you’re dead. Then you wouldn’t have to come in at all.” He heard a little gasp, as if she’d just heard what she’d said. “Not that I don’t want you to come in at all. Not that I do want you to come in, I mean it’s just that, well, when you come in you’ll have to meet your deskmate, Dwight, and there’ s really just no coming back from that. Though I suppose you’ve already met Michael and you were planning to come in anyway…you can stop me at any time, you know.”

He grinned, not that she could see it. He liked her rambling, and he really liked the way it made her voice go from the artificially bright, cheerful sound she’d clearly been forcing when she answered the phone to something much more human—and appealing. Could you fall in love with a voice? “Oh, no, far be it from me to stop someone on such a roll. Let me see, where were we: I’m dead, Dwight (whoever he is) is apparently a menace…did he kill me, I wonder?...and we apparently share the same opinion of our boss. Did I get all that right?”

She giggled lightly. “Just about. Although it’s probably not fair to Michael to compare him to Dwight. Dwight’s…well, if you decide not to be dead, you’ll meet him, and I really don’t think I can do justice to that experience. But Michael’s harmless.”

Jim plopped down in a chair, leaned back, and crossed his legs. “Implying Dwight isn’t?”

“Let’s just say there’s a reason that the available desk is across from his.”

“Is it across from yours too?” He hadn’t flirted this shamelessly since he was in grade school and thought Gilbert Blythe and Anne Shirley were the ideal model for a relationship, with all the braid-pulling and slate-breaking that implied.

“Uh…actually, yes.” Could you hear someone blush over a phoneline?

“Then I guess I’d better not be dead.” When she didn’t immediately reply, he panicked and filled the dead air. “I, uh, wouldn’t want to smell up your work area with my zombie stench or anything.”

“I hate to break it to you, Jimbo, but zombies aren’t dead.”

“Excuse me, Pam? Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, I think you’ll find dead right there in the name. And I prefer Jim.”

“Sorry, Jim, but George Romero didn’t know what he was talking about. Zombies are clearly undead, and you know un trumps dead.”

“So picky.” He recrossed his legs the other way, trying to distract himself from just how comfortable he was feeling with this stranger on the phone. “Are you suggesting, then, that my dead stench would be somehow worse than a zombie’s?”

“Your words, not mine. But yes.” He felt as if she’d stuck her tongue out at him.

“All the more reason for me not to be dead then.”

“So…”

“Yes?”

“If you’re not dead, and you aren’t sick, why did you miss work today? Michael missed you, you know.” She giggled again. “He says you’re his best friend.”

He rolled his eyes. “Is he the reason you were calling me Jimbo?”

“Yes.”

“Then he’s not my best friend.” He tried to find an excuse, but for some reason his normal bullshit faculties still weren’t working. So he prevaricated. “I never said I wasn’t sick.”

She laughed—not a giggle, not a laugh hidden in the depths of her words, but a full-on belly laugh—and he felt a strange sensation in his chest. “I think we’re beyond that, don’t you, Jim?”

“I suppose so.” He sighed, deliberately extending the sigh so it would be audible through the phone. “If you must know, I was helping my parents track down my elusive sister.”

“Is she on the lam?”

He chuckled. “Yes, in the very dangerous and deadly realm of the University of Scranton library.”

“Why did you have to track her down there?” She sounded puzzled.

“Because my mom is easily frightened, my sister is the baby of the family, she only started freshman year two days ago, and she doesn’t remember to charge her phone.”

“And you were at home?”

“And I was at home.” He shook his head. “Good thing I’m moving out next week, assuming Michael doesn’t fire me so I have a source of income.” Mark had been making noises about wanting a roommate for forever, and while Jim loved his parents, he had no desire to become the third side of a triangle that included their empty-nest syndrome and his sister’s newfound discovery of independence.

“Nice. I remember when I moved out of the house. I suddenly developed a much greater appreciation for my parents when I didn’t have to live with them, and…well, anyway, it was nice to move out.”

He wondered what she’d been about to say. “Yeah. I’m looking forward to it.” He shrugged. “Anyway, that’s my story. Six hours of wandering around campus followed by twenty minutes of my sister making fun of me for forgetting she’s a bookworm. How was work?” He put the phone down for a moment and buried his head in his lap. How inane a question could you ask? He must sound completely pathetic. Which, to be fair, he was, since he desperately didn’t want the conversation to end even though he’d now ostensibly achieved the purpose of the call.

“Work was…work.” She sounded hesitant, but then brightened. “You’ll find out tomorrow, won’t you? No death?”

“Not any that I’m planning at any rate.”

“Good.” She went on quickly as if she’d revealed something with that word. “We should definitely find a way to spin your little adventure when Michael asks tomorrow.”

Bullshit the boss? This was a woman after his own heart—which was dangerous, since he was already hanging on her every word. “Like how?”

“Hmm…it’s always best to stick as close as possible to the truth. How about this: you were called away for a very important meeting with a member of the university community on behalf of neighborhood interests.”

“Not bad. Although that makes it sound like I’m a politician or something.”

“Is that a problem?”

“No, I’m just not sure I could sustain it. How about this instead: I building close connections with individuals in the university library, for the betterment of Dunder Mifflin.”

“Then he’ll expect you to make a sale.”

“Oh yeah. Good point.”

“Could you?”

“Make a sale? I don’t know. I’ve never tried before.”

“What a great job opportunity this is turning out to be, then.” They both laughed, and Jim made a decision.

“You know, what the hell, I’ll…” and the line went dead.

What the hell indeed, he thought.

Pam was startled to hear the line go dead, and looked up to see a very annoyed Roy leaning over her desk, his finger still depressing the receiver to hang up the phone.

“Who the fuck was that?” he growled, and she stifled a sigh. When Roy got like this—“tipsy,” her mom had called it, “standing drunk” her dad had answered, and “just relaxed” Roy always insisted, which was to say, in her own terms, just drunk enough to be incapable of a mature conversation and just sober enough that a bar wouldn’t confiscate his keys—she had to be very careful of what she said and did. Not that he’d hurt her! He hadn’t ever hurt her, and she didn’t really think he would. But she’d started having to have those little internal debates where she had to assure herself that, no, he really wouldn’t, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Not that she was going to let him see that.

Oh god, what had he seen? Not that there was anything for him to see, of course. She was just on the phone with a coworker—or a future coworker at any rate—and she’d…well, she’d been laughing, which she hadn’t done that much of recently, but she hadn’t actually said anything wrong, had she? Silly thought, that. What would she say that was wrong? It was just an innocent conversation about zombies and Michael and a sister who went to Scranton (she wondered if Jim’s sister was in any of the same classes as her own sister, Penny). It was innocent. It was fun. It had been too long since she’d had innocent fun, honestly. Painting in the basement while Roy was out with his friends didn’t count.

So there was nothing to feel guilty about, nothing at all. Nothing even to reflect on to not feel guilty about, so why was she thinking about feeling guilty? No reason, she decided. She was just flustered by the unexpected appearance of her fiancé, that was all. The happiness and excitement you were supposed to feel when your one true love came by would be along in a minute. After all, Roy was her one true love, wasn’t he? She’d been in love with him since elementary school: the big, strong, popular kid that everyone could see was going to grow up to be the star football player and then did. It had been a dream come true (she’d actually pinched herself) when he’d lumbered up to her table in the cafeteria in tenth grade and asked her to homecoming; she’d pinched herself again when he’d promised they’d stay together after graduation; she’d been giddy when he’d proposed a year ago, after five years of dating. All her friends were jealous, not because they didn’t think she deserved him (when she’d voiced this concern Izzy had smacked her arm and said if anything he didn’t deserve her, which was nonsense of course but it was nice to have friends who believed in you) but because she and Roy had found each other so early, had stuck it out through thick and thin, and were just so lucky. It was one of those stories you told the grandchildren, a fairytale romance.

Unwanted, the memory of actually reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales in English class flashed through her mind.

But she hadn’t cut off a toe to marry Roy…not that they were married. Yet. They’d had some difficulty picking a wedding date, true, and she still didn’t have a proper engagement ring (he’d proposed at the dinner table on Thanksgiving, breaking the wishbone with her and asking her to be his wife as his wish. She hated public proposals, even in front of family, but she still had the wishbone, preserved and wrapped in a handkerchief in her sock drawer). But they were going to get married. It was what she most wanted in the world.

None of these were particularly new thoughts, though they didn’t usually come in such a horde all together, and they ran through Pam’s mind rapidly in the instant after she noticed Roy’s presence, along with a brief shock that she’d somehow failed to notice him come in. She must have been more wrapped up in her phone call—her innocent, no-guilt phone call—than she’d realized. She knew she had to respond to Roy quickly, because he got testy when he thought she was ignoring him, and missing his entrance into Dunder Mifflin was a bad start.

“Just a new employee who needed some orientation help.” It was probably a good thing her brain, or at least her mouth, was still in Michael-managing mode after that conversation. She didn’t like to think what it meant that the two men in her life, her boss and her fiancé, both needed “managing,” but at least she was good at it. “I was trying to convince him that Michael isn’t that bad.” Well, no, she hadn’t. She’d assured him that Michael was harmless, true, but only after she’d made it much more clear than she usually let herself do that he was not the easiest boss to work for. But turning from her own perceived misdeeds to Michael’s was usually a good way to get Roy off the scent. Again, she deliberately avoided taking that thought any further than it had already gone.

Fortunately, the technique was one she used often for a reason: it worked. “Fuckin’ Scott.” Roy leaned back and released the phone receiver, which clicked back loudly in the empty office. He narrowed his eyes. “Why was he calling so late?”

“He said something about having a meeting at the university.” She shrugged. “Not my problem, but I was still here, so I had to answer the phone.”

“Why were you still here?” Roy looked puzzled and still somewhat disgruntled. “Thought you were coming with us to Poor Richard’s.”

Before she could come up with a response to that that wasn’t snappish—exactly how had he thought she was getting to Poor Richard’s when he took the truck and left her?—he went on. “Darryl noticed you weren’t there and gave me shit ‘til I went back to you.” He reached for her hand. “Show him.”

She stood up without his help. “Are you really OK to drive?” She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth.

“’Course I am.” He didn’t sway as they walked out of the office together, but she could smell the alcohol on his breath. “I got here, didn’t I?”

The rest of that night was a pretty typical night, in Pam’s experience. She and Roy got themselves to Poor Richard’s, Roy made a production of bringing her to the booth where the other warehouse guys were sitting (“See, Darryl, I can take care of my woman”) and then wandered off to play darts, and she slowly sipped a single beer while watching the guys (and Madge) finish off pitchers. She drove Roy home, tucked him into bed, and watched old movies on one of the local access stations until she felt tired herself and trudged upstairs to join him.  She set out the next day’s clothes on her dresser, remembering that Roy always had a rough head the night after a Poor Richard’s outing and would probably be running late, and at the last minute decided to switch out her brown cardigan for a pink, somewhat less sacklike article. After all, she had a new coworker coming in tomorrow. It was important to make a good first impression.

Jim was glad his mother spent her whole evening puttering around the kitchen nattering at him about Larissa, because it simultaneously gave him something to focus on and didn’t actually require anything more from him than occasionally shaking his head and repeating “she was fine, Mom.” He dutifully scooped cookie dough, put damp towels over rising bread, stirred the chili on the stove—Betsy Halpert compensated for nerves by making ridiculous amounts of food—and did his duty to Larissa by refusing to let anything his mother said about immaturity go unchallenged, but his mind was whirling and his heart wasn’t really in his parents’ house.

Who was she? Obviously she was one of his coworkers—his new coworkers, not the guys at the Sheetz he’d worked at in high school and gone back to part-time so Mom and Dad would get off his back after college—but in what capacity? She’d answered the phone on the number that Michael had given him, so maybe she was his secretary or assistant or something? But then again, he didn’t think Dunder Mifflin was the kind of place that had executive assistants or personal secretaries, for all that Michael had tried to posture at their interview at the Starbucks. And he vaguely remembered the number being the same one he’d seen for the main Scranton branch when he’d first seen the ad on Craigslist. So she’d probably been answering the main line, which made her…what? The receptionist, or just the last person in the office? Obviously, of course, he’d find out tomorrow, but he was too excited to let it go at that. Maybe she was in sales, like him? She had said her desk was across from his, as well as this Dwight she’d told him about, so they were clearly working near to each other—he was looking forward to finding out what she looked like—and she’d teased him (he was pretty sure it was teasing) about Michael insisting that he make a sale if he’d been at the university today. So she clearly knew about how Dunder Mifflin did sales—but then again, it was a sales branch, so even the HR manager (tflenderson@dundermifflin.com) he’d been emailing with probably knew that much about sales. So she could be anyone. But he’d be working with her, no matter what, and he’d hear that voice again, and if he was very lucky he might get to make her laugh again. In fact, he was pretty sure he’d be doing more work on that than on paper sales, if his impressions about Michael Scott’s efficiency as a boss were confirmed.

What did she look like? He felt a little guilty wondering about this: if she was really the person he’d come to believe she was over the phone, it shouldn’t matter. In fact, he perversely hoped her face wasn’t as beautiful as her personality. That would greatly increase the odds that she was single—and he was very sure that he wanted her to be single. Though again, if she could impress him this much in twenty minutes on the phone, what were the chances she hadn’t had that effect on someone else who’d actually met her in person? No matter what she looked like, he was glad her desk was near his. And if she was as pretty as she was awesome? He’d just have to hope she was straight and all the other men she’d ever met were idiots.

What had happened at the end there? This was the thought he kept coming back to, even as he tried his hardest not to think about it at all. Why had she hung up? Why had the line rung through as busy when he’d tried to call back, but then gone to voicemail when no one picked up after he gave into the irresistible temptation and called back a few minutes later? It was probably nothing. She’d probably gotten another call on the line and just realized that the (extremely pleasant) light-hearted conversation they’d been having wasn’t actually her job, and switched calls without telling him. Or maybe she carpooled with someone and they’d been waiting for her and she’d had to run. Or maybe…but there was no maybe that fit the facts he could come up with that explained why she didn’t just say goodbye. Unless she’d dropped the phone—but then why hadn’t she picked up five minutes later? It bothered him, like a sore tooth, and he couldn’t keep from flicking it with his tongue. Metaphorically speaking, of course, although he’d just caught himself actually flicking his front tooth with his tongue. Not even licking his lips, which would have been appropriate to the cheesecake he was pulling out of the oven (Larissa’s non-mishap had really put Mom off-balance if she was breaking out the cheesecake) but probing his tooth like he had after biting down on a fork when he was fourteen and it had taken the dentist himself to assure him he wouldn’t need surgery, it would just hurt for a while.

He sat down at the kitchen table with one of the cookies and a glass of milk and tried to remind his mother again that Larissa had promised to definitely 100% for-sure charge her cellphone next time, and was it really that bad that his little sister actually liked college homework enough to spend the whole day in the library? There was some serious irony, he told her, to the fact that she’d spent twelve years between them (with some overlap, of course) telling him and Pete and Tom that they needed to spend more time studying, and now that Larissa actually wanted to study she was saying exactly the opposite. “Where was this when I was in school?” he teased, knowing from the way she bit her lip that his mother was fighting laughter. “Oh Jim,” he added in the high-pitched voice he’d used to imitate her ever since he could remember. “Please don’t spend your time in the library! Couldn’t you just go to another party? Maybe a rave or an orgy?”

“I do not sound like that.” No, his mother had sounded panicked in a way that he didn’t want to make her remember, but now she sounded like his Mom again.

“Do too.” He smiled at her and grabbed a second cookie. “At least, Larissa assures me so. I certainly never got that kind of lecture from you. It was all ‘are you sure you need to join that club?’ and ‘what about your classes, Jimmy?’” He took another cookie. “L’s gonna be fine, Mom. You just have to let her do her own thing. Even if that thing is,” he shuddered artistically, “studying.”

“Oh, Jimmy.” His mother looked over at him kindly and handed him a third cookie. “Your Dad and I just wanted you not to end up working at the Sheetz for the rest of your life.” She put a hand to her mouth and gasped. “Wait…wasn’t this supposed to be your first day at that new place—Dunder Mathlin or something? You didn’t miss it because of me, did you?”

“Mifflin, Mom.” He ate the cookie before answering her question. “And yeah…but I called in. It’s all good.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” He leaned back in his chair. “I’ll just start tomorrow. I think I’m going to like working there.” At least if that receptionist or whatever she is is single. “It’ll all be OK.”

“I hope so, Jimmy. I really hope so.” His mother slapped his hand as he reached for a fourth cookie. “The rest of those are for your Dad and Larissa.”

“Mom, Larissa doesn’t even live here anymore.”

“I know, but I’m going to send her a care package.”

“You never sent me…” whatever he’d been about to say was lost in a laugh as his mother mimed throwing another cookie at him to get him to shut up.

Pam was surprised to discover that she was actually more frustrated with Roy when she woke up than she had been when she went to bed. At first she’d just sort of chalked up the evening before to typical Roy: a bit thoughtless, a bit self-centered, but basically still the man she had been with for her entire adult life and planned to spend the rest of it with as well. Sure, he’d gone out with the boys and left her, but he’d come back for her, hadn’t he? And that meant he hadn’t gone back out without her, and even though she hadn’t really enjoyed the night at Poor Richard’s, it was better than sitting at home waiting for him to come back.

But when she woke up she found herself remembering the details, not the large strokes. How he’d taken it upon himself to hang up on that nice new coworker of hers, and how he’d acted like nothing was wrong or different about that. Not that it was actually that different, now that she thought about it, he’d definitely done that before, but not at work—only when she was on the phone with her mom, or Izzy, or Penny, and they’d just call back.

Actually why was it that Jim hadn’t called back? Or had he? Roy had hustled her out of the office pretty quickly, so it was quite possible he had. Maybe there’d be a voicemail on the machine? She wasn’t sure why she hoped that was true so very much, but there it was. She was definitely looking forward to checking, and even if there wasn’t, well, he was supposed to be at work with her today, wasn’t he? All her thoughts from the day before returned full force—maybe he’d actually be a nice person! He’d certainly seemed like on one the phone, and she was just dying for some actual conversation during the day.

Of course, they got into work fifteen minutes late, because Roy still hadn’t learned that drinking on a weeknight meant that you still had to get up the next morning even if you had a hangover, and he was still her ride. Oh, she could drive the truck, but if she drove it without him what would he do? Besides, she didn’t actually like driving it. Her feet barely reached the pedals, and the stupid mirror wouldn’t adjust off of Roy’s eye level so she never knew what was coming behind her. So she’d let him drive, which meant waiting for him to run the shower until he could think again before he drank three cups of coffee and they piled into the pickup for work.

Fifteen minutes late meant that she didn’t really get a chance to check for that voicemail, because when she walked in, already cringing from the dressing down that she was expecting from Dwight for being late for the second time in four days, and fifth time this month, she was confronted with an extremely foreign scene. Instead of Dwight staring her down and tapping his watch as she pushed through the door, she saw a pair of wide shoulders, stretching out the back of a white, lightly patterned button-down that seemed made for a slightly larger man. Her eyes involuntarily slid down to the pair of brown slacks that encased what she could not deny was a very attractive butt. Her cheeks burned and she moved her eyes rapidly up (and up—this guy was tall) to the lightly curling hair at the back of his neck where his slightly-too-long haircut met the collar on his shirt. She had always liked men’s hair a little long—Roy had always kept his cut short, ever since he’d needed to stuff it inside a football helmet every day, and one of their few out and out fights had come when she’d tried to convince him that now that he wasn’t a high schooler  he could, you know, maybe, possibly, grow it out? Just a bit?—and she found herself wanting to run her fingers through this, settling that little excess curl on the outside of the collar, where right now a little bit of it dipped down inside onto his neck.

“Pam!” Dwight’s insistent voice cut through her reverie, and she jerked alert at the realization that she’d just been ogling the back of a man she didn’t even know. “Finally! Tell our new colleague” he almost spat the word, “to keep his hands to himself.”

Normally, Pam Beesly was not the sort of woman who looked for innuendo in someone else’s words, least of all Dwight’s—working for Michael Scott had cured her of that if she’d ever had the inclination—but now she found her cheeks burning for the second time that day.

“Pam?” The lanky stranger turned around, revealing a wide grin and thrusting forward a very large hand that she stared at for a moment like it was a python, involuntarily imagining it very much not being kept to itself. “Jim Halpert.” When she didn’t take his hand immediately he pulled it back in a first and coughed into it. “We, uh, talked on the phone?”

“Oh!” She fluttered. She never fluttered. What was wrong with her? “Right. Yes. Hi. Pam.” She stuck out her hand and he took it into his and she stared at the way her hand disappeared into his. “I am Pam.” Good god what was wrong with her. I am Pam? What was she, Groot? “Pam Beesly.” Great, now she sounded like James Bond instead.

“Pam?” Dwight was glaring, she wasn’t sure if it was at her or Jim or just at the world. “You know this man?”

“Now, now Dwight.” Jim half-turned, not releasing her hand. “We’re all colleagues here, after all.” He winked at Pam and lowered his voice. “You were right, by the way.”

“About what?” Dwight sounded suspicious, but then again, Dwight always sounded suspicious.

“Oh, Beesly here was just telling me how much of an impression you were going to make on me, Dwight.” Jim squeezed her hand and released it before turning to Dwight with a smirk. “And she was right.”

“Is that why you stole my stapler?”

“I didn’t steal it, Dwight.” He rolled his eyes. “You told me I needed to staple my HR forms before I brought them into the back, and…”

“And you stole my stapler.”

“And I assumed that since there was only one stapler in sight when you were telling me to staple my papers, I should use it.”

“You assumed incorrectly.”

“Yes, I see that now.” Jim turned back to her and rolled his eyes before grinning. “So, Beesly, do you know where I can find a stapler without being informed that I was violated three local statutes?”

“Four.” She found her voice and grinned up at him. This was Jim? This was the cool guy from the phone last night? This guy was going to be sitting across from her every day? “The last time I tried to borrow Dwight’s stapler he told me there were four relevant statutes.”

“My apologies. Four.” He mock-bowed to her and she giggled before skipping—yes, skipping, what had gotten into her?—behind her desk and pulling out the stapler she had kept there ever since Dwight had last threatened her about “office supply malfeasance.”

“You can use this one.”

She was gorgeous.

He’d actually been afraid to turn around when Dwight had said her name, because he was already a ball of nerves about her. He’d been disappointed when she wasn’t there when he came in (by triangulation from Dwight’s desk, which had a large sign saying “Property of Dwight K. Schrute” on it, he’d been easily able to tell which desk was his, and then by process of elimination hers) and then the forms he had to fill out and his instinctive reaction to Dwight’s ridiculousness (which she had by no means exaggerated) had distracted him, but she was never far from his thoughts. Even as he was doing his level best to inject some sanity into his interaction with his bossy, loud new coworker (who was definitely not the Assistant Manager, no matter what he said: Michael had been very clear that ‘the assistant manager position is currently vacant, wink wink nudge nudge say no more’ during the interview—and yes, he had said those words aloud), he was also wondering where she was and what she looked like. He still wasn’t sure whether he wanted her to be plain and thus more likely to be single, or just as beautiful as her voice, but the decision was obviously not his to make, and now that he’d seen her he couldn’t imagine her any other way.

Just as beautiful as her voice, and just as quick on the draw in person as she’d been on their brief (all too brief) interrupted phone call.

He couldn’t meet her eyes, for fear that she’d see the desire pulsing in him after he’d seen her and actually gotten to touch her hand. It was urging him to lean over her desk just a little further to grab the stapler from her hand, making him tingle as the edge of his pinky finger caught on hers as she handed it over, and he couldn’t afford to look at her lest it should boil over. But then he realized that by averting his eyes he was actually staring at her (quite impressive) breasts, even if they were hidden behind a cardigan, and he forced himself instead to meet her eyes and smile.

“I, uh, I’ll just get these documents to HR then.” He waved at the papers on his desk with the stapler then realized how stupid he must look to her and blushed. “Um…which way is HR?”

“Back here.” He looked at her blankly as her hands, which he’d expected to point him in the right direction, went instead to the little butterfly necklace hanging around her throat. HR wasn’t in her cardigan, was it? He blushed again at the thought, thankful that his face didn’t tend to show red for very long. “I’ll show you.” Oh. He slammed the staple in and turned to follow her, working to ignore the glare that Dwight was still sending his way. He did his best not to watch the sway of her hips as she walked towards the back of the office.

“Ohmigod Pam!” A voice erupted from the back, followed at relativistic speeds by a young Indian woman who barreled into Pam and seized her hands, completely oblivious to Jim’s presence—which had the effect of stopping Pam in her tracks and causing Jim to come extremely close to plowing into her backside. Not the impression he wanted to make…not yet at least.

“Hi, Kelly.” So the mystery woman’s name was Kelly. He wondered what she did.

“Pam! Did he give you a ring yet?” Kelly lifted Pam’s left hand to eye level and Jim was momentarily confused. Sure, he was head over heels for this girl already, but how would Kelly know that…oh. Reality crashed down in an instant. He wasn’t he. There was someone else. He knew it. There’d had to be. She was too vibrant, too wonderful, too gorgeous not to be attached to someone. Well, at least she was interested in men, if this mysterious “he” was anything to go by, but that wasn’t exactly helpful if she was already invested enough in someone to be expecting a ring. He listened with a sudden twist in his belly to the rest of Kelly’s monologue, which only served to confuse him more.

“I mean, I thought when I saw him walking out to your truck yesterday that he must be going to get you the ring—I mean, why else would Darryl let him go so early if it wasn’t to surprise you with something amazing—like, I bet whenever he does get you a ring it’s going to be one of those two-carat ones you can put an eye out with, you know the type, after all the saving up you two have been doing. I don’t think I’d want my husband to do that—I’d much rather have one of those ones with three different diamonds, you know, like a carat each, because one diamond is just, like, so 1950s—but I’m sure you’d love it—and anyway, I think Roy’s just so traditional, you know? But I guess maybe he meant it as a surprise, or maybe he just went shopping and he didn’t bring it back with him because you know how the warehouse is, it would just get packed up in a paper box and ohmigod I would not be able to bear it if my ring got shipped out to some school in the Poconos or something, and…”

Fortunately for Kelly’s lungs, and Jim’s sanity, Pam chose that moment to break in quietly. “No, Kelly, he didn’t give me a ring. He just went to Poor Richard’s with the guys.” She looked embarrassed as she turned to him, staring for a moment deep into his eyes—and then suddenly jumped a half foot away, as if previously unaware how close he’d gotten to her when Kelly had interrupted her stride. “Kelly, this is Jim Halpert. He’s new.”

“Hi, Kelly.” He thrust out a hand, not entirely unaffected by the way that leaning past Pam affected him. God she smelled good. But she wasn’t his to smell, was she? Apparently she was this “Roy’s”…what? Fiancé? Wife? God help him, but the small twist in his stomach was becoming larger by the moment.

“Hi Jim!” Kelly pounced on his hand and pumped it once, then pushed past Pam and enveloped him in a hug. “I’m a hugger!” She leaned over to whisper to Pam, a stage whisper that Jim wasn’t entirely sure if he was supposed to hear, or definitely not supposed to hear. “He’s cute.”

He blushed, and disassociated himself from the hug as quickly as possible, and was surprised to see Pam also red in the face. Kelly took advantage of her release—even though she had initiated the hug—to tug Pam towards what looked like a break room. Pam gave him a look he couldn’t quite interpret and gestured past where Kelly had come from. “Toby’s back there. Give him the form.” She also mouthed something else—it looked like “Sorry”—as Kelly half-dragged her into the other room, where he heard something that sounded awfully like “jealous” before the door closed.

He pulled himself together—fighting manfully against the rising nausea that he couldn’t identify as anything other than disappointment—and walked into the back annex, where he identified Toby Flenderson by nameplate and handed over his forms to a pinched, sad-looking man in an ill-fitting wrinkled shirt. They exchanged some information that he hoped wasn’t important, because none of it remained in his head afterwards, and he strode back out to the main room and plopped himself into what was apparently now his chair. Dwight was still staring at him, making him wonder whether the man ever did anything else.

Somehow this was not the day he’d imagined when he’d gotten up this morning.

Pam’s arm hurt. Kelly wasn’t actually holding onto it anymore, but the surprising strength with which she’d hauled Pam nigh-bodily into the break room still lingered in the wrenched feeling in her elbow. She massaged the joint subtly with the other hand while she tried to keep track of Kelly’s frantic flow of words.  She caught words like “cute” and “Jim” and “tall” and couldn’t help herself from nodding along. He certainly was tall, and cute, and gangly in a way she wouldn’t have said attracted her if she hadn’t actually just met him. She shook herself gently. She didn’t like gangly. She liked…solid. Thick. Like Roy. Roy had always reminded her of The Thing from the Marvel comics she’d grown up reading (the one thing she and her father had in common, actually: he read them for the stories, she for the vibrant, often impossible illustrations, but each had noticed enough about the other’s interests to keep up a conversation). He was much handsomer, of course. She’d always felt vaguely sorry for Ben Grimm, whereas Roy had been the cock of the walk ever since middle school. And yet, if she was honest, the similarity was almost more in their attitudes towards the world, always with a chip on their shoulder, than in their physiques. But Ben had a reason—they called him The Thing, and he’d been reasonably handsome before the transformation—and Roy…Roy never really had, had he? But regardless, that was the kind of body she liked. Squat. Powerful. Not long and lanky. Except Jim really was…what was it Kelly had just said? “A tall drink of water.” And she was surprisingly thirsty.

Literally, too. She wished again that they had a teapot in the office…she could really go for something to drink right now and she hated coffee. It reminded her too much of late-night study sessions after Roy had kept them out partying all night. She grabbed a mug and filled it with water while letting Kelly’s jabbering pour over her. It was soothing—too soothing, it turned out, because Kelly had paused and was clearly looking for a response.

“I’m sorry?” She’d found that with Kelly, despite the extreme way she reacted to almost everything, it was actually best to be upfront when one had not been listening, because her reaction was almost always to fill you in, unlike some people (well, OK, mostly Dwight and Roy) who would just sniff that you ought to have been listening from the start.

“I said, isn’t he just so perfect?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Pam blurted, feeling a little guilty for commenting on the perfection of a guy who wasn’t Roy. Trying to reconstruct the conversation, she essayed what seemed like a safe follow-up, given just how much gushing Kelly had engaged in. “You should totally date him.” She sipped her water. Given that opening, Kelly would probably talk for long enough that she could get her bearings again. Why was she so off her game this morning?

“PAaaAM.” Kelly shook her head, a grin on her face. “I’m not going to date him.” She glanced over her shoulder and Pam’s eyes followed her to Jim, visible through the blinds to the break room, walking back from the annex. “He’s way too tall. My guys have to be at most five-eleven or I have to spend all day in 6 inch heels.” Pam refrained from commenting that Kelly was, at the moment, wearing said 6 inch heels and, feeling virtuous, took another sip. “You should date him.”

It was a miracle Pam didn’t spit in her face. As it was, she spat past her face and then choked on the water still going down and started coughing loudly. She had just enough time to hear Kelly whisper “I’m telling you” before a hand started rubbing her back and a soft voice murmured “you OK?” She whipped around and there he was, Jim Halpert, large as life and twice as sexy (and where did that come from, she asked her subconscious) reaching his other hand (God they were large) out to take her mug from her and set it on the counter. “You OK?” he repeated, staring straight into her eyes and he crouched by her.

The first thing she thought as their eyes met was “God, he’s tall.” He was crouching and he was just barely shorter than her—OK, fair, she was bent half-over from the coughing, but still—and it was impossible not to have a shock of awareness tingle its way down her spine as she thought about how easy it would be for him to push up, just a little, just into the tiniest bit less of a crouch, and kiss her. Not that she would ever bend down any further and give him that kiss herself—except that she felt her traitorous back start to move and had to jerk herself to a stop. What was coming over her? Why was she still gazing deep into his eyes? What had he asked her? Oh right.

“Uh…yeah, sorry, just…” she gestured at the mug on the counter. “Don’t try to breathe and drink at the same time.”

His eyes squinted slightly at the edges, as if he were suppressing a laugh. “Wait. Are you telling me you’re not a fish?”

“Not especially.” She smiled slightly. He was just so easy to talk to. Even in this ridiculous position, even when she was feeling this absurd urge to just bend that little bit extra over and kiss him…she coughed once more and straightened up. “Not last time I checked, anyway.”

He brushed a finger into her hair, sweeping it up behind her ear. “You’re right, no gills.” How was it possible that she could still feel the trail where his finger had been, from her neck up to her ear? It felt hot, and then her whole face felt hot, and she turned away from him to seek equilibrium, only to catch sight of her own reflection in the metal of the sink: she was beet red. Great. What a way to make an impression. He must think she was crazy.

“Yeah, no gills.” She tried to laugh and it didn’t come quite out right, but fortunately Kelly came to her rescue in her own inimitable way.

“You guys are weird.” She winked at Pam—what was that for?—and sauntered out of the room.

Leaving Pam alone with the new guy and her own rising sense of embarrassment.

Tell me I didn’t do that. Jim Halpert didn’t really believe in prayer. Sure, he’d grown up going to church, even gotten confirmed, but he’d been drifting away even then and, besides, even when he’d believed he’d never believed, not in that firm, heart-filling sense of actually trusting that someone was listening. But right now, he was desperately hoping that old Pastor Mayhew had been right when he’d told a much younger Jim that “God hears every prayer, even those that don’t believe,” because he needed a miracle right now. Tell me I didn’t reach out and touch the beautiful, funny, wonderful woman I just learned has a fiancé. He wanted to bury his face in his hands, except that would make it even more awkward. He’d just have to go on as if nothing had happened. Because nothing did happen, right? He’d made a joke so bad he didn’t want to remember it—gills, really?—and he’d let the overwhelming urge to reach out and touch her take over the more rational centers of his brain, but all that was really contained within his head, wasn’t it? She hadn’t bristled at his touch, she’d gone along with the bad joke, and now it was all in the past, right?

Only right now the silence stretching out between them was stifling, and that meant it wasn’t all in the past. It would only be all in the past if he could manage to actually do or say something to break the tension that crackled all over the room, thin and hard like the first ice on Lake Waullenpaupack in winter—and just as dangerous. If he broke it, would he plunge through to his death? Or was it more like ice-fishing, where you had to break the ice to get anything done?

Ten seconds. Twenty. The time for a normal, light, witty response to the tension had gone. Now whatever was said was going to have the weight of all the silence behind it, and it was going to be a disaster. He could feel it weighing his tongue down, forcing him to continue the silence well beyond what was safe. He could barely move—they weren’t making eye contact but they were doing the one thing worse than holding eye contact: deliberately not looking each other in the eye. Did that mean she felt something here too, even if it was just the insane awkwardness of what he’d just done?

Twenty-five seconds. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. And to his later relief but his immense startlement in the moment, a hand slapped down on his shoulder.

“JIMBO!” Michael Scott to the rescue, apparently, with the power of never-noticing-awkwardness on his side. “Buddy, why didn’t you tell me you got in?” The arm slid around his shoulders and he was suddenly the subject of the most emphatic side-hug he’d ever received. “We missed you yesterday! I see you’ve met Pam” a wave of the off-hand brought Pam into motion as she smiled awkwardly and fled the room, like a character in a painting coming to life and determined not to return to the oils “and Kelly, but you’ll want to get the grand tour from yours truly of course!” His smile dimmed as Jim remained immobile, still incapable of processing the shift from that shared moment of tension with Pam to…whatever this was. “You remember me, right?” He let go of Jim’s shoulders and stuck out a hand. “Michael Scott?”

Something in Jim responded to the man’s obvious insecurity—and besides, he owed him for helping him avoid any further awkwardness beyond the nuclear embarrassment he’d already experienced. “Michael! How could I forget you?” He pasted a grin onto his face, and evidently it was enough, because the answering smile was back at full wattage. “I’d love the tour, but” he lowered his voice “I do have to tell you about yesterday.”

“What? And why are we whispering?”

Jim flicked his eyes towards the window and back to Michael’s face. It was time to put the plan Pam had primed him with into action. And he couldn’t resist the opportunity to cast things in the most dramatic manner for his own amusement—just like he had with Pam on the phone the night before. “To avoid industrial spies, of course.”

“Industrial spies?” Michael’s jaw dropped open. “Dwight’s always warned me about them, but I thought he was…”

“Paranoid?” Jim shook his head. “If only. I mean, Dwight is clearly paranoid,” no reason not to encourage Michael to think that, given the plans for pranks Jim already had made after fifteen minutes of knowing his coworker “but on this, he’s right.” He lowered his voice to a comical level, so that Michael almost had his ear buried in Jim’s chest to hear him. “Spies who might not want Dunder Mifflin to make the sale of the century.”

“The sale of the century?” Michael seemed impressed, but also confused—but being Michael, as Jim had already surmised from an interview and five minutes in his company, he wasn’t going to let not knowing what was going on stop him. “Of course. The sale of the century.” He nodded. “Remind me about it?”

“Making Dunder Mifflin the sole supplier for the University of Scranton.”

“Oh. Uh. That sale.” Michael goggled. “Sale of the century indeed.”

“Yes. I spent yesterday contacting my…uh…contact at the University.” That was one way to describe Larissa, anyway. “So today I’d be ready to hit the ground running.” He decided it was good to give himself an out in case things went badly. “But I can’t guarantee that spies won’t make it difficult.” He shrugged. “So after the tour, I’ll get right to work on it.”

“Right.” Michael swallowed, and Jim heard him mutter to himself. “University of Scranton. Gosh.” Then he straightened and flashed Jim a surprisingly shy smile. “So we better get the tour going.” He pulled a VHS tape out of his suitcoat—when had he hidden that there?—and grinned. “We’d better start with this.”

The Michael Scott Experience™ (as Jim had begun to think of it) was somehow both completely unpredictable and exactly as he’d expected it. He was grateful that he’d had Pam’s perspective on Michael to confirm his own, though, because if he hadn’t had that microscopic little bit of extra certainty that it was Michael and not he who was insane, he might have folded halfway through—or worse, revealed that he was not entirely enthralled and disappointed Michael. It wasn’t that he loved Michael or even really liked the man. Rather, he could tell from the first moment, when Michael popped the video into the VCR and then ran around like a small child to sit next to Jim and watch his own orientation video with an attitude of complete enrapturement (with elbows in Jim’s ribs at particularly “good” parts) that Michael was the sort of man-child who needed special, careful management, and that a large part of that management would take the form of making Michael believe that Jim and everyone else in the office shared his bizarre obsessions and strange quirks, or at least found them delightful and not wearing. He was pretty sure, as well, that this was not the truth: the heavy sigh the older pair of Stanley and Phyllis shared when Michael bubbled up to them to introduce Jim was a sign, as was the accountants’ mutual conspiracy not to make eye contact when Michael swept into the back—or the “annex” as it was apparently called. Fortunately Michael seemed to have some kind of beef with Toby, the HR guy, who had seemed not just harmless but aggressively so, and so they were out of the annex before the accountants’ standoffishness (or that one girl, Kelly’s, strangely emphatic wink) could get too weird.

What he had not counted on was that the Experience™ included not only a tour of the upper office but of the lower warehouse as well. Currently he was standing by a large stack of reams of paper that was about to go out to customers—once Michael stopped fooling around with the forklift, that was. At least the man wasn’t driving it. But he was tapdancing back and forth between the arms of the lift (which was fortunately on the ground) while a very frustrated, almost square woman named Madge visibly held herself back from yelling at him. Darryl, the warehouse manager, was leaning against the other side of the stack of paper, and Jim shared a glance of sympathy with him in a way that suggested that Darryl was entry number two on Jim’s small but important list of vaguely sane people at Dunder Mifflin.

“So, Jim…” Darryl drawled as Michael, for no reason that Jim could tell, started humming something that in another world, with different musical scales and no concept of pitch, might have been the theme to Footloose.

“Yeah?” He couldn’t say more without letting out the belly laugh that was threatening to erupt from deep within his soul.

“You got any plans tonight?”

“Nah.” He waved a hand vaguely and changed his mind. Focusing on this conversation was probably the only thing that would actually keep him from laughing, because even noncommittal noises had their limits. “Got a lease signing at 5:30, but if that goes beyond like 5:45…”

“You’re screwed.” Darryl grinned. “Got it.”

“Exactly.”

“You want to join me and the boys for a drink?” Darryl nodded towards the square woman, who looked like she was deciding whether it was really such a bad idea to lift the forklift to its full height with her boss’s boss dangling between the tines. “And Madge, of course. We usually head out to Poor Richard’s, play some darts, drink some beers.”

“Of course.” Jim considered. Was going out with a bunch of warehouse guys he didn’t know (and Madge) any worse than a night at home with his parents? Well, they probably didn’t have his mom’s chocolate chip cookies, but he was making an effort to be an adult after all. “Sure, I’d love to.” He coughed. “I mean, sounds cool.”

“Cool.” Darryl grinned again and Jim was glad to have found at least one person here he didn’t feel he had to pretend to be cooler than he was around. Well, two—he couldn’t forget Pam, but then again, that phone call had gone well beyond “not pretending to be cool” into “just being himself.”

“Hey, Roy!” Darryl raised his voice and a worker Jim hadn’t noticed before—probably because he’d been inside the truck they were supposed to load, from which he now emerged—stuck his head out and yelled back. “We got company tonight!” He gestured at Jim. “New blood upstairs.”

Roy. That wasn’t that common of a name, Jim thought. But what were the odds that Pam’s fiancé worked at Dunder Mifflin? On the other hand, Kelly had said something about noticing Roy yesterday—Jim was embarrassed to admit even to himself how carefully he’d listened to that conversation—and that suggested that he might indeed be the same Roy. On the other…no time for another hand, Roy was sticking his hand out to shake, and it was time to go back to pretending to be cool. Just in case this was Pam’s fiancé, somehow, this big beefy guy with muscles on his muscles and a wide grin.

“Roy Anderson.”

“Jim Halpert.” Wait. Anderson? No way Pam was going to be Pam Anderson. Had to be another guy.

“You work upstairs?” Roy gestured towards the ceiling using a finger not normally employed for such work.

“Yeah. Just started in sales.” He nodded towards Michael, who was now piling boxes onto the forklift around himself to make a little fort. Michael caught his eye and yelled “Hey Jim, I made a fortlift! Get it? Fort-lift?” Jim smiled and waved, and Michael went back to playing.

Roy shook his head. “Better you than me.” Jim started to grin. That had to mean this wasn’t Pam’s fiancé, since Pam herself worked upstairs, and he couldn’t imagine the man wouldn’t want to work with his lovely, hilarious bride-to-be. But then Darryl cut Roy a sarcastic look, complete with raised eyebrow, which raised his suspicions again.

“I don’t know,” Jim shrugged. “It’s not that bad so far.”

“How long you been up there?” Roy asked. Before Jim could answer, Darryl shook his head. “It’s his first day.”

Roy clapped a hand on Jim’s shoulder. “Just you wait, Jim. I’ll bet you a beer tonight that by the time we all meet up at Poor Richard’s, you’ll be wishing you never replied to that job ad.”

“It’s a bet.” As they shook on the bet—the second time they’d shaken hands, and the second time Jim had noticed Roy had a tendency to squeeze a little harder than he needed to—Darryl headed over to Michael, apparently deciding that it was time to actually get a little work done, which obviously required rousting their erstwhile leader from his protective ring of boxes. Roy took advantage of the moment to shake his head sadly at Jim. “Sorry Halpert, but it’s a sucker bet.” He grinned. “My girlfriend works reception, so I know how crazy it gets up there.” He clapped Jim on the shoulder again and walked over to help Darryl reload the boxes the right way onto the lift, shooting a Parthian shot back over his shoulder. “I look forward to that beer!”

Jim raised a hand in farewell and trailed behind Michael on his way upstairs, nodding along at Michael’s excited jabbering—“did you see my fort, Jim? Did you?”—and pondering the fact that Roy was definitely winning that beer, even if not for the reason he thought. Jim was already regretting answering that job ad, but not for the reasons Roy might think. No, he wished he’d somehow answered it much sooner—soon enough to get there before a funny, delightful receptionist met a macho warehouse worker—or never at all—so he wouldn’t have to deal with the sudden twist that had ripped through his guts at Roy’s words.

The rest of Pam’s day was much less eventful—but that wasn’t saying very much at all, given how strongly she’d felt during the first hour. It disturbed her, actually. She’d become used to the even flow of her days, actually taking pride in how she’d curbed what her parents had always called an impulsive, artistic temperament into one that could roll with anything that came her way. As a child, she’d burst into tears when she felt off-kilter; she remembered doing so at the stupid hockey game where Roy had somehow managed to leave her. But part of growing up was setting aside childish things, and she had set aside the crying jags and the sense of unutterable wrongness. Now when things went poorly she let it slide off her like water off a duck’s back—and when things went well, she didn’t let herself get too excited either. Along with the tears she’d let go of the pulsing excitement that used to tear through her at Christmas when she’d unveil the watercolors, tempera, and once even oils her parents had thoughtfully wrapped up under the tree, or at school when her volleyball team used to practice and she could see a spike coming and rotate to dig it before it could become a problem. She was a calmer person now.

So why was it that this morning she’d wanted to scream?

No, not just this morning. She’d wanted to scream ever since last night, when she’d had that phone call with Jim. She wasn’t sure what it was about him, but something about his involvement in the situation upset her equilibrium, which was apparently more delicate than she’d thought. She’d felt her pulserate go up when she was on the phone, and while she’d managed to let go of Roy turning off the phone, it hadn’t slipped off her back in the way these things usually did. Instead, it had lodged somewhere deep inside her belly, and she was still feeling it today—only with a whole heaping helping of embarrassment on top of it for the way Kelly had acted. Well, was acting.

Because Kelly Kapoor had apparently decided that if Roy hadn’t bought her a ring yesterday he was never going to, and had made it her mission in life to push Pam Beesly into the path of “the new hot guy” as she kept calling Jim. When Jim came up from the warehouse, Kelly sauntered her way into the main office and insisted on showing him how “certain customers” preferred to be faxed to—a move that put Jim and Kelly both squarely in Pam’s space by the multifunction copier. Then she maneuvered him towards Pam under the guise of “getting a better angle to see how to program the machine.” Pam would have said Kelly was flirting with him if she hadn’t kept catching Kelly’s eye and seeing her jerk her head Jimward with an expectant look on her face. When she’d finally given in and said “Kelly, I can show him,” the smile she’d received from her friend had been surprisingly wide and sincere—but the one that had made her heart flop was the smaller, sadder one from the salesman beside her.

“What the hell, heart?” she thought to herself fiercely. “I’m engaged. I don’t need to get all squicky over the new guy, even if I can still feel where he touched my cheek two hours ago.” OK, so maybe Kelly was right. Maybe it was going to take Roy as long to give her a ring as it took Thanos to gather the Infinity Stones (OK, so that wasn’t the metaphor Kelly used, but Pam didn’t really want to disentangle the plot of the soap opera Kelly did compare it to. Comic book continuity was simple by comparison). That didn’t mean she wanted to give their relationship the snap. She was content. No, she was happy. Wasn’t she? So why was this salesman making her flip and flop?

She was awkwardly aware of him, and made even more awkward by the fact that she wasn’t entirely sure whether he felt it too—or whether that itself would be good or bad. Obviously she didn’t want to be flirting with anyone. She was happy with Roy, right? They were getting married. But at the same time, it would be just too crushing to realize that her little mini micro not-really crush wasn’t reciprocated. She hadn’t had a cute guy interested in her since Roy in high school. Not that Roy wasn’t cute now, but…it was different. It would have been nice to feel like the new guy at least noticed her.

Well, to be fair, he definitely did notice her. He’d come up to her desk and grabbed one of the mints she kept out for visitors, made a little joke about how she should have something sweeter in the jar, and told her he’d put into action their plan about telling Michael he’d been scouting out the university for sales. She’d found her face aching after his little visit, and realized she was smiling. So he’d definitely noticed her. But he seemed to notice everyone. Not that she was spying on him, but, well, his desk was right in front of hers and she could see the whole office (the front anyway) without moving. So she could see that after one afternoon Phyllis was already treating him like she treated her nephews when they came to visit (down to sharing her Werthers’ Originals—maybe he wasn’t joking about sweets), that he’d leaned over and suggested a word to Stanley for his crossword and somehow Stanley hadn’t bitten his head off, that even Toby had come out of the back (neck stuck out like a turtle from its shell to check first that Michael wasn’t hovering) to show him Sasha’s baby photos. He noticed everyone and they noticed him. So was it that bad that she noticed him too? Of course not.

She felt a little guilty, though, so she made sure to sneak down to the warehouse during her coffee break at three-thirty, only to find Roy too busy to talk. She trudged up the stairs and found Jim leaning against the wall in the landing, head back against the wall. Her eyes involuntarily slid up and down his torso and legs. God he was long. Embarrassed again, she debated whether to just sneak by him, but before she could make a decision his head came up and made eye contact. No sneaking now.

“Hey.” He grinned, sheepishly.

“Hi.” Oh god please don’t let my face go red.

“Sorry for blocking the stairs. I’m just…it’s a little much, isn’t it?” His eyes twinkled, inviting her to share the confidence.

“Yeah.” She felt as if she were watching someone else’s body move as she realized she’d come to lean against the same wall as him. “Does this mean you’re going to run away screaming?”

“Nah.” He turned to continue smiling down at her. Usually when tall people smiled down at her she just felt short, and maybe a little patronized, but with him she just felt…glad. “You don’t get rid of me that easily, Beesly.”

No one had called her Beesly since high school, and this was the second time he’d done it. She was surprised how special it made her feel. Like a nickname, except still hers. Maybe that was what made her blurt out the first thing that came into her mind.

“Good.”

“Good.” They had a moment of companionable silence, until Jim pushed off the wall. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a university to convince to switch to Dunder Mifflin. Good thinking on that one, if I haven’t said it before.” He put his hand up for a high-five and she swung hers up only to realize at the last minute that he was too tall or too far away for her to reach. But instead of making fun of her, like she expected, he just grinned again. “Air five. Nice, Beesly.”

She grinned back. “Nice yourself, Halpert.” His last name felt good on her tongue. “Now go get those Royals.”

“Yes ma’am.” He mock-saluted and left her staring after him up the stairs.

This time, for once, Roy actually remembered to take her to Poor Richard’s before the rest of the group left.

That wasn’t fair. When they’d first started dating, Roy hadn’t forgotten to pick her up for things. He’d forgotten to take her back from things—first on their nearly-last first date when he’d left her at a hockey game, but then later when they’d started drinking and she’d had to be the one to drag him back from things—but not, usually, to bring her in the first place. It was only once they started working at Dunder Mifflin, really, that he’d started to forget to include her. Maybe it was because it was easy to get swept up in the tide of everyone going out; maybe it was because he didn’t want to seem like he was “hen-pecked” (which had always seemed to her to just mean that a man actually cared what a woman thought, but to Roy it clearly meant something different). At times she’d wondered if it was a result of the transition from being cool because he had a steady girlfriend to being lame because he had a “ball and chain,” even if they weren’t married yet. But whatever the reason, he’d gotten pretty bad about actually bringing her—though usually he’d tell her, unlike yesterday. He’d call, or come upstairs, or send one of the guys who wasn’t coming to the bar (usually Lonnie, who’d had a DUI and was trying to get better about how much he drank) to tell her “the guys were going out” or he’d take her home and then leave after. Yesterday had been an aberration in that regard.

But today he was there, right at five, jingling the keys.

She involuntarily shot a glance over to Jim’s desk to see how’d he react, but he wasn’t there; then she realized she hadn’t actually seen him for the last couple of hours. Well, whatever. She was sorry she wouldn’t get a chance to ask him how his first day had gone—and what he was going to do about that University of Scranton contract. Oh well. She’d see him tomorrow. On that happy note, she bounced up to Roy and grabbed his arm as they headed out to the truck. He seemed a little nonplussed but accepting until he shook her off to get his keys out of his back pocket. They drove to Poor Richard’s in a fairly amiable silence, since the truck radio wasn’t working, and got themselves settled in the back with the rest of the warehouse guys.

About half an hour in—half a beer for Pam, three for Roy, who had pronounced himself “thirsty” as soon as he sat down—Darryl sidled up to her while Roy and Madge went to play darts.

“So, how’s the new guy fitting in upstairs?”

She found her cheeks heating, which was ridiculous. It wasn’t like Darryl had suggested anything by that comment, not that there was anything to suggest, but how had he known to ask her about Jim? Oh right, Michael’s tour—it always involved a stop down in the warehouse so Michael could ooh and aah over the forklift. A better question then: why hadn’t Roy asked her this same question?

“Good. He’s good.” She took a sip of the beer—why had she let Roy order for her? She hated IPAs—and tried to think of something more useful to say, since Darryl seemed to be waiting for her to go on. But what could she say? It wasn’t like she was going to tell Darryl about staring at the back of Jim’s neck when he bent over the copier, admiring noticing the way the hair curled around his collar. Or about Kelly’s ridiculous suggestion that she should flirt with him to make Roy jealous. Definitely not that one, given that Darryl was Roy’s best friend. “He’s pretty normal.”

Darryl leaned back and laughed. “Yeah, but at Dunder Mifflin, normal’s pretty weird, right?”

“Right.” She smiled, softly, trying not to think about air fives and nicknames. “Though I do think he’s a little reckless.”

“Reckless?” Darryl scoffed. “In an office with Michael Scott? You telling me this new guy swings off something bigger than a forklift?”

“Nothing like that.” Was she still smiling? She needed to stop that. “It’s just…he” and I, but she wasn’t going to say that to Darryl “came up with this idea to cover the fact that he didn’t come in yesterday, and it involved telling Michael that he’d get the University of Scranton account.”

“The white whale?” Darryl whistled. “Michael’s been after that since they went to Staples, what was it, three years ago?”

“Yup.”

“And now the new guy’s caught up in that? What was he thinking?” Darryl shook his head, while Pam blushed again. She’d forgotten that Michael was so obsessed with the University of Scranton account—something about the conversation with Jim, and then the…she’d have to call it what it was, at least in her own head…the flirting with Jim in the stairwell had driven it out of her mind every time it had come up. She hoped she hadn’t inadvertently gotten him into a situation he couldn’t get out of. If so, it was his own fault for being so…distracting.

“I don’t know what he was thinking.”

“He was thinking that his little sister’s in charge of buying stationary for the psych department.” Suddenly Jim was sliding into the chair across from her and Darryl one eyebrow cocked as he set down a dark, fizzy drink. “What’s this I hear about a white whale, Beesly?”

“Uh, it’s just…” she was reduced to babbling. What was he doing here? Why wasn’t Darryl surprised to see him?

“Jim! You made it.” Darryl got up and clapped the newcomer on the back. “Glad you could join us.” He slid into the seat next to Jim and proceeded to detail the events of three years ago, when Michael Scott had lost the University of Scranton paper and letterhead contract to an enterprising Staples rep who had pulled the old “low introductory rate” scam. Jim nodded in the right moments and laughed when Darryl pulled out his Michael impression, but Pam got the feeling that he never actually took his attention off of her. Under normal circumstances, she’d have called it unsettling, but as she examined her own feelings on the matter she didn’t feel unsettled at all. If anything, the opposite: his attention was making parts of her that she usually ignored feel…intrigued.

“So, Beesly.” Darryl, having hit the punchline of the Staples story (Dunder Mifflin hired the Staples rep away and promoted him to assistant regional manager in Stamford, but Michael couldn’t get the contract back), had wandered off to join Roy and Madge at darts, leaving Jim sitting across from Pam with an inscrutable look on his face. “Take a bow.”

“For what?” She’d been so lost in her own thoughts she wasn’t really sure what he expected from her.

“For the double prank, of course. You help me cover for having completely skipped out of work, thus pulling one over on the boss, but you also get me entangled in Michael’s personal obsession. Thanks for that, by the way.” He nodded at her and she felt her cheeks flame.

“It…it wasn’t like that.” She braced herself for the explosion.

“Wasn’t like what?” He leaned back and she winced. Here it came. He was going to yell at her.

But instead he kept his distance and kept his voice soft, somehow pitching it so she could still hear every word. “Beesly? You OK?” He started to get up and then thought better of it, settling back into the chair. “Seriously, what’s up?”

“You’re not mad?”

“Mad?” he sounded confused. “I’m impressed, Pam.”

“Impressed?”

“You pulled off the rare, but coveted, double-reverse. You got me coming and Michael going. Of course I’m impressed. The only thing better would be if you’d somehow gotten Dwight in there as well.” He tapped his fingers on his chin. “Think we could still do that?”

“Maybe.” She wasn’t sure what was going on. “You’re really not mad? I could have made real trouble for you with Michael, associating you with the university in his mind.”

“Nah. Michael loves me.” He spread his hands wide. “And besides,” he winked, “I have someone on the inside. My sister—you remember my sister Larissa? The one who was studying so hard my parents got worried?—anyway, she’s the work-study student admin for the psych department, and because of that terrible deal Staples made with them she has carte blanche to buy stationary, shall we say, under the table without using the university budget system. Apparently they’ve been driving to Office Max and putting paper on credit cards to avoid blowing the entire printer budget by the end of the first semester. She was actually complaining to me about it yesterday—‘Jim, why do I have to drive all the way to Office Max?’” he said in an imitation of a young woman’s voice that she assumed must be Larissa’s. “So I took a couple hours out of the office, drove down with some price sheets, chatted up her department chair, and now Dunder Mifflin is the official-unofficial supplier to the University of Scranton department of psychology.” He took a long sip from his drink and winked again. “So the way I see it, if Michael’s really that obsessed with the university account, you just did me a big favor.”

Jesus Christ, she’d flinched from him. Jim couldn’t get the thought out of his mind for the next three days. Even as he joked with her to defuse the tension, even after they were joined by her fiancé—a loud, cheerful, boisterous version of the man from the warehouse, clearly already several sheets to the wind—even after he went home that night to an empty bed in his parents’ house and confusing dreams about squirrels and hospitals, he couldn’t banish the memory of that moment when he’d tried to compliment Pam for playing a joke on him and she’d flinched away.

It hadn’t been a big flinch. He didn’t think Darryl had even noticed it. But he’d been staring straight into her eyes—a habit he’d have to break now that he knew for a fact she was engaged, but one he’d fallen into immediately—and he’d seen her bracing herself, seen the microscopic movement away as she thought he’d react badly to the discovery. And it haunted him.

It haunted him when he went up to her desk and chatted about nothing in order to annoy Dwight. It haunted him when he bought grape soda in the break room for them both and they mock-toasted the success of the University of Scranton plan (Michael had been literally overjoyed, his eyes overwelling with tears). It haunted him when he met her eyes randomly during the day (well, randomly on her part; he realized he was spending more and more of every day just looking at her hoping to steal a “random” glance).

Because behind all of it he couldn’t help but wonder what it was that made her flinch. It couldn’t be him, could it? She didn’t know him that well, of course—well, scratch that, she knew him better than anyone it seemed, since their minds synched up like two cogs in a gear, but she hadn’t known him that long—and so maybe he’d given off some strange vibe. But he didn’t like to think of himself as the sort of man that women flinched from, and he’d started watching his interactions with other women and none of them flinched, and besides she spent so much time interacting with him herself and not-flinching that it had to be something else, right? But what? Was it her parents? Her fiancé? Some other kind of trauma?

He gently poked at the issue occasionally, not wanting to reinvoke any trauma or hurt her, but trying to ease his mind. He asked her about her parents, heard funny stories about her siblings, drew her out on the subjects of her fears and her hopes and her dreams. A house with a terrace (even though they didn’t make them like that in Scranton). Two or more kids. A loving husband, presumably Roy (though he didn’t press on that because it hurt him to ask, for reasons he knew very well but didn’t intend to explore). Art—watercolors for now, oils when she could afford them. Travel—Italy, France, Morocco.

“Morocco?”

“Yeah. Want to make something of it, Halpert?” Her eyes flashed and he matched her grin with his own.

“I don’t know, Beesly, it seems to me like you’re the one making something out of it.”

“I’m just telling it like it is!”

“But why Morocco? Did you watch Casablanca one too many times as a kid?”  He certainly had, it was his mom’s favorite movie.

“…Maybe…” She blushed, which was just the cutest thing ever and which he absolutely had to stop thinking of as the cutest thing ever for his own sanity if nothing else.

He put on a bad French accent. “I am shocked, shocked to find that there is gambling going on in here!”

She giggled and handed him a jellybean from the container she’d recently started stocking on her desk. “Your winnings, sir.”

“Thank you.” He popped it into his mouth.

She cocked her head to the side and tsked. “It’s ‘Oh, thank you. Everybody out at once.’” Good god, she could quote the movie better than he could. He didn’t think anyone but his mother had watched it enough to do that.

“I stand corrected. And in exchange, I’ll gracefully concede that Morocco is an excellent place to visit. Anywhere else?”

She blushed again, which intrigued him, and said something too low for him to hear. “What was that?”

“Wakanda.”

It took him a moment to place the reference. “Wakanda? Wait, are you a Marvel fan?”

Her face was burning. “Yeah. So what?”

“I’m not sure we can be friends anymore.” He made as if to leave, but grabbed a jellybean instead. “You know Marvel’s best heroes are all just copies of DCs.”

“You take that back.”

“Why should I? DC obviously has the best lineup. Batman, Superman…” he started ticking names off his fingers.

She scoffed. “Superman’s boring.”

“He is not!”

“Come on, he has like one flaw, and even that’s just a plot contrivance so that everyone doesn’t get bored because he’s perfect all the time. Some rock from his home planet? Please.”

“Hey now!” This had started as teasing, but now he felt the sting of real rejection, because Superman had always appealed to him. “Are you saying that believing in Truth, Justice, and the American Way is boring?”

“Compared to a gun-toting, intelligent raccoon? Kinda.” She grinned and popped a jellybean.

“A what-toting, intelligent what?” He was lost.

“Gun. Raccoon.” She sighed. “Rocket Raccoon, I know he’s a minor character, but…”

“Minor? I’m not sure I’d even believe he existed if you weren’t the one telling me.”

“I’ll prove it to you.” She reached down and pulled a comic book out her bag with the words The Sensational She-Hulk plastered across the front. “I borrowed one of my dad’s old comics to do figure-tracing.” She flipped the book open and pointed. “Gun. Toting. Intelligent. Raccoon.” Her eyes glinted with triumph and it was all he could do to tear his own away from hers to look down at the page.

“So I see.” He shook his head. “Beesly, your taste continues to amaze me.” He slid around to look at the page from her perspective, and as he did, he saw her eyes flinch again. What was it?

“Halpert.” A deep voice from what had been behind him and was now to his side distracted him from Pam. Roy had just come through the double doors and was bearing down on him. “He bothering you, Pammy?”

“I was just…” he started to gesture towards the comic book only to realize that Pam had whisked it out of sight. “Getting a jellybean,” he finished, turning the gesture into a grab at the dish.

“You can do that from your side of the desk, can’t you?” Roy glowered at him, then turned to Pam. “Pammy, lunch, now.”

“Oh, right? Is that the time?” Pam’s voice sounded high to his ears. She grabbed her bag and slipped out past him, carefully not touching him. “I’m coming.” She hurried past him and out the doors, followed by Roy.

Jim stared after them, unsure what had just happened, when Dwight piped up, startling him.

“DC and Marvel? Amateurs. You should read Dark Horse Comics.”

“Thanks, Dwight.” He sat back down, his mind still spinning. “I’ll look into that.”

Roy was ominously silent as they walked to the truck. Pam didn’t like it when he was silent. Or at least, this kind of silent. This wasn’t a companionable silence, or a hangover silence, or a busy silence. This was a simmering silence, the kind where any words that were exchanged would just be bubbles of anger emerging from the deep well of whatever-it-was that was consuming Roy.

These silences had gotten more and more frequent in their relationship. When they’d first started dating, they hadn’t been there at all. If there was a bad silence when they first started out, it was a disappointed silence, on each end: him when she was displaying behavior that somehow wasn’t appropriate for a star football player’s girlfriend, her when he…well, when he forgot she existed. Those silences had been hurtful, at times, but the difference was…actually, there were two differences that occurred to her in the too-much-time-to-think she had while Roy simmered away. One was that those disappointed silences ramped down, not up; after a bit of being resentfully quiet, they’d always talk about what had happened, even if it was just a cursory “sorry.” That wasn’t the case with these much worse silences. These built up, and no amount of talking about it helped. Only letting Roy explode and dealing with it would solve the problem, and not even always then.

The other was that the older silences had gone back and forth: sometimes she was disappointed, sometimes Roy was, sometimes both. But only Roy simmered. Or maybe not. Because she felt different today. While she could feel Roy simmering alongside her, she didn’t feel the usual urge to conciliate at whatever cost, to try to see if this once would be the time he’d calm down. No, she felt annoyed. She felt put-upon. Roy had been five minutes early for lunch, which wasn’t a problem, but his caveman insistence that she come with him right then was clearly triggered by her perfectly innocent and pleasant conversation with Jim, and that didn’t sit right with her.

Alright, maybe not perfectly innocent. If she couldn’t be honest with herself, who could she be honest with? She had been flirting with Jim, very lightly, but flirting, and she’d enjoyed it. But after years of watching Roy flirt with waitresses, cheerleaders…anyone with a pulse and hearing it was “just being friendlilike,” it was her turn.

It wasn’t like she was going to do anything about the flirtation. He probably had a girlfriend anyway…except no, Kelly had found that out their first day. He was single. Unless he had been lying to Kelly to get her off his back? Only wasn’t the usual lie that you did have a girlfriend? Maybe one who lived in Canada?

But she wasn’t thinking about Jim. She was thinking about Roy. About how when he was the one having fun, he forgot about her and went to Poor Richard’s, and how two days later he had the sheer gall to expect her to stop having fun herself (even if it was at work, strange as that thought might be) and jump to his call when he was early. They didn’t eat lunch until 12, and that was when Roy bothered to remember; it was only just ticking across to 12:00 on the truck display right now.

So maybe now she was doing some simmering herself. All the more so as they turned into the parking lot at Pizza by Alfredo and she realized that, once again, Roy had screwed up which restaurant had decent pizza. He did this about half the time, as if he couldn’t keep the difference between Pizza by Alfredo and Alfredo’s Pizza Café straight. And usually she gently pointed out that they were twelve blocks away (eleven up, one over) from where they probably wanted to be. But today she decided it was time to let Roy deal with his own mistake. After all, Pizza by Alfredo had awful pizza, but almost halfway decent salads, and she wasn’t too proud to eat a salad. Unlike her fiancé.

The door slammed, breaking her out of her fume, and she hopped out of the truck and followed Roy’s hulking form as he stalked towards the doors.

Once inside, they ordered—had he still not noticed that they were in the wrong place?—and, after paying up front, she followed him again to a booth in the back. She could see his simmering coming up to a boil and carefully avoided rolling her eyes as she sat down.

“What the hell, Pammy?!?” he thundered.

“What?” She knew from experience that ‘playing dumb,’ as he called it, wasn’t a helpful strategy, but this time she wanted him to have to say what it was that had his nose out of joint.

“What?” he imitated her, which he knew she hated, and then slammed his hand on the table.  “What the hell are you up to with the new guy? Are you cheating on me?”

She was speechless. He’d jumped straight to cheating? When would she even have had the time for that, let alone the inclination? Before she could answer though, he’d gone on, as if actually hearing from her wasn’t the point, which she was sure it wasn’t.

“First you’re all over him at the bar, then I have to hear about him every day for three days, then I come upstairs and he’s all over you…are. You. Cheating. On. Me.” His jaw was clenched, always a dangerous sign, but still it was all she could do to avoid laughing.

“What the hell, Roy.” If she wasn’t going to laugh, apparently she was going to yell. “I wasn’t all over him at the bar. I was sitting with Darryl and Darryl invited him over to talk to us. You remember Darryl, your best friend?” Now she did roll her eyes. She felt out of control, not like the Pam she was used to being, but the sudden escalation of Roy’s accusation had knocked her off kilter and built on the resentment she’d already been feeling. She’d anticipated being told to stop flirting, or to watch out for Halpert, or not to encourage him, or something that actually corresponded with (a warped, jealous view of) her situation. But cheating? She’d never cheated on Roy, never would cheat, she wasn’t that kind of person. If she had cheated she’d be a nervous wreck, not calmly continuing to flirt at her desk. Didn’t Roy know her at all? She could already feel that the anger inside her was corrosive, that it was going to leave her weak and exhausted at the end, but she was on the tiger now and there was nothing to do but ride it. “I talked about Jim the last three days because he’s the new guy, his desk is literally the closest to mine in the entire building, and I thought you might actually be interested in what I did all day.”

“You were doing him?” Apparently Roy only heard the words of one syllable.

“No.” She could feel the exhaustion coming on. She didn’t usually yell at Roy. She didn’t usually even disagree with Roy when she could help it. “I wasn’t. I didn’t. I wouldn’t.” A bored-looking server plopped a tray down in front of them, oblivious to the tension in the booth, and she rustled for a tissue in her purse, only to find her keys wrap around the truck keys instead. She grabbed her salad in one hand—thank goodness Pizza by Alfredo was the kind of joint where even dine-in orders came in a clear plastic clamshell—and rose while she was still in the grip of the simmer. “I think we both need some time to cool down. You can get Darryl to pick you up.” She walked off, cherishing the feeling of getting the last word, before throwing a final thought back over her shoulder. “But remember to tell him Pizza by Alfredo, not Alfredo’s Pizza Café. God, Roy, that’s something Michael would do.” She slipped out the door and hurried to the truck, thankful to whatever God might be looking down that Roy didn’t follow her before she had the vehicle moving out of the parking lot and onto the road.

She drove in circles until she found a public park, and ate her salad in the truck, only realizing she was crying as the tears made the salad salty.

Or maybe that was just her fault for thinking she could get something decent to eat at Pizza by Alfredo.

The next two weeks were very confusing for Jim. To a certain extent, this was not surprising. He had a new job; he was moving into a new apartment (lots of high-fives with Mark were exchanged on the day they finally toured a house they could both afford and stand after many, many failures); his sister and parents were still trying to use him as a hypotenuse as they negotiated their triangular relationship; he was in love for the first time.

Well, that last one was the real problem. Not the in love part—true, love was notorious for being confusing, what with the rush of hormones and the apparent novelty of such otherwise mundane behavior as watching your crush do simple things like eat yogurt. But honestly, he was OK with that. It wasn’t confusing or difficult or disorienting to enjoy seeing Pam Beesly do normal things, because he derived too much pleasure from the experience to be confused or half-hearted about it. Nor was he confused by the fact that he was in love with an engaged woman. That was awkward, to be sure, and he was doing his absolute damnedest not to let anyone know about it, but it wasn’t confusing. Roy was a dick, a feeling that was confirmed every time they crossed paths, and besides, as long as he wasn’t actively causing infidelity it didn’t really harm anyone for him to be in love with Pam. So, no conflict. No confusion. Just certainty that Pam was the right person for him, even if she didn’t know it yet.

No, the confusion came entirely from that one perfect person, who was definitely confusing him by the way she acted around him. Most of the time, she was great: the same awesome, inventive, hilarious woman he’d met on the phone (was it only) three weeks ago. But, seemingly randomly to him, about 10% of the time she’d suddenly turn…off. Not as in becoming a turn off (that would be too convenient—no, she was always gorgeous) but more like turning off a light switch. The kind of jokes that made her giggle without fail would suddenly…fail. The bright smile he adored would go dim. The shining eyes would flatten, and the attention he’d hoped to coax out of her would not materialize.

The worst part of it was that he couldn’t find the trigger. It wasn’t anything he said. It didn’t seem to be anything he did. He even spent one whole day barely talking to her (not intentionally: blame Michael’s insistence that he personally call every person in the client list he’d inherited and check their contact information) and that didn’t do anything either, because halfway through the day he caught her looking at him and she abruptly turned away and started ignoring him again.

Wait.

That was it.

It wasn’t anything he did. It was what she did. Specifically, where she looked.

He started counting. Every day where she looked over at him more than five times, she stopped. Abruptly.

He’d just have to stop her at five then. Or maybe four; he couldn’t be sure he’d always caught every glance, although his Pamdar was becoming extremely strong.

He put this plan into action and got…well, not immediate results, but something better than what he’d had. He’d saunter up to her desk in the morning (thus ensuring that she didn’t glance over at him, because he was already in her space). He’d tell her whenever he was heading out, tapping his knuckles on her desk to mark the fact to draw her attention and (he hoped) make sure that she didn’t glance over there when he wasn’t around to count, because she’d know where he was. He developed a positive addiction to jellybeans. And all of this resulted in the proportion of the time she shut off dropping down to…about 5%.

Well, if he could have 95% of a happy, engaging (though sadly, also still engaged) Pam Beesly, he’d probably die happy.

He really did try not to let it bother him.

It bothered him anyway.

He took to spending his afternoons at the YMCA, hoisting shot after shot and taking on all comers: teenagers desperate (like him) to get out of the house, retirees missing their glory days, fellow young professionals (a term he despised, but had to concede applied to him) needing to blow off some steam. Sometimes Mark even accompanied him, though he did hear some grumbling about how when they actually moved into the house together (T-minus-one more week!) he’d probably see enough of Jim’s ugly mug that he wouldn’t need to hang out with him at the gym.

He took this as a sign, and that night they went out to Poor Richard’s instead.

It was a mistake.

Poor Richard’s, he had somehow forgotten but now never would again, was the hangout for the warehouse staff. In particular, it was the hangout for one very drunk Roy Anderson and a much less drunk but nevertheless enabling Darryl Philbin. If the drunkenness had been in the other order, he might have been able to make his way in and out from the bar with his and Mark’s drinks and had a nice night hanging with his bestie. It was not, though, and Darryl was sufficiently aware to notice him, and sufficiently drunk to yell his name at a sufficiently high volume that he could definitely not pretend not to notice (and that Mark definitely did notice). And so he found himself squeezed into a bar booth with two coworkers, one of whom was decent and the other of whom he really really hoped for Pam’s sake was also decent. But he had his doubts.

Fortunately, it did not at first appear that this was the night when those doubts would be either confirmed or put to rest, because Roy started snoring two minutes after Jim and Mark sat down. A strategic poke in the chest (well, more like a shove) simultaneously showed that Darryl had done this before and resolved the problem to their mutual satisfaction, so much so that Jim found himself wishing that he could have done the honors.

It turned out that Darryl was actually really worth knowing, when not accompanied by Pam (who entirely eclipsed him) or a wakeful Roy (who did so in the opposite direction). Jim and Mark ended up making plans with him to have a poker night at their place “once it was up and running,” and they all shook hands on it simultaneously—which prompted a fit of mutual laughter at how ridiculous they looked, which in turn woke up Roy

For about ten seconds, before he started snoring again and Darryl had to shove him.

But that was enough time to break up their conversation and move them all towards their cars, except that Darryl and Roy were still in no condition to drive. Jim and Mark would have offered to transport them, except that the backseat of Mark’s car had been somewhat overly optimistically filled with IKEA furniture for their new place the night before and he hadn’t managed to unload it into his parents’ garage yet for the last week of storage. That meant that Darryl went to the bar to call someone while Jim and Mark kept watch over Roy, and that they were back into deep conversation when that someone showed up.

To Jim’s undeserved surprise, it was Pam Beesly.

Pam knew it was a bad sign when she was more disappointed to see Jim Halpert at the bar than her own fiancé. But who was she kidding? It was always Roy. Darryl too, but somehow picking up Darryl at Poor Richard’s (after they had, once again, not invited her, but she was beginning to wonder whether she really wanted to be invited anyway) wasn’t that bad. Darryl was a funny drunk, and anyway, once she dropped him off at his bachelor pad apartment and made sure he got in the front door, he wasn’t her problem anymore. Roy didn’t stop being her problem just because she got home, if anything he became more her problem once they were, and he definitely was not a funny drunk. Oh, he thought he was, but he wasn’t, unless there was secret humor hiding in telling her exactly which waitress was hotter than her and why. Also, of course, Darryl at least bothered to call and ask (not that she was going to say no). Roy just seemed to assume she’d show up at some point, as if pulling him out of the gutter was her job. Which, to some degree, she supposed it was.

But Jim? She’d expected better from Jim. She wasn’t sure why—she’d already seen him at one Poor Richard’s outing, after all—but she had. She’d expected something more than “let’s pop a few beers, it’s the weekend” or “let’s do shots—you gotta do something to deal with another day at Dumbder Mifflin” or “just a few drinks, to be social.” She’d expected the intelligent, funny man she spent all day around to be better than that, more than that, and it was unutterably disappointing to walk into Poor Richard’s, do her normal orientation towards Darryl and Roy, and see him sitting there, beer in hand.

“Beesly!” He looked as surprised as she was disappointed. “I suppose you’re here for Exhibit A.” He stuck a thumb towards Roy and slung an arm around Darryl. She felt her heart sink. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much she’d built Jim Halpert up in her mind, even as she was trying to avoid getting to into him at work—maybe because she was getting too much into him at work. She’d started to think he was a good guy, a sober guy, and now she was disappointed when she’d tried so hard not to be. Not to idealize him. Not to think about…anything more than just that he was a coworker. And yet…

But Jim wasn’t done talking. “…which leaves me with Exhibit B.” He gave Darryl a friendly shake, and she realized with a start that he wasn’t drunk. He was telling her he could drive Darryl home. She took in the scene a little further and realized that while there were four beers in front of Darryl and an assortment across the table where she assumed Roy and Lonny had been sitting (fortunately Lonny lived walking distance from the bar; unfortunately his efficiency apartment barely had space for his own massive bulk, let alone such fantasies as having his friends crash with him). But there were no beers in from of Jim, just the one in his hand.

“You OK with that, Big D?”

Darryl grinned. “I dunno, Jim, Pam might miss my stories from the back seat too much.”

“Stories from the backseat? I gotta hear these. Sorry, Beesly.” Jim gave her a sheepish shrug and then a smirk that told her he knew exactly how little she wanted to be anyone’s DD this evening. He gave Darryl another shake. “If I’d known there were stories, I wouldn’t have let you call anyone for a ride for anyone.” He stopped, as if struck by a thought. “Although I will admit my old Corolla may not have enough space for more than one.”

She quirked an eyebrow at him. “Is this some obscure two-seater Corolla model I haven’t heard of before?”

He raised both hands in mock surrender. “No, no, I just…didn’t exactly clear out the backseat.”

“Since when?”

“Since…ever?” He looked so sheepish she burst out laughing, which brought Roy and Lonny lumbering over from the darts.

“PAMMY!” Roy slapped an arm around her side and pulled her in close. He smelled like what she imagined it might smell like if yeast grew a stomach and mouth so it could vomit. “Wait ‘til you hear how I beat Lonny at darts!”

“One time!” This from Lonny.

“I still beat you.”

“Once.”

“Still.”

With a pair of manly shrugs, this apparently decided the point. “Darryl, you ready to go?” Roy asked over her head.

“Nah, man, Halpert’s got me.” Darryl waved him off, which had the apparent effect of reminding Roy that Jim was there as well.

“Halpert! You ain’t been drinking?” He reached out and punched Jim in the arm. “You gotta man up next time.”

“I dunno, Roy, at least Halpert doesn’t have to have his lady come out and drink his…drive his drunk ass home.” Darryl was drunker than she’d first thought, but the response drew oohs from Lonny and the couple of lushes at the bar whom Pam could now tell were listening in on their conversation. She wanted to sink into the floor, and found herself meeting Jim’s eyes—and finding a sympathetic expression there that somehow helped make the embarrassment of being talked about as if she weren’t standing right there better.

“Whatever.” Roy clearly didn’t feel up to parrying Darryl’s verbal sparring, however inelegant it might be. “Pammy, lezgo.” He started to walk towards the door, forgetting he had his arm around her and causing them both to trip and fall. “Now what’d you do that for?”

“Roy…” she stopped herself short. Arguing wouldn’t do anyone any good.

“My fault, I’m afraid.” Jim was somehow standing over them both, one hand out to each. “I had my legs out.” She knew she hadn’t tripped over his legs. A glance at his face showed that he knew it too. But Roy was grabbing Jim’s hand—how did he not even move when pulling both her and Roy up?—and saying something offhand and rough but not too patronizing, and they were up. She felt the urge to hold onto Jim’s hand and that alone was enough to make her drop it, perhaps a little too fast. Her heart was beating hard and she missed a little bit of the conversation, but suddenly she and Roy were walking out with Jim and Darryl while Lonny trailed behind saying their goodbyes.

She had, apparently, parked right next to Jim without realizing it, as he swung open the door for Darryl as the same time she half-pushed Roy into the passenger’s seat. As she strapped him in and evaded his hands, she noticed Jim folding his long legs into the near side of the Corolla and waiting courteously for her to finish, and then to back out first. As she drove home and the motion of the car lulled Roy to sleep, she reflected that perhaps she hadn’t been mistaken in Jim Halpert at all: perhaps he really was the intelligent, humorous gentleman he appeared from the first.

This realization was not a particularly pleasant one, juxtaposed as it was with the argument that she and Roy got into as soon as she had to wake him up to get out of the car. It seemed beyond beyond to her that Roy would ask her why she was talking to Halpert outside the office when he was the one who was out drinking with the man. She’d only talked to him because she’d had to pick Roy up drunk! He’d spent hours in the same bar with him, but apparently it was the two sentences she’d exchanged that were the focus of their conversation, if you could call it that.

She just wanted to go to bed.

But, she realized, not with Roy. Oh, she didn’t want to cheat on Roy. She wasn’t that kind of person. But tonight she just didn’t want to sleep in the same bed as someone who, no matter how drunk he was, had apparently decided that she couldn’t be trusted. If Roy wanted to be jealous, that was one thing. She’d done her level best over the last few weeks to make sure he had nothing to be jealous of—though that itself might potentially indicate that he did, she knew—and if that wasn’t enough to make him at least wait until he was sober (whenever that might be) to yell at her, she didn’t need to take it. She was aware of a minor flaw or two in the specifics of that argument (drunk men didn’t think that logically) but the foundation was sound. Once she’d decanted Roy into bed and endured until his yelling fuzzed into snores, she quietly packed a bag. It was time for a sleepover at Penny’s—even if Penny didn’t realize it.

Pam had barely slipped into her sister’s apartment when her bag was forcibly removed from her hands and a beer pushed into it. “Sit,” Penny directed, and Pam flopped down on the couch that used to be in their parents’ basement. It was cracked but comfortable, and carried with it the memories of cozy afternoons spent sharing hot cocoa and playing Connect Four on the rickety folding table set up in front of it—a table so unsturdy that it had made Connect Four almost like Jenga, in that you could also lose by overturning the table and making everyone’s little checkers fall out. Pam felt her eyes fill with tears, not because she didn’t love the memories but because nothing in her own house brought those kinds of memories with it. Roy had insisted on buying new stuff or using his old bachelor pad stuff, and so all their parents’ hand-me-downs had gone to Penny—or the dump.

“So…” Penny wasn’t a patient person, and she was practically vibrating as she stood in front of Pam, her own beer’s label falling victim to nervous picking. Pam realized she’d been sitting on the couch a little longer than she’d thought—the beer had been new a few eyeblinks ago.

“So,” she started, but Penny interrupted.

“It’s not like I don’t want you here, or you’re not welcome all the time, but please tell me you’re leaving Roy this time.” Penny seemed to realize what she’d said and shoved the bottle into her mouth.

Pam stared at her. Leaving Roy? That wasn’t what she was doing, was it? OK, she was sitting on her sister’s couch, that bag by the door was definitely hers, with all of her stuff in it (well, not all her clothes, but all the ones she liked, and the art supplies, and her toiletries…), and she’d called Penny in a panic from an Arby’s parking lot after realizing her sister might not be home.

She could see why Penny might think she was leaving Roy, if it came to that.

But she wasn’t leaving Roy, right? What would that even entail? They were engaged, for god’s sake, not just roommates or boyfriend and girlfriend, but engaged, getting married, together forever. She couldn’t be leaving Roy because…because she couldn’t be leaving Roy, that’s why.

“No…” She’d meant for that to be more forceful, more of a “No!” but it came out halfway between what she’d meant and a question. She pushed out a shaky laugh. “I’m just…I just needed some space.” She just needed a bed that didn’t have a drunken Roy Anderson in it, and a morning wakeup that didn’t involve continuing an argument with a hungover Roy about how apparently he could hang out with Jim and she couldn’t even exchange two words with him. She was so tired. So tired, in fact, that she didn’t really see any real reason not to just tell Penny all of this. She was aware as she did so that she wouldn’t usually open up this way, even to her sister. Maybe it was the couch. Maybe it was the exhaustion. Maybe it was the beer, which had somehow become empty. But she sat there on Penny’s couch and let it all out.

Afterwards, her sister was uncharacteristically silent for a moment, then abruptly stood up and walked into the kitchen. Pam followed her only with her eyes, then slid them closed and rested her head on the plush but crinkled back of the couch. When she opened them again Penny was gently removing the bottle from her hands and sliding in a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

“I don’t think you really need my feedback,” Penny began, as she leaned back and started in on her own, matching bowl of ice cream, the only difference being (as it had always been, ever since they could remember) that hers was decorated with a small splash of caramel sauce while Pam’s boasted an equal quantity of chocolate. “But for what it’s worth, you’re welcome to stay here as long as you need.” If there was any extra emphasis on the last five words, Pam couldn’t be sure she wasn’t making it up. “And Pam?” Penny made sure Pam was making eye contact before she went on. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“Yeah.”

The two of them sat there side by side and ate their ice cream, then by mutual assent began a new conversation about something else—first their Dad’s new hobby of baking artisanal bread, then a restaurant that Penny had been to recently, and by the time that Penny got up to find Pam sheets that could go on the couch things felt a little better. But Penny’s words wouldn’t quite leave Pam’s head, and even in the morning it felt like an earworm of a song she couldn’t get out of her head.

“Please tell me you’re leaving Roy.”

“I’m sorry.”

What the hell was she doing? She really didn’t know.

When Pam didn’t come in the next day, Jim was worried.

Scratch that, he was scared.

Scratch that too. He didn’t know what to think. He didn’t think it was likely that Pam had done something stupid like let Roy drive and get into a horrible accident, but the idea was just plausible enough that he let himself linger on it for horrifying minutes. What if they were in a wreck? Even with Pam driving, a drunk, loud, large Roy in the truck could spell disaster. What if she was injured? What if she lost her memory? What if she died?

He’d driven Darryl home last night and the warehouse man, who was swiftly if somewhat confusingly becoming a friend, had had just loose enough of a tongue that he’d ended up telling Jim a lot more than he ought to want to know about Roy and Pam. Not more than he wanted to know—he was highly aware that, on the balance, he wanted to know more about Pamela whatever-her-middle-name-was Beesly than was good for him—but more than he ought to want to know. Like how she’d never kicked Roy out of the house (“thank God” slurred Darryl, because he didn’t need Roy on his couch) but she’d had good reason to a couple of times (“maybe three or four,” Darryl had confided in an overly loud whisper as they pulled up to a red light, and it had taken another car honking for Jim to realize when the light had turned green). Or how Darryl, who apparently only got hit with his alcohol when he got in the car, hated dealing with Roy, who got hit by it immediately, and so got into the habit of calling Pam and getting her to drive them both home (“’s great that you’re drinking with us now, Jim! Or rather, not drinking much” he’d added, “since that way we won’t need to bother her anymore” as if dropping a drunken Roy on her doorstep at 2am wouldn’t be a bother).

The pencil in his fingers snapped, and Dwight looked up in disapproval. “Those are company pencils, Jim.”

Jim took the bait with relief, glad to have a distraction. “Am I not part of this company, Dwight?”

Dwight muttered something that might have been “unfortunately” and might have been an obscure German swear word before speaking up more clearly. “Those pencils are intended for writing orders, not snapping in half.”

Jim leaned over his desk towards Dwight’s. “Really?” he said in an artificially treacle-y, bright voice. “Do you have proof of that?” His friends from high school would have known that voice was a warning not to cross him today. Dwight did not. Not yet anyway.

“I don’t need documenta…” Dwight started, but Jim cut him off.

“But you see, Dwight, you do need documentation. Because as far as I can see, this is a Dunder Mifflin pencil, right?” He held up the broken half of the pencil in his right hand, trying not to think about how he was already, on only a few weeks acquaintance and unrequited affection, certain that Pam would have laughed if he’d pointed out that it was technically now just a Mifflin pencil. He did not let that thought slow the pace of his rant enough to let Dwight get a word in edgewise, however. “And I’m a Dunder Mifflin employee.” He gestured at the nameplate on his desk. “So as long as I, a Dunder Mifflin employee,” he gestured again “am making use of this Dunder Mifflin equipment,” he tossed the two halves of the pencil on the desk in front of him, “then it strikes me that the pencil is doing its job. Does it matter if it’s the job that the pencil was originally designed for? Of course not. After all, there’s a piece of Dunder Mifflin paper leveling out the corner of my desk, and that’s not what the paper was intended for. There’s a Dunder Mifflin coffee mug holding my other, unbroken pencils, and that’s not what the mug was meant for. There’s even a Dunder Mifflin sweatshirt in the break room that we all use as hot pads when taking our food out of the microwave, and God knows that’s not what the sweatshirt was invented for. So tell me, Dwight Kurt Schrute, exactly where does it say I, in my infinite Dunder Mifflin employeeness can’t break this Dunder Mifflin pencil if I’m feeling just a little bit on edge?”

A hand came down on his shoulder and he realized he was breathing heavily. A voice that he slowly recognized as Michael’s came floating over the hand.

“OK, Jimbo, I think we all get the point.” He turned and Michael smiled weakly at him. “Just don’t break Dwight, OK? He’s a Dunder Mifflin employee too.”

“I’m the Assistant…” Dwight started.

“Not now, Dwight.” This was the most professional Jim had ever seen Michael, and it took the air out of his frustration.

“Sorry, Michael.” He turned to Dwight. “Sorry, Dwight. I’m just a little on edge today.”

Dwight made a noise that a generous soul might have interpreted as an acceptance of the apology and a more reasonable one might have taken as meaning “don’t do it again.” Michael gripped Jim’s shoulder a little harder. “Jimbo, you and I are going to go to lunch now,” he declared. “And we’ll get to the bottom of this. I can’t have my top salesman being on edge, now can I?”

“But Michael, I’m your…” Dwight attempted to interrupt.

“Not. Now. Dwight.” Jim let himself be maneuvered out the double doors, Dwight’s last plaintive attempt to enforce the rules—a muted cry of “but it’s only 10:30!”—floating behind them.

Lunch with Michael was not as bad as he’d expected. Once he was out of the office and away from Dwight—and the awareness of Pam’s absence like a missing tooth—he’d calmed down, and Michael’s obliviousness to the reason he’d been on edge was, surprisingly, the balm his soul had needed. Michael just kept burbling away about sales targets and creative repurposing of office supplies and Jim couldn’t help but smile. He was smiling a little less when Michael tried to pick up the Applebees waitress, but even that was ridiculous enough (and squashed quickly and firmly enough) that he couldn’t help but be amused. Michael was, for all his inappropriate ideas, trying very hard to be a good boss, and Jim found himself appreciating it. By the time they got back to the office, he was almost in a good mood.

That all evaporated, however, when he noticed the presence of a midsize pickup truck in the Dunder Mifflin parking lot when Michael pulled them back up to the office.

Looking back on it, Pam really had to admit that she’d intended, originally, to make up with Roy. She really had. Oh, she’d let her sister think that she was just going back to get a longer overnight bag, with more clothes in it, but she’d really had everything she’d needed already. She’d been going back, like she usually did, to make everything OK with Roy again, which would mean a little bit of groveling, a lot of telling him he was right, and then a comfortable, simple return to routine. They’d drive into work together, he’d wave at her as he slipped down the stairs to the warehouse, and everything would be back to normal. Calm. Stable. Ideal. Normal.

But that wasn’t what happened—not through any fault of her own.

Because what Pam hadn’t realized, or perhaps more accurately hadn’t let herself realize, was that her plan relied on Roy reacting to this problem, this argument, this fight the same way he reacted to all the other tiffs, disagreements, feuds, debates, and so on that they’d had over the years. It relied on him blowing up at her, sure, but ultimately calming down and accepting that things were going to go on much as they always did, in the perpetual stasis of relationship.

But this time, Roy thought he was the wronged party, and that made all the difference. Pam didn’t realize it at the time—Penny did, but Pam was just as determined not to listen to her about it as she was to go back to Roy—but in every other argument they’d had, Roy had been aware that he’d done something wrong. Oh, he certainly hadn’t always dmitted it—there was a reason their traditional two-step involved Pam groveling and not him, though there were exceptions to even that rule—but he’d known, somewhere deep inside, that he had contributed to the situation. Maybe Pammy had been a little too judge-y of where his eyes had wandered, but the eyes that wandered had been his; or she’d been too opinionated about his having the guys over once too often without telling her ahead of time even though she’d begged him to just give her a quick heads up, but hey, he had to admit she had said something about that if he really tried to remember; or maybe she’d gained a little too much weight and hey, all he’d been saying was that she should try to drop it off for her own sake, but yeah, even he knew that a guy couldn’t really get away with saying that sort of thing even to a longterm girlfriend. Maybe especially to a longterm girlfriend. So somewhere, deep underneath it all, Roy had always known he was at least a little bit in the wrong.

Not this time, though. This time Roy was entirely, 100%, supremely convinced that he was in the right. Pammy had been making eyes at Halpert, and she’d been at the bar with him, and that just wasn’t right. If anything, this hangover logic was reinforced by the fact that she wasn’t there when he woke up for his 4am piss, and it was, illogical as it might seem, only strengthened by the memory of the fact that he’d headed to the bar with Halpert without her. After all, that made Halpert his guy to hang out with, so Pammy was doubly in the wrong. She shouldn’t be sniffing around any other guys, and she definitely shouldn’t be horning in on his social world.

The idea that this might be a problem in a longterm relationship occurred to him, but not because husbands and wives tended to move in the same social circles. No, when Roy was waiting for her in the living room, steaming, it was because, he snapped, he couldn’t trust her. Where the hell have you been was followed by I fucking bet and Why don’t I just call Penny. He didn’t seem deterred when she told him he could do what he wanted, because she had been at Penny’s, and the invective only escalated from there, not entirely on his side. Because Roy wasn’t interested in the traditional two-step, not this morning, not when he was so certain he bore no blame, no shred of culpability for the situation he found himself in. Groveling wouldn’t be enough; there needed to be consequences. He was quite fuzzy as to what those consequences might be, but that didn’t mean he was interested in hearing any of Pam’s ideas on the subject.

And that was why Pam found herself calling Penny again for a ride to work almost two hours late, eyes puffy and bag no more packed than she’d started with, instead of making up with Roy and going in with him. She wasn’t entirely sure whether they were broken up, but the sound of breaking pottery as she’d closed the door behind herself didn’t bode well.

She still went into work, though. She was Pam Beesly, not Bridget Jones, and her personal drama was no justification for slacking off while Dwight Schrute was still in the office. And although she wasn’t anywhere near admitting it to herself, the possibility of being cheered up by a lanky, surprisingly effective salesman was clearly also on her mind, as witnessed by the sheer disappointment that shot through her when she noticed the desk across from Dwight was empty. Where the hell was Jim?

She sat down at her desk and organized her pencils, and still no Jim. She sorted cardstock and paper stock and even the rarely-sold cardboard in the supply closet, and still no Jim. There was, to her relief, also no Michael, so she began to realize that the two of them must be out even though there was no sales call on the timesheet, but that realization did nothing to calm her nerves, especially when she saw Roy’s pickup slam into the parking lot on two wheels at about 11:45. She braced herself for feet on the stairs, only for none to materialize, and the tension began driving her mad—a fact she admitted to herself only when she voluntarily went looking for Kelly’s company in the annex.

It was there that Angela found her with a sniff to tell her that her boyfriend was bleeding in the parking lot, turned on her heel, and was gone before she could object that Roy wasn’t her boyfriend, he was her fiancé.

Jim didn’t really know what he’d expected when he and Michael had gotten out of the car—Pam and Roy kissing on the side of the building, maybe?—but he knew he hadn’t expected to peer into the pickup’s side door and see a visibly disheveled Roy eating Arby’s from the bag.

Nor had he expected Roy to look up, meet his eyes, and lunge out of the truck. Fortunately for him, hung over Roy was apparently less coordinated than drunk Roy, who had been surprisingly good at darts, and the lunge became more of a fall in short order.

“Halpert!” The bull roar was the same, though.

“Hi, Roy.” He wasn’t sure what was going down, but if Roy was a bull, he knew that running was a sure way to enrage him.

“Halpert!” He yelled again, as if Jim hadn’t spoken.

“What?” He’d always gone through life with an insouciant attitude; he found that for the people whom he could charm, it worked, and for the people he couldn’t, it didn’t matter, and it amused him, so he clung to it whenever possible. He put it to full use here, but as he’d guessed, Roy fell squarely in the category of those he couldn’t.

“What the fuck”—he said this with a peculiar relish, as if it were the key to the whole sentence—“are you doing with my girlfriend?”

Jim bit back the instinctive retort that he at least knew that Pam was Roy’s fiancée, not his girlfriend, because he sensed that even for him this was perhaps a bridge too far, and for Roy it was several major highways in the wrong direction. He also bit back his second instinct, which was to laugh in Roy’s face. What was he doing with Roy’s fiancée? Not what he wanted to be doing, which was being her fiancé instead of Roy. No, he was just pining for her and worrying about her and hoping for the best for her. You know, being the lovelorn, lovesick fool he was combined with the best friend to her he could be under the circumstances. But that, he could tell, wasn’t the answer Roy was looking for. He was looking for black and white, for “nothing” and a scared jump backwards or “wouldn’t you like to know” and the asshole swagger he himself specialized in (although Jim had the distinct feeling that if the situation were in fact reversed Roy would fall into the latter group, not the former). He wanted the excitement of the mano-a-mano macho encounter or the uncontested dominance display. Jim did not feel inclined to give it to him.

His hesitation, however, allowed someone else to enter the conversation. He had somehow forgotten Michael was there—a dangerous practice if there ever was one—and his boss reverted to form, balancing the earlier humanity and grace of his reaction to Jim’s interactions with Dwight by the sheer tactlessness of his reaction to Jim and Roy.

“Jimbo! You and Pam, huh?” Michael socked Jim in the shoulder, and at that moment Roy charged, and everything went haywire.

Reconstructing the scene later, Jim could tell that Michael had meant to go for the old one-two punch on the shoulder, a manly and/or comradely gesture to indicate that they were all men of the world. This was unexpected but only in the specifics, as Michael mishandling a situation was, he already knew, the most likely outcome of any given scenario. Less unexpected than that was Roy’s angry reaction to the implication of Michael’s ill-chosen comment, but more unexpected was the speed with which it developed: while Michael reared back for the second punch, Roy snapped out of his crouch with the speed of a former all-city linebacker, and the impact of his body into Jim’s moved Jim just that crucial inch or three down as Michael’s fist landed.

Smack.

Michael hit Jim square on the lip.

Crash.

Roy’s followthrough put them both into the door of Michael’s car.

And suddenly there were lots and lots of voices, as the warehouse guys had apparently come up for their break and, seeing Roy charge, come over to investigate. Jim was a little dazed, but he though he saw Darryl leading Roy away, muttering something about “liability” and “your job” while Michael tilted him onto his back and started yelling distracting things like “what year is it, Jim?” and “How many fingers am I holding up?” while shaking his fist in front of his face. His eyes gazed skyward and he thought he saw a figure turn away from the window, though he couldn’t tell in the moment who it might be.

It didn’t take long for the warehouse guys to figure out that nothing more was going to happen, not now that Roy was being crammed back into his truck by Darryl and led away, and soon Michael and Jim were left alone again outside the office. Michael gave a last effort at checking in on how Jim was doing—“you know you’re bleeding, right Jimbo? You haven’t given into toxic shock? NOD IF YOU CAN HEAR ME”—and at Jim’s annoyed insistence that it was just a bruise and a split lip, sat down next to him.

“You know she has a fiancé, right?”

Jim stared at Michael. “Yes. Yes, oddly enough, I did know that.”

Michael went on as if this were the most normal conversation in the world and not the dominant cause of Jim’s worry that he might have hit his head hard enough to cause serious damage. “Well, BFD anyway. Engaged ain’t married.” He shrugged. “It’s like Winston Churchill used to say…” he trailed off.

Jim decided to help him out. “Never, never, never, never, never give up?”

“Nah, that’s not it. Oh yeah. The difference is, ma’am, in the morning I’ll be sober.” He patted Jim on the shoulder. “You think about that.”

Jim wasn’t sure that under ordinary circumstances he’d have been able to think about anything else.

But these were hardly normal circumstances, and at that moment he spotted the actual subject of his thoughts striding across the parking lot to meet them.

Pam went to the window and peeked out between the blinds. No Roy, thank goodness, but there was Michael and there…was Jim. And while he wasn’t her boyfriend, he was definitely bleeding—or as best she could tell from this distance, as he had a hand pressed to his face and Michael was doing the thing Michael always did at the sight of blood, hopping around implying that he was going to faint at any moment if only someone would be so kind as to both care about his “weak stomach” and provide a comfortable place to do so. There being a distinct lack of cushy chairs or sofas in the parking lot, she thought it unlikely that he was actually going to go through with it. In addition, given that Jim seemed to be the one injured and thus only peripherally dealing with Michael’s self-concern, it seemed unlikely that he was reaping the attention she wanted, and indeed as she watched even briefly she saw him transform back into a reasonable facsimile of a helpful person instead of the parody of a fainting matron he’d been a moment ago and bend back down over Jim.

She had a momentary surge of anger towards Angela—how dare she call Jim “your boyfriend!” And no, she had no illusions that Angela had somehow mistaken who was lying out there bleeding. This was too much of a piece with her, well, catty tendencies towards anyone in the office she thought was behaving outside of her bizarre set of acceptable behaviors, such as having a male friend who wasn’t Dwight—but then the anger was replaced by concern. Why was Jim bleeding on the asphalt? Why was Michael of all people the one tending to him? What were the odds Michael wouldn’t make things worse? As the last of these thoughts hit home she found herself slinging her coat on, pointedly ignoring Angela’s eyes, and walking down the stairs.

She was halfway across the parking lot before she realized that she had no idea what to do with a bleeding Jim. But it couldn’t be that hard, could it? She had a mostly-full box of band-aids in her purse, a side effect of buying the cheapest heels she could in order to stretch her salary and thus always ending up with pairs that rubbed her heels, never quite in the same place consistently to build up a callus but just enough to bleed. She also had a little pack of Kleenex for seasonal allergies. She had Vaseline, both for cracked heels (see above) and because she’d once heard a rumor that rubbing it along small tears in hose could keep them from ripping any further. She’d found no truth in that particular rumor, but the Vaseline hadn’t left her purse. And obviously she had ibuprofen, because…well, duh.

Clean with Kleenex. Put Vaseline on the wound. Apply band-aid. Treat pain with ibuprofen. Simple.

Well, simple if it wasn’t a split lip, which of course it was, she noticed as she approached. You couldn’t really put a band-aid over the inside of the mouth…ugh. But still, she recited to herself as she neared the two men: Kleenex, Vaseline, ibuprofen. Helpful. She was being helpful.

“Hey.” Jim spoke softly, and it was slightly slurred by the split lip, but it was still somehow a relief to hear his voice. And when did that happen? She wondered to herself. When did I start reacting to his voice like it can make everything better? That line of thought was abruptly cut off, though, as she got close enough to talk to the two men.

“Pam! Thank God. Roy knocked Jim out!” Michael pushed ahead of Jim, gesticulating wildly as if he could reenact the event for her horrified gaze. “I mean, well, technically I knocked Jim out, but…”

“Michael, I was never,” Jim tried to interrupt but Michael steamrolled on over him.

“But Roy was so mad! I’ve never seen him so angry, and I mean, you know the time that I borrowed the paper shredder and a few reams of paper and it turned out those were special order papers that Darryl and Roy had been trying to load onto the truck for shipment and they totally should have told me but they didn’t and somehow they all ended up shredded and Darryl yelled at me?”

Pam nodded, uncertain where this was going but certain she should probably be grateful to Michael for delaying the inevitable reveal. She felt oddly sick to her stomach. She did remember that time. The paper hadn’t just been a special order, the order they were part of had been misfiled three times—by Michael, naturally—and only finally going out perilously close to the warehouse drop-dead date when the warehouse staff would get performance penalties for letting shipments slide too long. “Yelled” was a misnomer: Pam had heard wild rumors that Roy hadn’t bothered to deny or confirm that he’d picked Michael up by the scruff of the neck. Both Roy and Darryl had almost quit and Michael had had to give the entire warehouse staff a three-day weekend “for teambuilding” that was really just to let them all cool off.

“He was like, ten times madder than that. And he yelled ‘fuck’ at Jim!” Michael seemed really impressed by this, so much so that he repeated it. “‘Fuck,’ Pam! And he said that…” he abruptly ran out of steam and glanced over at Jim for the first time in this whole monologue before straightening and continuing as if he hadn’t stopped at all. “Anyway, he charged Jim! And then I sort of accidentally punched Jim…sorry about that, buddy…and then Darryl and the guys took Roy over there”—he gesticulated generally towards the warehouse doors—“and then Jim and I were talking and then you came over and…and I guess you know that.” He reached over to pat Jim on the shoulder and then stopped, as if thinking better of it for some reason. “I better go see that they’re dealing with that, actually. Excuse me. Pam. Jim.” He started walking off towards the warehouse and then turned, gave an exaggerated stage wink to Jim behind his hand, and continued off, whistling.

Jim turned to Pam. “If you can believe it, that was Michael being subtle.”

She nodded. “I believe it. I’ve known Michael for a while.” She stuck her hands into her coat pockets. “So, uh…how much of what he said was true?”

Jim gulped.

How much of what Michael said was true? Well, as he was already beginning to understand after only a little bit of time working at Dunder Mifflin, Michael was telling the truth—but in a particularly Michael way. And done so, again as was typically Michael, in a way that made it impossible for Jim to say so. Because if he did, he was basically being a dick, right? If he just nodded and said “all of it, except for my being knocked out”? Because while Roy was entirely off base in terms of what had actually happened, at least in terms of what he’d implied (the realization that he’d never specified what he thought Jim had done with his fiancée dawned now, inconveniently enough), he wasn’t wrong about what Jim had wanted to do. And didn’t that mean that he was at least somewhat complicit in what had just happened?

Instead he shrugged and gave Pam a little half-smirk. His hand instinctively came up behind the back of his head and rubbed the long hair rising there. “Uh…”

The air seemed to deflate out of her and she leaned herself up against his car and closed her eyes.

“It’s all true, isn’t it?” Her voice was different than he’d ever heard it before. Defeated. Empty, maybe. She opened her eyes and rolled them towards him without moving her head. “Jim, be honest with me. I don’t know why, but I can tell when you’re trying to lie.”

Bullshit was all he could think, because if Pam Beesly could tell that he was lying about something, she would be able to tell that he was lying every moment of the day. Lying about how he felt about her, lying about being uninterested in her every movement, lying about being OK with her and Roy.

“Like right now, Jim. Right now you’re thinking something like ‘bullshit,’ and you’re about to try to convince yourself and me that I don’t know what you’re thinking.” She closed her eyes again. “And yes, telling someone you can read them and then telling them they’re thinking ‘bullshit’ is the oldest trick in the book, but it’s not that. It’s the way you rub your head when you’re nervous—not rubbing the place where Michael hit you, or your ribs that hit the car and then the pavement, but just rubbing the back of your neck. It’s the stupid little faces you make when you’re reacting and think no one else is looking at you. Did you even realize you smirked at me when you started to lie?”

“Uh…”

“Oh yeah, and it’s the way you pick your words out when you’re around me, like if you say the wrong thing something is going to explode.” She shoved herself up off the car and turned to face him. “So for once, Jim, just once, please, be totally honest with me. How much of what Michael said was true?”

“All of it, except for my being knocked out.” It was like the words were drawn out of him without any intention, any volition. They were a whisper in the wind, but evidently a strong enough one to reach her, because she nodded.

“I thought so.” She grabbed his hand, startling him so much that his hand only curled around hers when it had already pulled away, leaving a weird jumble of items in his hand. He turned his palm up and stared down at a small jar of Vaseline, a single bandaid, a Kleenex, and two ibuprofen. “Get something on that cut, Halpert,” she threw over her shoulder as she turned and walked quickly away in the direction that Michael had headed a moment before.

Roy was favoring one shoulder, Pam noticed idly as she walked over towards the clump of warehouse workers that now included her very awkward boss. They all turned towards her as if with a single will when she got close, and she was involuntarily reminded of a Tumblr post she’d seen of a bunch of cats staring at their owner from the kitchen table at night, eyes shining in the darkness, with the caption “Apparently I interrupted something.”

Well, it was about time she fucking interrupted whatever the hell was going on with Roy.

Before she could muster the gumption to figure out what it was she actually wanted to say to him in front of a large group of sympathetic witnesses, he took the decision out of her hands—or at least, eliminated several of her more conciliatory options.

“You fucking him?” He lurched up to his feet, and the sting in his words took away any softness that might have welled up in her from the way he sucked in his breath when pushing off his left shoulder. “I should have fucking known.”

She stood there for a moment, mouth agape. This was the man she was planning to marry? This was the man she’d delayed all her life plans for, the one she’d worked for years at a dead-end job with an ineffectual boss whose best friend sexually harassed her just in order to be close to? All she could muster as a response was a single syllable. “No.”

No, she wasn’t fucking Jim. But also no, this couldn’t be happening. No, this was not her life. If she were Kelly, she’d already be looking around for Ashton Kutcher to jump out and tell her she’d been “Punk’d,” because no, this had to be fake. It couldn’t be real. It simply couldn’t.

But also no, she was not going to take this anymore. Yes, she loved Roy, she had loved Roy for all of her adult life and even hearing crazy, jealous bullshit out of his mouth couldn’t stop that (if it could, she would have stopped loving him senior year, when he’d made a big deal out of Austin Blackmon’s staying after school to help her finish their joint final project for art class: as if a wall-size mural could be a one-person job!). But no, she was not a doormat. She was a person, dammit, and worse, they’d been through this all this morning. She’d told him he had nothing to worry about. She’d told him she was friends with Jim (wasn’t it great that there was someone for her to talk to about how crazy Dwight and Michael and everyone else was, she’d practically begged? Wasn’t it wonderful that she wouldn’t have to bottle up every smirk, every laugh, every comment and try to recap it all for him at the end of the day just to avoid going crazy?). She’d told him Jim had never made a move, would never make a move, didn’t like her that way, and that besides that, for god’s sake, obviously she wouldn’t do anything with him even if he did. Because they were engaged—her and Roy, not her and Jim—and she wasn’t that kind of person, and anyway she didn’t want to.

No.

This was not on her.

This was not even, she was beginning to realize, about her.

It was about Roy, and his ego, and the fact that that ego was never going to be small enough to allow for the idea that she wasn’t a possession, that she was a person, and that her being a person, ironically enough, meant that she was actually more faithful to him than she could have been as a possession. Because she had actual agency, and she loved him.

But she couldn’t love Ego the Living Planet.

“No,” she repeated, in case he hadn’t heard her the first time, this time stronger, a building crescendo. “No,” a third time, and this time she took a step towards him. “I am not fucking Jim Halpert. But you know that, Roy,” she said, and she poked him in the chest, temporarily ignoring the ridiculous difference in their relative sizes. “You know that because I already told you that. Because it should be obvious to you and to everyone else here,” and she swept her arm around to indicate the warehouse workers and Michael, who was trying to look as if he didn’t exist, “but apparently somehow isn’t, that I’m not. That. Kind. Of. Person.” She stood there, shaking from the emotion and uncertain where to go from there, but the words kept coming. “And if you think I’m that kind of person, maybe we shouldn’t get married.”

She hadn’t known a parking lot could get that quiet.

Now it was her turn to speak before Roy could rally himself to respond. “I guess that’s my answer.” She twisted the ring off her finger—a familiar motion with a novel ending—and held it out. Roy just stared, and eventually Darryl coughed, reached out a hand, and took it.

“I’ll be at Penny’s. We’ll come for my stuff this weekend…don’t make this harder than it has to be.” That last was a prayer, and she walked with shaky legs back towards the office building, conscious of the eyes that followed her back, but refusing to turn around again.

The next couple weeks were tough for Jim. As he thought that, it felt incredibly self-centered: Pam and Roy were breaking up, Pam was getting her own place for the first time as an adult, Pam was renegotiating her entire life, but it was tough for him? But it was, nevertheless, tough for him, because whatever fantasy he might have had looking at her storm across the parking lot of having her show up at his doorstep the next day and confess that she had feelings for him the way that he did for her (that was how he thought of it to himself, when he let himself think about it, back before the Break Up: feelings. If he’d let himself think “I’m in love with you,” or even just “I love you,” he’d have had to say something, and saying something would…well, he thought it would have been bad, but how could anything really end up as bad as this had? Except if she’d actually shot him down, and that…that was unthinkable except that he thought about it every day), she hadn’t. She hadn’t come into work the next couple of days, and Michael had been very wink-wink-nudge-nudge about it all until Jim had made it crystal clear that he had actually literally zero information or knowledge about what was going on. Then she’d come back, but there had been bags under her eyes and a bare patch on her ring finger and there were too many eyes on them and too many elbows poking at them (thank you again Michael) for there to be any real conversation about it, and besides he could read the look in her eyes well enough: it said “can we not” and so they didn’t.

That was what was tough.

Well, that and watching Pam drag herself in day after day, clearly not as OK as she wanted everyone to think. He’d managed to worm out of her one day in an unguarded moment that she hadn’t actually found a place yet; she was staying with friends and family, rotating between Penny and Izzy and her parents—yes, they lived three hours away, but she was spending weekends there so that her friends could have a little time to themselves given how completely generous they were being of their couch and futon, respectively. But that meant she couldn’t really use the weekends to look for apartments, because she was three hours away and her mom was treating her like a kid again and…

Well, it was a long unguarded moment. Actually, a whole unguarded meal at Cugino’s, which he was pretty sure she’d only agreed to because they had somehow found themselves the only people in the office at lunchtime and so there was no one around to notice that they went to lunch together. And he’d enjoyed every minute of it, and there had been the same crackle in the air between them that he’d felt that first night on the phone, and he felt like an idiot for feeling that way because surely if she actually felt that way about him there’d have been some kind of sign now that she’d been broken up with Roy for…ten whole days.

OK, so he was getting a little unreasonably impatient. She’d been with the guy for years, she didn’t have a place to stay yet, she probably wasn’t in a place to date or anything. But still, you’d think there’d be a sign.

Or you could make a sign yourself, he decided. Or at least take steps to create the situation in which a sign might possibly be put up by someone else. In this case, it was the moment when Pam threw up her hands—they were alone at work again, this time at 5:30 when everyone else had gone home, even Dwight, who had left mumbling something about a beet harvest and how it was more important than making sure Jim didn’t mess with his desk. Jim had already decided the perfect prank for that: he was going to do absolutely nothing to Dwight’s desk, but subtly change his own desk, using a faux-wood set of extenders he’d found on eBay, so that it looked like he’d moved Dwight’s because the relative positioning was off. But he’d done that already, so now he was just killing time, trying to figure out something to say to the woman behind the reception desk, when she threw up her hands and sighed. He raised an eyebrow and she shrugged.

“Penny’s got a date tonight—something her friend set up that she forgot to tell me about—and while she promises that they won’t be staying at her place, and I have a key…”

“She was your ride?”

Pam nodded. “And so now I have to take three buses to her place, which will take me an extra hour…” she glanced up at the clock. “Shit, two hours, because I just missed the first one.” She let her head slump against the keyboard (or so he assumed, as it dropped out of sight behind her monitor) and let out a loud sigh. “And then I won’t have time to look for apartments, or a car to do it with, and it’ll be another week of suitcases and stretching her and Izzy’s generosity to the breaking point.” Her voice was slightly muffled by the monitor, so he got up and walked to her desk. To hear her better, he told himself, even though he knew he was lying.

He looked down at her from the other side of the desk. God she was cute, with her hair all out of sorts against the keyboard. She didn’t quite meet his eyes—was that a blush? Maybe that was the sign he needed. He decided to make it so, and knocked on the desk.

“Well, Beesly,” he drawled, knowing this would definitely draw her interest, since it was the way he introduced most of his pranks on Dwight—but this was definitely not a prank.

“Yes?” She sat up. “You have an idea?”

“Well, it occurs to me…” He grabbed a jellybean and pretended to consider it. “It occurs to me that if you’re already committed to spending the next two hours getting home.” He looked up at her. “You are committed to that, right?”

“I guess so.” She made a face, he made one back,  and she half-laughed, which he considered a whole victory.

“Then since you’ve already marked those two hours down as being spent getting home, we might as well take it as read that you will spend those two hours getting home, and arrive home,” he  glanced at the clock “around 7:37?”

“More like 8.” She grimaced, and he nodded.

“So we’re agreed you’ll get home to Penny’s at 8.”

“Yes?”

“Then why don’t you and I spend the next two hours and…twenty-two minutes now shopping for apartments for you?” He shrugged as nonchalantly as he could with the idea of helping Pam and also not coincidentally spending another two-plus hours one on one with her in his mind. “I have my car, we have the internet…it seems to me that the world is our oyster.” He popped the jellybean in his mouth. “Whaddya say?”

Pam was surprised at just how nervous she was as Jim opened up the car door and ushered her into the cramped environs of a Toyota Corolla. Well, cramped for Jim, she realized, distracted for a moment by his long legs sliding into the driver’s side, but actually remarkably roomy for someone like her. She could see Jim and his buddies (he had buddies, right? She was pretty sure he’d mentioned playing basketball at the Y on weekends) cramming four six-footers in here, so for her much more minimalist needs in terms of legroom the car was actually very spacious—or it would be if there wasn’t junk everywhere in the back seat, which put a damper on the idea of Jim hanging out with his buddies.

But this was all a distraction, the kind of distraction she was so used to finding to stop herself from thinking about her real emotions. With Roy, it had always been “what can I make for dinner” or “I wonder why that car from Washington state is all the way out here in Pennsylvania” or “ooh, a purple Mazda” to stop herself from noticing how emotionally distant she and Roy had become. She wasn’t going to let stupid sexy Jim and his imaginary basketball buddies distract her from what she was thinking and feeling. She was…nervous. Because she liked Jim, and what did that say about her? Did it say that Roy was somehow right? No. No, it didn’t, not at all, because for all she liked Jim she had never thought about him that way until the day Roy had decided to punch him. She’d thought about him a lot before that, of course, but it was always as her outlet, her friend, her lifeline, not as…well, not as stupid sexy Jim whose legs seemed to stretch all the way out under the hood of the Corolla and whose shoulders were almost touching hers even across the center console.

She realized this was because she had instinctively begun to lean towards him while he turned to look out the rear window and back out of the parking space, and hurriedly adjusted herself in the seat.

But even if liking Jim didn’t mean Roy was right (and Roy was, she was beginning to discover, basically never right) it was still an uncomfortable feeling churning in her gut. She hadn’t ever liked someone before, not like-liked. If she hadn’t known that before, she could tell it now, both because the feeling was itself new and vaguely nauseating (“what is this feeling, so sudden, and new?” she started singing in her mind before cutting it off—Roy didn’t like Wicked—and then defiantly if still silently finishing the verse because she wasn’t with Roy anymore) and because, well, she was using terms like “like-like” instead of what it probably was, which was (deep breath) probably a potent mix of liking, lust, and maybe the first stirrings of a crush. Make that the deeply definite stirrings of a fairly hard crush, she amended as Jim turned back around and she was caught by the amusement twinkling in his eyes.

“So, Beesly,” she loved it when he called her Beesly, it made her remember that she was never, ever going to be Anderson and at the moment that felt very important for reasons it hadn’t necessarily felt before but she couldn’t imagine not feeling again, “you’re probably wondering where we’re going.”

Actually, she hadn’t been. She’d just been staring at him, finally letting herself recognize just how appealing she found his, well, everything about him. Shit, he was pausing like she was supposed to respond. How did this work? She wasn’t used to an actual dialogue, Roy usually monologued enough for the both of them. Wait, this wasn’t Roy, this was Jim, and she knew what to do when Jim asked her a question: make a joke.

“Oh no, Jim, do you not know either? Is the car in charge? Is it, like, one of those S.H.I.E.L.D. vehicles that takes control away from the driver when you least expect it?” she grinned at him, because this was Jim and she could tease him.

He snorted. “If my car is going to be anything, it’s going to be the Batmobile, thank you very much.”

“In maroon? What, did Bruce Wayne go to the University of Chicago?”

“Maroon is a very nice color, thank you very much! And besides, it was like $500 cheaper if I didn’t get it repainted,” he mumbled.

“Ah, a fine financial decision.”

“Thank you.” He rallied and grinned back at her. “So anyway, did you want to know where we’re going, or were you just going to let me kidnap you?”

“Hmm…” she tapped her chin. When he opened his mouth to continue she made a shushing gesture. “I’m deciding!” He snorted again.

“Well, in case you decide you’d like to know…”

“Fine, you can tell me, if it’s so important to you.” She mock-pouted, and realized that she somehow knew that Jim, who had only known her a few weeks, would definitely realize it was a mock-pout, when Roy hadn’t been able to figure that out over all the years they’d dated and then been engaged. Stop comparing them, she chided herself. He’s probably not into you. Roy was wrong about everything, remember? He might not have a girlfriend, but that doesn’t mean he’s looking for one, or at least not you. Wouldn’t he have made a move by now if he were?

 “We, Miss Pamela—what’s your middle name?”

“Morgan.” Why?

“Miss Pamela Morgan Beesly,  are going to check out two apartments I think you’ll like.”

She sat up—as much as one could sit up in the passenger’s seat of a Toyota Corolla—and stared at him as he drove. “But you said we’d need the internet to look up places.”

“We still might,” he admitted grudgingly, “but you forget: Mark and I just moved in together.”

“Right.” Shit, is Jim gay? I’d know, right? By now? Please tell me I’d know. “So…”

“So while the needs of two youngish men—and Mark’s girlfriend Janine, not that she’s living with us but she did come along on the tours—as I was saying, the needs of two youngish men might not be the same as one young woman, but well, we viewed a lot of apartments, and there’s a couple I think you’d like.” Was this Jim babbling? She was pretty sure this was Jim babbling. Now the interesting questions were: 1) why was he babbling, and 2) could she get him to continue? It was cute. She decided to say nothing and see where it went.

“So, um, I don’t really know what you do in your spare time, not that it’s entirely my business or anything, but, uh, it seems to me that you probably want some space to do, uh, whatever it is that you do want to do in your spare time, and you just strike me as, well, as one of those people who like natural light, you know? Like, not everything fluorescent like in the office or even normal lightbulbs, but you know, light.” He was definitely babbling, and so she decided to take pity on him.

“Yeah, I like to draw and paint, so…” she shrugged. “Natural light is key.”

“Exactly.” He threw her an obviously relieved grin. “And there’s just the one of you, and well, it’s not like I know exactly what you make as a receptionist, but I’m assuming it’s not like twice what I make as a salesman, even though you’ve been working there a little longer than me obviously, and it’s not like you don’t do the work or anything, but um,” now he had progressed from babbling to flailing and she decided to go beyond taking pity and put him out of his misery. She touched his shoulder, surprised at the shock that traveled through her at that light touch.

“Jim. Don’t worry, I do not make twice what you’re making. I assume you’re suggesting that the places we’re looking at aren’t ridiculously expensive?”

“Yeah.” This time the relieved grin was twice as relieved and also somehow twice as wide. “Just…there were a couple of places that were cheap enough for one person, great natural light, but just…cramped for two? We looked at them because, well, two guys just out of college, the cheaper the better, and I wasn’t sure I was getting the Dunder Mifflin job 100% or anything, but once I did get it…we didn’t want to live on top of each other. Especially with Janine, of course.” He gulped. “But anyway, I think you’d like them, if you’d like to see them? I’m pretty sure they’re still on the market, I drive by them every day on the way to work and the signs are still up.”

She smiled, and realized her hand was still on his shoulder—but left it there anyway. “I’d love to.”

Jim wasn’t sure what had prompted him to make that offer, other than the desire to spend more time with Pam alone—which was probably reason enough. But there were two apartments he had in mind for her; honestly, they had been a bit small for him and Mark together, but the main reason he hadn’t chosen them was that something in the back of his mind had been screaming “you only want to live here because you think Pam would fit in well here” and that was a scary thought when the girl you were interested in was engaged to another man.

It was only slightly less scary when she was in the car next to you, single. Especially when you hadn’t explicitly told her you were interested.

Oh, and when the apartment complexes in question didn’t know you were coming. Well, that was fixable, at least. Yeah, sure, he could probably tell Pam how he felt, too, but that thought scared him a lot more than talking to a couple people on the phone for a few seconds. After all, talking to people on the phone was like two-thirds of his job.

He pulled over into a Starbucks parking lot and flashed a tight grin at his passenger. “I just realized we should probably not show up at these places unannounced.” He pulled out and waved his phone. “Thought I’d fix that.” He pulled out his wallet and handed her a twenty. “And we could probably both use some caffeine after a long day of…well, I could hardly call it work, but you know what I mean.” Her smile at that very feeble sally gave him hope, and he watched as she trotted inside. When she was through the doors, he lunged into the backseat, where he’d carelessly thrown the printouts of the apartments he and Mark had been looking at. Funny—when he’d walked her to the car and held the door open, he’d been wishing desperately as anything that he had cleaned out the car before coming into work today. Now he was just as glad that he hadn’t, because his horrible habit of just shoving everything under the basketball in the backseat was finally paying dividends.

Webster Ave, Prospect Ave, Crown Ave…no, it wasn’t any of those. Fig St, Locust St, Beech St…ah, there was one. Linden St, just another tree-named street on the surface but just down the street from Nay Aug Park and with giant gorgeous bay windows. 2 bed, but affordable, as was almost everything he and Mark had looked at (no way they were sharing a room, but also no way they could afford much more than two bedrooms—even the house they’d ended up renting only officially had two, although you could probably sleep someone in the “den” upstairs if you didn’t care too much about fire codes). The other was on…here it was…Gibson. A few blocks away, same great views, and the second story of an old house which meant the trees next door didn’t block the light. He and Mark hadn’t wanted to live above the slightly chatty landlady, but Pam…Pam would probably charm her in a microsecond, if he was any judge. He flipped open the phone and started to dial.

“Yes, ma’am, I know my friend and I just looked at it, but I was wondering…no, we aren’t interested in renting it, my friend’s knees you know” he was shamelessly slandering Mark, whose knees, as far as he knew, hadn’t had an issue since he skinned one of them at the YMCA three years ago “but I have another friend who…yes, we’d love to…oh, I’m so glad…” it was almost impossible to get Gladys off the phone, and he was glad he’d called the other, much more professionally-managed building first. “We’ll be right over. See you soon. Yes, thank you.” Pam slid into the seat next to him just as he flipped the phone down. “Whatchya got there, Beesly?”

“Earl Grey tea, hot, for me,” she said, putting the relevant cup in the appropriate cupholder. “Grande mocha frappuccino for you,” fitting the word again to the action. “And your change.” She held out a handful of bills, which he waved away.

“Keep the change, Beesly, in case seeing these apartments drives you to drink.” She smiled and he knew he’d said the right thing. “Speaking of which, I’ve made appointments for us to view a couple of charming little apartments near Nay Aug Park. Ever heard of it?”

“Hmmm…” she put her hand on her chin and rubbed it, and he tried not to stare at the lips just above her fingers. “I’m not sure…it rings a bell…” She grinned abruptly. “That’s awesome. Where do we start?”

“We start here.” He handed her the first apartment’s information sheet. “Ignore the scribbling. Mark gets antsy when he’s making decisions.” His roommate had scrawled information about the size of the closets and the positioning of the kitchen cabinet doors across the front of the information sheet. “Or you can take his mad musings for gospel, if you want.” He pulled the car back into traffic and took a sip of his frappuccino. “Mmm. Chocolatey.”

“I don’t get how you drink those…milkshakes,” Pam admonished with a shake of her head.

“It’s not like you’re drinking coffee either!”

“No, but tea is a civilized person’s beverage.” She stuck out her tongue, which he noted from the corner of his eye as every instinct but self-preservation tried to get him to take his eyes off the road and turn to her. “Not…whatever that is.”

“Well, thank you for indulging my sweet tooth anyway.” He took another sip. “It was my money after all.”

She sighed theatrically. “I know. I debated getting you a more enlightened drink, but then I thought: if Jim wants to waste his money and his health, who am I to stand in his way? So I got you the most ridiculous thing on the menu.”

He shook his head. “No, the most ridiculous thing on a Starbucks menu is…earl grey tea, hot.”

“What?!?”

“Seriously, who goes to Starbucks for the tea?”

“Who goes to Starbucks for the coffee?”

“Ah, but I don’t go to Starbucks for the coffee. I go for the milkshakes.” He took another sip, and waggled the drink at her. “As you already pointed out.”

“Touché.” She picked up her tea and took a delicate sip. “But then again, I didn’t go to Starbucks.”

“No?” He gestured with the cup. “So a stranger came up to you and forced this frappuccino on you?”

“Of course not. But still, I didn’t go to Starbucks. You did.” She pointed. “Your car. Your choice. Your money. You went to Starbucks. I was merely your…assistant.”

“My assistant regional manager?”

“Do not compare me to Dwight.” But they were laughing, and she was happy, and all was right in the world.

Pam was preparing herself to be disappointed in Jim’s apartment options: not because she didn’t trust his judgment—she did, honestly, more than she felt like she should for someone she’d known a comparatively small amount of time, although the time she’d spent with Jim definitely felt more significant than most time she spent doing other things—but because, well, the kinds of apartments two young guys looked at weren’t really likely to be the kinds of apartments one young woman wanted. Especially not young, fit, athletic guys and small mousy artsy-fartsy girls. So while she trusted that Jim thought these might be good fits, she was working hard to tamp down her own expectations.

The first place only confirmed for her that while Jim was trying, and she appreciated it, his and Mark’s needs just hadn’t been the same as hers. It had a large room that she guessed they’d imagined as a gaming room or workout room or something, and would have been perfect as a studio for her—if it had any light at all. The bedroom, she had to admit, had a huge window that let in natural light, but it wasn’t big enough for a studio and there wasn’t a real closet in the other room. Admittedly, she hadn’t spent all that long looking at the details of the bedroom—something about standing with Jim Halpert in a room that was even potentially going to be her future bedroom and contemplating where the bed might go made her breathing get light—but she was pretty sure it wasn’t right. And the kitchen was all wrong—Jim and Mark probably didn’t cook much, and honestly she didn’t love it either, but if she was going to have a kitchen she was going to be able to open the dishwasher and the oven at the same time. The location was gorgeous, and she could see Nay Aug Park out the bedroom window, but…no. It was lovely of Jim to try, but no.

She tried to find the words to tell him this herself as they walked over to the other place—he’d parked in between them and they were strolling side by side down a leafy, idyllic street that made her long for the other apartment to be even just good enough so that she could live in this neighborhood—but her tongue just wouldn’t do it. Why ruin things? She could enjoy this walk even if she didn’t have any expectations—she didn’t—for the other place.

She smiled up at Jim, who was telling her something about the woman…Gladys?...who owned the place, looking absolutely adorably intent. She could tell that he’d been hoping she’d like the first place, and that he clearly could tell in turn, even though she had tried hard not to say anything too negative, that she didn’t. So now he was doing his best to prepare her for the other one—apparently Gladys talked a lot?—and that was just so sweet. He was always like that. So sweet. So cute. Especially when he got excited and his hair started flopping around.

“And here we are.” Apparently in getting lost in Jim’s hair she’d missed the fact that they had come to a stop, and now he was looking at her, amusement twinkling in his eyes. “Care to come in, Beesly?”

“Lead on.” She gestured expansively towards the door and he knocked and the door was opened by the smallest, most wizened little woman that she’d ever seen.

“James Halpert!” Gladys looked him up and down. “So, my upstairs wasn’t good enough for you?”

“Hello ma’am. It’s not that…you know I told you Mark’s knees were killing him.” He swept the little woman into a hug. “But it was so sweet of you to offer it to us. And you know, ma’am, I think I might have found you a better tenant.”

“Better than you? That’s not too hard.” She slapped his shoulder playfully and turned to Pam. “Hello, dearie, I’m Gladys Wilson, and, for my sins, I was this young rascal’s third-grade teacher.” Well, that explained why he called her ma’am, Pam thought inanely. Gladys lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper. “And don’t tell anyone, but I taught his mother too.”

“Come on, ma’am, no one believes that. You don’t look a day over…” Jim looked down at her speculatively and Gladys looked back with challenge in her eyes.

“Go on, young man.” She turned to Pam. “He should know better than to start a sentence he doesn’t know how to end.”

“He does that.” Pam stuck out her hand and received a surprisingly firm handshake. “Pamela Beesly, ma’am.” Somehow it felt right to give this woman her full first name.

“Now, now, Pamela, I didn’t have to teach you how to spell, you can call me Gladys.” Gladys stepped around Jim and gestured up the steps. “Would you like to see the place? I don’t know about Jim’s other friend’s knees,” she shot him a sharp look “but I can take this flight of stairs just fine, and I’m old enough that I was gray when I taught Jim.” Jim sighed and shook his head, and Pam followed Gladys up the stairs, listening carefully as she pointed out the small details of Victorian décor in the stairwell. “My late husband bought that in Cairo,” she said, pointing to a particularly garish wall hanging in the landing. “I didn’t like it myself, so now it lives up here.” She turned a key in the lock in the door. “It’s the same entrance for both my part and this one, but we each have a different lock on the inside and I’m a heavy sleeper.” She winked and Pam felt her cheeks heat up. Gladys opened the door and waved Pam through into a furnished parlor. “You can bring you own things if you want—I can clear things out—but the place comes furnished if you want it to. My late husband, god bless the man, could just not resist a deal.” The room had wallpaper on it with fruits and gourds intertwined with a fascinating almost magenta hue. It ought to have been horrid, but Pam found it oddly soothing.

“That sounds great.” She didn’t have any particular attachment to any of the furniture in the house she’d shared with Roy. It was all functional, but he’d resisted her desire to acquire the big heavy heirloom furniture she loved—and that this room was full of. There was an overstuffed armchair in the corner under an antique lamp that she could just imagine curling up in with a good book. But Gladys was already leading her on. “This is the bedroom,” she gestured to a warm, homey room with a giant closet and master bath. “This is the kitchen, obviously,” in a room with seemingly a million cabinets, a gas oven and range, and surprisingly up-to-date countertops. “This is the back room; it’s not technically a bedroom, because of some silly fire code issue they invented in the 1980s,” she sniffed, “but in my opinion it’s the nicest room in the house. Shame no one can sleep in it.”

She might have said more, but Pam didn’t hear it. The room was perfect. A huge bay window with a built-in seat bringing in tons of natural light, with heavy curtains that would clearly let her paint by lightbulb if the natural light was ever wrong. Large enough to set everything up; walls painted a neutral color with an off-white ceiling; an ideal studio in fact. She twirled around in joy and saw identical smiles on Jim’s and Gladys’s faces at her excitement.

She marshaled herself for disappointment in a different direction. “How much is this place?”

Gladys smiled. “For a friend of James?” She named a number well within Pam’s prospective price range, and seemed to enjoy the way Pam’s jaw dropped. “I’m fairly picky about who I keep company with.” She sniffed. “Though you wouldn’t know it from the fact that I offered the place to James, of course.”

“Thank you for that, ma’am.” Jim was laughing. “I’m sure Pam would like a little time to make a decision?” He turned to her. “Maybe a walk in Nay Aug Park?”

“Of course, of course, take your time.” Gladys twinkled at them both. “I’ll be here.” She took Jim by the shoulder and whispered in his ear. “Nice to meet you, Pamela. Do let me know about the apartment.” She showed them out the front. “Goodbye, James. Tell Elizabeth hello.”

“I will.” He hustled Pam out of the house and when they heard the click of the door they both burst out laughing.

Things moved remarkably quickly in the next week, at least from Jim’s outside perspective. One day he was showing Pam his third-grade teacher’s spare apartment, the next she was bringing in his third-grade yearbook, flashing a glimpse of it across the office, and then arranging to make sure he was in a meeting with Michael for the next two hours watching her leaf through it through the blinds while Michael droned on and on about corporate responsibility (re-themed ala Michael as Corporate Responsibili-Tea, which seemed mostly to involve dunking the reporting forms in hot water for some reason. He could already tell that wasn’t going to last beyond the first time something got sent wet to New York, so he filtered it all out and focused on trying to see what Pam was getting out of the yearbook). When he got out she was on break, and by the time she got back he was out on a sales call (he assumed; maybe she never came back).

The next day he asked her about the yearbook and she smiled up at him blankly. “What yearbook?”

He popped a jellybean in his mouth and considered his next move. “Do you and Mrs. Wilson think I don’t recognize the Isaac Tripp Elementary school logo?” He popped another. “Go Gray Wolves Go.”

“Did you say Isaac Tripp?” Dwight’s voice cutting across the conversation made him realize in that moment that he had made a tactical error. “That fool!”

“Why is that, Dwight?” Pam took immediate advantage of the interruption.

“Wyoming!” Dwight was agitated, Jim could tell, which he had to admit was intriguing. “What kind of fool settles in the Wyoming Valley before the Lackawanna?” He stood up abruptly. “Lackawanna County deserved better!”

Jim leaned over to Pam. “Isn’t…this the Wyoming Valley?”

“Apparently not,” she whispered back. “I think that’s technically just west of here?”

“Like Tunkhannock?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know, Dwight.” He raised his voice. “I always wanted to live in Tunkhannock or Meshoppen. I think Isaac Tripp had the right idea.”

“You idiot, Jim.” Dwight spat. “That’s Wyoming County.”

“What’s the difference?” Pam asked innocently.

“Yeah, why wouldn’t they name the county for the valley?” Jim echoed.

“You…you…” Dwight sputtered, then stormed out of the front doors of the office muttering something about “local knowledge” and “deliberate ignorance.” Jim and Pam burst out into laughter.

“Nicely done, Halpert,” she said, grinning up at him.

“Thank you kindly, Beesly. The same to you.” He mock-bowed and they burst into laughter again.

It wasn’t until he was back at his desk that he realized that he hadn’t gotten an answer about the yearbook. She kept on ducking him for the rest of the day: a party planning committee meeting (“Halloween” having been vetoed by Angela, they were currently planning a “Pumpkin Spice” celebration at Kelly’s very enthusiastic suggestion), another Michael meeting (“Corporate refused my idea of waterproof paper for the Responsibili-Tea” turned into three hours of brainstorming how to stop the paper from bleeding and then how to convince corporate to accept sodden paper, which transitioned seamlessly into grief counseling as Michael finally came to realize that wasn’t happening), and finally a real meeting with representatives of the University of Scranton psych department about their new paper order, which involved hustling them into a conference room and making absolutely damn sure Michael never knew they were there until after, lest he should come on too strong. Pam was always at her desk when he came by but somehow always busy; he actually started to wonder at one point if she’d somehow downloaded a version of FreeCell that looked like an Excel sheet so she could pretend to be working. If she hadn’t, they should find one, he reflected, but it was still disappointing that she wasn’t available. She was doing what he thought of as a week’s copying in a day, and he found himself resenting her efficiency even as it pushed him to his own most productive day in weeks (Michael-sobbing included).

But it was all made worth it when as they were leaving for the night—silently agreeing to walk out together—and he glanced down at her desk and noticed something that hadn’t been there the day before: a small picture of a towheaded little boy with a very familiar smile.

Pam Beesly had a problem.

No, she reminded herself, not a problem, an opportunity.

Her mom had visited her and Penny in town last night and that had been the message they had drilled into her over a bucket of margaritas at a Mexican joint Pam hadn’t even known about but Penny apparently knew like the back of her hand. Problems are opportunities, Pam¸ her sister had insisted, slurring the Ss at the ends of the words. And to her surprise, her mother, who was much less drunk and actually eying Penny with a little concern, hadn’t shushed her but had put a hand over Pam’s and nodded. Maybe not all problems, she’d said, cutting her eyes over to Penny refilling her glass, but this problem? This problem is an opportunity, Pamela.  Things were always serious when her mom called her Pamela. There had been nothing but Pamelas for a week or so after she’d broken things off with Roy: what are you going to do, Pamela? and I thought he was such a nice boy, I’m so sorry Pamela, and most of all and most frequently have you found a place to live yet, Pamela? But she’d been “Pam” again after things had stabilized, and “sweet P,” her old childhood nickname, had made a happy reappearance (and not a sad one, as on that fateful day when she’d called from Penny’s). But now she was being Pamela-ed again, and it wasn’t just the faux-seriousness of alcohol.

So that morning she’d gotten up early (aided by the wonderful morning light in her beautiful studio that helped her stay awake) and made a list.

A problem: she didn’t know what to do with Jim. She was aware that she was rapidly falling for him, but could it be real if she was still rebounding from Roy?

An opportunity: was she really rebounding from Roy? Oddly, she hadn’t really thought of him at all the last week or so—after they’d divvied up the things in the house (kitchen implements-her; furniture-him; decorations-her; TV-him) they hadn’t had any real reason to talk at work, and apparently Roy had gotten the fear of God put into him by Darryl about coming up to the office after almost-but-not-technically hitting Jim. When she had seen him (picking up the toaster, for instance) he’d practically begged her to take him back, but since he hadn’t actually been able to tell her that he was sorry for what he’d done, or really (as far as she could tell) comprehend why it was she wanted an apology (hint: not for any damage done to Jim, but for the whole attitude that led to attacking Jim in the first place), she had felt no real compulsion in that direction. Yes, she’d been with Roy most of her adult life. But didn’t that maybe, just maybe, mean she hadn’t really ever been an adult as long as she’d been with Roy? He certainly hadn’t acted like an adult. So maybe yes, this was an opportunity. An opportunity to choose something for herself.

A problem: but was choosing Jim really a choice, or was it just what everyone else expected of her? Her mother and Penny had practically swooned over the idea that Jim had ‘defended’ her even though all he’d done was take the brunt of Roy’s misplaced and misbegotten ire (not that she hadn’t swooned a little at him herself back there, but that was different, dammit. Don’t ask why). Kelly had already made her opinion loudly known to the whole office, and Roy had obviously assumed it given the way he was tiptoeing around Jim whenever there was a work-related reason for them to be near her, that she could see at least (then again, maybe that was just the Fear-of-God/Darryl/Getting Fired at work). Was she really making a definite choice here, or was this just another instance of Pam going along with what everyone expected?

An opportunity: but then again, she did want Jim. She definitely wanted Jim. In more senses than she was going to admit to her mother even if she was a bit drunk. So what was the problem? This was definitely an opportunity.

A problem: but did he want her?

An opportunity: if Jim spent more time at her desk during work, he’d be the receptionist, as Angela had nastily pointed out earlier this afternoon. If that wasn’t a sign, what was?

She made a decision. Jim Halpert swung out of his chair, took two steps past the reception desk, flashing a grin her way, and walked out the main doors of the office, and she took it as a sign that he’d forgotten his coat. She grabbed it and hustled out the doors to follow him.

“Hey.”

The voice was soft, but Jim would have been no more capable of turning away from the sudden appearance of his childhood dog (Rex, King of All Dogs, a Yorkshire terrier who thought himself the size of a bloodhound) than he was from that voice, no matter how far away he’d been. As it was, he’d gotten three steps into the parking lot in the forty-degree drizzle outside when there she was. Pam, standing in the doorway of the office building, holding a much too large coat that it took him a surprisingly long beat to realize was his.

“I...uh, thought you might be cold.”

Cold? No, he wasn’t going to be cold, not if Pam Beesly was noticing when he forgot his jacket. But now that she mentioned it…yes, the decision to veer out into the parking lot had been somewhat rash. It had just suddenly become intolerable, sitting there in the office, looking over at her, not being with her, and he’d been hit with two choices: beat his head against his desk in frustration or get out of the building. So he’d gotten out.

But here she was, apparently ready to reel him back in. Or maybe not, because rather than waiting for him in the safety of the just-barely-ajar doors to their building she was striding out into the chill mist with him and waving the jacket.

“Did you…want this?”

Did she even realize what she was saying? Did he want that? He wanted everything and anything to do with her. The sight of his picture on her desk had been mesmerizing, heart-melting, wonderful, but neither of them had done anything about it. He, because he was scared shitless of what would happen if she turned him down. What would he do? What could he do? He needed this job, but he couldn’t exactly do it (to the extent he could do it anyway) if he was nursing a broken heart and staring at her like Rex had the time he’d accidentally run his paw over with his tricycle. She because…who knew? Possibly, probably, most likely because she was just not that into him.

But then again, here she was, standing in the cold holding out his coat to him and not wearing her own. And…oh, waiting for him to respond. He became aware of his hanging jaw and staring eyes and much less aware of the drizzle around him.

“…Thanks.” He took the coat, but didn’t put it on. He just held it and her gaze and the two of them stared at each other in the rain, until she took a deep breath.

“I…uh…didn’t want you to get cold.” She seemed abashed; it wasn’t cold enough to put that much red in her cheeks.

“Again…thanks.”

“Where are you going, anyway? Isn’t your car over there?” She gestured to the Batmobile, which was indeed in the exact opposite direction of where he’d gone.

“Yeah…uh…” He scratched the back of his head. “I just kind of needed to get out of there.”

“I know the feeling.” She leaned against what he was pretty sure was Michael’s car, seemingly unaffected by the rain and the wet. “So…now we’re out of there. What next?” She didn’t quite meet his eyes, but he had the sensation of something electric crackling in the air between them—static yet deadly, like the moment before a lightning strike. His immediate instinct was to say “I don’t know,” but somehow he felt like that would be wrong: the first step into quicksand, maybe, or like Wile E. Coyote off a cliff.

“What do you want to do?” That was better, but the danger was still tingling in his fingers.

“We could go…somewhere. Out.” She tossed it out offhand like it was nothing, but the moment he heard the words every nerve in his body was on edge. “Get a drink or something?” she continued, the words slipping softly into the wind so that he might not have heard them if he hadn’t been concentrating so hard on what she said.

Then it hit him like the ground at speed. This was Pam Beesly’s version of asking him out. She wanted to go, with him, for a drink, in the middle of the workday. Don’t screw this up. But somehow the realization, which should have been terrifying, was instead exhilarating, like how he imagined skydiving or doing the kinds of drugs Dwight probably thought he was already doing. His brain swung back into action after the extended vacation it had apparently been taking and his mouth was moving before he realized it.

“Sounds good.” He shrugged and flipped open the coat. “First, though, we’re going to get you out of the rain.” He gestured for her to put the coat on. “Then, assuming you’re amenable, we’re going to go on a date.”

“Is it raining? I hadn’t noticed.” Pam was beaming up at him as she slipped into the raincoat, her hands swallowed up by the long arms until she pushed the sleeves up with a delightfully workmanlike gesture.

“Four Weddings and a Funeral, Beesly? I expected better from you.” He took her arm and started walking towards the Batmobile.

“Excuse me, I just agreed to go on a date with you, do you think this is the right moment to be critiquing my choice of movie?”

“I’m glad you agreed. Otherwise this would be a kidnapping.” He opened the door and bowed her in, then came around to the driver’s side. “So, where to?”

“Hey, I came up with the idea of going somewhere, the where is your problem.” She was smiling, though.

“Fair enough. Cugino’s?”

“Sounds lovely.”

“Then it’s a date.” He put the car in gear and left Dunder Mifflin far behind.

When her friends and family asked Pam to recount the details of that date later—even when Penny pressed her for details at their sisters-only lunch that weekend—she was never able to do it to their or her own satisfaction. She remembered feelings, colors, impressions—she could and did paint a marvelous picture of the date in the style of Monet (specifically: none of that Renoir bullshit)—but she couldn’t describe the events in a proper narrative style. The one exchange she could recount, word for word, didn’t speak to anyone but her, Jim, and her dad, but that wasn’t her problem, she decided. It was everyone else who didn’t manage to understand.

It all started when Jim was doing…something…with the candle in the middle of the table, which had gone out. Whatever it was he’d been trying hadn’t been working, and she remembered giggling helplessly at him as he made a face at her. He closed his eyes and meditated for a moment, which of course only made her laugh harder, then out of nowhere yelled “Shazam!” pointed a finger, and the candle burst into light.

She never got him to admit how he’d done that.

“Shazam? Really?” She stuck out her tongue at him.

“What? Captain Marvel’s the best.” He picked up a slice of pizza and folded it in half. “Better’n Superman,” he murmured as he munched.

She scoffed. “Of course Captain Marvel’s the best.” She grabbed her own slice of pizza and transferred it to her plate. “But she doesn’t say ‘Shazam.’ Only two-bit superheroes need catchphrases.”

“Wait a minute. What about ‘Hulk smash’? And Billy Batson…”

“Billy Batson is a fourteen-year-old kid. He couldn’t hold a candle to Monica Rambeau.” She took a deliberate bite out of the pizza and swallowed while Jim was still goggling at her. “And the Hulk is a perfect example! Bruce Banner doesn’t need a catchphrase. Only his less intelligent alter ego does.”

Jim finally found his voice. “Monica Rambeau? Who’s that?”

She rolled her eyes. “Try to keep up. She’s Captain Marvel. A seriously superior Captain Marvel, if you ask me. DC should stop trying to imitate the genuine article. ‘Shazam?’ Really.”

“Excuse me, but…”

“Now, I’ll admit that she goes by Photon now, or is it Pulsar, but both of those are way cooler than Shazam. And the original Mar-Vell and his relatives are cooler than some kid on the streets.”

“Hey, that’s what makes Captain Marvel cool. He’s like…the superhero you’d make up if you were a fourteen year old boy, but it actually works!”

“Jim, Jim, Jim.” She shook her head sadly and took another slice. “Some of us were never a fourteen year old boy.”

“I guess not.” He finished his slice slowly and then grinned. “And some of us are kind of glad of that. Truce?”

“Truce.” She held out a hand and then pulled it back. “But only if you’ll agree that Monica Rambeau is the best Captain Marvel.”

“How can I agree to that if I haven’t read any of her stuff?”

“Well, I do happen to have the trades back in my apartment…” Her dad had let her take them when she’d moved into her own place, suggesting that she might use them to fill the time. This was, she reflected, probably not what he’d expected to mean by that, but she wasn’t complaining.

The rest of the meal went extremely quickly. And when Pam woke up the next morning to find Jim Halpert busily reading Marvel Comics in her living room, half-dressed, she knew she’d made the right decision. Not that she’d really had any doubts, but Roy had never so much as cracked the cover of a single issue—much less (as far as she could tell from the pile next to Jim) bulldozed their way through The Amazing Spiderman Annual #16, the early run of Captain Marvel, and a third of Avengers Unplugged.

“I see. This was all a ploy to get your hands on my comic book collection.” She lounged in the doorway taking in the sight of Jim in his boxers reading her favorite books.

“Guilty as charged.” He sprang up, carefully marking his place in the book and then striding over to give her a kiss. “This whole thing—from that first phone call to dinner last night at Cugino’s—was all a setup to have a chance to read twenty-year-old Marvel comics.” He grinned. “These are actually pretty good, though.”

“I know.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re the expert. Say, do you think Monica could take the Fantastic Four single-handedly, or would she need Spider-Man’s help? Assuming, as I think we should, that we’re into hero-vs-hero shenanigans.”

The rest of the morning passed in debating this and other important topics—and this time, unlike his first day, they both ended up calling in to tell Michael they were working on the University of Scranton account. After all, Pam pointed out, it had been her idea in the first place—and clearly Jim needed extensive further guidance. In person.