It's very new.
She knows she needs to be better at being discrete, at reining in the corners of her mouth, which seem unavoidably determined to escape upwards in his presence. Her usually unflappable reserve has become begrudgingly amused by her descent into smitten and so although she knows it's very new, that she is still very new, she allows herself to radiate just a little every once in awhile.
Her family and friends had been surprised to hear she was going to follow her job to some town in Pennsylvania, a town whose very name even seemed in sharp contrast to her personality. She thinks she is slowly beginning to adjust to this place, slowly learning the little things that make the big things less noticeable. She keeps a small bag of coffee beans in her desk and has learned an assortment of ways to subtly sniff them when the pine scent emanating from Phyllis becomes too much. Although she’d rather not think about it, after a two day stare down she realizes never to whisper to Ryan, not even about card stock prices. She also learns how far online gossip columns can go towards mending fences, although she’d rather not think about that either.
She sometimes thinks about the friends she left behind in Stamford, the ones she half heartedly emails whenever Michael is lurking around the office. She wonders if they felt able to judge her for her decision because they really knew her, or whether they judged because they were surprised to realize that with her making this decision, they might not. When resolved towards the former she feels stubborn and determined to prove that it was the best choice for her, for her life. When leaning towards the latter she feels lonely. Conditional friendships can very rarely be true friendships she suspects, and she's realizing most of hers were of the cherry stained and high pitched variety.
She thinks about asking Pam to have lunch but she has been uncharacteristically shy and hesistant. Pam seems nice, normal, but has made no overtures towards friendship and it makes her embarrassed by her own interest. Eventually she takes to flattering herself into wondering if her arrival somehow bothered Pam, whether taking away her position as the sole normal female in the office was an unforgivable offense. On more generous days she thinks maybe Pam is just being shy too. When he said he had been planning on setting Andy on Pam “perfect” she is almost grateful, hoping that Pam is a good sport and goes along with the prank, hoping that maybe this could break the ice. When instead he says they should probably try someone else she doesn't hide her grimace, as she already knows she has no strong desire to break anything with Angela.
Stamford. Scranton. Stamford. Scranton. Stamford. Scranton. Sometimes she says them over and over again in her head, secretly liking the way their names each claim a different tone of her voice. She thinks sometimes about how it would have been impossible for her to grow up in a place like this and be the person she is now. She wonders if she will stay here and stay the same, or whether she will stay here and slowly begin to take on parts of a shadow Scranton persona, slowly adopting little things to make the big differences less noticeable. She sees the way he shifts subtly when he thinks she isn’t watching, a split second when he is totally one of them and then a face and he is back to being Stamford. It makes her envious that he doesn’t seem to need to think about being Stamford or Scranton –that somehow here he just fits as a lazy mixture of the two. She doesn’t particularly like feeling envious but it makes her even more attracted to him all the same.
It's still all very new.
She smokes cigarettes sometimes. He doesn’t know that yet. Actually no one really does. She only smokes them alone late at night, balled up and precariously balanced on the windowsill she likes to pretend is actually a window seat. She thinks it's a disgusting habit and in public usually finds herself coughing loudly when near smokers. In her old apartment, in Stamford, she’d had a big fire escape. She had always meant to buy it potted plants but it had somehow instead slowly turned into her late night parlor with a small ceramic ashtray and a zippo lighter stolen from a previous boyfriend tucked away by the edge. She had ceremoniously thrown both out before the move, insisting to herself that the late night smokes were a ritual, not a habit, and in a new place she should need neither.
***
She had, however, bought a pack on the drive down anyway. If she was in transit it shouldn't count. She'd burned through two cigarettes in quick succession at a rest stop somewhere still in Jersey, watching little kids on the McDonald’s playground and feeling the disapproving eyes of their parents when she put out the first cigarette and lit the second. She had never before smoked in the daylight. She blew three smoke rings (remnants of the college semester she spent dabbling in certain things) and then with a deep swallow and exhale of the cold November air melted the rings fast away. She had put out the cigarette and thrown out the pack, taking quick steps back to her waiting car.
He had left three days earlier, had gone on ahead to see his family before work started. She had known she was far too new to meet his family, that she probably would have been uncomfortable if he had asked. No, that wasn’t totally true. She would have liked to meet them, if he had asked. But he hadn’t and at the time she had secretly hoped it was because he wasn’t comfortable introducing her as just a coworker. Then they hadn’t quite merited anything more than that, although with the move she found herself humming the Cardigans while packing. She'd known for awhile that she wanted to be more than that and although he did things so carefully, she had started to think he might too. He was always so cautious with this, with her feelings. It made her want to smile for him all the time. “Love me love me saaaay that you love me. Fool me fool me go on and fool me” She had started laughing over the lyrics at one point but ended up laughing at herself instead, blushing a little that she might love too much the way she could hear his voice ringing in her ears along with her low hum. In her head she had let him do the singing, let him do the asking.
***
It was her second night in Scranton when she bought another pack of cigarettes, choosing to ignore the nonsmoking symbol next to her room number. The first night had been so quiet. When she had moved out of New York she had felt constantly unnerved by the peace, though Stamford itself was relatively constant. Her mother had laughed at her about it, saying she always had liked sounds like sirens to play all through the night. Now it was the murmurs of Stamford she was listening for, straining to hear it so far from the stillness here. The windowsill seemed just deep enough to fit the width of her body and although she missed the fire escape she liked feeling a little more hidden now. She had opened the window wide and used a bottle cap as an ashtray, listening to an old Dntel cd on repeat with sounds like sirens keeping time. She had fallen asleep somewhere in between Life is Full of Possibilities and Last Songs.
***
Things had moved much faster once they were both in Scranton, like being home provided a safety for him that encouraged him to pursue her in a way he had held back from doing before. She notices in so many ways he seems more comfortable here, at home, until she finds herself wondering constantly why he left. They talk about it only once, at dinner (non smoking table) and she can tell he doesn't have much to say to her about it. She doesn't really want to drop it, thinking about how she never really wants to drop anything, never knows when to drop anything, but something in his casual lopsided grin distracts her and she lets it be for the moment, trying to be proud she has managed not to push him. It's useless though because she immediately realizes he can just see it pushing through her face anyway. So he shrugs, says he realized he probably shouldn’t live his entire life within a 5 miles radius. “Besides Fillipelli, you spent an entire year in France studying. I got to spend six months in the rarely infiltrated Stamford, Connecticut, building up a tolerance for Jager. Totally a fair trade.” She reflects on her childhood moving around, her family scattered across the country, and the aforementioned year in France. She knows she can’t really say anything to that. She wonders what it's like on the other side.
She doesn’t think she will ever understand being that stagnant, getting that stagnant and wonders if that is what draws him to her. She considers whether she has it in her to become like them, or whether all her previous movement gives her a special dispensation against its pull. Sometimes she worries that staying at Dunder Mifflin has proven to be stagnation’s first infiltration but she writes it off as situational and knows that she isn’t tied here by her past, isn’t kept here by hopelessness or disillusionment for the future. It just is what it is. She wonders if he could ever leave here, Scranton, and not have that guarded shadowed look about him he so often had in Stamford, or whether he is too tied into this place to ever truly leave it behind. Home does seem to suit him and she notices again that he doesn’t seem quite so angular in Scranton. She had kind of liked those angles but at this point she is pretty sure she likes him more.
***
They mainly eat lunch out. She enjoys being able to relish in his attention and understands that while this is still new it is safer to keep things separate. She is trying to learn how to strike a balance in the office, to imitate their easy banter from the weeks before without alluding to the developments of the weeks after. She is slightly offended he is so good at it but guesses that maybe the constant presence of the cameras has taught him how to pretend, how to hide a little.
He had warned her after the cameramen asked whether they were seeing each other, saying that he knew the camera scrutiny on them would likely be more intrusive now. She had nodded and given him an answering conspiratorial grin, as it again sank in that at some point her personal life would be airing on tv. She will someday have to? get to? relive her own experiences from another perspective. She wonders if people will be watching their relationship develop, what moments the cameras will have caught. She remembers feeling giddy that day in Stamford “I don’t think he’s into me or anything, but I’m kind of into him.” She blushes a little from the memory of her exuberance, the memory of the surprised smile from the cameraman, but she regrets nothing. She's never told him about that.
During lunch things are always warm and easy, so she doesn’t mind as much when they get back to the office and he retreats a little. He sends her off with a small smile before slipping back into stealth mode, as she carefully tries to regulate her own grin. It is all very new she knows. It crosses her mind that her daily lunch absences probably aren’t helping her make any friends but right now she prefers to have them and the ability to bask a little in that newness of it all. Besides, after the first couple lunches she comes back to notice that Pam tends to close herself off during lunch, either surrounded by Scranton or seemingly involved in her work. She still thinks she might feel less guilty about her long lunches if she can find a route to friendship elsewhere, so when Angela mentions it she quickly asks to join the party planning committee, before she really has time to realize that quality time with Angela is probably not the solution. She briefly has an image of Angela finally being the ice breaker for her and Pam but she puts it aside, hating the feeling that she is secretly begging for friendship
***
She buys a large wooden jewelry box, stained an assortment of rich browns, and uses it to store her cigarettes, a few matchbooks and an old soap dish she had decided deserved a second life as an ashtray. She keeps it in a drawer next to her bed and pulls it out in the dark at night, after she has pinned back the thick hotel curtains and opened the window. She had purchased a thin cushion for the windowsill and when he asked about it once she said something about yoga that led him straight into a story about Dwight and an exercise ball. It is the same night he asked her in all seriousness, Dwight or Andy, and seemed put out when she only laughed and refused to answer, because seriously, the question is unanswerable. Besides, she suspects that Jim's prank has backfired a bit, as Andy has been telling anyone who will listen how well things are going with Pam and who is she to get in between a love match like that? He laughs when she suggests Kevin as an alternative, rolls his eyes when she mentions Pam and Andy but is still shaking his head at her for not coming up with a better response.
Sometimes, rarely, she smokes two straight through, although she never smokes more than two. She hasn't figured out what makes those nights worth two, only that she can almost immediately sense them coming. Other nights, more often, she doesn’t even smoke the cigarettes, she just lights one and watches it burn against the empty city skyline. She finds if she squints hard enough she can pretend it is a skyscraper flickering in the distance, as if it is getting ready to turn off its lights for the night and go to sleep beside her.