Mid-morning, Pam took a break to grab a soda from the break room. There, she found Karen sitting alone at the only table, nursing a can of Ginger Ale.

"Hey," Pam said, smiling as she turned to put a few quarters in the soda machine.

"Hey," Karen replied with a sigh.

Pam pressed the button for Coke, and turned back to Karen. "You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. Just a weird couple of days."

"Okay..." Pam hesitated after pulling her can of soda from the machine. She wondered if she should push the issue and be a friend to Karen, if she should try to get her to talk about whatever was bothering her.

Just when she decided it would probably be best to just go back to her desk, Karen spoke up, sounding brighter than when she'd first come in. "Oh, hey! I heard something interesting about you this morning."

Alarms went off in Pam's mind. She'd heard about her and Jim. What was she supposed to say to her? Pam stopped and stared at her for a second before she was able to reply, "Oh... yeah?"

"Yeah. I was chatting with that guy... Darryl from the warehouse this morning on the way in, and he said something about how you and Roy used to be engaged?"

Pam relaxed a bit, but still felt a little awkward. "Oh, yeah. We were." She laughed nervously.

"For how long?" Karen looked curious and a little fascinated.

Pam finally decided to sit down at the table with Karen. "Um, four years." Her voice rose at the end as if it were a question.

"Wow. That's a pretty long time to be engaged."

"Tell me about it. And we'd been dating for almost twice as long before that."

"Wow. Why didn't you say anything about it that day when I mentioned him to you?"

"I-I don't know. I guess I'm still not comfortable with the way we ended things- so close to the wedding. I'm a little embarrassed, I guess."

 Karen seemed to be thinking, and an expression of realization began to dawn across her face. "Um, so, when did you call off the wedding?"

"Beginning of June." Pam opened her soda with a hiss and a crack.

Karen almost looked wounded at her response. "Oh. Wow."

There was silence for a couple of moments when Karen seemed to be studying her soda can, and then she asked Pam, "So, why did you call off the wedding?" Pam was a little surprised at how personal the question was. She and Karen got along, and they'd had fun planning the rival Christmas party together, but she didn't consider them to be close, and was caught off-guard by a question you'd usually only dare to ask a really close friend.

Pam knew she couldn't tell her it was about Jim- that he'd had a role in her decision to break the engagement. She hadn't admitted that to anyone yet. She'd only admitted it to herself recently. So, she gave Karen part of the truth. "Well, a... friend helped me see that I wasn't truly happy. I was settling for what was comfortable and what I'd known for so long, but Roy didn't treat me the way I deserved to be treated, and we just didn't click anymore. We'd changed so much over the time that we'd been together that we just didn't fit."

Karen still seemed a little suspicious, but she was supportive. "Wow. That was really brave."

Pam blushed and spun her soda can on the top of the table. "It didn't feel like it."

"No, I mean it. Most women in that situation would have been too afraid to break out and get what they wanted. They would have settled and been unhappy for the rest of their lives."

Pam smiled. Nobody had actually said that to her in all the months since. She'd felt cowardly and weak for waiting so long to make that decision. "Thanks," she said, quietly.

It was silent for a few more seconds, and Pam was about to get up and go back to her desk when Karen asked, "Hey, can I ask you one more question?"

"Sure."

"Um, I don't know if this is out of line for me to ask you this because I know we're not best friends or anything but... what happened with you and Jim before he came to Stamford?"

Pam's head shot up. "What do you mean?"

 "I just...," she began, and her voice became almost a whisper as she continued. "Someone here mentioned to me that Jim used to have a thing for you... and I asked him about it, and he told me what happened but I don't know if he told me the whole story."

Pam couldn't believe she was being put in the middle of all this. She didn't know what to say. She didn't want to tell Karen the whole story and ruin things for them if Jim had left things out. "Um, Karen, I don't think this is the best idea... I'm sure Jim told you the truth."

Karen sighed. "Pam. I just- I should trust him, but it seemed like he wasn't telling me the whole story. I can't shake the feeling that he's still hung up on you. I mean, what would you do if you found out that a guy you were dating and who you felt you had a future with had had a crush on someone who he still sees every day?"

"I'm sure he's not still hung up on me. I mean, does he act like he is?"

Karen seemed to be considering this.

"Yeah, didn’t think so." Pam sighed and then tried to paste a reassuring smile on her face. Karen smiled back weakly.

"It's all in the past. I mean, yeah, he was in love with me, and I told him I couldn't be with him because I was marrying Roy. And then he moved to Stamford. But now he's with you, and we're just friends. Really." Pam was fighting back tears the whole time. It was enough of an effort that at first, she didn't notice Karen doing the same thing.

"He told you that he loved you? Like, not that he liked you or had a crush on you, but that he loved you?"

Oh shit. Pam just looked down at her hands in her lap.

 "Did he decide to go to Stamford before or after he told you this?" Pam couldn't say anything. She heard the tears in Karen's voice when she continued talking. "And then you called off your wedding three weeks later. Was that a coincidence?"

"Oh, Karen, no-- I--"

"No," Karen said, standing up. "I get it now. I have to go. I'm taking an early lunch. Or something."

"Karen," Pam said weakly, following her out into the office, through the kitchen, and through the front part of the office. Jim wasn't at his desk. Karen grabbed her purse from her desk and her coat from the rack. She turned to look at Pam one last time before leaving, and Pam couldn't say anything.

Pam turned to see a camera in her face, and she headed to the bathroom to be alone. Going through the kitchen door, she almost ran into Jim. "Pam what's--"

"Nothing," she said, trying to get past him, tears in her eyes.

He grabbed her wrist gently. "Come on, what's up?"

She looked up at him then, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, having captured the attention of everyone in the office. "I'm sorry, Jim."

"What-" he shook his head slightly, clearly confused.

"Karen... she--" Pam began, whispering, "she asked me what had happened between me and you. She said you'd already told her but she wasn't sure if you'd told her the whole truth, and I--" Jim pulled her into the kitchen with him, away from prying eyes of their coworkers.

To be continued...

"Okay, continue," Jim said, dropping her wrist as the door closed behind them. Her arm fell limply at her side, and she felt a cold chill at the loss of his touch.

She was afraid to look at him and see that he was angry with her. "I just, I didn't know what you'd told her, and I thought it would be more suspicious if I refused to tell her anything." She glanced up at him only as she finished.

"Pam..."

"So I told her the Cliff's Notes version, which is apparently more than what you'd told her, because she got really upset, and she left."

Jim passed a hand over his face. "I can't believe this," he sighed, and looked up at the ceiling. 

"Jim. I'm-"

He shook his head slightly, his jaw tense, his mouth pursed.

Feeling shut out, Pam turned around and pushed open the door to the Ladies' Room, hearing Jim say her name softly and almost apologetically as the door closed behind her. She shut herself in the last stall and cried for the next fifteen minutes. She was so confused, full of such a mix of emotions. She felt ashamed that she actually felt relief that things with Jim and Karen were most likely over. On top of that, she felt like she'd betrayed Jim, and knew she'd upset Karen and lost the possibility of a friendship. Who would want to be friends with the woman who your boyfriend might still be in love with?

But the strongest emotion that came out of the whole situation was hope. The fact that Jim hadn't told Karen the whole story, that he was hiding their past from Karen, probably meant that he wasn’t over Pam. She just hated that this whole thing had blown up like it had, and that it probably put a distance in between her and Jim again, just when they had been slowly repairing their friendship.

Back at her desk, Pam stared at the back of Jim's head for the rest of the afternoon. Karen hadn't returned from her early lunch, and Pam couldn’t keep her mind on her work. She kept looking up at Jim every few minutes, noticing how tense he seemed, watching him dial a phone number, listen, and then hang up the phone. He did that at least five times, and then he started leaving messages. She had to strain to hear, but what she was able to put together sounded like, "Listen we have to talk. Please, just-- call me. If I don't hear from you, I'm stopping by after work anyway. Okay... um, bye."

She watched Jim leave the office at the end of the day without even glancing in her direction. She felt it in the pit of her stomach that she’d lost her chance. Crying in her car on the way home was something she was sort of getting used to.

------

Over the next few days, Pam quickly came to the conclusion that Jim and Karen had broken up. Karen basically refused to look at Jim, and when Pam did catch Karen gazing in Jim's direction, she looked wounded and angry all at once.

Things between Jim and Pam weren’t much better. They were back to square one-- awkward, forced interactions; trying to avoid each other; and whenever their eyes met, their gazes would fly apart like shrapnel.

A week later, Karen transferred to the corporate office. Michael, always looking for an excuse to have fun, threw Karen a farewell party on her last day in Scranton. Pam spent most of it behind her desk, catching up on work rather than participating in the festivities.

At four thirty, Pam heard a rustling in front of her desk. She looked up, and Karen stood there, having just put her coat on, and was looking Pam in the eye for the first time since the conversation in the breakroom.

"Hey."

"Oh... hey, Karen."

"Um, I just... wanted to apologize. For putting you in the middle of everything, and then acting like it was all your fault."

"Oh, Karen, it's okay."

"No, I feel really bad about it. I like you, Pam... I had been hoping we could be really good friends. But everything blew up in my face, and I didn't know how to deal with it."

Pam smiled slightly. "It's totally understandable. And I would have liked for us to be friends, too."

"Karen's whole face relaxed into a smile. "Hey, well, I have your e-mail address, so, if I ever get bored at work..."

"Oh yeah, definitely." Pam smiled.

"Well, I have to go," Karen said, pointing with her thumb over her shoulder.

"Bye, Karen."

"Bye, Pam..." Karen hesitated for a moment, and then leaned closer, her voice lowering to a whisper. "Don't wait too long to tell him."

Pam's eyebrows rose, and her mouth opened and closed with no sound, not really knowing what to say.

Karen took one last look around the office, and turned to go.

------

Slowly, over the coming weeks, Jim and Pam began to talk again, to eat lunch together again, and they even planned a few pranks together. As Valentine's Day approached, Pam knew better than to get her hopes up about Jim doing anything special for her on that particular day. But she still found herself in the card aisle of the Stop& Shop, looking through the Valentine's Day cards the night before February 14th. She found the perfect card for Jim. She couldn't help herself- she had to buy it for him. It played too well into one of their inside jokes for her to not to at least give it to him for the laughs that would come out of it.

The next day in work, as she predicted, Jim hadn't made any Valentine's Day gestures toward her. But she couldn't help but feel a little twinge of disappointment, even though she'd tried to prepare herself for it.

Late in the afternoon, she walked over to his desk and leaned back against it to his left, facing him. She casually dropped the red envelope on his desk, and watched his face. He looked surprised, touched, and maybe even a little bit shy.

"Open it," she said from her perch on his desk. She hadn't leaned on his desk like that in such a long time, she'd forgotten how intimate it was. She watched as he picked up the card, looked at the small, neat letters that spelled "JIM" on the envelope, and then turned it over and slid his finger underneath the flap, opening it.

She watched his face blossom into a smile as he looked at the picture on the front- two cartoon people who looked suspiciously like Dwight and Angela- and she almost closed her eyes at the sound of his deep chuckle at her note on the inside- "These two people on this card look so familiar. But I can't quite place them. Hmm..." which was followed by a smiley face and her signature.

"Very nice, Beesly," he said to her, laughing.

"Glad you like it," she answered softly.

She smiled at him, and his eyes sparkled back at her for a long moment, before he broke the silence. "So, hot date tonight?" he asked.

She laughed. "Nope..." then asked, tentatively, "What about you?"

"Just a date with the TV and some leftover pasta," he answered.

They held each other’s gaze again for longer than usual. Pam tried to hide her disappointment when he didn't say anything else on the subject, and then gave him a little smile and retreated back to her desk. 

So close, but not quite there yet.

To Be Continued...

Disclaimer still applies.

Jim and Pam had both been invited to Phyllis’s wedding (along with the rest of their office-mates), which took place at the end of March, and neither Jim nor Pam brought dates. They kept each other company through the ceremony (where they'd sat so close their shoulders had been touching the whole time) and the reception (where they'd each ordered a different entree and shared with each other); both too afraid to admit that it was essentially a date.  They watched their coworkers get drunk and make fools of themselves on the dance floor as they sat close together at their table making up voices and narrating stories for each couple they watched from a distance. Neither was a stranger to the champagne, and when they'd gotten a little tipsy and had enough of narrating other peoples' lives, they turned to each other simultaneously, and began to speak.

"Oh, you go first," Jim said.

Pam blushed a little. "Um, I was just going to ask if you wanted to dance."

Jim's face blossomed into a smile. "I was just going to ask you the same thing," he said quietly, and stood, holding out a hand to her. 

Jim led her to the dance floor, where a slow song was playing, and he turned to her, smiled slightly, and wordlessly slid an arm around her waist as he held her hand with his other one. They started off sweetly awkward, standing a few inches apart, and giggling at every movement, unable to keep eye contact at first. But slowly, things got more serious as they just let themselves feel. Soon, Their bodies were flush against each other with Pam's arms having slid up to rest on his shoulders, and Jim's arms both wrapped around her. They were too close to look each other in the face anymore, and they swayed gently to the music together. Pam had constant waves of tingles passing through her body, and her affection for him made it impossible to keep herself from finally laying her head on Jim's shoulder, eyes closed as her face was tucked into the crook of his neck. She placed a soft kiss there without thinking as the song ended, and felt his body stiffen. She was afraid she'd misread the signals and done something wrong, so she didn't look at him right away when he stepped back from her.

He didn't move, and when she finally did look up at him, the look on his face was halting; instantly making her feel weak at the realization that he wasn't pained or upset, or regretting having to tell her that she'd read the signals wrong. He wanted this as much as she did. He bent his head down to whisper to her that they had to talk, and she shivered from the feel of his hot breath in her ear just before he pulled on her hand, and they headed out of the reception hall, up a couple flights of stairs, and into the empty balcony above. They could see the whole reception if they leaned over the railing, and could hear everything that was going on below them, but they sat in the back corner, where they were hidden from everyone else.

"Pam, I think it's time that we were honest with each other."

She nodded in agreement, taking a deep shaky breath, and then it felt like time slowed to a crawl as they both reached for each other, standing up at the same time, and colliding into each other, their lips meeting and fitting together like pieces of a puzzle.

"This isn't talking," Jim mumbled against her lips after a few intense moments.

"She giggled at his words and the change in sensation as his lips lightly nudged against hers as he spoke. And then she breathily confessed, "I love you so much, Jim."

"I love you, too," he said, pulling away from her mouth and wrapping his arms around her more tightly. She felt a lump in her throat at the happiness and relief she felt to hear him say that to her again after so much time of disappointment, disconnect, and misunderstandings.

They began to sway together to the music floating up from below, sharing an even more intimate dance. Pam tilted her chin up to look Jim in the face again, and she was full of an ache and longing for him, being so close to him, having confessed their feelings to each other, only to be in a public place together and unable to truly enjoy each other.

She felt her mouth curl into a smile as she stepped away from him slightly and took hold of his hand. She simply gave it a little tug, and led him through the upper floor of the facility where the reception was being held. No one was around, as all the guests were at the party downstairs, and there was a small, empty room with a couch, and a door that locked and blocked out the noise enough that they could talk and be together alone. She closed the door behind them, and sank into the couch next to Jim, where he'd already made himself comfortable.

"Trying to take advantage of me?" he joked with a raised eyebrow at the click of the door closing.

She slapped him playfully on the arm. She looked into his face, and saw his love for her just shining there, no reason to hide it anymore, and she realized that they didn't need any more words. They'd told each other they loved each other, and after all, they always seemed to communicate with each other best non-verbally. She reached up to place her hands on either side of his face. She stroked his cheeks with her thumbs and watched his eyes slip closed for a moment. When he opened them again, she whispered, "Always," and leaned in to kiss his forehead, his nose, and both cheeks before he groaned impatiently and leaned forward, kissing her mouth. He pushed her back on the fancy sofa, so that he was lying on top of her, arms around her and underneath her shoulders as he kissed and kissed her, his lips soft and gentle, parting from hers and then softly returning over and over again.

"I'm so sorry I lied about my feelings on Casino Night," she whispered, breath hitching before she kissed him more fervently.

"Shh," he said, smoothing the hair back from her face and then kissing her again. "It's okay."

His tenderness and understanding after all they'd been through in regards to each other brought tears to her eyes. She sniffled, and Jim immediately pulled away from her, alarmed. Embarrassed, she covered her face with her hands, and a small sob escaped.

"Hey, hey, what's wrong?" He asked, his voice soothing but concerned.

She shook her head, her hands still over her eyes. "I'm just... a little overwhelmed."

He gently pulled her hands away from her face, folding them in his own hands and kissed the tear tracks that ran down the sides of her face into her hair. She wrapped her arms around him again. "You think we can escape this place a little early?"

"You want me to drive you home?"

"Only if you come inside with me," she said, hugging him tighter.

He pulled back and smiled brightly at her, the most genuinely happy smile she'd seen from him in almost a year. "Come on, let's go."