She waited on the roof, wishing that she could find a way to stand or a place to sit that didn’t make her feel like an awkward moron. Instead, she just huddled against the wall, hugging herself in her puffy jacket and thinking that she probably didn’t look at all cool and collected.

            He had been avoiding her, and it had been driving her crazy. At first she wondered if something had happened between him and Karen at the wedding, something she’d missed when she left so early with Roy. And then she remembered: She’d left early with Roy. Maybe someone had noticed; maybe someone had told Jim. But she couldn’t quite convince herself that Jim would care enough about something like that to ignore her for two solid days.

            She had cornered him in the break room as he bought himself a bottle of water.

            “What’s going on?” she’d asked softly. “Are you okay?”

            “Yeah,” he’d said, looking at a point over her right shoulder. “Perfect.”

            And he’d tried to walk out, as though there was nothing else to say. She’d reached out and caught his arm, and even though he turned back towards her with a weary sigh, he still hadn’t looked at her.

            “Roof,” she’d hissed. “Five minutes.”

            She hadn’t waited for an answer. She’d just walked purposefully back to her desk, grabbed her coat, and disappeared into the stairwell. It wasn’t until she found herself on the roof that she started to realize that this might have been a stupid, stupid idea.

            She heard the echo of steps behind the door, and her body tensed. She bit her lip as the door opened and Jim stepped out.

            “Hey.” She didn’t even try to smile. Whatever was going on here, it was too big to be smiled away.

            “What do you want, Pam?” he said, and she almost gasped at the anger in his voice. She’d never heard him use that tone before, never known that he could sound that way.

            “Why are you avoiding me?” she forced herself to say. She was shivering, but only partly because of the cold. Jim finally looked at her—finally gave her what she’d been wanting for the past two days—and she found that she couldn’t hold his gaze. He had never looked at her like that before.

            “I just don’t have much to say, that’s all.” He kicked at some loose gravel.

            “That’s crap,” she said, suddenly feeling some anger of her own rising up in her stomach. “You clearly want to say something, Jim. What?”

            “Nah,” he said, shrugging. “It’s none of my business.”

            “What? What is none of your business? Quit acting like this.”

            “Okay, sure.” He found her eyes again. “Did you have a good time with Roy this weekend?”

            She stepped back. So it was about that.

            “You’re right,” she said quietly. “That really is none of your business.”

            “Fine. Fine. I mean, I thought you had moved on, but if you want to go back to Roy—” He put his hand on the door knob.

            “I’m not going back to Roy.”

            “Really? You guys looked pretty cozy at the wedding. I mean, you left together, right?”
            “Who told you that?”

            “I saw you, Pam.” His voice had dropped, but it hadn’t lost any of its anger. “You left with him, after he treated you like shit for, what, ten years?”

            “No, I left with him after he paid attention to me for two hours.” Her own voice was sad. She knew how pathetic it was, but she didn’t feel like lying to him about it. “I left with him after he asked the band to play our song, and I left with him after—” But she stopped. She didn’t want to lie to him, but that didn’t mean she had to tell him everything. She didn’t have to tell him that she had never been as sad as she was when she watched Jim dancing with Karen, watched him smiling down at the woman in his arms that wasn’t her.

            “So that makes it okay? How he used to treat you?”

            “No,” she said. “Give me some credit.”

            “Why should I? Do you even know what that felt like, watching you hold his hand and just walk out like that?”

            “Yeah,” she said, “I think I probably do.”

            They stared at each other for a moment. He seemed to just be realizing now what he had said, what she had said, and the look on his face started to shift slowly from anger to confusion.

            “Pam. Are you saying—”

            She nodded, slowly, wishing that she knew a way to stop this conversation here, before things got worse.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

            She shook her head. “You’re with Karen.”

            “So?”

            “What do you mean, so? You’re with another woman. I wasn’t going to try to get in the way of that.”

            “Didn’t you think I had the right to know?”
            She stared at him. “The right? Is that how you think about these things?” She almost laughed. “Is that why you thought it was okay to tell me you loved me three weeks before I was supposed to get married?”

            He didn’t answer.

            “Do you want to know why I didn’t tell you? It’s because I never wanted you to have to feel like that. I had no idea what to do when you told me, no idea. I couldn’t sleep for three days.”  She paused. No one knew about that, not even Roy. She’d told him she was coming down with something, and he didn’t question the fact that she spent the next three days curled up in the armchair in their living room.

            “I’m sorry,” Jim said, but she could tell he was still feeling a little defiant. Before he could say anything else, she cut him off.

“And I didn’t think it would be fair to do that to you. I don’t even want to be doing this to you now. I should never have come up here.”

“What did you think was going to happen?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Not this.”

“No, I mean—what did you think was going to happen, big picture? Did you think you’d just wait until Karen and I broke up? What if we had gotten engaged? Would you still feel like it wasn’t fair to tell me?”

“It would be even less fair then.”

“So you would just let me keep living my life, no matter how you felt about me?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

“You really don’t get it, do you?” She took a deep breath. “I can’t stand that I hurt you last year. I can’t stand it. But you hurt me, Jim—and I know you didn’t mean to, I know that’s not why you told me, I know all of that. But I figured, this time, I would know how much I was hurting you if I told you…how I feel. And I couldn’t hurt you like that, not on purpose.”

And before he could speak or move, Pam walked past him, opened the door, and made her way back inside. With the same sense of purpose she’d had fifteen minutes ago—oh, god, had it only been fifteen minutes?—she took off her jacket and sat down at her desk.