Karen sat back down in her chair, watching as chaos took over the middle of the office. She watched as Roy pulled himself off Jim and left the office. She watched as Creed surveyed the mess at his feet and then, without a word, walked back to his desk. And she watched as Pam kneeled next to Jim and pulled him up, brushing his hair out of his face and pressing a Kleenex against his bleeding nose.
What. The hell. Was that?Part of her thought that she should be the one on the ground, taking care of Jim. But a bigger part of her knew that it wasn’t her place. She wasn’t the one he’d been fighting over.
And so she took a couple of deep breaths, stood up, and went to the break room. She put some ice in a towel and made her way to Jim and Pam.
“Here,” she said, handing the towel to Pam. “This might help.”
“Thanks, Karen,” Pam said, and she sounded really grateful. Karen thought that Pam would say something else, maybe try to explain, but she just went back to murmuring to Jim and gently holding the cold towel against the side of his nose.
“This should stop the bleeding,” Pam said quietly. Karen stood silently for a moment longer, waiting for Jim to open his eyes and look at her. But he didn’t, and she went back to her desk.
A few minutes later—or longer, maybe; she’d been staring at her computer without moving for she didn’t know how long—she heard someone say, “Hey, Karen, want to go get some coffee or something?”
She looked up to see Toby standing next to her desk. She wasn’t sure she’d ever spoken to Toby alone for more than a few seconds at a time, when their paths crossed near the coffee machine. And she had opened her mouth to say no, a sort of automatic reaction, when she noticed that Jim hadn’t gone back to his desk. She glanced over to the reception desk to see Pam and Jim, talking quietly and not quite looking at each other. Jim was in Pam’s normal seat and she leaned on her desk next to him—close enough to seem comfortable, kind of intimate, even, but not close enough to be touching him.
“Um, yeah. That sounds really nice, actually.”
She followed Toby out of the office, not even stopping to say goodbye to Jim because she was so afraid he would ignore her. She followed Toby out of the building and down the street, huddling against the chilly wind and enjoying the fact that he wasn’t trying to talk.
It wasn’t until they settled into a corner table and she was warming her hands on her coffee cup that Toby said, “So, hey. I figured you might need someone to talk to. You know.”
Karen nodded. He was probably right. But, as nice as Toby was, she didn’t see herself telling him everything that was going on in her head right now. It might feel okay-- good, even-- to get some of this stuff off her chest while they were sitting in a Starbucks, but then they’d get back to the office and Toby would know these things that she was thinking, and she just didn’t want to have that fact floating around for now on.
“Can I ask you something?” she said. She didn’t want to talk, but it occurred to her that maybe Toby would have some things to say himself.
“Yeah, of course.” He fiddled with the empty Sweet’n’Low packet she had left on the table. “What’s up?”
“Did Pam used to date that guy? Roy?”
Toby looked like he was trying not to look surprise. “Um, yeah. For awhile, actually. A long while.”
“How long?”
“Ten years. They were supposed to get married last summer.”
Karen almost choked on her coffee. “What?”
“I… can’t believe you didn’t know that. Yeah, she called it off.”
“When? Why?”
“Oh, um, I don’t really know. It was pretty close to the wedding. June, I remember that.” He wouldn’t look at her. There was more to this. Karen just wasn’t sure how much more she wanted to know.
“Did Jim— Nevermind. I don’t care.”
She sat silently, sipping her coffee, barely acknowledging the few attempts Toby made at small talk. She wasn’t stupid. Even if she didn’t have the details, she had enough pieces to put together a pretty good picture of Jim’s life now.
And that was the problem: she wasn’t really in it.
