He closed his eyes and settled under her hand, enjoying the fact that, even though his face was broken, he was close to her and she wasn’t pushing him away and she wasn’t saying no.

            “I’m sorry,” she said, and her mouth was close enough to his ear for him to feel her breath. He wasn’t sure he could stand it. He tried to focus on the pain in the middle of his face instead of the complete joy tingling around his earlobe.

            “Not your fault.” He didn’t open his eyes as he listened to the rustling around them, people going back to their chairs and answering the phones. “Did Creed really call the cops?”

            “Oh, God, I don’t know,” she murmured. Then she sighed. “I don’t actually care. Does this hurt?”

            He winced as she put a little more pressure on his nose. She apologized again as he moved his hand over hers, repositioning it so that it hurt a little less.

            “Here,” he heard Karen say. Shit. Karen. “This might help.”

            “Thanks, Karen.” She moved the Kleenex from his nose and replaced it with something cold and dry. He kept his eyes shut. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to stare straight into the fluorescent lights, but he wasn’t a very good liar. “This should stop the bleeding,” Pam said. “Can you stand up?”

            Jim really, really didn’t want to stand up. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been quite as comfortable as he was right now. But he let Pam pull him up and guide him toward her desk. He slipped an arm around her shoulder as though he needed the support, and she only hesitated a second before putting her own arm around his waist.

            “Sit down,” she said. “Hold that ice pack over your nose.”

            She deposited him in her chair, squeezed his hand—don’t let go, he thought, surprising himself a little with the desperation in his inner voice—and then disappeared into the break room. He watched her for a few seconds, then forced himself to glance over at Karen. She was staring at her computer. He wasn’t sure she was even blinking. Now would maybe not be a good time to talk to her.

            Pam came back and leaned against her desk, holding out a mug of something hot.

            “So,” he said. “It was nice seeing Roy again.”

            She met his smile with a giggle.

            “You didn’t have to,” she said quietly, still smiling but somehow managing to look sad at the same time. He had always wondered how she did that. “I mean, thank you, but maybe you shouldn’t have.”

            “I don’t know if you know this, Pam,” Jim said, using his best confidentially-speaking tone. “But I’ve never really liked Roy. I’m not that upset if we’re not friends.”

            “I’m not talking about Roy.” He followed her eyes to Karen. Wow—Pam was actually worried about Karen. He knew it was sick, twisted, maybe even evil to feel this way, but he suddenly wanted to kiss Pam more than he’d ever wanted to before. “Drink your tea.”

            They sat silently for a couple of seconds as Jim tenderly touched his nose and Pam casually drank her own cup of tea.

            “How does it look?” Jim asked, partly to have something to say and partly because he just really wanted to feel Pam looking right at him again.

            “Not too bad. It’s only swelling a little bit. The ice really helped, I think.”

            “Good, because you know how vain I am.”

            She giggled again, and he never wanted her to stop. He smiled up at her, then stopped smiling when he noticed Karen and Toby slipping out the door.

            “So—I hate to bring this up again,” he said as the door clicked shut. “But you and Roy--”

            Pam sighed. “I thought maybe I could go home with him, and I thought maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but I was wrong. And I told him to take me back to my place, and I practically slammed the door in his face, and I spent my Saturday night crying by myself in my bathroom.”

            “Wow, Beesly,” Jim said, trying to sound normal but knowing that his voice was shaking. He had to get used to this whole honesty thing she was trying out—she kept catching him off guard with it today. “That’s…pretty pathetic.”

            “Oh, I know.”

            “Want to know what I did Saturday night?”

            Pam shot him a look that clearly said, “Not particularly.”

            “I faked a headache and dropped Karen off, then spent the next 24 hours not watching TV.”

            “And you think I’m pathetic?”

            Jim let himself sit at Pam’s desk for a few more minutes, but eventually it seemed silly to keep pretending like they were on some kind of private island or something. The rest of the office was back to work, and he didn’t really have a good excuse for keeping Pam from answering the voice mails that were blinking angrily on her phone. So eventually he forced himself back to his desk, and he forced himself not to turn around, and he forced himself not to talk to Pam. And when Karen got back, he forced her to make eye contact with him—and it looked like both of them had some things they needed to say.