Disclaimer: Don't own anything but the plot, I swear.
~~~!~~~
Pam’s drunk, and she can’t remember why. She can’t remember what bar she was at, how many straight tequilas she ordered, what obscenities she sprayed at the bartender before he called her a cab, or what address she gave the nice man in the front of the car. She can’t remember where her car is, or why she’s not in it, or what time it was when she saw the cab through the neon lights in the window and started bawling.
There’s steps right now and she stumbles up them, leaning against the railing. Beesley, you’re a real mess right now, she hears, but there’s two steps to go and a friendly-looking doormat that looks so familiar.
She falls into the door and jams her thumb onto the doorbell, misses the first time and hits on her third try, feels a twinging pain in her hand and somehow wants it again. Pain would be nice. Anything but this. Laughs a bit and wonders what the voice is talking about, because you can’t just throw words like “pain” around without an explanation, dammit.
Door opens and light seems so sharp in her eyes, sharper than the TV screens at the bar and there’s a girl with friendly-confused eyes and nice hair, gray cami and panda PJs and Pam decides that she likes this girl a lot. Karen, the voice supplies, if only, if only.
“Pam?” Karen says, and she can feel herself sort of stumbling inside and Karen’s hand is on her arm, taking an unzipped purse from her arm and closing the door behind her. “Pam, what did you drink…?”
Tequila, the voice supplies again, but she hears herself say “Nothing” in a little murmur like some kid, but Karen seems like she gets that “nothing” means “tequila” and then Pam turns and sees him –
Eyes grow wide, and she can’t tell if it’s hers or his. She looks down at the corner where the futon meets the floor and swears to God that she can still see the boxers there, X-ray vision through the wall and swears to God that the shaving kit is still there, and now his smell is everywhere and his eyes are everywhere and she can’t get away this time.
“Tequila,” she hears herself say, and he lifts himself off the couch with a look on his face that says he gets all the rest of the words behind what she can say now, and the world spins around the axis of his eyes and she can feel his arms catching her just before she passes out –
Tequila means you.
~~~!~~~
A part of Karen wants to take pictures, and she knows that part needs to go away as fast as possible. Pam’s head is rolling on Jim’s shoulder and Karen finds herself at Pam’s feet, gently untying her Keds because that’s what you do when a girlfriend stumbles into your room, drunk to the gills.
“Is she all right?” she asks as Jim takes Pam’s body up in a fireman’s carry and gently lays her on the futon. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her this drunk.”
“She doesn’t drink much.” Jim’s forehead is knotted and his face is clearly worried. Karen realizes with a vague, dawning fascination that this is a facial expression she hasn’t seen before. “At least, she never used to.”
Karen reaches down and gently unclips Pam’s hair, strokes it to where it’s comfortable and she can feel her conscience riling up – Why are you so nice to the girl who’s in your way? But she can’t help it, she just naturally befriended this girl and it’s only weeks after the first slumber party that she realizes they would’ve been the BFF type in middle school and how easily they could have been roommates in college.
Jim gently slides Pam’s hands off from where they’ve caught the fabric of his shirt and moves in to arrange her more comfortably on the sofa, and it’s something sweet and protective that Karen’s seen him do so many times to this girl that’s not her.
She stands up and goes to the kitchen, puts the wine glasses away and slides the candles back into her third drawer. Jim hears the sound of the drawer closing, because it’s the only drawer in her house with squeaky hinges – hears the sound and closes his eyes.
~~~!~~~
“Are you going to stay up with her?”
“I don’t know, I thought you wanted to.”
“We can’t just leave her alone.”
“Do we want to move her?”
“Probably not.”
“Right.”
“…”
“…”
“So are you going to stay up with her?”
“Let’s both.”
~~~!~~~
Pam wakes up with a huge headache and instantly winces. A hand is at her elbow almost immediately, and one more gently lifts her up to a sitting position. Something hot is at her lips and she can smell chocolate and whipped cream. “Drink.”
It’s warm and soothing in her throat and the headache is a little less now, enough for her to open her eyes and see the two heads peering at her, and she knows who they are now.
“Sorry, Karen,” she mumbles and ducks her head down for some more hot chocolate.
“No problem,” Karen says, and uses both hands to tuck her hair behind her ears. It’s then that Pam realizes that it’s Jim’s hands holding the hot chocolate up to her lips, Jim’s hands on her back.
She jumps a little, as if someone’s shocked her simply with static, and Jim brings the mug away before it can spill over. She can hear the sound of the mug being placed back onto the coffee table and remembers the tubs of Ben and Jerry’s, the vague reflections of cartoon characters on its smooth brown surface. His hand is gone from her back, and she’s cold again.
A pair of smaller hands brace the handle of the mug when it comes back up to her mouth, and the mug shakes more often and the whipped cream hits her nose a few times, but it’s better than nothing and maybe she needs it sometimes.
“You’re my friend, Karen,” she mutters. “I don’t care anyway, you’re my friend.”
The mug jolts and then steadies, and a soft warm thumb wipes the whipped cream from the tip of her nose. “Me too.”
~~~!~~~
It takes half an hour for Pam’s headache to go away, and she’s still a mess with her hair in a tangle and her clothes all rumpled. Karen points her at the bedroom with a change of clothes and helps her in, and when she comes back out, Jim is standing in the doorway, putting on his coat.
“Going somewhere?” she asks, walking right up to him, and she can see the lines of worry and confusion still on his face.
“Um, yeah, yeah,” he nods. “I’m not needed here, and it’s kind of a touchy thing anyway. I’ll just, uh, go home, I mean Mark’s there tonight, and there’s a UConn game on.”
“Jim.” Karen reaches up and gently touches her fingers to his cheek, nudges his chin so that his eyes meet hers. “I want to say something to you, and you better be listening to me when I say it because you need to hear it.”
Jim nods, and Karen forces herself not to look down. “I get what I came in the middle of, Jim, I get it. I understand. Completely. I didn’t understand before, mainly because you didn’t tell me, but I think I get it all now, and I get what’s going on. Honestly, Jim, I feel like I love you, but I get that you just can’t.” Her voice almost breaks on this last word, but she catches herself just in time.
“I can’t hate you, and it’s going to sound weird, but she’s somehow my best friend and I can’t hate her either. Now, Jim – “ he turns his head away and she catches his chin again, buries the feeling in her chest and continues – “Jan sent out an email for the women in the company. She’s looking for a new female head of company-wide HR. It’s purely corporate, a leg up from my job now, and the pay’s great, and I’ll be in charge of Toby and all that, so…I asked her for it. I was going to tell you tonight.”
His voice is hoarse and she tries hard to keep her fingers from shaking as he speaks. “You don’t have to move to New York City because of me.”
“Because of you and her.” She shakes her head a little and does the wry smile she’s learned from him after months of butterfly kisses and jokes. “And I already moved to Scranton for you, New York City’s going to be an upgrade.”
He tries to speak again, but she cuts him off because she knows if he started saying something, she’d break. “I know – at least, I think I know – that it’s not just me. There’s something here that nobody could break. I got in the middle of it, and I know now that I never stood a chance. Listen now, Jim, because this is the really important part.” She swallows and lets herself say what she’s needed to say since she closed her squeaky candle drawer. “What you’ve got with her is something greater than what almost everyone else is ever going to have. I don’t want to be the one to keep either of you from it, because it’s something very few people get.”
She can’t read the expression on his face, but she keeps talking because if she stopped now, she’d never finish. “You two deserve it. I want you two to have it. And there’ll be other guys for me, I mean, probably nobody like you, Jim, but I’ll find someone. The thing is, you don’t know it, but you two already have.”
Karen leans up on her toes and gives Jim a kiss on the cheek, and it feels so odd to her, like somebody’s ripping half her heart to shreds and sewing the other half at the same time. Then she turns from him and walks back to where Pam is calling for help in the bathroom, and the ripping stops and the sewing begins in earnest.
~~~!~~~
The next morning, Jim Halpert sits on the futon next to Pam Beesley and wonders how and why. Karen is still asleep in the bedroom where she and Pam talked all night. He can’t think about Karen now. He can’t think about much at all.
“She’s moving to New York,” he says, and feels her chest heave beside him.
“She told me last night.” Something raw and open is in her tone. “For us.”
“Any other way but this way,” he says quietly. “I didn’t want to hurt her, ever.”
She’s quiet for a long time. “Me neither.”
They can’t say anything for a long while. The apartment’s quiet with the sound of Karen’s steady, gentle breathing.
Then he turns. “What happens now?” And his gaze is frank and honest and so real.
She opens her mouth to say something intelligent, but “I love you” spills out instead and for once she’s glad that it happened that way. Despite this thing between them and the girl sleeping in the next room, Pam feels like it happened right, and the feeling of his hand intertwined with hers is so perfect, so perfect.
~~~!~~~
