At seven o’clock Jim picked her up and they drove to the Italian restaurant in silence.  She was eager, confused; she wore her hair up, pinned in place with pearl-tipped bobby pins that matched the choker around her neck.  She found herself clutching at the choker absently the whole drive there – clutching her pearls, she thought, as he got out and opened up the door for her, looking down at the rain-slicked pavement at her feet.

She paused there, looking at him with one foot out of the car she still thought of as new even though it had been so long, now, even though she’d had a summer riding in it, and she didn’t move as the rain bubbling up around the heel of her shoe until finally, still without looking at her, he gruffly said, “Come on.”

“Jim,” she said gently, tugging at the hand that hung limp by his side.  She realized, then, that he looked more haggard than usual; haggard wasn’t a word for her Jim, smiling and sardonic and vibrant even when he wasn’t happy.  Haggard wasn’t a word she’d ever run up against before, trying to describe him.  When he returned the pressure of her hand and smiled faintly (at her forehead, not her eyes) the worry sprung up from her belly and lodged itself beneath her heart.

She stood up, following a step behind him, trailing behind their loosely clasped hands like a float behind a fishing reel, consigned to aimless bobbing until someone reels it in.

He let go of her hand as soon as they emerged into the restaurant, giving the hostess the name on the reservation in a hushed, cracking voice.  At the table she pulled out her own chair and continued trying to trap his eyes in hers, but he avoided them expertly, with a subtlety too resolute to be born of indifference.

After he ordered the wine she leaned desperately across the table, her hushed whisper lost in the buzz of the low-lighted room.  When he finally looked up she wished he hadn’t; his eyes were torn and raw.

“What, Pam?”

She forced through her stammering, feeling anger scratch at the vault of her ribcage.  “What’s gotten into you?”

He shook his head and let out a long breath, so she knew he meant it when he said, “I don’t know.”

She laid her menu flat on the table and folded her arms over it.  “Please think about it,” she entreated, because she didn’t know what else to say.  The words stuck on her tongue like charcoal dust when she added, her voice low, “You’re scaring me.”

His reply was so quick and angry that her addendum got lost in his syllables.  “I don’t want to think about it, Pam!  Don’t you – don’t you get it?”

Now he was staring at her and she couldn’t hold his gaze, knew what he’d been feeling on the way in, so she dropped her eyes to her lap.  “No, I don’t.”

He fell silent, took a drink from his glass; ran a hand over his face, the meat of his palm rubbing sorrows into the corners of his mouth.  “I’m sorry,” he said, and there was that crack running the length of his voice again, opened wide beneath his lashes.  “I’m sorry.”

“I just don’t understand,” she pleaded helplessly.  “You were so – when you came back from talking to Dwight, you just – in front of everyone…”  She faltered and trailed off, her face flushing red above the string of white at her throat.

“Yeah.”  He nodded.  “I did.  I’d just gotten done reliving that whole damn night and I just needed to – know I could kiss you.  Still.  Without you walking off.”

The heat mounted in her blood.  She wanted to ask which night, wanted there to be a question, wanted any reason to believe that he wasn’t bringing this up now in public in front of God and the waitress and everyone else.  “Jim,” she said sharply, waving a hand to fend off the server coming forward.  “Don’t do this here.”

“What?  We can’t talk about that?  Still?”

“I don’t understand why we have to.”  She heard the plaintiveness in her voice.  “We’re here now – isn’t that enough?”

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he jibed bitterly.  “You don’t know what it’s like to have to watch you like that, for years, and just get shut down and end up riding down in an elevator wondering what the hell you did wrong, and then come back and it’s like nothing ever happened –”

“I had to watch you with Karen, didn’t I?” she parried, with equal bitterness.

“That’s not the same thing at all, and you know it.”

Scoffing, she demanded, “Why not?”

“Because you never felt about me the way I did about you!”

In a moment the fury ebbed from his face, leaving it pale beneath his brows and the shaggy line of his hair.  He looked spent.  She realized that now he was leaning forward, while she was pressed against the back of her chair, back as far as she could, her eyes watering and her mouth open.

“Come on, I didn’t mean that.”

“I think you did,” she said, very quietly.  “So – what, Jim?  I just had a little crush and you had a bigger crush?  Is that what you’re trying to say?”

She knew instantly that she’d said the wrong thing, but she couldn’t take it back as he said, voice as bleak as his eyes, “A crush?”

“Jim,” she backpedaled.  “Come on.  I mean – back then.  Not now.”

He shook his head.  “A crush?  That’s what you think I had?”

The worry that had sidled up beside her heart beat out frantic rhythm against it.  It was the time to say something, anything; but she couldn’t speak.  He looked like a marionette, slack-limbed, slouching in his chair when the waitress approached them again.  “Ready to order?” she asked, her voice bright and clear and throbbing inside Pam’s head.

“I think we’re ready for the check,” she murmured, twisting her napkin in her lap.

When the waitress had vanished, he reached across the table.  “Pam, please.  Don’t – let’s just have dinner, all right?”

She looked up at him in silence, and after a long moment she slid her hand into his.  He didn’t clutch it the way she was expecting him to; their hands remained in the center, touching, but not secured.

He didn’t open the door this time when he dropped her off, or maybe she didn’t wait for him to do it, but either way she was halfway out of the car when she heard his breath catch in his throat.  “You wore your hair just like that,” he told her, voice empty.

She pushed the car door closed as softly as she could, but the sound echoed down the street until he drove away.