It was another one of those days at Dunder Mifflin. Pam had been subjected to a rather condescendingly stern glare from Angela after she and Jim had entered the office only slightly late. It didn’t help, Pam had acknowledged to herself, that both she and her boyfriend had been wearing giddy grins that were extremely hard to hide, grins that were also very connected to why they had been late. However cheerful she had felt at the moment, she couldn’t help but also suspect that Angela somehow knew exactly why they had come in twenty minutes behind schedule. This discomforted Pam more than a little.
Of course, Michael hadn’t helped that morning, either. He hadn’t seemed to care that she was late (after all, it wasn’t as if she and Jim were late often; it hadn’t happened since that first morning they had come to work together a few months before), but he made up for his tact in that department with an utter lack thereof in soliciting Pam’s help regarding he and Jan. He disclosed an account of how they had spent the previous night, and the details were less than pleasant; indeed, they were remarkably gag-worthy. She had known that he wanted her advice, but she also knew her tolerance for the information was thinning fast. When her first subtle, and progressively less subtle, hints to Michael that the story he was sharing was an unwelcome addition to her morning went completely unnoticed by him, she desperately looked at Jim with what she hoped was an expression of deep anguish.
It was never hard for Pam to catch Jim’s eye, since it seemed his body was always slightly oriented towards reception, but, although he saw Pam’s need quickly, he infuriatingly teased her by pretending to not understand what she wanted. Quickly glancing at Michael to make sure he didn’t notice her looking at Jim, she saw he was still drawing some sort of diagram to aid in his explanation of the night before. Her repulsion to the prospect of seeing the picture increased her resolve to persuade her boyfriend to get her out of the situation. Making her most sorrowful expression, she looked at Jim. The playfully-fake oblivion he had worn on his face became tinged with guilt and he nodded almost imperceptibly. Picking up his phone, he dialed what Pam knew was the extension for reception. Sure enough, seconds later her phone rang.
She cleared her throat loudly, and Michael looked up. “Sorry,” she said, putting all her energy into faking her regret for having to leave the ‘conversation,’ “but I need to take this.”
Looking perturbed, he picked up his thankfully unfinished drawing (at which Pam avoided looking) and started towards his office. Pam picked up the phone, while shooting a grateful glance at Jim. For a moment, all seemed well. Not only was she out the horrible situation, but she could talk to Jim for a few minutes on the phone. Bonus.
Before she could even get out a “Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam,” however, Michael called out: “Jim, come into my office. I need your opinion...on a, er, an important business matter, um, client situation.” He was holding the drawing like an important document and Pam knew, with a surge of guilt, that Jim had taken the fall for her.
Trudging into Michael’s office, Jim had given her an exaggeratedly brave smile, and Pam had replied with a look that she hoped said that his courageous and selfless act would not go unrewarded. He raised his eyebrows and smile more mischievously, which let her know that her message had reached him.
That had been the morning. She and Jim had enjoyed their lunch together and were back at work for a long afternoon. She knew that the possibility of a good prank was very low, for both of her and Jim’s favorite targets, Andy and Dwight, were out on sales calls for the rest of the day. Jim himself had been tasked by Michael to update the branch’s client directory. He seemed, in Pam’s opinion, to be working hard at it, and she was sure that he was doing so in order to finish it as quickly as possible, which would be long before Michael’s deadline. Even though she knew that Jim disliked tasks like this one, she also knew that he tended to them faster. She had noticed through the years of their friendship that he savored and drew out any activities he truly enjoyed and rushed those that he didn’t want to do. He nearly always did things well, even if he hurried, but he didn’t spend any more time on a project like the one he was doing now than he absolutely had to.
As occupied as he was, he still occasionally glanced over in her direction and smiled. On the other hand, his occupation made her even more conscious of her lack of it. It was a Friday afternoon; she had picked up one call in the hour since lunch, and it had been Jan calling for Michael. Although she had been trying to keep herself busy by checking her favorite websites and playing solitaire, she wanted to do something that would at least make her feel a little more productive. Looking idly at Jim typing away at his computer, an idea struck her. She reached to the shelf below the fax machine at reception and pulled out a piece of white Dunder Mifflin printer paper. Taking her art pencils from the middle drawer of her desk, she smiled to herself, contemplating this impromptu art project.
Picking the right pencil out of the set’s case, she looked at her chosen ‘model.’ He sat, totally unaware that his face was soon to be immortalized on a piece of paper plastered at the top with the Dunder Mifflin logo...or at least Pam enjoyed thinking so.
As she started to sketch the beginnings of Jim’s face, she frequently glanced up at it, determined to get it perfectly right. She was sure that she could have drawn his face completely from memory—how many times had she looked at him from reception, and how many times in the past few months had she woken up to see his face beside her?—but she also was glad for any excuse to look at it.
Often, before she had really allowed herself to dream of pursuing her art, she had contemplated attempting some sort of portrait of Jim (after all, he sat in a place very visible to her), but she had always ended up deciding not to. She had been afraid...of what she didn’t really know at the time. Her reasons had always been that Jim would be weirded out if he discovered that she was doing it and Roy would be angry if he found out she had picked Jim over him for a portrait. Although those were probably true, she thought, she also knew now that there was a much more subtle reason that had kept her from doing it: her art generally gave a full indication of her feelings for the subject. The reason her art tended to be so boring was that she sketched objects she considered boring, like her stapler or Dunder Mifflin’s office building. She had been afraid that if she sketched Jim a very different emotion would show itself, and she had always carefully avoided as much evidence that those feelings for him resided in her as possible. The act of sketching him also seemed like such an intimate act, considering the emotions that would be involved, that she felt she would almost be cheating on Roy if she even made the simplest sketch of Jim’s face.
Minutes went by, and what had started as vague lines had begun to fill in slowly. There were certain features she puzzled over when it came to committing them to paper, like his eyes (so expressive and always able to make her knees go weak), and his mouth (her mind actually drifted off for a moment as she thought of his gentle and amazingly soft lips). She had seen his face with so many expressions, from teasing and perfectly content to desperate and longing.
She smiled as she remembered before he left for Stamford, things like his Phyllis impressions, and those triumphant, yet schoolboy-giddy expressions he wore when a prank on Dwight had gone off well, or, she thought guiltily, she had been acting flirtatiously towards him. She really had given him every reason to hope she cared for him, because, well, she did. Times such as their poker game on that fateful Casino Night came to mind, and she could still feel the butterflies in her stomach from those looks Jim had given her across the table. For a moment it had just been them in the room.
Other times, his expressions had been much more serious; her mind went to the seeming eternity she had been lost in his gaze on the deck of the Booze Cruise. He had worn a slight smile, but that point in her life she had never seen so much emotion locked behind anyone’s eyes, nor had she ever been so afraid that she was somehow betraying the same types of feelings in herself. Although she was continuously denying the feelings she knew (and hoped) Jim harbored for her, and even more her feelings for him, she had been left unable to speak as his gaze had sped up her heart and made her feel dizzier than she had at the previous Dundies.
Turning down the chance for the graphic design internship had hurt her less than had the disappointed look on Jim’s face when he found out she had done it. She had let herself feel then, in a rare moment of unguarded thinking, that even if she wasn’t engaged, he was way too good for her.
She cringed inwardly when she remembered how she had been the one to cause the light to go out of Jim’s eyes, and that solitary tear to meander slowly and painfully down his usually jovial face in the parking lot on Casino Night. She had caused him so much pain, and, despite the fact that much of it had been unconsciously done, she was now well aware that she could have avoided seeing such heart-rending sadness on her best friend’s face by having simply acknowledged her feelings. It still made a pit form in her stomach when she thought about the anguished expression that had quickly replaced glowing ecstasy on his face when she had, later that evening, stopped him from kissing her a second time. She had been sure in her head in that moment that she had made the proper, expected, and even right decision when she persisted in denying Jim. On the other hand, her heart seemed to have been in vehement disagreement, and, taking control after Jim dejectedly left the room, its breaking caused her to dissolve into quiet sobs.
She had missed his face during that horrible year after Casino Night more than she had ever thought possible. The absence of the humorous expressions and perfect smiles he used to regularly throw in her direction were first replaced by his physical absence. He had come back eventually, but her anticipated return to the old days had been met by the brick wall Jim had built around himself to shut her out. When she actually was able to see his face (which wasn’t incredibly often, due to the new, extremely unfortunate seating arrangements), he rarely wore those trademark looks she had loved instantly when they had met years earlier. Even his smiles were missing their luster, and she knew that, although she hated to see him and Karen together, she had been the cause of the whole idiotic situation.
She had occasionally been given reasons to hope, like when she and Jim had played the cell phone prank on Andy, but as time wore on her anticipation for the moment he would start being his old self again dissipated. In her newfound sense of self-awareness she had seen a sickeningly ironic mirror situation to the previous year; now, in a cruel twist of situation, she was the person watching longingly from the sidelines as the one she desperately wanted was happy (even though she wasn’t totally convinced he truly was happy) with someone else. Seeing his face as he danced with Karen at Phyllis’ wedding, her resolve to keep waiting for him had broken down.
Instead of dealing with the situation by confronting it, however, as Jim had on Casino Night, she chose to hide from it by retreating into a familiar place. Besides her two refusals of Jim on Casino Night, she often felt that her biggest mistake had been getting back together with Roy at the wedding. Then again, she allowed herself, she had learned to be much more independent and assertive, partly as a result of that choice...but she couldn’t help but feel that there must have been a better way to do it. Nevertheless, she had finally put her feelings out in the open, and the wide-eyed, stunned expression of Jim’s face, lit only by flickering flames that night on the beach, was one she would never forget. She had been unsure of how he felt about her declaration, but it was such a burden off of her heavy heart that she somehow felt that no matter what else happened, she had done what she could, and everything would turn out the way it was supposed to.
Shaking herself out of these thoughts, Pam put her mind back to her sketch of Jim. She was now trying to get his hair just right. It had always been, along with his eyes and smile, one of her favorite “Jim” features. In former years she had wondered—when she actually allowed herself to—what it would feel like to run her fingers through it. The slight flip on the ends, the adorable messiness of it, had often distracted her in her duties as a receptionist. She had been sure it must have smelled good (a fact she had long since confirmed). Although she had said his new haircut had looked good the day he left for his interview in New York, it had broken her heart to see it. The one part of her Jim that had remained had now surrendered to becoming part of Karen’s Jim. When he had asked her, about two months after they had started dating, if he should get it cut that way again, she had replied in horror at the very suggestion.
After putting a few finishing touches on the sketch, she blew off the excess pencil dust and surveyed her work. It wasn’t perfect, but it was hers...kind of like Jim.
“What’ve you got there, Beesly?”
She jumped, at Jim’s voice. She looked up and he was standing right at reception, grabbing a jelly bean; being so immersed in her creation she hadn’t even noticed him approaching. Trying to be smooth and nonchalant, she quickly hid the drawing under another document on her desk. “Oh, just doodles,” she replied, a little too forcefully.
He leaned closer to try and see what she was attempting at hiding. “Yeah, right. I didn’t get a good look, but that appeared to be a little more complex that doodles...or at least my doodles. Come on, let me see it,” he pleaded.
“Nope. This is private. I apologize for the inconvenience.”
“Beesly, you know deep down in your heart two things: one, that I will not mock or ridicule you for whatever you have drawn, and two, that I will find a way to see it. I’ll buy you dinner tonight AND take you to a movie if you let me look,” he offered, smiling mischievously.
“First of all, those were our plans tonight anyways, and second...well, fine. Don’t laugh.” She couldn’t resist him. Taking a deep breath, she pulled out the sketch.
As Jim examined it, his face was expressionless. Pam, needing some kind of reply from him, asked expectantly, “Well?”
“Wow...how long did it take you to do this?”
“About a half an hour.” She waited, afraid he was feeling a bit creeped out by realizing she had been eying him closely for almost a half hour without him knowing.
A smile spread across his face. “Well, Pamelangelo,” he teased, using a nickname that was a favorite of Michael’s, “I think you’ve captured my rugged good looks quite splendidly. This should fetch a nice price at an art auction, don’t you think? As long as there are any women there...But really, having looked at myself in the mirror daily for the past many years, I can say that this looks very good!” He chuckled. “You know, Pam,” he lowered his voice suggestively, “if there’s another kind of art form you’d like to take part in after the movie tonight, let me know and I’ll be glad to help out...”
She rolled her eyes playfully, relieved that he seemed to like it. “I don’t know. I think I’ve used up all my artistic inspiration for the day.”
He winked roguishly at her. “Hmm...well, I’ll have to see if I can’t give you a little inspiration later.”
Pam blushed and grinned. She knew that with that face, he’d be able to inspire her to do anything.
Author's Chapter Notes:
My second JAMfic. Took a little trip into Pam's POV this time. Try to enjoy. Please, please try.
Chapter End Notes:
Please review. I need to know if I'm wasting my time... ;)
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