1.
Jim doesn’t really know what to talk about with a woman who sells purses. He doesn’t even know why he asked her out. He knows how to make a woman melt with his grin, so he does, flashing one to her as he carries her bags for her.
Conversation feels a lot harder to come by. Strange, really, because he’s never had a hard time talking to women since high school, and he doesn’t know why it’s a problem right now. He hasn’t been on a date in so long that it’s hard to imagine Katy is real, sitting across the table from him and breathing and sipping a beer and not talking.
He isn’t talking, either. Everything he thinks to talk about is something that Katy wouldn’t understand. He thinks of pranks he plays on Dwight, but anyone who doesn’t know Dwight might just think he’s an asshole. He doesn’t want Katy to think that’s what he is. He thinks of the dumb things Michael has done over the years, but he doesn’t know if she’d even believe most of that.
Jim thoughts inevitably linger on the receptionist. He hates that he can’t ever get her out of his head, but he knows he wouldn’t trade it for the world. Definitely not a good topic of conversation in that moment, but he knows that Pam would laugh at everything he’d thought to say without thinking less of him. Still, Pam isn’t there, and he knows that.
He wishes he could find himself sitting across from Pam, but he knows he won’t.
Instead, he settles on the only thing he knows for sure Katy’s interested in.
“So, how’s the purse business?”
Smooth, Halpert, smooth, Jim thinks to himself, and he orders a second drink as the waitress walks past.
2.
Sometimes Jim really doesn’t like being at home. Sure, he likes his house, and he knows he’ll miss it in a few days when he leaves Scranton for good. Mark, his roommate, is a pretty awesome guy. Sometimes they manage to play basketball together on the weekends, and it’s good at making him forget the week.
But this week, Mark’s not here. It’s just him, the house, and a room he sometimes feels he’s grown out of. He loves it, but it feels like a dorm room. He thinks that he’s too old for that, but he could never change it.
That day, the barbeque, Pam sat on the end of his bed, laughing at his yearbook photo, in this room. God, he thought she looked beautiful that day, perched on the end of her bed, a rare glimpse of her in casual clothes with her guard completely down and a face full of smiles. Even her eyes smiled. It’d been so hard for him to stay glued to that chair. If he’d had any guts that night, he’d have walked over there, sat side by side on the bed, and kissed her.
But he hadn’t.
He shouldn’t be thinking about Pam in his bed, anyway. She’s engaged. He knows that, and even more he knows that he never wanted to be that guy. The guy who fucks another man’s girl.
Sighing, Jim shoves himself off of his couch, meandering towards the kitchen even though he knows he’ll find nothing. Mark did the shopping this week, and he’s on a health kick. A frozen pizza and a beer might suit his needs, but a health kick most certainly will not.
Jim stares at the fridge for a minute, trying so hard to will the fridge to be filled with the sort of junk food expected of two bachelors sharing a place. When he stops trying to use his mind powers on the fridge, he flings open the door.
The grin on his face from the absurdity of what he’d been doing slowly fades, and Jim doesn’t know when he started slowly sinking to the floor.
The fridge door is still open, proudly displaying a row of yogurts.
Mixed berry.
He slams the door shut in frustration, standing up and avoiding eye contact with the fridge.
A bowl of dry cereal will have to do.
3.
Jim smiles as he leaves work last that night, discreetly swiping Andy’s calculator out of his desk. He’s been at the Stamford branch long enough, and after that phone call with Dwight, he realizes how much he needs to do something again. Andy is the second most perfect target, after all.
The next morning, Jim walks into the office first, a bounce in his step and a smile in his face.
Not to mention the calculator encased in a dome of Jell-O.
He can’t stop grinning as he quietly opens Andy’s desk drawer and gently places the treat in Andy’s desk. He spends the rest of the morning looking up from his computer to Andy, waiting for him to open the drawer.
It feels like forever, and he grins like a maniac when it happens. He tries to hide it, but he knows that the cameras see him smile anyway.
Suddenly, Jim realizes nobody’s laughing, and his grin fades. He goes back to work as Andy terrorizes a garbage can, but he can’t focus. He can hear a laugh in his head, and it’s not his. It’s not anyone’s in this room.
He hears Pam laugh. He knows, that if she were here, she’d be trying not to laugh, her facial expressions safely hidden behind the receptionist desk.
But she’s not there, and she won’t be. He left that life behind.
Maybe it’s time he really moved on.
4.
Jim really can’t believe it the day he walks into to work to discover that the entire office is playing Call of Duty. They beg him to play, and Andy tries to change his nickname to Tiny Shrimp. He finds it necessary to explain that he’s calling him a wuss.
Jim finds it necessary to roll his eyes, but he finally caves after a few looks from Karen. It’s not the same as the Olympic games. He smiles at the memory those yogurt lid medals Pam had so brilliantly fashioned as the game loads.
As he tries to hunt down Nazis, grasping the concepts of which weapons to use in which situation much more slowly than he should have, Jim can’t help but remember that Dwight had played this game once.
If Pam were here, the two of them would laugh at the group of gamers just as they’d laughed at Dwight, probably speculating on whether or not Andy had ever played him on the internet. Jim would steal a jellybean, and Pam would smile.
If he was in Scranton, playing this game, he knows that his character’s head would get blown off because he took a second to sneak a pleading look at Pam.
It’d happen again as she returned the glance, her face now full of pity and laughter at the same time instead of the boredom derived from ten games of Freecell.
He misses that look.
5.
He’s sitting at his desk, entering things into spreadsheets and trying to ignore phone messages for as long as he possibly can. He glances over at reception, and he smiles as an excited grin spreads across Pam’s face, just for him. She’s waving her hand the slightest bit, and Jim thinks it’s the cutest thing he’s ever seen.
He quickly looks away just as Pam quickly goes back to shuffling papers. Neither of them knows who noticed Michael walk past first, but they need to hide. They’d rather laugh off awkward insinuations that they should be boning each other than have Michael actually know.
Michael’s come to ask Dwight into his office. Good. He won’t have to speak to anyone right now. He’d rather just keep that grin in his mind as long as possible, and he knows a conversation with Michael would have ruined it quicker than Dwight would be at thwarting a fake ninja attack.
It’s so strange to him. Surreal, almost. All of those days he sat at this desk, all of those years he spent glancing over at reception. He was always excited to be as close to Pam as often as he could. The moment she’d sat him at his desk the first day, warning him about Dwight, he’d known that nothing in the world could stop her from making every day at Dunder-Mifflin wonderful.
But now, now it was weird. Now that she’d seen him with his shirt off and he’d seen her in nothing but a towel as she rung out her wet hair in the morning, trying to relive how he’d felt back then is hard.
Because now, their desks feel so far apart.
He looks up the clock.
Five, on the dot.
He smiles like a lunatic at the sight, and he knows it. He just can’t help it. It’s been exactly nine hours and forty-six minutes since he’d last kissed Pam Beesly, and now he is just moments away from holding her in his arms while she ran her fingers through his hair, clinging on as long as they could to the brief moment of passionate anticipation before their lips met.
Jim Halpert feels like the luckiest man on Earth as he secretly holds hands with Pam and stares into her eyes as they ride the Dunder-Mifflin elevator.
Nobody blames him.
Story Notes:
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
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