and something's gotta change
'cause our love's the slowest moving train


She found the ring a week later.

Total accident – she wasn't even snooping. (Because he'd been kidding, right? Of course he was.) Her pen ran out of ink while she was making a shopping list, his messenger bag was right there, and as she was digging through the front pocket she closed her hand over something square and velvet-covered and knew without even pulling it out what it was.

Pam glanced over at the bathroom where he was showering, because guys were always in the shower when their girlfriends found The Ring, right? And sat there a long time, still holding it, still not looking.

Part of her wanted to march into the bathroom and demand "Tonight? Tonight is laundry night. You were going to propose to me while I was wearing yoga pants?" but then she thought maybe he was taking her out to dinner over the weekend. That made her mind jump to all sorts of things – where we had our first date? somewhere in the city? should I pack a bag just in case? – before she derailed the entire train of thought, zipped up the pocket again, and went to get a pen from her desk.

No dinner that weekend. They hung out with his friends on Friday, rented a movie on Saturday, and he went to his place on Sunday. She was still thinking about her answer.

It was supposed to be easy. Binary. 50/50. Yes/No. You didn't get to slip in a "maybe" for your fourth-grade crush to circle when you were talking marriage. You could manage a little wiggle room, like "Can we talk about this in six months? Things are just really complicated right now," except after five years and change she thought she probably ought to know whether or not she wanted to marry Jim Halpert.

It would still be really nice to say "maybe."

After two weeks he was still tying his shoe and asking for coffee and suddenly saying "Pam" in a serious voice, pausing long enough that she broke out into a cold, panicked sweat, then following it up with "I totally forgot to get toilet paper at the store." After three weeks she thought he was going to have a permanent bruise on his upper arm where she kept hitting him.

Maybe the punches were what stopped him. Maybe she was reacting the wrong way. Maybe he was sensing her "maybe."

After a while it was like waiting for bad test results, or for her dad to get home and ground her for breaking curfew. A month. Five weeks. Six. She didn't think she should be dreading it this way, just like she didn't feel, two years ago, that hanging out with her best friend should be more fun than planning her wedding with her fiancée.

And now she was thinking about weddings, and coral-colored prom roses, and picking the band and chicken or fish? Jim would like all that. Jim wouldn't mind if she wanted to get married at her mom's church, not his mom's. Jim would have opinions on cake. Jim would have opinions, period. But a wedding wasn't a marriage, and a marriage wasn't five years (and change) of throwing paperclips and eating lunch together and tricking Dwight into eating a peanut butter-soy sauce-pickle-honey sandwich because it was "rich in antioxidants." A marriage wasn't even cooking dinner and having Thanksgiving at his parents' house and peeing with the door open and fake-naming their hypothetical kids ("Fitch." "Mildred." "Pittsburgh." "Nevaeh. That's 'heaven' spelled backwards.") They hadn't been doing this long enough.

At seven weeks she finally opened the box, just in case he'd bought something for $12.99 at Wal-Mart as part of an elaborate future prank. It was real, stamped inside with "18K Gold," and it was beautiful. At eight weeks, she tried it on.

At the end of June he brought up the idea of taking a trip for their anniversary next month. Pam sucked in a breath while stirring the chili and hoped he didn't hear, but he was putting silverware on the table and hadn't even been looking at her when he said it. She managed something like "that sounds good," and later that night he started looking at stuff online, B&Bs in New Hampshire and hotels in Savannah. "There's that great design school there," he said. "Maybe we'll like it so much we'll decide to move." She heard that we, and every time he asked her where she wanted to go she just kept shaking her head, letting him decide. That's all she'd been doing for months now.

She hated backsliding like this. Old Pam would have kept waiting. Old Pam did wait – but she didn't even say "maybe," she said "no." It was weird to think that two years ago she'd had a better idea of what she wanted than she did now.

Pam checked his work bag again the day before they left. No ring. She wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

Savannah was gorgeous, the food was great, their hotel was charming, and sitting by the river in the humid air with cool drinks was so nice that she relaxed a little, more than she had in weeks. She barely even tensed up when he took her hand on that first night, because by now she'd decided she'd just let whatever happened, happen. If she got teary and said "yes" it would be because she wanted to, and if she looked down and said "I can't, not yet," well, she'd deal with the fallout on that. It was like getting drunk to lose her inhibitions, only the one time she'd tried that before she'd ended up having sex with Roy that way on his cousin's bed on New Year's, until someone walked in, and yeah, that wasn't exactly what she was going for with this.

(Roy. He'd asked her while they were camping, under the stars, just the two of him without his buddies for once, and the night was so pretty and romantic and she was so young she thought she'd die of happiness right then.)

Jim kept taking her hand and he kept not asking. And not asking. On Saturday morning she was shopping alone in an antique store while he slept in and took care of a couple of work things online, and it just hit her, so hard that she had to slip into the store's one-room bathroom and cry silently until she thought her head would explode from not making any noise. All this time and she hadn't let herself think of any possible reasons because that was just going to drive her crazy, and as long as she wasn't going to confront him there was no point in doing anything but trying to forget about it. And now all she could think about was whether she'd been giving off such weird signals that he couldn't make a move. Or worse, whether she'd hurt him so bad that last time, ruined their trust and his confidence, that he couldn’t try again. Or if he still hadn't made up his mind – and that was the worst of all, so bad that she got up, sponged her face with wet paper towels, and hurried out of the store as fast as she could.

(She barely let herself think, as she rode back in the cab, that she hadn't made up her mind either.)

Pam knew she was too quiet for the rest of the day, and he did ask her about that (he always asked her about things), but she just said "it's the heat." They went swimming in the pool, and afterwards they made love on their four-postered bed, and he didn't ask.

On Sunday she kept falling asleep on the train, her head dropping against the warm window. Every time she blinked back awake Jim was looking at her with this fond, sweet look, and he didn't ask.

On Monday, their actual anniversary, they went out to dinner at the place where they'd had their first date. (They weren't counting their anniversary from that time, though, since all they'd done that night was kiss once and agree it was going to be least two weeks before either of them felt remotely OK about Karen, and even though she left right away they still hung onto being "friends" for almost two months. It was one of her favorite things about the beginning of their relationship, that they'd waited until they felt comfortable with each other again.) He pulled out a flat box and it was a necklace. Beautiful, but a necklace. He didn't ask.

Pam started pulling away.

"I have a big project," she said one night. "Still the project," she said the next night. "I have to revise the project, the teacher had all these comments," she said the night after that.

"I have to call my mom," she said the next week. "There's all this weird family stuff going on and it'll probably take hours."

"Maybe you should spend the weekend at your place," she said the following week. "I will bet you ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents that there are dishes rotting in your sink and your carpet has an inch of cracker crumbs on it. Plus you need to take all these gross undershirts home and, like, burn them."

"I'm really tired," she said the next week, and from then on that was all she said. Each time she looked at that spot on her ring finger where the skin had never tanned or really come back, and she still had this little white circle, like a ghost of something she'd only half-forgotten.

Pam kept thinking about calling her mom. She was going to cry on the phone, she knew it, and she hadn't done that since July. She thought about getting a therapist. About telling Kelly, even though all Kelly knew was how to drive a man off screaming into the night (Darryl had lost it eventually, shouting in front of everyone in the office that he couldn't take the crazy anymore, no, he did not want a pedicure and that didn't mean he didn't love her, and before Kelly could point out that those statements were mutually exclusive he was out the door). She thought about telling anybody except Jim, because he was so goddamn nice and so goddamn understanding that he didn't even care that she was brushing him off with the modern equivalent of "I have to wash my hair tonight," since he would be sensitive even if it killed him as long as he thought she was happy.

Pam started testing him.

"All your dress shirts are practically see-through by now," she said, which was true, but when she dragged him to the mall she talked him into a pale pink shirt and a checkered one, like Andy wore.

"I just really want to see this movie," she whined, and dragged him to the absolute worst romantic comedy she could find (even if that kind of backfired because it was a miserable two hours for her too). She didn't even let him make fun of it afterwards.

"I need new work shoes," she said, and dragged him to store after store, where she made him comment on six different pairs of identical black flats and kept saying her feet were too big, so that he had to keep telling her that they weren't.

Basically she was taking lessons from Kelly without having to actually talk to Kelly. And he still didn't ask, but now there was a reason for him not to.

In mid-October, right around his birthday, Pam went looking through his wallet while he was picking up his dry-cleaning. One might have thought she'd have learned her lesson about accidental snooping, but no. He'd hung onto the receipt from dinner last night, even though she'd paid and needed to balance her checkbook, and when she started sifting through the papers in the back, there it was. Receipt from a jewelry store. A price that made her boggle. And the date.

He had had it for eight months when she found it, and not a word until she'd started a joke that went a little farther than she'd meant it to go. And he'd teased her and let her punch him, and when he eventually quit doing that she didn't even notice because she was so tired of worrying about it. And he'd taken her for a romantic anniversary weekend and to dozens of dinners and he hadn't asked.

Pam was sitting on the bed when Jim got home. She heard the rustle of the dry-cleaning bag, and his footsteps creaked down the hall before he came into the room. Jim smiled at her briefly, then opened the closet door and started putting his clothes on plastic hangers because he knew now that the wire ones scratched up the wooden bar. He turned back to her with a bigger smile, and saw what she was holding between fingers she wouldn't let shake.

"Fifteen months," she said.

"Pam," he said.

"I found it in April. Right after you started fake-proposing."

There was a really long pause, and his face looked white and nervous, even more than the first time he'd told her he loved her. He'd told her a second time last August, and he'd already had this little box in his bag.

"I don't even know," she said, and she wasn't going to cry, she wasn't, but the tears she didn't want slid down her face. "This has been the worst six months of my life. I thought – with Karen – but at least I felt like it was over back then. I had a reason."

"Pam," he said again.

"I don't know if I can be with you," she said, sniffling, "if you don’t have a reason I can understand."

Jim looked at the floor. "I can't – " he started, and stopped.

If he didn't look up in ten seconds, she was walking out of the room. He looked up in five.

"You kept getting mad last spring," he said. "So I backed off. And then you backed off, these last couple of months. I couldn't figure it out."

"You could have asked," she said.

"You could have asked," he said. "Any time this year."

Pam wiped at her cheeks with the back of her hand. "I don't even care about this year. You bought it last year."

He didn't say anything.

"Please, Jim," she said.

"I was scared," he said, after a while. "I was scared that this was all some kind of crazy dream and that if I pushed too hard you were going to leave. I've always loved you too much, and I've always been scared you'd figure that out."

"I needed to hear that six months ago," she said.

Jim was breathing fast, like maybe he was going to start crying too, and then he bent down. When he looked up she could see that there actually were tears in his eyes, and this was never how she'd thought it would be.

"Will you marry me?" he asked.

Pam looked at Jim, kneeling there on her bedroom carpet, proposing, the person she might love more than anyone in the world, the person she might want to spend the rest of her life with. She was still holding the ring he'd bought for her, and she reached out to take his hand.

"Probably," she said.