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It’s awkward, the next few days.
Pam starts to make plans for her three months in New York. She’s just a receptionist, so Michael would have every right to replace her for good, but somehow with Jim’s charm and Michael’s unwavering loyalty to those he claims as friends, she’s granted a sabbatical of sorts, and he hires a temp for those three months.
“You’re coming back, right?” Michael asks for the thousandth time. “Because we need you to fill the hotness quota.” His face is earnest, and she knows, in his strange way, that he honestly will miss her while she’s gone.
“I’ll be back, promise,” she says, and surprises both him and herself, and Jim watching, when she leans forward and places a kiss on his cheek. “You know, Michael, you are a really great boss.” And Michael beams the rest of the day, and she feels good about herself.
Jim helps her pack, although neither of them is really talking to one another. They’re making conversation, but it’s not the banter that they are used to. It’s stilted and forced, and she traces it back to Toby’s going away party. Something shifted in their relationship that night. She’s not sure if she’s at fault, or he’s at fault, but somehow they’re off balance and she doesn’t know how that happened or really how to fix it.
The night before she’s set to leave, Jim stays over, and she wonders how she’s going to last three months up in New York without him next to her every night. His rhythmic breathing has become the soundtrack to her nights, and without it, she’s not sure if she’ll be able to sleep.
As Jim sleeps next to her, his arm slung around her waist, his breath warm on her neck, she begins to second guess herself. The night is dark and still, and the quiet presses down on her until she can’t breathe, and she slips out from under his arm to splash water on her face. She watches him for a few minutes, sitting at the edge of her bed and trying to imagine it empty.
The whole thing terrifies her for many reasons. She terrified of finding out just how untalented she is; she’s intimidated by the prospect of living in New York for three months by herself, and even though she knows even the idea of it is absolutely ridiculous, she’s afraid of Jim finding someone else while she’s gone. She would feel better if she had a ring on her finger, but her finger is bare, and her mind is racing with paranoid theories about Jim falling for someone else.
He helps her pack up the car, and kisses her good and hard against her car the next morning. Leaning his forehead against hers, he whispers that he loves her.
“Be careful, okay?” He makes her promise. He’s been the model boyfriend, attentive and protective, taking her car to a garage to change the oil, and check the brakes.
“I will. I’ll call you when I get there,” she tells him. And they make tentative plans for him to drive up the next weekend, and one last kiss and she climbs into her car and he stands on her driveway, hands shoved into his pockets watching her drive away.
It takes fifty seven minutes before he makes a decision.
He gets in his car on the fifty ninth minute.
He doesn’t miss the irony of it all. Almost exactly a year before he had been rushing from New York to Scranton, hoping to catch her before she left for the day, his palms sweaty and his mind racing with hope and possibilities. And now he was racing towards New York from Scranton, his palms still sweaty and his mind still racing.
He knocks three times on her new apartment door before she pulls the door open.
Her eyebrows furrow in confusion for a moment before a smile creeps onto her face.
“I left you like three hours ago,” she says. “Missed me that much already?”
“You have no idea,” Jim replies, and immediately drops to one knee. He’s pretty sure she can hear his heart beating outside of his chest, but she’s in shock, standing with her hand over her mouth. “Okay. So this isn’t how I planned it. I had fireworks in mind, and a band playing a romantic song, and someone beat me to the punch.” The mention of Toby’s party does the trick, and she unfreezes, shaking her head a little and letting out a breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding.
“I knew it! Stupid Andy,” she murmurs, and Jim smiles a little.
“Stupid is one of the nice words I would use to describe him,” Jim says. “But you drove away today and I realized that I don’t care about fireworks. I don’t need it to be perfect, I just…need to know that you are mine. For good. And that sounds a little old fashioned and slightly proprietary, and that’s not how I meant it. I just meant...what I mean is, I’m trying to say…and I’m really bad at this.” He lets a quick puff of breath, and gives her a rueful smile. “I guess, I just…will you marry me?” And Pam drops to her knees too and throws her arms around him and kisses him soundly on the mouth. “Is that a yes?”
“It’s an absolutely,” she replies, laughing against his mouth.
“So, here’s the second part,” he whispers. “How do you feel about getting married now?”
“Now? As in…?”
“As in now?”
“I don’t understand,” she says, and Jim reaches into his back pocket and pulls out two tickets to Vegas.
“I mean now,” he repeats. “How do you feel about the Shortest Engagement Dundie?”
He returns to work four days later, late, and collapses into his desk chair. The woman behind the desk is unfamiliar, she looks and sounds nothing like Pam, and every time the phone rings he flinches at the foreign voice.
It’s Kelly who notices it first, the flash of the silver ring on his left hand.
“Oh my God, Jim, is that what I think it is?” And all of a sudden the whole office is looking at him, and he can’t hide the smile on his face, as he thinks about the past few days in Vegas with Pam. His wife.
His wife. Holy crap.
“Jim! Did you get married? Did you and Pam get married? When did you get engaged, what happened? I need deeeetaaaaaailssss!” Kelly whines, and Michael bursts out of his office and everyone gathers around his desk, with the exception of Stanley who could care less. Even the new receptionist is leaning forward to get all the details, and Jim finds himself pulling out pictures of Pam in her wedding gown and him in his rented tux.
Their parents were understanding and jumped on a plane a few hours after them, his mother and Pam’s sweeping her away to find a gown and his father and Pam’s dad renting tuxes, and comparing chapels and buying flowers and wedding bands.
They couldn’t take a honeymoon, not with Pam’s classes, but she’s going to extend her sabbatical by another couple of weeks, and both sets of parents pitched in money to pay for an Italian honeymoon when she’s done in three months.
“We can’t take this,” Jim argued when his father handed him a check. Pam’s father handed her a similar one, and Pam protested, pushing it back into his hands.
“Look honey,” Paul Beesly had said, “this is only a fraction of what we would have paid for a big wedding. This is our gift to you, take it, please? Lie on a beach somewhere, or stroll around Paris. We don’t care, just please go have the time of your life.”
They lay in bed that night, admiring the new, shiny rings on their fingers, arguing the merits of Paris versus Venice. Greece or Spain? They laughed giddily every few minutes, wondering how this had become their life.
“I’m unbelievably happy,” Pam whispers. It’s almost as if she can feel them shift back to solid ground. They’re balanced again, the weight of the rings on their fingers equaling them out.
Michael’s upset that they didn’t call and invite him to Vegas to witness their vows, even when Jim explains that it was spontaneous and the only people there besides him and Pam were their parents and a costumed Elvis.
He can’t stop staring at the ring on his finger, and he resists the urge to call Pam every few minutes. He left her that morning, early enough that he could make it to work somewhat on time, pressing a kiss to her temple and leaving a note on her pillow promising that he would see her soon. This wasn’t how he expected to spend his first few months as a married man, but he’ll take it.
Kelly makes him go over every detail of the ceremony, and runs and gets Darryl, who glares at Jim. Phyllis asks for Pam’s address in New York to send a card, and Michael finally stops pouting by the end of the day, working instead on getting Jim to agree to name their first son after him.
He sends about a thousand text messages to Pam starting every one with “Dear wife,” and ending “your husband,” and counts the minutes until he can drive back up to New York again.
Story Notes:
You all were so kind the first time around, I thought I would try again. My take on what could happen between now and September. Title is from the song by Mojave 3.
bashert is the author of 37 other stories.
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