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.
Author’s Note: A post-finale piece, because I just couldn’t resist. This is utter fluff, possibly the fluffiest thing I’ve ever written and probably the first of many fics to get me through the long Office-less summer. It made me happy writing it, so I hope reading it can do the same for you :)
~
He should have seen it coming. He should have known that the patch of concrete could be lit by fireworks and a Ferris Wheel and her smile and it’d still just be that patch of concrete.
He’s an optimistic guy, these days at least, and he tries not to let the shadows of the past darken the bright glow of their present. That’s why he doesn’t link the parking lot they use every day with a tear-stained memory of pain and regret and a Periwinkle dress in the early Summer evening. He doesn’t leave his car in the morning and wonder if he’s standing again in exactly the same spot where two words shattered every idea he’d ever let himself have about what they could be like together.
Instead he thinks about laundry, or calling his Brother back, or where they’ll eat dinner tonight; he fills his head with the things that make up their life together and he never looks down to remember that he’s treading in the same spot where he once thought this life could never exist. When he does think about it, it is only to acknowledge that those vague ideas he once had about them were only paper thin, abstract things, black and white sketches of perfection compared with the beautiful, messy, color canvas that his world is splashed on now.
Still, tonight he doubts his philosophy. Tonight, he doubts what he’s always told himself about how a nondescript patch of concrete is just a nondescript patch of concrete and nothing more. He wonders if he had made himself dredge up the moment when he bled the contents of his heart all over that dull, grey, ground then perhaps tonight he wouldn’t have tried to cover it in the colors of their future. If he’d made himself remember, he decides, he would have seen it coming.
Clearly the parking lot is cursed.
It’s a fairly odd sort of statement to make but he thinks about running it by her anyway. She’s quiet beside him, there but really not and he hates that he disappointed her more than he hates Andy for taking their fireworks tonight. He takes her into his arms against his car, kisses her softly because he can and he’s not going to let an inanimate patch of ground start to make him forget that.
The drive home is full of conversation but they don’t say anything and he wonders how a difference of a millisecond could be setting them back two years. He drives to her place and doesn’t immediately follow her inside, gripping the steering wheel though he’s already parked and holding his breath until she frowns and asks him why he’s not moved yet.
The moment they get inside, she peels off the various layers she collected earlier against the evening chill and emerges, exhausted, tiny, but smiling and he thinks that perhaps she’s shed some of her melancholy along with the two blankets and a coat. While she goes to change, he promises to rustle up some dinner from the contents of her refrigerator. He’d been too nervous to eat earlier and previous experience of Office party food was enough to keep her away from anything beyond chips and dip.
He stops short when he spots the post-it note she tacked to the fridge door the last day she was home, some time early this week.
Don’t bother, there’s nothing in here.
There’s a grocery list underneath her little comment, including essentials they’ll need by morning. He finds a gap amongst her extensive magnet collection to rest his head against the cool plastic of her refrigerator door and sighs heavily.
“Hey Pam, we’re out of -” he calls out to her, straightening up to pull open the fridge door, “-everything. I’ll have to go to the store, okay?”
She emerges from her bedroom in pajamas, slapping a hand to her forehead. “Crap! Sorry. Did you want me to come with you?”
He raises an eyebrow at her attire, his bad mood momentarily lifted by the approaching pinstriped, messy-haired reminder of how lucky he is.
“I’ll put some real clothes on first,” she promises, already turning back toward her bedroom. Her feet drag, evidence of her exhaustion.
“Don’t worry about it,” he tells her quickly, pulling his suit jacket back on and heading for the door. “I’ll bring back something for dinner too, any requests?”
She turns and waves a hand carelessly. “Anything.” When he grabs the list off her fridge door, something that looks a little like guilt flashes in her eyes. “Thanks for doing this Jim.”
“It’s nothing.” He shrugs off her thanks, the disappointment of tonight leaving him unable to feel much like a good boyfriend.
The drive to the nearest open Grocery Store is unremarkable, which is lucky since he’s running entirely on autopilot, barely registering what’s going on. The black velvet box in his pocket is suddenly a palpable weight against his thigh, a burden, and he wonders how he let his entire future get trapped inside this tiny little box.
It takes him about five minutes to lift his head from where it’s resting on the steering wheel after he parks. His head is heavy, full of fireworks and Ferris Wheels and the exhausted, pajama-clad girlfriend who really should be his fiancée by now, who should be exhausted for entirely different reasons and who should certainly not be wearing pajamas and a frown.
The store is quiet but even so he almost runs his shopping cart into two other customers, lost in his own self-pity. He indulges himself, leaning his weight onto the cart with a heavy sigh while he pulls out her list and starts to find the things they need.
Somewhere between the dairy section and the cereal aisle he has an epiphany.
His back straightens and his strides become suddenly purposeful as he steers the cart around the quiet aisles at almost alarming speeds. He’s distracted and a fair few things fly into the cart that he’s sure weren’t on the list, his sudden good mood and the return of the nervous excitement from earlier leaving him strangely susceptible to nice packaging and two-for-one deals. He adds a few extra things, on purpose this time, and pays without bothering to check he’s got everything they need.
The drive away from Pam may have passed in a blur of green lights and empty roads but the journey home to her is endless, seemingly all red lights that leave him drumming his fingers impatiently on the wheel. He’s almost home when he remembers his promise to pick up food. Cursing so loudly that he thinks the nearby drivers can probably hear him in their cars, he turns around and heads to the nearest Chinese place he can think of.
She’s on the phone when he finally returns and he just catches one sentence when he opens the door.
“-my best friend, I can usually tell...”
He somehow manages to keep her door open and get all the shopping bags and the food in without dropping anything, a feat which causes her to raise her eyebrows, clearly impressed.
“Yeah, he’s just been to the Grocery Store Mom, that’s him coming in now. I’ve got to go. I will.”
He almost drops the bags at her words, forced to cling tighter to the thin plastic handles as he resists the urge to laugh at the symmetry. Of course she’s on the phone to her Mom when he comes back in, of course it’s just like that night.
She replaces the phone in its cradle and heads over to help him unpack. He waves her away, wondering if she can see that his hand is shaking as he rolls up his shirt sleeves.
“I’ll do it, you just ... stay there. I want to talk to you about something.”
He lifts the bags onto her tiny little kitchen table and looks at her over them; her forehead is creased, half a frown perhaps, or just confusion. She rests her weight against the back of her sofa, facing him in her kitchen and blinks encouragingly, waiting for what he has to say.
He stares back at her for a long moment, then down into the shopping and finally, back up at her.
“I don’t know where to start,” he says honestly, letting out a nervous laugh.
“The unpacking or the talking?” she shoots back quickly, eager to lighten the moment.
He laughs, though it’s not particularly funny. “Uh, both.”
He focuses back on the shopping, lifts something at random out of the first bag he reaches and starts to talk.
“So I was in the Grocery Store and I was feeling kinda sorry for myself, y’know thinking about how tonight didn’t exactly go ... according to plan.”
She lets out a huff of breath at the confirmation of her suspicions about what Andy had ruined earlier. “I knew it! You were gonna-”
“Yeah I was,” he cuts her off, looking up with a face full of disappointment, a carrot in one hand and a block of cheese in the other. He thinks he probably looks absurd but she seems to be melting at the very sight of him, visibly relaxing into her seating position atop the back of her sofa.
With the acknowledgement of earlier out of the way, he turns back to unpacking the food and somewhere along with it, his heart and hopefully the future he’s inadvertently trapped in a velvet box.
“The whole way home from the party, I was thinking that I should have seen it coming, that I never should have tried to do it in the parking lot because nothing good ever seems to happen for us there.”
He says it quickly, pushing all the words out in one breath because even now, even though they’re together, even though they’re the sort of together that means he can stride around her kitchen like it’s his own, it still takes a physical effort to talk about that night.
“In the store, it started again - I just couldn’t stop thinking about that night, two years ago. And that night, Pam, it was ... awful.” He feels everything drop out of his voice at the end of the sentence, leaving nothing but a hollow honesty that leaves her with her hands over her mouth and tears in her eyes. It’s not what he wanted, the guilt in her eyes, but he has to bring this up if anything he’s saying tonight is going to make sense. “But here’s the thing about that night that I realized. You see, even though I had just ripped apart the entire fabric of my life ... of everything ... everything our relationship was balanced on, I couldn’t let you walk away.”
She lowers her hands to say something, one tear spilling down each cheek in an odd sort of race. He pretends to be too busy putting the coffee away to notice her attempted interruption, because now that’s started, it’s easier not to stop.
“I didn’t just come across you in the Office that night Pam, I followed you there. All because I had this idea in my head ... this picture of what we could be like together and even though you had just broke my heart, I still came back. I still tried, again.”
She nods, more tears racing down her cheeks, overtaking the two that spilled out earlier. He wants to throw the gallon of milk in his hand aside and rush over to pull her into his arms and tell her that it’s okay now, because they’re okay now. He doesn’t, because this isn’t about that night, it’s about tonight.
“And back then all I had was an idea, just this perfect little fantasy of us together and even though you told me it couldn’t happen, I tried again. But tonight? Tonight, when I know exactly what’s it like to be with you ... and it is,” he pauses to look at her, really look at her, “amazing Pam, it’s ... more, much more than anything I ever imagined, and I was going to let Andy Bernard stealing my fireworks, take my chance away?”
He pauses to remember the moment, the bolt from the blue back in the store when he realized he was more of a coward now than he was then, and the moment a second later when he decided that that couldn’t possibly be how it was supposed to be.
Now that he’s strayed away from the past and back to tonight, she seems to understand where all this is leading. She impatiently wipes the tears away, her eyes suddenly wide, suddenly following his every move around her tiny kitchen as though afraid she’s going to miss something.
There’s not much left in the bags now and he soon reaches the things he strayed purposely off her list for.
“I got you some New York cheesecake, y’know, for getting into Pratt,” he tells her and it seems to take a moment, given his sudden deviation from the topic in hand, for his words to even register with her. “Although I’m fairly sure it’s never been anywhere near New York, you get the idea. And, not to get ahead of myself or anything, but if I’m getting this right - I thought we’d need ... Champagne!” He reaches into the last bag for his second to last purchase, shrugging as he does so. “Well really - it’s the closest I could get to Champagne at the Grocery Store so some sort of expensive Sparkling Apple Juice, I think.”
He slips the bottle into her fridge door, turning to face her with his final purchase in his hand. “And finally ... the fireworks!” He lets off the party popper into her kitchen, smiling at her through the shower of confetti. When it’s finally all landed, he picks off a streamer from his shoulder and laughs. “I ended up looking like one of those people, you know the ones you see in line with the crazy assortment of food, like three peaches and a packet of pork chops, and you think, ‘what the hell are they going to do with that?’” He suddenly becomes aware that he’s talking almost comically fast, that now that he’s started, his words are almost tripping over each other on their way out. “I’m sorry, I’m rambling aren’t it?” he asks her, turning away from the refrigerator with a crooked smile.
She laughs and her voice cracks when she replies, “Yeah, but don’t you dare stop.”
He smiles, lifting out the final thing that’s left waiting to be put in it’s correct place. Her breath catches in her throat at the sight of the tiny black box in his hand, and she whispers shakily, “You got all this at the Grocery Store?”
Of all the things he thought she’d say when he finally showed her this box, this certainly didn’t occur to him but it’s so perfectly them that he almost forgets he hasn’t actually asked yet. He pulls himself together enough to say, “Well ... not everything.”
He heads out of the kitchen now, velvet box clasped in his hand and he takes her hand in his free one, leading her around the sofa to her one armchair, the one that’s got paint stains and frayed arms and is her absolute favorite. She sits and he kneels, taking a minute to appreciate the quiet beauty of the moment, as her table lamp casts the room in a golden glow and she looks at him with no makeup and no pretenses, just love reflected in her shining eyes.
“So here’s the thing,” he begins and somewhere on the journey from the kitchen to here he’s fallen apart a little and his voice is low and gravelly, “I can’t promise you that the fireworks are always going to work out perfectly, or that the Champagne will be fancy and expensive, or even real Champagne. But I can promise you that I’m always going to want those things for you, I’m always going to think you deserve them. And when something goes wrong, I am always, always, going to come back and try again because this life that we have, it’s worth it.” He opens the box for her but she doesn’t even look down, just starts to nod before he’s even asked.
“Pam, will you marry me?”
Her whispered “yes” is released the second he finishes asking. For a long moment he just looks at her, his own smiling growing with hers at each “yes” that escapes her lips. Then the spell is broken and time seems to speed up as he’s slipping the ring on her finger and she’s crying and laughing and telling him it’s perfect and she loves him and she has never, ever, felt this happy.
The world only slows down again when he stands, pulling her up with him and into his arms. He kisses her then, in the middle of her living room and Andy can have their fireworks because the promise of their future is an explosion of color going off in his head that’s a thousand times more vivid.
~
Chapter End Notes:
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