Pam wakes up half an hour earlier than she usually does, so she can get her hair just right, and spends too long picking out her clothes. She rushes out the door at 8:30, which is just enough time to be at work if there’s not bad traffic. There are five different shirts and two different skirts which she considered and rejected spilled across her bed. One of the shirts is that garnet deep v-neck, which she didn’t choose due to it being far too obvious.
When Pam finally gets to the office, it’s 9:15 and she swears she almost got into at least three car accidents on the way. She almost gets all the way to the business park building’s door until she remembers she left the bag with the doughnuts and other bizarre food Michael asked for in her car, so she has to turn back. “Good morning!” she cries out when she walks into Dunder-Mifflin’s suite. Yes, she’s incredibly nervous, but she’s still in a terrific mood.
“Got the food? Good!” Michael exclaims right back. He’s completely ignoring her as a person, but Pam doesn’t mind, not today. “What I want you to do… set it up in the conference room, please. Make it look nice. As if you are trying to impress – ” Her heart seizes up for just a second, because how much does he know? How much does everyone know? All morning long, she knows she’ll feel pair after pair of eyes trained on her.
“ – A much older man who’s way out of your league.” She feels Michael’s hand too heavy on her back, and is immensely creeped out. Yes, he looks good in a suit and tie, but he’s still Michael Scott. She never had any real romantic feelings for him to begin with, but all desire she ever had for any man that wasn’t Jim seemed to have evaporated since May. When she’d finally gotten home from the casino night fundraiser, she’d made sure to inch as close to the edge of her bed as possible, away from Roy; just looking at him had filled her with an empty fury. She knew it was no one’s fault but her own, but she blamed him for the fact that she had to break Jim’s heart.
As she unpacks, she gives the camera crew a ridiculously chipper interview, and swears the female crew members look at her sympathetically, while the male ones roll their eyes. After that, she sits behind her desk all day long. She doesn’t even take lunch. The Stamford employees come in one by one, and Pam feels terrible for all of them, because she’s heard their branch was efficiently run and, well, sane. They can’t know what they’re getting into. Then again, she thinks they might be able to handle it after all when she actually meets them; Tony looks way more bewildered than horrified, Hannah’s bitchiness rivals Angela’s, and Karen seems like she simply doesn’t take any bullshit.
It’s around noon when she sees, through the frosted glass by the door, a tall male figure walking – no, waltzing – to their suite. Pam quickly runs a hand through her hair and shifts forward, because she’s been waiting for this for so very long and –
Oh. It’s not him. She should have known that, because he’s tall but not that tall, and not lanky. The hair is in a precise cut, not floppy. She’s just been so worked up all day, that she feels herself ready to jump any male figure that comes through the room (when Tony had come in, she’d even had to look at him twice). Her next thought is, Well, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to jump him. He’s cute. Very...precise-looking. Pam's horrified by her thoughts. Jim! She’s supposed to be thinking of Jim! She only has been, constantly, for the last five months!
Of course, when she sees the new guy – Andy Bernard, apparently – talk to Michael, it occurs to her how similar he is to her boss, and how similar her reaction to them is. She was, initially, attracted to both of them. And then they spoke, and all attraction evaporated. Her instant attraction to Andy seemed even stupider an hour or so later, when she embraced Jim – Jim! – and as she pressed as close to his neck, chest, groin as she could while still being decent, she didn’t even care that everyone in the office shifted to look at them (in later years, he’d tell her it took every modicum of control in his body not to swoop her up and twirl her around, like a sailor in WWII returning to America, and kiss and kiss and kiss her, right there). It’s perfect, exactly like she imagined, for just a few seconds.
But then, they break apart, and he feels the need to explain his joke and Pam’s stomach seizes up. They never had to do this before; they just got each other. It’s different now. It’s weird. It’s wrong. The roles got reversed; she’s in love with him, pathetically and hopelessly, and he had obviously decided that whatever happened in May was a mistake, and he didn’t love her, never had. Later, in the break room, the parking lot, her suspicions get confirmed. It’s even worse when she considers that she’s got no one to blame but herself. She doesn’t even have the backbone to do what he did six months ago, when so, so much more was on the line.
It’s a week or so later, while that whole stupid thing with Martin is going on, that Andy starts paying attention to her. She’s been so busy moping over Jim, literally moping, sitting in her apartment alone in pajama pants, conspicuously avoiding any sappy romantic comedies that are playing on television, that she totally forgot about Andy, a difficult feat indeed. For just a second when he strode up, every inch alpha male, she was extremely flattered. And then, the words started coming out, so wrong, so perfectly wrong (he called her “Pam-a-lam-a-ding-dong,” for God’s sake. Michael had called her that a few times!), and she realizes what this is. She snatches it up; she has no other options. When Jim whirls around in his chair, that gleeful, boyish look alight in his eye, it is quite literally the best thing that’s happened to her since Scranton and Stamford merged.
As she’s leaving for the day, Andy pauses her by the sofa near reception. “Please wait, my fair lady,” he says, holding up a hand, as if that would really stop her from leaving. “So far, you have proven resistant to my charms.” Pam half-nods. She’s looking at Jim’s neck, trying to see the side of his face, to see if he’s holding back a smile like he used to. Maybe he is. Maybe this would be okay. Things wouldn’t ever be quite the same as they were. Whatever they had was so beautiful, precious, perfect even. She didn’t think she could justify it to anyone with words, just with images, like his face when she said he could tell her anything, or that single tear he’d brushed away, so destroyed he didn’t even bother to hide it. That didn’t exist any more, but what was there now was okay. It was good. Survivable.
“No woman can resist...a banjo!” Andy interrupted her constant internal monologue. He was holding up, indeed, a banjo, pulled out from seemingly nowhere. Oh, no, Pam thought. Oh, no. This is too good. Thanks for this, Halpert. It’s Friday and she’s itching to leave for the weekend, maybe to get some sketching done, but instead she sits on the sofa, listening to Andy singing “The Rainbow Connection,” Pig Latin and falsetto and all, because she thinks if she listens hard enough, hidden somewhere in those words would be the code to making Jim Halpert love her again. It reminds her of the day after the Christmas party last year, when she spread out his “bonus gifts” on her kitchen table and kept rearranging the order she’d placed them in, trying to figure out what, exactly, about him had made her exchange a $400 iPod for a teapot.
As cute as Andy is, and however good he smells (seriously, he smells really good, he must be using some expensive cologne from Abercrombie or something), Pam just can’t keep her eyes on him very long. She turns her head toward the cause of this prank, with a tiny smile for everything they lost, for everything they might get back. She can only see the back of his head, but she sees his cheeks expand, the area right below his cheeks contract. He’s got a big, irrepressible smile on his face, she’s sure of it.
“So, how was your day?” Jim asks, walking out of Dunder-Mifflin. It’s a few minutes later, Andy’s done, and she left the suite and is standing by the elevator. She notes he’s not wearing a coat, so he must have just left to talk to her. It shouldn’t make her so happy, she shouldn’t be thinking like that, but it puts a big smile on her face, like the one he’d surely had a few minutes ago.
“It was okay,” she responds, and her voice sounds so freaking giddy it almost embarrasses her. “There was kind of a nice highlight.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I think I found the love of my life.”
“Really.” He arches his eyebrow and Pam thinks, Yeah, you bet I did.
“Really.” She makes her smile one of those big, almost fake (but she didn’t have to be fake with him. Didn’t used to, she amends.) sweet ones he used to look at and just... melt. She’d taken him for granted so much. She thinks she might see something flicker in his eyes for a second, but dismisses it. She’s over-searching for something, anything, and Jim’s eyes are just so expressive, no emotion of his remained hidden. Still, that one little flash, imagined or not, reminded her, turned her bitter, made her take a turn for the cruel. “I mean it, Jim. Andy’s really cute. Thanks for the hook-up.” The tone’s not nearly as jokey.
He sputters a little. He’s not interested in saying the perfect thing to her any more, hasn’t been since Stamford. “Well. You’re welcome, I guess. Am I gonna get an invite to the wedding?” He’s still smiling, if not widely, at the beginning, but at the word wedding, the way his face falls isn’t subtle. He might not love her any more, but he’s still hurt. Why wouldn’t he be? It just reminds her of months of silence, emphasized by the past week. Physical distance between them was no longer an issue, but maybe the emotional one was insurmountable. She realizes right then that there’s no maybe about that; it is.
Fittingly enough, she answers with the response that doesn’t exist, “Maybe.” Her answer is quick. It has to be, otherwise any hope of anything, of being able to just look at him without crying, will be destroyed. “Thanks, it was funny, though.” She gets in the elevator, and wills herself not to turn around. “It really did make my day, Jim,” she says, but the elevator doors are closing and she’s looking down so she can’t see his face.
Six Dunder-Mifflin Men Pam Finds Attractive at Inappropriate Times (and one she doesn't) by bigtunette
Author's Chapter Notes:
Oh, merger. It's angstalicious!
Chapter End Notes:
So we've been told and some choose to believe it...
