“Hey, you look bored.” A low voice interrupts her lunch and, to be honest, she is, and yeah, her usual salad is doing nothing for her today. She looks up and sees the new sales guy, JAAAAAMES! AAANDREWW! HAAAAALPERT! as Michael had announced him. He’d just sort of looked at his feet and shuffled off to the Annex to go work with Toby. Pam had thought that, with that attitude, yeah, James or Jim or Jimmy or whatever he actually called himself was perfect to work with Toby. He seems far more spirited now.
“Well, you must be psychic, because I am,” she says with a laugh, and she looks at his eyes and her gaze lingers for just a second too long, because he glances away almost guiltily. She thinks she catches him blushing, so she speaks up again quickly. “Sorry I didn’t really get a chance to introduce myself before, though you can probably tell how things are around here with Michael. I’m Pam Beesly, I’m the receptionist.”
“Jim Halpert.” They shake hands, and Pam finds herself thinking he’s possibly the cutest thing she’s ever seen, bulbous nose and all. Her head screams for her not to think that, but the thoughts keep coming, unwanted. “Hey, look, I hope this isn’t really forward or anything, I know I just met you, but I got this discount to that place Cugino’s down the road in my little gift baggy, so...” Pam sort of giggles. She’s not nervous, she’s not, but his use of the word baggy is cute. He’s cute. “Do you want to come with?”
“No, no, it’s not forward at all. Sure, I’ll come!” Pam tries not to sound too enthusiastic, but she is, and not just because he’s very good-looking. She doesn’t really have friends at work; she’ll sometimes eat lunch with whoever, and she gets along well with everyone (except Angela, but that’s a lost cause), but nobody invites her to do things outside of work or anything like that.
She insists that they go in separate cars and Jim makes a joke about destroying the environment that she laughs at uproariously. She hasn’t laughed like that in months. In her car, she bites her lip and worries. She realizes she’s scared of how charming he is, how kind his eyes are, how easily she thinks of herself running her hands through his hair. A thought comes, unbidden, into her head, of her popping off button by button on his shirt and – no. She gnaws on her lip so hard she has to yelp out loud, to herself, and feels stupid.
She expects their conversation to die a horribly awkward death at Cugino’s, but it flourishes without even trying. She’s telling a story, completely animated, so not like her, when the two words she completely forgot about, but that explain why she’s been feeling so guilty since he first spoke to her, slip out – my fiancé. Jim’s smile fades for just a second until it perks right back up. “You didn’t say you were engaged!” he exclaims. Pam thinks he might be overcompensating for some sort of disappointment, but she also thinks she’s probably overanalyzing it. “Let me see your ring.” So she stretches out her hand, forcing a happy grin, feeling a little embarrassed because of how tiny the diamond chip is, but he just says “very nice.”
On the ride back, she replays the “very nice,” in her head, the way his voice turned all gruff but still affectionate when he said it, the way it – broke her heart, really. But no, she has to convince herself this is lunacy. She’s engaged. Even if she wasn’t, she’s sure Jim simply wouldn’t be attracted to someone like her. For God’s sake, it’s July and she’s wearing a cardigan and pantyhose and her hair is frizzing out everywhere. His looks aside, he’s so devastatingly charming and funny, there’s no way he doesn’t have a girlfriend.
They get back to the Scranton business lot at exactly the same time. They take the elevator up together, and it’s so awkward because even though they’re talking, Pam just wants him to press the emergency stop button and, quite frankly, kiss her. Hell, she thinks she’ll do it. Then, she thinks of the finger she’d have to press to stop the elevator, which is connected to her hand, on which another finger she wears an engagement ring. She’s engaged, she has to keep thinking. It isn’t helping much.
Pam doesn’t tell Roy about her lunch with Jim that night, or ever. It feels like a betrayal of some sort, and really, it is. She was out on a date with another man, who she was attracted to, and she’s pretty sure she openly sort of flirted with him. Jim meets her eyes the next day when he comes in, and gives her a giant grin. Pam feels her stomach seize up. She figures if she ignores it like she ignored Darryl, it’ll go away.
But it doesn’t go away, even when she starts a genuine friendship with Jim. At the end of August, Michael has a fit when he catches Toby and Jim in a normal conversation in the Annex, and he moves Jim to the empty desk that’s diagonal from Pam’s. After a week, she moves her computer to the front of her desk, claiming it’s for space reasons. Her job gets much better; all day long, when she feels like she’s going to die of boredom or slap Michael, they’ll exchange looks that are just... great. They’re totally public, but somehow, they’re intimate.
Privately, she’s thrilled. In company, though, she actually snaps and nearly screams at Michael when he suggests once, at the end of the fall, that she’s getting a little too close to Jim (thankfully, Michael tells her later, once she’s calmed down, that he knows that girls get PMS really bad sometimes, and she keeps her job). She makes sure Jim hears her outburst, though she can’t bring herself to turn and look at his face. She wants, needs those boundaries between them. It terrifies her to think of what would happen if they weren’t there.
Almost four years later, she’s playing cards with Jim in the Warehouse. When he says “three nines,” she mishears it for just a second as “very nice,” and it’s with the exact same inflection as that first day. He’s shocked her back to that booth at Cugino’s. Pam tries to remember to tell herself to stop it with the blatant coquettishness, but there’s something in his eyes that night that is irredeemably sad, so she goes along with it, beaming at him and giggling and twirling her skirt in the parking lot. Of course, the outcome is that she sobs even harder in the office, in his chair, later in that night once he’s slipped away.
Six Dunder-Mifflin Men Pam Finds Attractive at Inappropriate Times (and one she doesn't) by bigtunette
Author's Chapter Notes:
Oh hey, it's a Jim/Pam's first day story. Yes, I know things in here go against what we heard in "Launch Party" and "The Secret," but if the series can't keep its own continuity straight... ;)
Chapter End Notes:
Will the writers just make Jim's middle name canon already? ;) For the record, I didn't realize Jim wasn't saying "very nice" in Casino Night until I looked it up on OfficeQuotes... oops.
I don't own The Office.
I don't own The Office.
