She reaches through the thick spray coming from the showerhead and turns the hot water knob all the way to the left. Her skin is already red and raw, the heavy steam filling the room and settling in her lungs. There was a weight in her chest that felt lodged so deep that she wasn’t entirely sure how to remove it. The ache was familiar though, and Pam realized a while ago that she deserved it.

He gave her his heart and she hadn’t been brave enough to keep it for her own. To acknowledge his name already on her own heart – easily blotting out the name of her fiancé.

Her fiancé. She hadn’t thought of Roy in what felt like weeks, months – maybe even years. Instead, her mind was filled with her hand across Jim’s back, her body perched on the edge of his desk now, her mouth on his. The latter was too raw a wound to even poke with the lightest of touches. He brought her back because of those moments of hesitation back in May.

And, such hesitation made her mind wander so easily, as it so often did, back to how he had found her at his desk back in May and proceeded to turn her life upside down for the second time in the same night. His lips had felt smooth and warm; he felt like coming home. His words, “I’m in love with you”, were poured into the simple caress of his lips on hers, in the way he gently caught her bottom lip between his teeth.

She had been so stupid to ignore how much she loved him in that moment. How much she loved him in every moment before that night, possibly even from the second she had met him for the first time.

Pam realized she was starting to dry out under the heat and the steam and reached through the spray again to turn the water off.

He had called her Fancy and New, but really it was a painful façade. She was, nearly a half a year later, broken beyond repair. She missed her best friend who had disappeared to Stamford and returned to Scranton “evolved”. His return had made it apparent that he had not only replaced his grape sodas with bottled water, but also phased out the shy receptionist for a beautiful businesswoman.

If this is what being replaced feels like, Pam thought bitterly as she stepped from the shower, I don’t ever want to feel this way again. She slipped on her robe and padded from the still steamy bathroom to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. These days, she found, not even a cup of tea could really calm her nerves. She would sit for hours at the reception desk and try to ignore the way Karen ran her hand over his desk, or how she would press slight touches on Jim’s shoulder or back. All it took was the mere thought of such behaviors and Pam’s hands would start to slightly tremble.

In the quiet of the office, she wondered if anyone could hear the way her teacup rattled slightly off-kilter when she put it down. To Pam, the small sound seemed as loud as a volcanic eruption. However, no one looked up from his or her desks to comment, and she breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

She wondered if he noticed how disjointed she was lately. Too bad the back of his neck couldn’t help her decipher more of his thoughts or feelings.

In the months since his return, Jim had made it completely clear about his feelings for her. He had shot her down so easily and so thoroughly with, “I’m kind of seeing someone”. Ever since, he shut her out entirely – in the break room, in the mornings when they used to exchange hellos, and more recently with the Christmas gift she had prepared for him. Jim was, essentially, a stranger.

The kettle whistled, disturbing Pam from her thoughts. She removed the kettle from the heat and poured the still-boiling water into a mug from the night before. She lived alone and had a dismal social life, so why bother with dishes?

She wondered how much of the Jim she loved was still in there, under all the layers of fancy new designer suits and bottled water; behind the façade he was putting on around her at work. It was punishment enough to have felt his lips on hers only once – so why torture her further? Why force herself to live in anxiety, filled up with secret speculation that without Karen, he would have returned to her?

Because, Pam thought, I know he is in there somewhere.

Pam sat down on her old couch and sat in the silence, soaking in the warmth of the tea in her hands and the comfort of the darkness in her tiny apartment. It wasn’t much, but it was all her own. She wonders if she’s going to be lonely for the rest of her life – purely because she was too much of a coward to have said, “I can” when it counted the most.

“I was such an idiot,“ she mumbles over her tea. The words seem a little garbled with the frustration evident in Pam’s thoughts. She had ignored the most perfect moment in her entire life, uttering then a simple, “I can’t”.

When all she really wanted was to jump into his arms and shout from the rooftops that she had been waiting for this moment for years. That he wasn’t alone, that there were no misinterpretations with their friendship. He had never misinterpreted a single thing between them. That was one of the most beautiful things about Jim: he always understood her in the most complete way.

And she had tried to make it perfectly clear how much she missed him.

He knew, but that didn’t make that deep ache she had for him hurt any less.