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.

Apart  

‘Okay.’

There was nothing more to say. He’d said it all, done everything he could. And still. Hands slip away. Time to let go. 

Jim’s new desk in Stamford has a view of the water, but through the dark tinted window it always looks muddy and grey. It’s lonely here, but he knows he’d be lonely anywhere now. He stares at the bleak cloudless sky and his mind wanders where it always does. He thinks he could have made her happy. 

At least now he knows it hadn’t all been his own private fiction. Pam had given him that much, a small consolation. Sometimes he lets himself imagine there’s some possibility left; after all, she’s alone too. Michael has made sure he knows that, as if expecting Jim to do something with that piece of information. There’s been nothing but silence between him and Pam since that night. The proverbial ball is in her court now. But this is no fucking game. He’d made that mistake once already. Gone all in and lost. Big.

Accept it. She’d presented her rejection to him as a fact, and after all, it was her fact to invent. She’s given him no reason to second-guess since then. In rare moments, his better ones, it’s almost a relief. If not closure, then at least a path that might, one day, please, lead there. Meanwhile, time stands still, moves forward a step, back two. It is what it is.

So he works hard. Decides to take it more seriously. Turns out it was just a choice he could make all along. Attempts to be friendly, even though no one here knows him. Some don’t even know his name. He buys a new suit, too expensive, has it tailored so it fits perfectly. Tries to invest in the present, because really, what else is he going to do?

-------------------------------------------

Pam’s new apartment is small, not nearly as nice as her place with Roy. But she can paint here, sleep on whichever side of the bed she wants, not have to wipe shaving debris off the sink every damn morning.

There’s only her now, no distractions, no excuses. Her decisions are her own. What to have for dinner; which team to root for; what rug; say yes; say no; who; how. This is going to take some time.

‘How’s it going, Pamster? You holding up okay?’ Michael asks, trying to be solicitous.

‘Fine,’ she always answers firmly. Saying it is like an incantation to make it so.

He’s kind enough to pretend he thinks she misses Roy, but she knows that Michael knows whose absence she feels. Sometimes she’s grateful for his concern. Sometimes she wishes he’d just stop.

She thinks of Jim every morning when she wakes up, every day when her eyes involuntarily scan the office, looking for him. When she turns off the light late at night, she wonders if he’s asleep. Sometimes she wonders if he’s alone. He could be lost in someone else by now. Someone not her.

She’d let it slip away. Seemed like the right thing to do…at the time. She’d been so sure. Kind of. But, that moment’s passed. Time to paint herself back into the center of the landscape. Every so often, she thinks it might almost feel good to be alone. If only she could do it without this aching phantom limb.

----------------------------------------

Time goes slowly and then it speeds up. Jim figures out ways to almost feel at home, even though he never quite is. He makes a few casual friends, or glorified acquaintances, plays basketball on Saturday afternoons with some guys from the office, goes for beers, tells stories they think are amusing. He never makes the Scranton people the butt of a joke here, not even Dwight. From this distance, he feels somehow protective of them. Sometimes he hears bits and pieces about Pam from Michael, the odd email from Phyllis. He can’t tell if she’s happy. He can’t tell if he is either. Maybe this is just what it’s going to be like now.

When Karen, the woman who sits behind him, stops regarding him so suspiciously and begins warming to him, he flirts with her. At first, it’s a conscious effort, but she’s smart and kind of pretty and it gets easier. When she smiles at him, he thinks maybe he sees somewhere to go.

Before long, she asks him to dinner and Jim accepts. Away from the office, she laughs easier, has softer edges, is unambiguous in her interest. She’s nothing like Pam and he finds this reassuring. After a few dates, she asks him if he was involved with anyone back in Scranton.

‘Yeah, sort of,’ he replies. ‘I mean, not really…but yes.’

She looks at him quizzically, than says ‘So, she broke your heart then?’

‘Into fucking smithereens,’ he answers too quickly, looking away.

She has the good sense to let it go. He genuinely likes her.

That night when Jim takes her home, he kisses her. Of course, he immediately thinks of someone else’s mouth, another night, another place. But, when Karen invites him up, he readily goes. If nothing else, he hopes it might unravel the knot in his gut. It does. For a minute. So he goes back other nights, waiting for that instant. But afterwards he always feels sad, lonelier than before. If the light’s on, he quickly turns it off, so she won’t misinterpret what she sees in his eyes as disappointment in her.  It’s just not her.

He wills himself to remain optimistic that Karen might become the one. He reminds himself to take her hand when they walk together. He calls her just to check in if he hasn’t seen her all day. He tells himself he’s not going to hurt her.

At work, he’s not terribly concerned if other people notice anything going on between them. It’s partly because he doesn’t really care that much what they do or do not know about him. It’s mostly because he knows there’s nothing much there to betray anyway. He’s doing the best he can.

_______________________________

Pam’s art classes are going well. Her fear of discovering she didn’t have the talent, the drive, the creativity, turned out to be unfounded. She did and she does and she can’t believe she waited so long to find this out.

She begins to inhabit her apartment too. She tacks her drawings up and buys a chair upholstered in a shade of dusty rose that Roy would never have allowed. It’s big and overstuffed and it quickly becomes her favorite place to read, to watch television, to curl up when she feels lost. It happens. She doesn’t fight the loneliness so much anymore, just lets it pass through her. Sometimes she closes her eyes and says his name out loud. In an odd way, it helps.

Before Christmas, Michael announces that everyone will get a bonus this year; their sales figures have hit their mark. Barely.

‘Despite some big changes around here, looks like we’re still the office to beat,’ he declares, delusional as ever.

‘Yeah, and without Jim too. So much for that big loss.’ Dwight interjects triumphantly, oblivious as ever.

‘Shut up, Dwight,’ Michael snaps, quickly looking over at Pam to gauge her reaction at the same moment as everyone else in the room does.

She puts on her best poker face. No one is fooled. Phyllis catches her eye as everyone goes back to work and smiles wistfully at her. Pam starts to feel like maybe there’s no shame in admitting she misses him. God she misses him. Maybe being strong isn’t about being alone.

When Roy comes by her desk at work now, Pam no longer clenches up. Once in a while he still calls her, but his tone is no longer plaintive, demanding, relentless.  Ironically, she rediscovers an affection for him that she’d lost when he was hers. She starts to remember the parts of their relationship that she doesn’t regret. He’s a good guy. For someone else.

When she wakes up in a sweat at night, she no longer feels guilty that it’s not Roy, but Jim who’s been moving over her, touching her, whispering in her ear. It’s only a dream, but she swears she can actually feel his breath on her neck, on her thighs. After a while she stops fighting this too. Alone, in the dark, she can make it feel real. Almost.

Something shifts, by increments. The door opens a crack. She wonders what she’d find if she peaked through it. ‘I can’t’ doesn’t seem quite so absolute.  Maybe she can.

Together  

They’re having an Indian summer in Scranton. It’s almost October, but it feels like July. Pam works at the easel Jim bought her outside in the yard, while he reads in the hammock they’ve strung up between two trees. Mostly he just sways and watches her. She wears cut-off shorts and an old tank top, her hair in a messy ponytail. She looks beautiful and focused and content. She looks like the rest of his life.

He’s always been impressed by Pam’s talent, but now it’s taken on a new dimension. It’s hers. It’s not about how he sees her, or Roy sees her or anyone sees her. He encourages her, tells her how amazing she is, but he knows not to intrude. She’s his, but she’s not. Jim watches her moving her charcoal over the paper and he feels unbelievably proud of how brave she is.

When it clouds over, they gather everything up and barely make it inside before the sky opens up. Jim likes this, being holed up with her while it pours and thunders outside. All that’s left to do is open some beers and lazily spread the Sunday papers out on the floor. It doesn’t take long before they’re no longer reading the papers, but moving together on top of them. Later, in the shower, Jim finds smudges of newsprint and the charcoal from Pam’s hands in the strangest places.

When they were first together he’d always make love to her like it might be the last time. He’d try to memorize every facet of her body, just in case it was: the luxury of her breasts pressed against his chest; the secret taste of her; her voice crying his name when he’s deeply, tightly, blissfully enveloped by her.

The intensity of it was almost too much. He began to understand why characters in romantic novels go mad from this. Finally, he starts to believe his welcome won’t disappear at any given moment. He finds it’s even better when he starts to trust it, to relax into it a little. Now he relishes making her laugh in the dark almost as much as making her moan.

Yet, sometimes in middle of night, he’ll wake up aching so badly for her that he’ll instinctively reach out, desperately needing to connect. Barely conscious, she’ll move into his arms, feeling it too.  It’s as if they’re sharing some primal dream as he wordlessly takes her, simply and directly. Afterward, they’ll drift back to sleep without even separating, smiling, connected, released.

-----------------------------------------------------

She thanks her lucky stars. The way she loves him is like some inevitable force of nature. But she knows she can’t get lazy. She needs to make sure he knows. She finds herself endlessly curious about him, familiar as he is. There are so many things she still wants to know. The name of his first dog; his favorite teacher; was he homesick when he left for college? She’s fascinated by the idea of him before she knew him and who he still is, apart from her. She asks a lot of questions.

‘Wait, Pam, there’s something urgent I almost forgot to tell you,’ he says.  ‘I had a cat named Mongo when I was in junior high. And…now listen carefully…his favorite brand of cat food was Little Friskies.’

‘Are you mocking me?’ she says, pretending to be affronted.

‘Course not. I just don’t want to withhold any critical information. You never know when there might be a pop quiz.’

She laughs, but is not deterred. For all his teasing, she can tell he’s happy that she wants to know these things.

He sits in her rose-colored chair and says he likes it. For some reason, this tickles her tremendously. Amused by her reaction, he pulls her down into his lap. She kisses him and settles in. He tells her stories. Some are true, some he makes up to entertain her. She’s happy just to hear him talk. She nuzzles her cheek into his neck and can feel the soft vibrations when he laughs.

Sometimes when they lie in bed together, she still imagines he’s slipping away, becoming a phantom again. She’s thought about him like this for so long that she almost loses track of what’s actual and what’s not. As if trying to make him materialize, she runs her hand over his body. Across his chest, broader and more solid than she’d imagined. Down his stomach, his leg, back up along the inside of his thigh, until her hand is cupping him. She feels him seize a little beneath her fingers, as he gasps into her hair. She strokes the length of him, slowly exploring his contours. He’s long and thick and beautiful and so hard for her that she never quite gets used to provoking this response. It makes her want to do things she’d never really liked to do before him. She craves a connection so intimate that it will obliterate any vestigial doubts he has about how she feels. As she gently takes him into her mouth, he shudders, closing his eyes, moaning her name. When he can’t hold back any longer, he pulls her up into his arms and flips her over in one motion.  She knows he wants to finish inside her; he always wants her with him, to feel it too. She’s so primed by that point that the instant he pushes into her, she’s gone. He feels so good, so good, so good. She wishes she’d known sooner, known so many things sooner.

------------------------------------

More than once, they’ve stayed up all night talking, not sleeping until the sun starts to rise. She tells him everything. He even presses her to divulge the painful parts, the parts he may not want to remember. He feels like an archeologist, finally making sense of a spotty history. Filling in the parts that never quite made sense. It’s a relief to discover that what he’d always suspected was pretty much true.  ‘They’ had never been a figment of his imagination.

‘It’s about time we got our stories straight,’ he tells her.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Reconciliation  

Jim is careful not to lead Karen on. He’s never said he loves her, not even close, not in their most intimate moments. He never asks her to come with him to Scranton. She doesn’t even think to suggest it. He wears his heart on his sleeve and she’s no fool. She knows there’s someone there who still owns the jagged pieces missing from his heart.

He makes sure Karen knows it has nothing to do with her. And yet, when he leaves, he feels like a heel. She takes it with grace and he’s grateful for that. He tells her how sorry he is, and he means it.

His decision to transfer is complicated, but not really. It’s a promotion, putting him more or less at equal stature with Michael, running a new division the company is launching out of Scranton. It won’t take anything away from Michael, won’t threaten his position. He still calls before accepting, just to make sure Michael gets this. He actually sounds relieved that Jim will be returning.

‘Like a moth to the flame,’ Michael practically sings. Jim’s not sure whom Michael thinks is the flame, but he lets it go.

Jim still considers declining, because, well, obviously. But turning down this opportunity would just prove that she owns him more than ever. Maybe being around her, and surviving it, is what he needs to finally, really, no more smoke and mirrors, get over her. He has no expectations, just a small, sad glimmer of hope peppering his resignation.

When he gets there, Pam is distant. Awkward. Or maybe that’s him. Either way, the disconnect is not subtle. But over time, she begins to make an effort. Looks for his eyes when Dwight says something inane. Manages a shy smile across the conference room. Sits down at the lunch table with him. He feels the pieces, slowly, not so surely, gravitating together. Maybe.

She seems the same, but different. The current between them is still there, but the frequency has altered. He hears her mention her art classes and works up the nerve to ask if he can see something she’s done. She seems pleased and the next day she brings in some drawings, oil pastels. They’re bold and colorful, so unlike the delicate pencil sketches she showed him years ago. When she looks at him expectantly for his reaction, he grins from ear to ear.

‘You’re fantastic,’ he says.

He loves her still. He knows it and he thinks she must know it, but that’s not enough anymore. It has to come from her. Thank god he’s a patient man.

----------------------------------------------------

She comes to him early one Sunday morning, sits on his front stoop. Waiting.

Finally, he comes outside to get the paper, hardly awake, in need of a shave, bed-head deluxe. He looks so beautiful to her she could weep.

He pauses for a moment when he sees her. Then the old smile starts to emerge. The one that she knows is only for her.

She looks him directly in the eye and says the only thing she can think of.

‘Okay.’

It’s enough for now. He knows what she means. He reaches for her hand, leads her inside, closes the door. Breathes.

This is how it begins.