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Story Notes:
Well, yes, okay, it's another post Casino Night story, but really, can we ever have enough?
Author's Chapter Notes:
The title comes from Rilo Kiley. Because I loves Rilo Kiley something fierce.
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.







It takes him seven rings to answer the phone.


She almost hangs up four times.


He has to say hello twice before she talks.


It takes exactly one sentence.


“Jim? It’s Pam. I, uh, I called off my wedding.”





He’s suddenly pulling on jeans, and searching for a sweater, and grabbing a pair of shoes and his car keys as he runs out the door, phone still cradled between his shoulder and his ear, Pam’s voice breathlessly telling him about how she called off her wedding a week before, and how she just needed a little time, and what an idiot she was, and how she’s sorry, sorry, sorry. And he can’t get the reassurance out his mouth fast enough.


Yes he still loves her.


No, it’s absolutely not too late.


He’s sorry too. For things that don’t seem to matter.






He runs exactly fourteen red lights and stop signs on his way to her new apartment in Scranton.


The drive wouldn’t have been too terrible, but his legs are shaking and his body is buzzing, and he counts the miles to keep himself calm.


She’s waiting on her front porch with a glass of wine in her hands when he pulls into the parking lot. She puts the glass down and starts walking towards him, slowly at first, hesitant, but he turns off the car and climbs out and she lets out a small, choked sob and sprints across the lawn, throwing herself at him.


“How long can you stay?” She asks and he buries his nose in her hair and breathes out for the first time in two weeks.





They lay in her new, bare apartment on the living room floor with a few pillows under their heads. The new apartment for the new Pam that she’s been living in for three days, and he wraps a curl around his finger and presses desperate kisses to her lips. They talk about everything and nothing, and Pam finally falls asleep, but Jim can’t, but its okay, because there’s pretty much no where in the world he’d rather be than lying on Pam’s living room floor with her curled into his side and the smell and feel of her all around him.


It takes him forty three seconds to decide that whatever he needs to do to get back to Scranton, back to her, he’ll do.






He calls work the next day and tells Josh he needs the day. He calls corporate next and talks to Jan about coming back to Scranton.


“Sorry, Jim, I can’t do that. We need you up in Stamford,” Jan explains.


“I understand,” he says, and he does, really, it’s just that he doesn’t care. “But I quit. I’m putting my two weeks in now.” And Pam is behind him, wide eyed, and he just gives her an uncertain smile, and when he hangs up she says,


“And I suppose I’m just supposed to provide for us now? You can sit around and watch your soaps and be a made man?” There’s a look on her face, a crooked smile and a teasing glint in her eyes and he thinks it’s impossible to love her any more than he already does.


“That’s the plan, Beesly,” he grins back at her. And when she laughs, it fills him up and warms his insides.






“I love you,” she whispers into his flushed skin that night as they stand out by his car. He needs to drive back up to Stamford, talk to Josh, put his two weeks in and start figuring out what he wants to do with his life.


She’s said “I love you” twenty seven times since that first phone call.


He’s counted.


“I love you, I love you, I love you,” she presses a kiss to his face each time. Thirty times, he thinks.


Pam asks him what he wants to do for a living, not what he’s good at, what he wants to do, and it takes only a second for him to answer that he wants to be a writer.


“Then that’s what you’ll do,” she says. And there are plenty of things to figure out, but plenty of time to figure it out in, and he watches as she waves until his car is out of sight.






He hasn’t made any friends at Stamford, so it’s not difficult to say goodbye to any of them. Jan calls and tries to negotiate with him to stay at Stamford, and then gives up and offers him his job back at Scranton, and he almost takes it, but Pam tells him that this is a chance for him to do something other than sell paper and it’s terrifying, but he tells Jan no, and packs up his desk and leaves his Dunder Mifflin ID on Josh’s desk and doesn’t look back once.






She’s waiting again, this time on his front porch with his old and new roommate Mark. He doesn’t even ask her if he can move in with her. This is her time to live on her own, be on her own, and he doesn’t want to get in the way of that. Their relationship is only two weeks old, but he doesn’t doubt that eventually they’ll be moving all of this into her place.


Mark helps him carry back in his furniture and grins at him as they wipe the sweat from their faces.


“She’s pretty great,” he says. “I can see why she’s worth the trouble.” And Jim ducks his head and smiles.





He gets a job writing at a local paper covering sports and it’s a pay cut, but he has some money saved, and he actually looks forward to going to work and that has to count for something.





Roy finds out after a month that they’re dating and freaks out in the office, throwing a stapler at the wall just above Pam’s head and it’s enough to get him anger management and suspension, and it’s enough to make Jim wish he had been there so that Roy would have taken it out on him instead of her.


“It’s over, he’s gotten it out of his system, it’s over,” Pam reassures, but he brings home some applications for art schools the next day, leaving them on her kitchen table and she doesn’t say anything, but he finds her later pouring over the applications, comparing pieces to put in her portfolio.







He buys a ring after a week, but waits a year. Waits until he has a steady job with a steady income, and she’s getting set to leave for the summer for a program at the Pratt School of Design, and he slips the ring on her finger and kisses her on the Ferris wheel at her goodbye carnival in the parking lot.






She almost turns back around four times on her way down to New York.


And when she gets to her new dorm room there are already six messages from him telling her how proud he is and how much he loves her and her chest tightens and she twists her ring around her finger and counts how many times he says he loves her in the message.


bashert is the author of 37 other stories.
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