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Story Notes:
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.
Author's Chapter Notes:
My sincere thanks to Callisto, my beta reader and re-reader. I deeply appreciate her patience and insight. This is for her.
~~~~~

May, 2004

Van Halen was playing that night. They hadn't changed the CDs in the jukebox at Poor Richard's in years, so Jim's memories of his visits there are structured around the repetition of the same songs. It's always metal and hip-hop when the warehouse guys are along; always Christina Aguilera and Madonna when Kelly has some cash or Michael's making the choices.

He remembers the Van Halen because he knows Roy and Darryl were over at the pool table and because he can recall, vividly, the way Pam gripped an imaginary microphone and sang "it's got what it takes, so tell me why -" about four inches from his face as they hid in the back corner booth together. Well, sat, really, but the tall back of the bench, blocking their view of the rest of the room, made it feel like hiding. He had been chatting with Kevin, Toby, and Dwight until he noticed Pam watching them from a booth. He raised his eyebrows and she patted the bench next to her, inclining her head away in a gesture of invitation.

Pam's voice was tuneless and charming. She was a satisfied giggle, a stack of maraschino cherry stems, and two empty amaretto sour glasses. She tipped out of his personal space and into the wall behind her with a sigh. She was the color of her hair, the shirt button between her breasts that strained against her curves as she inhaled; a myriad of small, compelling things that he was just beginning to keep careful track of.

That night was insignificant; nothing - just an early May, after-work outing. But he remembers, anyway. He tells himself that he remembers all of it, even if that's pure, impossibly romantic nonsense.

As she sat there, smiling tipsily at him, she reached over and took his hand, lacing her fingers with his. It was the opening iteration of a pattern that had yet to emerge - Christmas party punch bowls, pilfered margaritas at chain restaurants, and her fingertips, her mouth.

He was the quick burn of a blush and averted eyes. Every nerve ending in his body migrated to his hand to take part in the experience of touching her. He was a little shocked that it felt like... well, that.

She turned his wrist this way and that, like she was trying him on for size. Her left hand; his right. Her engagement ring was brand-new then, pressing against the back of his middle finger. He had noticed it in the kitchen one morning as she put the coffee on. When he complimented her on it, she curled her fingers inward, out of view, murmuring a bashful thanks.

Her laugh was too loud. "I had this babysitter? When I was, like seven or eight? She loved Van Halen."

"Oh?"

"Loved," she insisted, squeezing his fingers. "Jill - that was her name, Jill - had a boyfriend. He used to come over sometimes while she was watching me."

Jim smiled and squeezed back. "Oh, I know how this one ends."

~~~~~

May, 2006

The soft, blue glow of the backlighting does Jim's face tremendous favors - erasing his dark circles, canceling out the bloodshot tinge in the whites of his eyes, and softening the three-day beard on his cheeks. It makes him look thoughtful, not distracted; tired, not exhausted. He's leaning on his forearm, index finger on one of the white, rectangular arrow buttons, watching his options slide by.

Having fed the machine five dollars, he's making careless, quick selections. He knows it's tacky to hog a jukebox in a crowded bar, but he's been on a faux pas streak that would horrify Emily Post, so whatever.

He gathers up almost an entire punk compilation, and, thus inspired, goes in search of British new wave and fuzzy, more contemporary, happy-to-be sad guitar rock. His choices, taken together, make little sense, but the initial, hard, miserable shove of his first selection feels like an embrace. He rests his forehead on the cool glass front of the machine for a moment before turning back to the room.

Poor Richard's is loud, happy, Saturday night busy and Jim is quiet, wary, and seated on a barstool, away from the heart of the early summer glee. He passes fifteen minutes by pretending, at least for one drink, that he is the sort of guy who likes straight whiskey. He is half-Irish on his mother's side, after all, so it seems possible that it's just something about himself that he hasn't discovered yet. It isn't bad, but he's happier with a pint of Blue Moon sitting in front of him, sweet with orange juice, making a new, wrinkly, wet circle on his napkin every time he picks it up.

The singer is insisting that love will tear us apart and the bartender, who is short, cute, and in possession of a pile of messy red curls that are just about killing Jim, is making small talk while she chops limes, when, of course, Pam steps up onto the metal footrail at his elbow. Jim mutely berates himself for not being more creative in his choice of bars while he waits the bare second required for her to notice that he's there. She's wearing a pair of jeans and a black tank top. Her maroon bra straps are showing and her hair is pulled up into a messy bun, off of the rarely-seen, downy curve of her neck. Her eyes register shock, locate Roy and his brother over by the pool table, and go cautiously neutral, all within an instant.

"Hi," he gives his pint glass a twist, tearing the napkin.

"Hey," she says blankly, just as The Pretenders surge from the bar's speakers, making it harder to hear. It's warm in the crowded room, but he chooses to assign himself the blame for the flush in her cheeks, because he knows now that he can, has made them burn.

Pam looks like she's considering walking away without saying anything else, a choice Jim would understand, even support, but, instead, she asks the bartender for three Coronas and perches lightly on the seat next to him. She leans in close - too close, he can smell her breath, which reinvigorates his recollection of the taste of her mouth - and speaks into his ear, over the music. "You - uh -" she pauses and studies him silently. With a tilt of her head as the bottles hit the bar, she finally asks, "How are you?"

He's too weary and sad to formulate a quick reply, yell, cry, or beg. He rests his elbows on either side of his drink and rubs his face. "Not good."

She pays the bartender, who has sense enough to move herself and her limes to the other end of the room after she takes Pam's money. "Jim, please - we don't have to -" she falters and stops. He's not looking at her face, but at her hand, laying inches from his on the overpolished surface of the bar.

He knows she's right. He draws a breath and turns his face to hers. "How are you?"

"Not good," she echoes, loading the words with a different set of meanings.

They're wallowing in this impasse, staring at one another, when Roy motions to Pam from the other side of the room and then waves at Jim, indicating with a jerk of his head and a smile that he should join them.

Jim shakes his head and turns away. "No."

"Please, just -" she lays her hand on his forearm and he nearly comes out of his skin. "I haven't told him anything. I need - he doesn't know anything's weird, okay? "

She is bleary-eyed and appears not to have slept any more than he has since he last saw her two days earlier. "You haven't said anything?"

"No. I wouldn't do that. I can't imagine how he'd react..."

Jim pulls his arm away carefully. "That's not exactly the point -"

"Just," she sighs, "Just please? Okay? It'll make things so much easier. I can't explain why without - "

She appears, abruptly, to be seconds away from bursting into tears, which, again, Jim thinks would be a reasonable thing to do. He's tempted to let it happen, to see if her screamingly apparent misery will catch Roy's eye. But, instead, because he is a sucker of very nearly epic proportions, Jim picks up his beer and indicates with his eyes that she should lead the way. She murmurs her thanks and gathers the bottles from the bar. He takes one from her without touching her fingers.

Roy claps Jim on the back as he sets his drink on the ledge that runs along the wall behind the pool table. "Hey, Halpert, how are you, man?"

"I'm great, how are you?" Jim gives him a tight smile.

"I'm good." Roy grins back. Jim feels the urge to describe, in glorious Technicolor, the events of Thursday night. It's so overwhelming that it's almost as if he's already said it. He knows Roy's ignorance of the situation isn't the problem, though, not really. It's only the problem insofar as the actual problem, the one testing the weight of two cues from the rack on the wall with a look of sustained, masked panic on her face, makes it a problem.

Jim approaches Pam to select his own cue and their eyes meet. He mutters, "Don't worry, I'll be good."

"Okay," she says, handing one of the cues to him. He puts it back and selects another, his temples throbbing as he turns away from her without another word.

It is assumed, without discussion, that Jim and Pam will play against Roy and Kenny. Roy breaks and sinks the nine. He calls the fourteen, but misses the shot, and joins Jim at the wall as Pam steps up to the table. "So, Australia, hey?"

"Yep."

"When do you leave again?"

"The eighth."

"That sounds so great." Pam puts the three in the side. "Gotta do stuff like that while you're single, trust me. It's too bad you're not coming to the wedding, though, man. I know Pammy's disappointed." Jim nods impassively, noticing without noticing that he can see down Pam's shirt as she lines up her next shot. Her sternum is white as wax. He looks back at Roy, who is so content, so very obviously looking down his future wife's shirt, that it makes Jim's knees feel like they're going to give out. He reaches for his drink as Pam glances the five off the bumper near the corner pocket. Indifferent, she joins them, standing on the other side of Roy. He put his arm around her and she doesn't so much lean into him as allow it to happen. Kenny misses his shot.

Jim leans over the table to put the five in, calling it with a lazy wave of his cue. When he turns, Roy is over talking to Kenny, chalking his cue, there's a fresh pint waiting for him, and Pam is studying the television on the other side of the room intently. He picks up his drink and gestures at her. "Thanks."

"Roy bought it," she clarifies.

"Either way, thank you," he says tightly and she nods.

Pam is hanging onto her cue with both hands, twisting them in opposite directions. As Jim is noting the way her hair is frizzing out of her bun, he feels the room shift a couple of inches away from him and grow a little brighter. He should have had dinner.

He watches Pam watch Roy line up his shot, bobbing her head to the song that's playing. It has an easy hook and she mouths on the third repetition. She wets her bottom lip with her tongue and steals a glance at him. When he doesn't look away, play their usual game, she turns her head quickly back to the table, where Roy is on a roll.

Kenny is standing off to Roy's side, watching his shot from over his shoulder, beer in hand. The song's bridge catches his ear and he glares, accusingly, at the nearest speaker, "Jesus, who put this faggy stuff on?" he says happily.

Roy snorts and shakes his head as he drops the fourteen. Pam, making an educated guess, looks over at Jim again. Their eyes meet and it would be funny if he wasn't able to see Pam's entire life spread out before her, these people at the very center of it.

He excuses himself and hides in the men's room for five minutes. When he emerges again, Kenny is over at the jukebox, stabbing at the buttons with his fat fingers, and Pam is taking Jim's turn for him. When she sinks the four on a difficult shot, she spins, victorious, and beams at Jim, forgetting herself for a moment. He smiles back. He can't help it. He just barely wants to.

~~~~~

His selections end and Kenny's begin as he declines to join the brothers at the dart boards. Pam is nowhere to be seen.

Van Halen.

Again.

So tell me why -

He finds her in the corner booth they sat in years ago, on the night that she sang and held his hand for the first time. He joins her wordlessly and she offers no greeting. His grasp of chronology, cause-and-effect, are alcohol-slick, their entire relationship shutting up like a telescope. He would be completely unsurprised if she began joking with him like nothing was wrong. He expects that he will eventually confuse this night with others much like it; another touch, argument, or kiss, in 2008, 2010, and on and on...

He tries to be casual about making sure Roy and Kenny are at a safe remove, but his sense of how he's coming off is unreliable at best. He realizes that this is as alone as he's ever likely to be with her and he scrambles for something to say.

"So, um," she starts, surprising him, making tiny tears around the edges of her napkin. "You didn't come to work yesterday."

"No, I didn't." Axl Rose shrieks and Jim hopes that Kenny didn't have as much cash to burn as he did.

"Why?"

He wonders what she's up to and cautiously replies, "The official reason is that I have a cold."

"Oh," she says flatly. "I've been thinking about it," she tries again. "Maybe you just think -" she nearly tears the napkin in half.

He turns his head, devises six or seven different ways to end that sentence for her. "Think what?"

She shakes her head, completes the tear. "I don't know where this is coming from. It doesn't feel real."

You're telling me, he thinks. But, somewhere inside his ribcage, hope and anger twist together in a knot so tight that he can't tell which is driving the other. "It's been there for a while." He sighs and turns in his seat, facing her profile, and craning his neck to locate Roy and Kenny one more time before he continues. Jim leans in closer, "I feel like an idiot for not telling you years ago."

This earns him eye-contact. He realizes, too late, that this is probably new information for her, even if he feels like it's the most painfully obvious thing about him. "Years?"

He presses his lips together and nods. "It's not coming out of nowhere."

She looks away, out into the busy room. When she looks back at him, her eyes are bright again. "It is for me. I thought we were friends."

"We are," he insists, but it doesn't feel like the truth.

"How can I be your friend if I know that you feel like that? When you -" she purses her lips.

He makes a quick guess and, gently, says, "You kissed me back, Pam. It felt incredible."

She glances over at her drink, like it's going to supply a suggestion. "I don't know why I did that. Not really."

He closes his eyes for a moment, giving the room a chance to right itself. What he wants, really, desperately wants, is to get the hell out of this bar, to take her with him, for just a couple of hours, so that they can, for once in their lives, have a conversation that isn't happening on borrowed time. "I don't believe that," he's debating the merits of such a statement, even as it's coming out of his mouth.

Two hot pink dots bloom deep in her cheeks. "You told me just a little while ago that it was a crush. And that you were done with it," she spits the last three words at him. "I don't think you know what you want." She reaches for her drink. "What do you want?" He shakes his head, but her look stops him cold. "No, Jim, tell me. What were you picturing when you said... all that? What did you hope I would do?"

He draws in a deep breath through his nose, checking again for her fiance. "I was hoping," he leans in closer without lowering his voice, "that you would be honest with me."

"I was honest with you. I can't."

He rolls his eyes, "Oh, that is such bullshit."

"What?"

"You can do whatever you want, Pam. That's what I've been trying to tell you. You're so smart and you're so talented and - the internship. Who you marry. It's your -"

"Years? Years, Jim?" she interrupts, evading, moving quickly, in a tone less sorrowful and more accusing.

"Yeah. Years." The alcohol has promoted itself to second-in-command and is clearly contemplating a mutiny, so he adds, "Since the first time I saw you. You were wearing a gray skirt and a pink shirt. You were so pretty that I completely blanked on my own name for a second." He pauses. "Which is why I asked you out."

"We went to lunch," she corrects.

"I thought that maybe it was a date until you told me about," he gestures over at the dart board.

"That's not my fault."

"I didn't say it was. It's just what I thought," he forces his voice to stay even, which only makes him sound angrier.

She bites her lip and begins shredding her napkin. "It's -" He waits for her to continue. "It's just proximity, seeing each other every day," she glances up at him, "You know."

"No."

"I mean, I think it's really normal to have a crush. In a situation like this," her eyes are pleading with him.

"This isn't a crush." He refuses to elaborate, even though it's sitting on the tip of his loose tongue.

"I don't think you know. I don't think you understand what - what it means. Being with someone every day for a long time and trying to make it work and - you couldn't possibly know what that's like."

"No, I couldn't. But should it feel like effort? Shouldn't it just feel, I don't know, natural?" Something about what he has said increases the apparent tension in her posture, so he pushes, "Shouldn't it just be irresistible?" he says softly.

"That's not how it works," her voice is unsteady.

"I think you're wrong."

She shrugs. "It doesn't matter. This is how it is." There is a long pause. She is trying to reconstruct the napkin on the nicked surface of the table. On another night, he would have helped her, his fingers brushing against hers as often as seemed reasonable. "Like I said, you're with someone every day and it just happens. It doesn't mean that you have to change your whole life just because you feel something." He tries to interrupt, but she persists. "I bet it happens all the time. It's probably really normal to wonder what it'd be like if things were different."

"I have never once wondered what it would be like to make love with Dwight."

He says it so evenly, so calmly, he barely even notices that it's coming out of his mouth. It's true and it's awful and it hurts like hell to make it clear to her, even if she could have probably guessed. Love is quite one thing; that disembodied, chivalrous nonsense that he tried for a long time to convince himself he felt for her. The base, messy truth of it is quite another.

Being able to see his own want and curiosity reflected back at him is the most hollow sort of victory. She scoots toward him, the hurt flintiness of her eyes obscuring what had been there moments beforehand. "Let me out."

"Pam," he tries.

"No. I said let me out." He moves out of her way and they both stand. She spots Roy, absorbed in his game, and spins back to face Jim. "I love you. So much. Okay?" He employs the same trick that he used earlier that week, looking everywhere but her face. Crying in front of her once was the absolute limit permitted by his dignity. "This is awful."

"It is," he agrees, clawing his way back to composed.

"I don't even know how to fix this."

"I don't either."

"I can't just ignore it. You can't say things like that - "

"Yeah. I know."

"Maybe you should go home now. Maybe this was a bad idea," Pam says to the floor at his feet. Turning her face up to his, she adds, "We'll figure this out. We have to."

"Alright."

"I'm going to take some time off. It just feels like I should."

"Actually, I was going to do that. You don't need to." He's got a meeting, an interview, really, in Stamford on Monday. He can't bring himself to tell her this, even though he's already said the hardest, scariest thing possible to her.

"Don't you need the days for your trip?"

His gaze is steady. "Don't you need them for your honeymoon?"

Pam looks away first. "If you're going to take time off, I'll keep going in."

"Wouldn't want it to look too obvious, right?" She sighs and crosses her arms in front of her chest. The fight has gone out of him in a rush, so he brushes his fingertips against her cheek and kisses her forehead. He murmurs, "Take care of yourself," one last plea, against her skin.

Roy, naturally, notices the kiss from twenty feet away, oblivious to everything else - her posture, the tears on her cheeks - and happily hollers, "Hey! Keep your hands off of my woman!" Jim glances over his shoulder and gives Roy a closed-mouth smile, holding up his hands in a gesture of innocence and surrender. He brushes past Pam without looking at her again.

He is way, way too drunk to drive home. He waits alone in the parking lot for a cab, looking up at the sky.

~~~~~

May, 2004

Pam let her head loll back against the wood-paneling behind her and, while staring at the ceiling, pointed at Jim and, in her best hair metal voice, sang, "you want it straight from the heart."

In that moment, he remembers wanting to kiss her, really wanting it, for the first time ever. Pam Beesly, he realized with a calm clarity, was infinitely, endlessly kissable. He knows, without a doubt, that he believed that whatever came of the chance to press his lips to hers, even just once, would be totally worth it.

~~~~~
Chapter End Notes:
Thank you so much for reading.

For those of you looking for new things for your iPods, Van Halen, "Why Can't This Be Love?" is what's playing during the flashback. The first selection that comes up when Jim loads the jukebox is The Buzzcocks, "Ever Fallen in Love with Someone (You Shouldn't've Fallen in Love With)?" Also referenced are Joy Division "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and The Pretenders, "The Wait." Finally, both the story and chapter titles are taken from Jimmy Eat World, "Authority Song." The hook that Pam sings as they shoot pool is the title of the chapter. The song inspired this story. Go listen to it to find out why.


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