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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:
I believe that TPTB have a number of potentially compelling balls up in the air right now. Consider this story a physical manifestation of my very sincere wish that they do not drop them.

A million thanks to Callisto, who just performed the fastest beta-read in history.
~~~~~

Pam drove to work in the morning; Jim drove home at night. He was never awake enough at the start of the day, so he was in charge of her mug of tea, passing it to her at red lights. Her eyes were always tired by five o'clock, so she toed off her shoes, turned on NPR, and hummed the "All Things Considered" tune, reaching over squeeze his knee, remove his hand from the steering wheel to kiss his palm, and pull herself in to nuzzle his cheek.

Jim wonders if that's really all past tense now. He's alone in the car, radio off, a half-filled box of her possessions riding shotgun. He packed everything up after Charles was gone for the day, certain that, had the opportunity presented itself, he would have accused Jim of stealing from a former employee, malingering, or both.

While he collected her things, he thought of how, lately, she had taken to giving him fierce hugs from behind while he was in the middle of some necessary chore - the dishes, dusting, painting. Her arms would suddenly be around him, somewhere below his ribcage, a tight, insistent squeeze. "You're the best thing ever," she would say into his back with a sigh, resting her forehead between his shoulderblades.

He'd disagree, trying to continue the task at hand without dislodging her. March Madness was the best thing ever. Puppies. Bookstores. Sex. Lasagna. Saturday afternoons. Her, when he needed to say it or he thought she needed to hear it. Sometimes she would agree quickly - blue crayons were pretty great - and others she would reassert her point, running her hands up his chest or - here plates would get bobbled, knickknacks tipped - down, just to tease him.

Cleaning out her desk didn't take as long as he expected it would, as Pam, apparently, had never really settled back in after she returned from Pratt. The drawers were mostly empty, littered with things like old compacts and tubes of lip balm, legal pads filled with cryptic notes, a spare pair of tights, and a couple of half-read novels. Two, three years ago, he would have obsessed over the absence of her teapot, sketchpad, and good pens. Now, he is so surrounded by the mundane, fascinating objects of her life that he didn't notice it. He thinks he should have.

At the first red light, he moves her empty travel mug, so scuzzy that he likes to tease her, threatening to send it to the Mayo Clinic so they can check for possible cancer cures, from the cupholder to the box. He sighs, the light changes, and his phone hums in his pocket. Clumsily, trying not to piss off the driver behind him, he fishes it out from under his seat belt as he puts the car in gear. The display tells him that Beesly, Laura (home) is calling. This suggests that Pam isn't answering her phone, a cryptic hint as to how she has spent her first afternoon of freedom. He lets it go to voicemail.

Pam's parents are living in separate places now, but it's very far from over. The divorce proceedings bring them into constant contact with the idea of one another, if not the reality. Pam's aunts and cousins keep calling it "amicable," but the whole thing makes Jim's skin crawl. Thirty-five years of memories and the sudden freedom to admit was what had "actually happened" in that time has led to nigh-daily phone calls from either her father or mother; torturous, lingering dinners; and one awful weekend where Pam was asked to sort through the contents of her childhood bedroom, her corner of the attic.

While Pam discovered that her mother had kept all of her Barbie dolls ("See? I made my own clothes for them...") and withstood as much information as she could concerning her father's various inadequacies, Jim couldn't stop thinking about the Catholics on his mother's side of the family, who were most definitely not fooling around with that whole "till death do us part" business, and then of the Halperts, who would point out each other's flaws so enthusiastically, so affectionately, that it left no doubt in anyone's mind that they were thoroughly, crushingly loved. He didn't get the weird silences and the manipulation, but, suddenly, Roy, all nine years of him, made more sense than Jim ever wanted. He carried boxes, let her talk, and kept his astonishment to himself.

As he merges onto the highway, he remembers where he last saw her good pens, poking out of a broken coffee cup on the kitchen counter, along with the ballpoints for grocery lists and crossword puzzles, a highlighter pen, and three Sharpies, escapees from the supply shelves at work. Her report card was nearby, open, facedown, and at the bottom of the stack of mail that they tended to ignore during the week. All incompletes, but they knew that was coming.

Mentally surveying their house, he realizes that he has no idea where her textbooks are hiding - she hadn't placed them on the shelves he put in the garage, which were instead filled with art supplies that she hadn't touched since she came home. She never talked about Pratt or the people she knew there, none of whom called or wrote.

He suggested local art shows when he noticed them advertised in the paper, proposed a weekend trip so she could wander around the Philadelphia Museum of Art and he could kiss her in the Cloister or listen while she explained Cezanne, but she just shook her head, saying they were too busy or too poor to do it. "Sometime soon, though," she would smile at him over the top of her wedding planning book or home improvement magazine.

Money and time were tight, yes, but not impossibly so. She had been buying new clothes, in dark jewel tones he had never seen her wear before. They flattered her tremendously; made her look collected and serious in a way that didn't necessarily line up with how she spent her days. She left her hair down or swept it all up off her neck, painted her nails more often, and wore, heaven help him, way more black lingerie than she used to.

The house had generated a series of one-time expenses late last year - carpets and paint and new fixtures for the bathroom - but, small flaws and questionable taste aside, his parents really had left the place in good shape. The roof, the basement, the plumbing, and the wiring were all perfectly fine. All of the trees were healthy. It was fine. They were fine, no matter how many times she furrowed her brow at the checkbook.

And they were planning their wedding, a little slowly, but planning it nonetheless. They weren't saying a word about it at work or in front of the cameras because they were still trying to decide who to invite and how to handle it. Honestly, he wanted to elope, to marry her in some old church in Ireland, on beach in California, or at City Hall on a Tuesday, but she would just smile and ask him what kinds of flowers he liked in a teasing tone when he suggested it. The planning was fun, almost like a game, inventing the whole thing, blushing while they talked about their vows.

Once, when they had her bridal magazines spread out on the floor and the websites of three different hotels pulled up on his laptop, she started to say, "At my parents' wedding," and the smile fell right off her face. She looked at him and said, "Do you think this is what it felt like? Do you think they knew?"

They were fair questions. "I have no idea."

"What if - " she brushed one of the magazines closed, her hair falling over her shoulder, beautiful in her flannel pants and his t-shirt, long as a nightgown on her.

"Nope," he said firmly.

"How do you know?"

"I can just tell." And then, because he wanted to reassure her, to make her see it, and because she was putting her finger squarely on the most frightening thing he could think of, he asked, "Can't you?"

"I can," she nodded, "I hope I can?"

He reached under her shirt, circling his arm around her back. "Trust me?"

"Yeah," she nodded, wide-eyed.

"So," he kissed her, "I can just tell."

Jim laid her down on the floor, slipping her pants down off her hips, kissing her bare legs. He could feel her struggle to concentrate, a sort of frustrated unsteadiness that had become a regular participant in their sex life. He said her name, kissed her navel, and parted her legs with a gentle but insistent hand. Her first moans seemed to come later than they used to, but perhaps that was just his fretful imagination.

He pulls into their driveway, turns off the car, and just sits for a moment. Her car is there and he wonders if she's home or out with Michael. He thinks of that moment in the parking lot, just a couple of hours earlier, looking between the set of her shoulders and the idiot grin that he was dying to wipe off of Michael's face. He's troubled by her obvious affection and gift for getting herself wrapped up in the lives of the most extraordinarily pathetic men. He crosses to the other side of the car to remove the box of her things, trying not to read too much into that.

Jim's already revisited it a dozen times and he's convinced he did the only thing that he could have possibly done in the moment. He was, of course, making frantic calculations involving his paycheck and a $1200/month mortgage payment as he said yes to whatever she thought she wanted, but he didn't need to make that her problem in the moment. She'd think of it soon enough.

She's not in the living room when he steps through the front door. "Pam?" he asks the seemingly empty house.

"In here."

She is lying on her side of the bed, still in her clothes from that day. Her largest sketchpad, one sheet covered in different ways to draw Michael Scott's name, is on his pillow, on top of two of her graphic design textbooks. He stands in the doorway. "Hi."

"Hi," she tucks her chin to look at him.

He sighs. "Charles put Kevin in charge of the phones. Stanley's in charge of productivity."

She blinks and turns onto her back, propping herself up on her elbows. One of her pencils rolls against her side, under her hip. "What?"

"Yeah, I know. He really doesn't know what he's doing." They shake their heads in sync. "Hey, listen," he hesitates, "are you okay?"

She nods, because nothing is ever, ever wrong with Pam Beesly. He's on the bed, on his knees, pulling her into his arms, before the facade crumbles.

~~~~~
Chapter End Notes:
Thanks for reading. Responses to your kind reviews of What the Jukebox Knows are pending, I promise.


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