It had been 6 months since Jim’s transfer to Stamford. Things had run as smoothly as ever, perhaps more so without interruptions from Michael. Yet, something wasn’t right. Something was missing. And Jim laid in bed that night thinking about that something. The tears danced in his eyes and he let them dance. They twirled themselves in ornate fashions and, as their motions got wilder, they spilled out onto his cheek where they traced heartbreaking lines down his face. He couldn’t bear to be without her. He couldn’t bear to be without Pam. He knew her backwards and forwards. Jim knew he wanted her. He could take anything the world threw at him, as long as he had her. But, he couldn’t have her.

            Pam slipped into her car, her movements so quiet they almost blended in with the night. She didn’t crank up the car. She just stared into the distance. This was her routine. Every single night, at 2:30 in the morning, Pam would grab her keys and follow a narrow hallway to the stairs of her apartment complex. She would grope her way down the stairs, trying carefully not to wake the other inhabitants. Almost mechanically she would climb into her car and wonder if she should go. She could do it. She could drive to Stamford. She could be happy. But, she didn’t. Every night she would move out of her car and back into her apartment, where Pam would spend the next half-hour crying herself to sleep. She would whisper his name while clutching her pillow, tears burning her eyes. She could do nothing to relieve her of this horrible pain. It ripped and tore at her heart, breaking and bending at the very fibers that held her emotions together. And tonight, as she sat in her car, the pain worsened. Finally, she couldn’t take it. Pam took her keys and daintily slid them in the ignition. She took a deep steadying breath and cranked up the car. She pressed her feet to the gas and began the long drive to Stamford

She had been driving for an hour and a half, when her cell phone began to ring. Pam tried to focus on the numbers flashing on the LCD screen, but she couldn’t. Her eyes were blurry from tears and an hour of staring at the road. She answered it anyway.

“Hello?” Pam almost whispered. Her voice was hoarse from crying.

“Pam, baby where are you?” a male voice said back. It was her ex-fiancé, Roy. She really wished he would stop calling her baby.

“I’m driving, Roy. Please, leave me alone. I have a lot to think about…”

            Pam closed her cell phone, and threw it down on the seat.  She didn’t want to deal with his fake affection anymore. He was like this in high school, and he would be so sweet for awhile and then Pam would get a feel for who he really was. They didn’t belong together. She didn’t want to belong with him. And she wasn’t going to do it anymore.

            Jim had long since fallen into a deep sleep. He rarely dreamed, but when he did it was sporadic images of Pam. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t married Roy. He always thought that if she didn’t go through with it she would call him. The thought of her not loving him was more than any other pain he could have possibly fathomed. He had no idea that she wanted him too. He didn’t know that she was coming to him.

            When Pam hit the Connecticut border, the icy dawn was just beginning to explode across the fall horizon, and she was beginning to loose her nerve. As she began to think about turning around, she felt a gnawing in her stomach. She wondered if it was from the nerves, but she figured she would stop by a nearby IHOP, for some coffee.  Pam pulled into the tiny parking lot of her favorite pancake house and turned off her car. She leaned her head against the rest for several moments and wondered why she was here at all. The gnawing, however, wouldn’t go away so she slowly trudged her way inside the warm building.

            Once inside, Pam found a seat at the bar and shook off the chill of the outside air. A wrinkled, thin waitress with tobacco stained teeth approached her.

“What can I get ya’ dear?” She asked in a heavily accented voice. Her breath reeked of cigarettes and alcohol. Her face retained the vestiges of long, lost good looks. Her eyes were sunken and had deep purple circles underneath them. A wedding band hug loosely around her finger and it looked brand new. Pam saw it and her eyes began to burn again. Small tears were forming in her once dry eyes.

“So, you said no to the love of ya’ life,” the waitress said knowledgably.

“How did you know?”  Pam sobbed.

“Ya’ have the ‘I’ve driven a long way look’. Judging by ya’ outfit, you are an accountant or someone in an office. It’s a Tuesday, so work isn’t off tomorrow. So, you’re either going away from him, or coming back to him. And you can’t go back to something, if ya’ didn’t leave it first.” The waitress replied leaning against the counter.  Pam sobbed even louder. There was no one else in the little restaurant, so Pam held nothing back. She cried out her story, and spared no detail. No detail except Jim’s name. She could only whisper it at night; she couldn’t bear to say it to another human. The tears flowed harder from her eyes, and her sentences were punctuated with gasps as she finally spoke about the kiss she and Jim had shared. This was the most open she had felt since Jim left.

            “And it was a few days before our—mine and Roy’s—wedding day. All I could…think about was him. I could feel his arms around me, his lips. Everything I had ever felt for him was locked in that one moment. And in that one moment I made the decision to come here…and try to do something. Anything,” Pam finished with a flourish. Her sobs were less frequent. The flow of her tears had been restricted. Pam felt better.

            Throughout Pam’s tale of love, the waitress had been giving her cup after cup of coffee, and listening intently to her story. By the time Pam had finished, the 8 am morning rush had come and gone and all the while the waitress hadn’t left. Finally, Pam uttered the last words of her story and the waitress sighed.

            “Well, I ain’t gonna lie to ya’ honey, you have made some pretty bad mistakes. You let a great guy, the love of your life, spill out his heart and soul to you, and you told him to take a hike. Hon, that’s not what cha’ do. But, you had damn solid reasons, not good ones, but solid. Now, I’m not gonna let ya’ stay here anotha’ minute. You go out there and you get this guy,” the waitress motioned towards the door.

            “But what do I say? I screwed up so badly.” Pam began to sob again.

            “Yeah, yeah ya’ did. But it’s not the end of the world. It wasn’t for me. I did the same as you honey. I was young, stupid, thinking I had it all. At the time I was dating someone. He was funny at times, smart enough, very successful. I thought there was a connection. I was serving at a club, when Nick came in. He came right up to me and we started talkin’. He made me feel somethin’ I had never felt before. We became friends. I swore it was just friends. Then, he told me that he was getting married to someone else. I lost it. I told him he couldn’t marry the other girl because I was in love with him. And we have been married for 3 months.” The waitress sighed with happiness and twisted the gold band around her finger. Pam glanced over at the TV in the corner.

“…and the forecast for the afternoon shows a real promise of snow…” the weatherman boomed through the speakers of the old TV.

“Oh, don’t pay mind to that, dear. Those weathermen hardly know what they are talking about.” The waitress snorted at the television.

Pam nodded and sipped the coffee. Without paying much attention she tossed 30 dollars out of her wallet and slid off her stool and broke for the door.

            “Good luck, honey!” The waitress called after her. Pam stood at the doorway and waved a rapid goodbye, and sped for her car.

            Jim sat at his desk playing 3 cell solitaire. This was how he spent his days without her. In between sales calls, he tried to beat his top score. Right as he won his 11th game in a row, the phone began to ring. He groaned and picked up the phone.

“Dunder Mifflin, this is Jim Halpert.” He said in a bored voice. The reply that came shortly after made him drop the phone.

            After shuffling through a phone book at a pay-phone, Pam found Jim’s address and apartment number. The one and a half-mile drive seemed to last for years. When she reached the complex it was as if physics and matter and time didn’t matter. She had finally found what truly mattered in the world. She barely felt her fists on the door.

            “JIM! Please answer! Come on! Jim!” She yelled as she pounded the door. After a minute of her incessant knocking, Pam looked down at her watch. It was 10:45. He had been at Dunder Mifflin for over an hour and a half. She slammed her head against his door, her right hand over the doorknob. In her frustration she turned it, and to her surprise the door opened. She wandered into his apartment and looked around. It looked more or less like his home in Scranton. She shut the door delicately behind her, and ambled into the kitchen where she spotted a phone. Her face lit up as she formulated a plan in her mind. Pam pushed the numbers needed to dial Dunder Mifflin Stamford branch and her heart began to beat faster. A cold, hard male voice answered.

            “Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, how may I assist you?”

            Pam stalled. Her voice wouldn’t work. Her eyes were becoming unfocused again.

            “Umm…Jim Halpert please.” She finally answered.

            “Transferring.”

            Pam was fretting. She was feeling tremors. And her heart was pounding. Soon, almost too soon, she heard a familiar voice on the other end of the line.

            “Dunder Mifflin, this is Jim Halpert.”

            Pam was completely silent for the second time in 30 seconds. Then something just awoke in her brain. She had come all this way. She was going to do this.

            “…I love you.” She stammered out at last. The words burst from her mouth and she was finally free.  A millisecond after the words were uttered, she heard a crash. This made her smile. 

            Jim heard the words, but wasn’t fully listening. He grasped for the phone, and snatched it up.

            “Umm…who…who is this?” he faltered. He already knew. But he wanted to be certain this was real.

            “The girl who is sitting in your kitchen.” Jim could almost hear the nervousness and laughter on the other end. This was the happiest he had been in a long, long time.

            “Well, I guess you are going to make me go down there and find out who you are.” Jim laughed.

            “I guess so,” the “mysterious” woman replied.

            “I’ll be over in ten minutes.” Jim gathered his stuff and walked out of the office without a word to anyone.

            Pam hung the phone up and leaned against Jim’s kitchen chair. This was the pinnacle of perfection.

            Jim was stuck in the Stamford lunch-hour traffic. At first, he figured he had waited for six months; he could wait for another half an hour. But the prospect of the love of his life in his kitchen was too much to handle. He pulled out of the traffic and into the parking lot of an IHOP. The temptation of the pancake house he had eaten lunch at for 6 months was overwhelming. He went inside and saw his favorite waitress on duty. She was thin, rather wrinkled, always smelled of tobacco or alcohol, but she would listen to him.

            “Hey Margo, can I get a ham and cheese sandwich to go?” Jim said, sitting down at the bar.

            “Ham and cheese, Jim?” the waitress asked puzzled, “But ya’ always get tuna? Ah, well I can have it ready in ten minutes.”

            “Yeah, but Margo…you know Pam? The one I’ve been telling you about? She is back…and, I just think a Ham and Cheese is in order.” He replied with a smile.

            “She’s back! Congratulations honey! Wait…she’s back today? Oh… a woman…but I didn’t think to put…oh my god. Jim, honey let me get that sandwich for ya’ right now,” Margo ran into the kitchen and almost instantaneously was out with the sandwich in a bag.

            “No charge, honey, just go!” Margo waved Jim out with a smile, and he could almost see a sparkle of a tear in her eye. Jim could see that the traffic hadn’t thinned in the slightest. So with the ham and cheese in the bag he walked the one and a half miles to his apartment.

            Pam’s intentions had not been to fall asleep on Jim’s kitchen table. But she was so tired. Sleep came so naturally. She didn’t hear the door open when Jim finally arrived. She didn’t see the joy on his face when he saw her sleeping on his table. She didn’t feel him gently pick her up.

            Jim picked the sandwich up out of the bag and ate it on the way to his apartment. The walk seemed like nothing. He would run 1000 times as far just to get to her. The time slowed considerably as he got closer to his apartment complex. Anticipation of seeing her again was building up. After a period of time, he arrived at the complex. He didn’t waste any time getting to his apartment. He opened the door and immediately went to the kitchen, where a feeling of ecstasy rose in him like never before. He threw the leftover half of a sandwich down on the table and gently picked Pam up in his arms and carried her into his bedroom. He lied her down on his bed and held her in his arms. Jim held her as closely as he could without hurting her. He had waited for years to just hold her. With her head against his chest, Jim drifted off to a sleep of his own, but was woken about an hour later by the love of his life.

            Pam gently shook Jim awake, with a smile on her face she watched his eyes flicker open and a smile play on his lips. She wrapped her arms around his waist and kissed him hard against his lips. He was shocked, but returned the kiss with just as much valor. And finally Pam felt alright.

            “I could press charges for trespassing you know…” He whispered in her ear.

            “Well, I could press charges for theft,” Pam retorted.

            “What?”

Pam rose out of the bed and went into the kitchen. “Figure it out,” she finally yelled from the kitchen. Jim smirked at the absolute corny-ness at what Pam had just said. Reluctantly, Jim rose out of the bed and gave himself an awakening shake. Jim maneuvered his way into the kitchen and with as much passion as he could muster he said “I’m so in love with you.”

            “I don’t even think love is enough to describe what I feel about you.” Pam replied. She was more beautiful to him than anything he had ever seen as she walked toward him; Jim almost thought she was floating. She pressed her lips to his and wrapped her arms around him. Jim was surprised for only moment then kissed her with equally as much passion.

“Jim,” She whispered, her lips grazing the skin, “Jim…you need to understand something.”

“Pam, for god’s sake, don’t do this to me now. I’ve waited....for so long.”

“No, Jim. Listen,” Pam said sternly, pulling her lips back, “I need you to know exactly what I feel. You deserve so much more than what I am, but you love me anyway. I never even thought, for one moment, that maybe you were the one. Maybe this whole world had been playing tricks on me, because you are the one. It wasn’t until that day—that horribly, amazing day—on the Booze Cruise when I realized that I didn’t just think of you as my best friend. I discovered that you were so much more to me than that. You gave me feelings, and hopes, and dreams that no one else ever could. And then Roy—he had to get plastered to set a date. But I was drowned in feelings and denial and happiness. But when you told me you loved me. That was when I absolutely, without a doubt, knew that I was so terribly in love with you that if I didn’t do something to stop this snowball effect with Roy, nothing would be right. And every single damn night since you left I sat in my car crying over you. Crying over what could have been. I wanted to know what could be—what should be. I know that everything I could ever want or hope for lies with you. And, Jim, I don’t love you. It’s so much deeper than that. I feel that if everything else in the entire world fell into despair, I would be perfect, because you are with me. Because I have no other words to use I will use these, I love you, Jim. I love you so much. All I need is you.” Pam was winded when she finished, but Jim pulled her closer and kissed her with such extraordinary feeling, it was as if love itself was pouring from his lips.

 And at that moment, snow began to fall.