the first time.

Cugino’s bread basket over smiles and salads. She wrings her hands as the rain begins. It is this unsureness of why there are tears on her cheeks that offsets the casualty of it all. It was only lunch, after all. It couldn’t have been a date. Her fiance is waiting with the truck mere feet away. And yet.

She wipes her eyes, the computer clicking off. His chair is empty. This morning she didn’t even know him. And yet.

Everything feels different as she dries her cheeks. Pam pulls on her coat, the same one she’s had for three years – or is it four now? She wonders if Roy is simply the familiarity of the fabric she wears; the comfort of something old is always safer than the unknown of new possibility. But no, this is crazy. Is she just scared?

These are all new thoughts, but now they will never go away, a tightrope stretching before her as the days unfurl. She leaves, stepping carefully. She cries because of today; the possibility, the what if; the realization that this was the best first date she had ever had. And even with the ring glinting on her finger, she couldn’t ignore the tingles that crept up her spine the first time she saw Jim Halpert.

the second time.

It is darkness in a silk dress, with silent fingers and unseen kisses. There it is; she can’t pretend that she doesn’t want this as much as he does. And yet she’s scared. Just moments before there were hands on his chest, the feeling of his heartbeat across her palms. For her.

He’s in love with me, she thinks to herself, and soon she’s crouched beneath his chair, leaning against his desk: the steadiness in the world that only comes from him. She’s shaking with sobs. “I love you too,” she whispers into an empty room.

the third time.

The cup of soup in her hands crashes to the floor, porcerlain spattered all over the carpet. She sinks to the floor, picking up the pieces as the tears fall. Today he had come back. Today was what she had waited for, hoped for, longed for, wanted for so long.

Today.

Today he had his arm around someone else, turned his back, never once glanced her way. She kneels to pick up the pieces of a shattered cup, wishing with every breath in her body that picking up the pieces of a shattered world was just as easy.

But it can’t be.

She abandons all hope as a shard slices her finger, the shock of unexpected pain and clotting blood. The world stings. Her cup isn’t the only thing that broke today.

the fourth time.

He didn’t come. This is what she thinks as the tape comes easily off her painting. The watercolors drabble away as the tears come. They always come.

The biting lip, the downcast glance, the tape sticky on her hands. He didn’t come. She had known deep down he wouldn’t, but the fact was still there. She was always waiting to be proven wrong.

And yet she kept her head down and painted on paper instead. It was the result of waiting that had produced this mess. With him, it was color. Without him, it was motel art.

She took all the paintings down, rolled them up. she was tired of waiting.

the fifth time.

The last time he makes her cry, there are squealing tires, beating hearts, hurried footsteps. that impecably bright smile radiating from the receptionist as she spills secrets to a camera crew who has followed her life for the past three years. the sun spills through slanted blinds, falling on her face and cresting her cheeks in afternoon light.

In a blur of colors and sudden surprise, he is there, uttering the words she’d longed to hear in all those moments of crying in the dark. As the camera clicks off, she is biting her lip and holding back tears, but soon she can’t help it.

Tears streaming down flushed cheeks, laughing as Jim gathers her in his arms. They wrap themselves in the dream of reality, with teasing hair and a soft kiss that’s been held back for years. They break the barriers.

Five times Jim makes her cry, but there’s a difference between the first and the last. The last time, there’s joy in the tracks across her face. The last time, he wipes the tears away and promises that the next time (if there is a next time), he’ll be there.

But it doesn’t matter anymore. She stops crying. She smiles.

It’s a date.