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Story Notes:
I wanted to write about a character other than Jim and Pam, but I couldn't seem to get them totally out of the story...so you know, they're there. Okay, so they're there a whole lot. I tried!
Author's Chapter Notes:
The title is a Snow Patrol song. Toby fascinates me. I hope I did him at least a little bit of justice.
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.




“What do you do for a living?” The woman tilts her head slightly to the left, and she has curly hair and a nice smile and when Toby squints she kind of looks like Pam, who kind of looks like his ex-wife.


He was supposed to have Sasha this weekend, but she has a sleepover (they always seem to fall on his weekends). He couldn’t stand sitting at home, in his empty apartment, and went down to get a drink at the bar down the street. It is Scranton’s half-hearted attempt at being cosmopolitan and he gives it another four months before it closes down and becomes something depressing like another dry cleaners.


This is not how he normally spends his Friday nights, and it’s unclear to him how he found himself next to this woman, who by all accounts should be talking to someone who is not him, and smiling a Pam, an ex-wife, smile at him.


“I work in HR,” Toby answers. “At a paper company. You?” He’s never been very good at small talk. He thought in college that while they were teaching him astronomy and calculus, maybe they should have taught him classes that would actually have some application in real life. Small Talk 101. Divorce 101. How to Deal with Ridiculous Bosses 101. Learning that Life Never Turns Out How You Think it Will 101.


He could teach a couple of those classes now, but that thought depresses him as much as most anything does.


“I’m an accountant,” she answers. “My name is Gwen.”


“Toby,” he answers, and they spend the evening talking about books and movies and about their equally lame jobs, and he gets her number and gives her his and feels pretty damn good about himself for the first time since his disastrous trip to Costa Rica.





If he’s being honest with himself, and he rarely is because being honest with himself never turns out to be anything but depressing, he’s been kind of a tool lately.

Jim was supposed to be his friend, and on some level Toby knows this, knows that Jim was a good friend who babysat Sasha for him on more than one occasion, but Toby can’t help but hate him a little.


He was going to ask Pam out on a date.


He was waiting the appropriate amount of time after her break-up with Roy to approach her. On a Tuesday in February, four days before Valentine’s Day, Toby got the courage to ask Pam out on a date. She was single now, no Roy, and no Jim hanging onto her every word, and Toby thought that maybe it was time to make his move.


He thought maybe he should approach her in a smooth way, tap on her desk with his fingers and steal a jelly bean like Jim used to do. When he went to her desk, and tapped his fingers twice, she glanced up at him. (He had watched Jim do this many times before Michael had made up some reason to banish him to the Annex with Kelly).


“Hi Toby, what can I do for you?” She asked with a small smile, and he tried to maneuver some of the jelly beans out of her candy dish, but his fingers weren’t as graceful at Jim’s, and he ended tipping it over, scattering jelly beans across the counter and her desk and the floor. She had the decency not to look too annoyed as she leaned down and started picking up the mess that he had made.


“Sorry, sorry,” Toby said, scooping some of the jelly beans into his hand and dumping them into the trashcan next to her desk. Pam told him that it was okay, but she was still leaning over trying to pick up the jelly beans, and Toby decided that it just wasn’t the right time to ask. He went back to the Annex, and found Kelly and Ryan making out on her desk, and he cleared his throat, but they either didn’t hear him or they both ignored him, and he found himself pulling out his headphones and playing some Vivaldi loudly to drown out the sound of the two of them (but he couldn’t ignore the way that the partition sometimes shook)


The second time that he had worked up the courage to try again and ask Pam out was when he found out Michael was planning on taking everyone to the beach. She was done with Roy for good, and Jim seemed to be happy (enough) with Karen, and Toby decided that it was time to just go for it.


He decided he would ask her out on beach day. He was pretty excited for it, went out and bought some sunscreen and big hat, and Michael ruined it, because Michael can pretty much ruin anything, and banished him to the office all day, insisting that someone stay behind to answer the phones.


So Toby stays behind, working on what to say all day, and even staying behind so that he can catch her before she goes home.


Kelly is the first one in, grinning from ear to ear.


“How was beach day?” Toby asked, knowing even as he asked it, that he didn’t want Kelly to answer the question.


“It was crazy! Michael had this coal walk that he wanted everyone to walk across, like yeah, who’s dumb enough to walk across hot coals right? And no one would really do, including Michael, and so we’re all sitting by the fire, which is great, because firelight is so romantic and I made sure that Ryan was sitting on my good side so that he could see what I looked like in the firelight, but then Pam is off by herself, right? And she comes over and she’s all like ‘I walked across the coals’ and then she looks right at Jim and tells him that she called off her wedding because of him and she misses him and blah, blah, blah. But it was crazy! With Karen sitting there the whole time just like listening to Pam tell Jim she’s in love with him, and Jim just sort of sat there, and no one really said anything on the way home, and I can’t believe you missed it!”


“She told him that she called her wedding off because of him?” Toby repeated, and Kelly, oblivious to his crush and his pain, nodded excitedly.


“It was crazy!” And Toby finally gathered his things, and figured that it was the wrong time to ask her now.


As he was heading out, Kevin stopped him.


“Oh dude, you missed it!” Kevin exclaimed. “She walked across the hot coals and then she told Jim that she called off her wedding because of him. You should have seen Karen’s face, she looked like she was going to kill someone on the ride home!” And Toby glanced up to see Jim trying to put his hand on Karen’s arm, and her jerking it away, and he wished that his email had gone through the day before.


“Yeah,” Toby mumbled. “I heard.”


When Jim was still going to go to the interview in New York, Toby figured that it was time to try again to ask Pam out. But she was jittery all day, wondering if anyone had heard from Jim, or if they had heard who had gotten the job, and he wanted to wait until she calmed down, or until Jim got the job (because Toby figured he was a shoe-in). Towards the end of the day, he got up to go find her and ask her out, when the door opened and Jim walked in purposefully.


“Hey Jim! How’d the interview go?” Phyllis asked.


“Oh, I don’t think I’ll get it,” Jim said shrugging. Toby noticed that he didn’t seem too upset. “Do you know where Pam is?” And Phyllis’ eyes lit up and she grinned and told Jim she thought Pam was being interviewed in the conference room, and Toby watched as Jim crossed over and knocked on the door and interrupted, something that hardly anyone ever did, and Toby strained a little to hear what Jim was saying, and all he caught was,


“It’s a date.” And Jim closed the door, and a huge smile crossed his face, and Toby knew that he should have asked her months ago, because it was too late now.


Which was the story of his life, really.





He likes Gwen the accountant.


She smiles a lot and laughs a lot and she has the good sense to see that Sasha is pretty much the greatest kid ever, and that makes her pretty smart.


They go on three dates before he invites her back to his apartment and pours her a glass of wine and they talk about things that they had always wished they could do, and the things they wished they had never done.


She tells him that she’s always wanted to go to Prague, and listens to him when he tells her about Costa Rica and how awful it was, and how stupid it was.


“What made you just go and do it?” She asks, and he almost shrugs, but instead decides that his marriage failed because he and his ex-wife never talked, not really, and so tells her the truth which involves that stupid night Jim had them stay late to work, and Toby’s hand inappropriately on Pam’s knee, and how he thinks that his attraction to Pam was just that she was nice to him, which is pathetic on so many levels.


And then she kisses him, squarely on the mouth and her hands are on either side of his face and he tangles them in her hair.




It's not as if he doesn't feel badly about writing that memo about office PDA's and outing Pam and Jim. Or about writing that report up on Jim spending too much time up at reception desk.

He's not sure when he became this bitter, and part of him blames Jim for stealing the girl he liked, and part of him blames Pam for not seeing that he had a crush on her, and part of him blames Michael for being so awful, but the bigger part of him knows that it's his own fault.

He doesn't bring Gwen to the office yet to meet everyone. It's too soon in their relationship (if you can call it that. Toby would like to call it that, but he's not sure if Gwen wants to call it that, and he's too afraid of pushing her away like he's kind of pushed everyone else away). He likes having Gwen around, but he's nervous around her.

He's gotten so used to having other shoe drop, he doesn't realize he's been holding his breath waiting for it until he gets the wedding invitation for Jim and Pam's nuptials and Gwen asks him if he's going, and then smiles at him with a shy smile and asks him if he can take a date.




He splurges on a room overlooking the Falls, and he takes her to dinner and to Ripley’s Believe it Or Not.


She holds his hand when they announce Pam and Jim as husband and wife, and watch as Jim dips his new bride. She gives his hand a squeeze when Michael asks if she’s his cousin.


“Like you know, when you can’t get a date to the prom and your mom has to ask your aunt to tell your cousin that they have to go with you because you already rented the tux and you can’t go by yourself?” Gwen has that look on her face that Toby recognizes as the one people get when they first meet Michael and can’t believe he’s serious.


When they are on their way back to Scranton, Gwen thanks him for bringing her and he smiles at her, a genuine smile, and thinks about how much nicer it was to go to the wedding with someone instead of going alone with a card signed, “Congrats! Hope your marriage turns out better than mine!”


He likes to think that Bitter Toby has moved on, and starts to hope about things that he hadn’t let himself hope about in long time, futures and marriages and maybe half-siblings for Sasha and traveling back to Costa Rica and actually seeing it, and he wonders how long new Optimistic Toby can stay.


bashert is the author of 37 other stories.
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