Spoilers: post-Casino Night
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, not mine.
Authors Note: I rediscovered this story recently, written in the summer after Casino Night when we didn't know what would happen with Jim and Pam. (Remember those days?) It's a little dated and AU at this point, but it still says something to me.
---
Her ceiling was uneven. Little tongues of plaster, dropping toward the floor, cast small patterns of light and shadow that radiated from the lamp by the headboard. She followed the short, pointed shadows carefully, looking upward, feeling that her mom's old 70s style lamp had created a miniature replica of Starry, Starry Night on her ceiling - a curved, line here, pointing out the next destination - here! it pointed casually. Go here!
The next day, she painted the wall opposite her bed purple.
Bursts of inspiration were hard to maintain. Pam could feel herself drifting and didn't know what to do, didn't know how to stop herself from prodding her newfound loneliness, tonguing it like a loose tooth. Her apartment was small, basic, and experienced. She liked the odd character it had, liked the echo of tenants before, found in the wax running down the side of the stove and the scuffed carpet near the front door. She hated how quiet it was sometimes. She hated the feeling that she had locked herself in this apartment, that it was her own choice, and there was a world out there she was shunning without knowing how to reach it. She hated that she had not slept alone in five years, and had forgotten how.
Every morning, she woke up to her alarm clock, showered, did her hair, and ate breakfast. She was grateful for her job. It gave a structure to her days, and forced her into routines of care that she knew would be all too easy to discard.
Actually being at work was another problem altogether. She was aware of Roy, working in the warehouse beneath her feet. The situation was too tender and explosive for interaction, but they were both too proud, or too ingrained in habit, to do other than keep working for the same company. Their silences and glances were tense, and awkward.
Opposite her was Jim's empty desk. Not quite empty, though - the monitor still sat on the desk, its blue cord curled sadly in a tail behind. The phone bore a post-it note with a list of frequently called numbers; the drawers still held pencils and bits of gummy eraser, an almost dry marker, twisted paperclips, a half used packet of jello folded in upon itself. Sometimes she found herself staring at his empty desk. Sometimes she found herself avoiding looking at it for days at a time.
One particularly bad day, Michael got to her more than she should have let him, and she stood up with dignity to walk to the ladies room and cry small, quiet sobs in the second stall. She heard the door open, and Phyllis's tentative, "Pam?"
"Sorry," she said, and flushed the toilet while she wiped her eyes and bucked up. "Just one of those days, you know?" Phyllis nodded and patted her tentatively, gently on the shoulder.
That night, when she got home, she took out a black marker and sat at the bottom left corner of her large, shockingly purple wall. She twisted her hair back in a knot, and leaned forward to place the tip of the marker at the exact corner, then took a silent moment before bringing the marker swiftly upward in a slight curve, then another curve so the line crossed back down upon itself. Then she let herself drift into the artistic haze she had spent so much time in during high school, balancing light and dark, drawing curlicues, using line to evoke feeling, and letting the lines evolve into trees and chairs and faces, bits of expression all abstract and strung together like small, dark pearls.
When she had filled four square foot of wall in this fashion, she gathered her courage together enough to call about the graphic arts internship in New York. There was an awkward moment when Jan could not place her name and Pam was forced to explain her position to provide a point of reference, and a moment of panic when Pam realized she would need to gather a portfolio of her work to apply. Her mother helped her piece the portfolio together, with her few newer drawings and her strongest older ones, patiently helping her sort through this piece of her life and calling her "Honey" more times than strictly necessary.
The first time she drove to New York, her purple wall was half-filled with a dark, spreading infestation of itching, crawling lines and circles and thoughts.
Slowly, amazingly, Pam felt life stabilizing around her. She no longer felt the need to come home at five o'clock and lie on her bed, killing time by half-napping and thinking drowsy, aimless thoughts. She felt bits of her old cheerful, cynical view of work bubbling up again, blessedly easier to maintain.
One night she sat at home, staring at her phone. It would be so easy.
"Jim... it's Pam. Hey. I've missed you. What are you up to?"
and
"Roy and I broke up."
Said casually, somehow - no expectations, no way to avoid the memory of the night, the last time they really spoke. The memory of what he had said, and what she'd slapped away with the desperation of somebody who doesn't understand what is really happening.
She called her mother instead to kill the sudden upsurge of loneliness.
---
One day she looked up and Jim was back.
He was standing in front of the desk he had abandoned, carefully unpacking small items and not looking at her direction. His lanky body was arranged in an unspoken message she'd never seen before - the shoulder closest to her slumped a little inward, defensively, his eyes held carefully down as he reassembled the pieces of his working life in front of him. The Stamford branch had been downsized and consolidated into the Scranton office. Several other people, new faces, looked warily about and found empty desks of their own. Michael greeted each person far too loudly, caring on in an immediately casual manner that was not returned. Hearing Jim's voice as he spoke to Michael was a shock to her system. She busied herself behind her computer and watched him closely but quietly. She wrote several emails throughout the day, ranging from casual to full confessional, but sent none. When it was time to leave for the day, she waited until Jim was putting on his jacket, and then quickly left behind him, grabbing the elevator at the last moment.
"Hi, Pam." His voice was carefully casual.
"Jim... I... how are you doing?" She winced at her own awkwardness.
She watched his face as he talked, his expressive face and well-known mannerisms. She told Jim that she was out of the office sometimes during the week doing the internship in New York. He said that was great for her, great to hear. And, in the quickest way possible, because it was impossible to avoid, that her and Roy. Were over. His eyes flickered at that, but he settled a mask of over them quickly. But she noticed. They said goodbye at the elevator, and walked to their respective cars.
As she drove home to her apartment, she felt a slow, blossoming, tentative feeling of hope rising within her. She knew what had happened between them, and she could feel the hurt in him. She knew what would need to happen between them would be slow, and maybe painful, but she could feel... something.
She felt, for the first time, a path opening up before her, and (better still) it was a path she already knew how to travel - friendship. They still shared that, as tender and hurt as the connection was at the moment. She knew how to be Jim's friend, and she was determined to be the sort of person he deserved, this time.
This time, she would know what their friendship meant.
That night, she sat on the floor in her apartment and stared up at her wall. It was more black than purple at this point, crawling lines and bits of realism shaded in. She wondered what Jim would think of it, thought about showing it to him and flushed a little at how intimate that sounded.
She decided that he would be surprised, and then intrigued by the wall - that he would lean in close to examine the details, with his hands pushed into his pocket and his head craned forward. She imagined him, lanky and tall and a little gawky, standing in her apartment, looking around cautiously. The image made her terribly happy, made her breath catch.
She traced a black line in the bottom corner with her finger, and smiled.
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