“Jimbo, you know I don’t like to have to discipline my family, but…”

He wasn’t often called into Michael’s office.

Okay, correction. He wasn’t often called into Michael’s office for office related things.

Relationship advice topped the list, closely followed by What should I do about Dwight? and Do you think I could make it as a career magician? You could take care of Dunder Mifflin when I leave, right? following closely behind.

Today though, Michael wore an expression they rarely saw, one with his eyebrows pinched together, his fingers clasped in a serious demeanor. Something very boss like that took Jim back in time over the past weeks since his return to Dunder Mifflin Scranton. Had he done something wrong?  Were there new protocols he wasn’t adhering to?

“I know you need time to adjust to being back, and seeing Pam again has to be hard on you, but Jim, you’ve been…distracted. I don’t really know how else to put it.”

He had to bite his lip, look away from his oh so concerned boss while he touched on embarrassment, fully aware of what Michael was talking about.

It was Pam.

Pam was his distraction.

And now that she was his, it was all so much worse.

In the past, he had boundaries.

She was engaged, so being at her desk more than a certain amount throughout the day would look suspicious.

When Roy was upstairs, he was pinned to his work.

If he’d already taken a candy break that hour, he held back.

But now? Now all bets were off.

And apparently his work was suffering enough for a disciplinary hearing.

Suddenly, he felt like he was in eighth grade again, called into Mr. Avery’s office because his girlfriend of three weeks, April McGovney, the love of his life, had broken his heart, and he, Jimmy Halpert, straight-A student and star of the basketball team and organizer of the Big Buddies program with the special education department, hadn’t done a damn thing aside from scowl in the past ten school days.

“Jimbo, you’re my family, and you know I don’t like to have to discipline my family, but…”

The call this time was like a personal attack.

I know everything with Pam has been so hard.

It’s been hard on us, too.

I’ve tried as hard as I can.

Corporate is breathing down my neck.

If you don’t start coming back to work, they’re going to make me terminate you.

I can’t do that to my family, Jim.

Please don’t make me.

It wasn’t something he wanted to bring up with her. It would only cause her more stress and confusion, things she didn’t need at the end of her road here.

So instead, when he knocked on her door that morning, so much earlier than he was expected, she was confused to see him standing there in a button down and a tie instead of jeans and a t-shirt, his hair slightly styled rather than flat and rumpled.

His black dress shoes matched, making her thoughts drift to the night that one was accompanied by a black Nike.

His shoes didn’t even match.

He didn’t even notice.

His voice was soft and tentative as he told her things like I have to go into work today and I’m only a phone call away if you need anything and I can stop by as soon as I’m done, if you’d like that.

Her words were equally as distant though, hesitant as she let him know that My physical therapy is at four and My OT wants to meet with me and my parents after dinner and I think my friend Isabel is planning on stopping by.

They were both quiet, in the eerie golden glow of the sun still coming up, his aftershave and shampoo overwhelming the antiseptic.

It felt wrong, all wrong when his butt hit that desk chair with a squeak now slightly foreign, when he looked over to see an older woman in her place. The sad smiles and sympathetic nods of heads didn’t help, nor did the shoulder rubs and pats on his head.

Michael wanted him to show up, but he mentioned nothing about doing actual work.

But as the hours ticked by and his fingers were itching to do something, he found himself organizing expense reports and sifting through the paperwork that his coworkers had taken over in his absence.

After a lonely lunch, one whose seclusion he chose, he noticed her desk empty, the calls forwarded to voicemail while Ronnie took her break. He gulped down the huge lump in his throat, and took the familiar walk from his desk to reception.

Her things were right where she had left them on that day, right down to the unopened bag of Cheetos.

If we’re going to do this celebratory dinner right tonight, I don’t want to spoil my appetite. I’ll just save it for a snack on Monday.

He grimaced, fingering the edges of the orange bag as he sat down in her chair, too tall at Ronnie’s adjusted height. There were pictures tacked to the back wall, of Pam and Penny, Pam and her parents, and a new one--framed--of Jim.

“Remind me again why you need a picture of me behind your desk?” he teased, his eyes mortified at the goofy image that she was sealing into a new plastic frame. “I sit five feet away from you.”

“You do,” she admonished, placing the frame upright as he popped another jelly bean into his mouth. “But, on the off chance that you’re away from your desk, I’ll have this in your place.”

He shook his head, a goofy, tongue-sticking-out, one-eye-pinched-closed version of himself staring back at him.

“And out of all the options you have, you chose this one because…?”

“Because it’s my favorite.”

She shrugged, set the frame down, smiled at it, and made her way around the counter, brushing her fingers lightly against his as she passed him to head to the kitchen.

He was in the stairwell not moments later, hunched at the waist while he tried to catch his breath.

It should’ve been easier now. She was awake. She was going home soon. But she was still so far away, so distant from him, almost held back in his memories that he was afraid were going to slip away.

That thought alone had him clenching his eyes and gripping one arm around his gut while he balled the other into a fist and pressed it firmly to his lips to stifle a groan or a sob or whatever it was that was threatening to slip past his teeth.

He couldn’t lose her again.

Couldn’t. Lose her. Again.

But lunch was coming to an end and he’d already been warned once and he sure as hell wasn’t about to catch flack from Dwight when he sat back down at his desk. So he took some deep breaths, wiped furiously at the backs of his eyes, stared up into the ceiling, and pushed the air forcibly from his lungs before pushing past the glass-etched Dunder Mifflin, Inc. door.

The click-clacks of his fingers on the keyboard mingled with his heavy breathing, and he pinched his eyes, tightened his jaw, scrunched his lips, anything to shove down the emotions that were getting in the way of selling paper.

He could feel Dwight’s eyes upon him, and had an unwarranted threat on the tip of his tongue, a business appropriate Don’t fuck with me right now, man, in anticipation of quizzical mocking tones and unnecessary facts about head injuries and real men don’t cry.

All of those preconceived notions were exactly why he was caught off-guard when his strange coworker began to speak in a tone that was soft, respectable, almost kind.

“Mr. Harris called your line while you were at lunch. He was concerned about your absence over these past weeks. I informed him that you were out of the office due to a family issue, but that you still valued his place as a client. The order form has been drawn and placed. You’ll have to have Michael sign the commision check when you’ve double checked my work.”

He said it all without taking his eyes from his own computer screen, and true to his word, Jim found a carefully filled out form placed neatly to the side of his keyboard, a pen awaiting his signature.

At a loss for words, he sat with his mouth agape, blinking from the form to Dwight to the form and back again. It reminded him of a not so long ago occurrence, when Dwight had stepped in to save him from a raging Roy and denied him of thanks because it wasn’t necessary and therefore not accepted because someone was breaking the law and a whole crock of bullshit that just made him feel awkward for the rest of the day. But now, in the absence of any inherent violence, it was entirely uncharacteristic for Dwight to go out of his way to do much of anything that didn’t benefit him in some way.

So when he uttered a simple, sincere, “Thanks, Dwight” between their desks, it made his chest clench to see large, round eyes meet his behind thick, wire frames, and offer back a soft, “You’re welcome.”

He had his own bag of Cheetos for dinner while a late season Phillies game gave him something to listen to. He wanted to call her or text her or run himself to the hospital so badly, but he resisted, opting to text Penny instead, his How is she? responded to almost immediately with Tired, but good. Still a little sad. The doc said she can go home in two days.

It kept him sane for the next day of monotony at Dunder Mifflin.

When he got the text the next day from Penny, She was talking about you this morning. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind a visit, it took all of his energy to physically keep him in the chair rather than springing from it and trekking downtown to the hospital. He didn’t even go home to change his clothes once five o’clock struck.

She was sitting up in bed, chatting with one of the nurses whom he’d come to recognize from this hour in the night, her eyes wide with laughter and her hands resting on her thighs as she tipped her head back. He was staring, he knew it, but she was just so, so gorgeous without even trying. He couldn’t help it.

He was leaning against the door frame with a smug, boyish grin when she caught him, a new hue of pink adding to the spectrum that was beginning to even out across her cheeks. After the initial shock that had her lips open, she smiled, a hint of shy in the way that her eyes flicked to her lap.

“Hi.”

“Hey yourself,” he mused. “Care for some company?”

He didn’t fully entire the room until she was gesturing at the open chair, but once he was finally inside and sitting with his hands clasped between his knees and his head hung low to cover the smile that was eating him away, they were oddly quiet. It was a content silence, but one also filled with nerves, because he hadn’t actually spent a day without at least seeing her in months, and he wasn’t sure that he could manage opening his mouth without wanting to drown her in kisses or tell her how much he loved her. So he stayed silent, letting the buzz between them and the hum of the machines talk for them, until she spoke first.

“Wow, I didn’t realize this was a formal occasion. I would’ve worn something a little less frumpy if you’d given me some warning.”

She gestured between his formal office wear of dress-shirt-and-tie-and-shiny-shoes and her pair of sweatpants and an old Hanson concert t-shirt that Penny had brought for her to wear in place of a hospital gown.

“Oh, trust me, Pam, it doesn’t get any classier than MMMBop.”

She was giggling, and he was waggling his eyebrows, and all was righted in his world when they were chatting so easily, and she was telling him with wide but timid eyes that she was going home soon, and he was telling her that he was excited for her, and she was saying that she was nervous, but he was telling her that it would all be okay.

“Yeah, but like...you don’t understand, Jim. I haven’t actually stayed in my parent’s house, like in my old bedroom since high school. It’s just going to be…”

“Weird?”

“Very,” she chuckled nervously, fingering a loose thread on her cast. “I guess I’ve just been living with Roy so long that…”

She caught herself on several things as she trailed off, the first being that no, she wasn’t living with Roy, the second that she wasn’t actually with Roy, and the third being that little warning bell inside of her that seemed to go off anytime she brought up the subject in front of Jim. When her eyes snapped, searching his, she saw that flicker of pain, but he covered it well with a warm smile.

“I know,” he reassured her. “I mean, trust me, when I go home for Christmas, it’s still a wonder that good ol’ Betsy and Ger-Bear haven’t torn down the life-sized poster of Spud Webb that’s been on my wall since 1986.”

“Who’s Spud Webb?”

“Exactly.”

He was just so good at easing her tension, at making the pain and awkwardness of her whole screwed up situation melt away, that when her tummy flipped and her heart fluttered, she made a mental note to find out why before the pattern on his tie caught her eye and derailed her.

From far away, it was a red tie with blue speckles, but as her fingers moved of their own accord to pull the silky material from his chest, she found herself completely missing the way that his breath hitched as she asked, “Are those...crabs?”

He was at a loss for words, oxygen, a lot of things, when she had him by the tie, her eyebrows furrowed as her dainty fingers slid over his tie, effectively pulling him closer to the bed, as her eyes examined the pattern that she had picked out especially for him.

“Uh, y-yeah, they are,” was all he managed to choke out before his throat closed up and he had to bite his lip.

He wanted to close his eyes, rather than fixing them on the way that her nails, still painted sky blue from three days before the accident when she had trucked a box full of polishes and cotton balls and remover and Q-Tips to his apartment and painted her nails while he pretended not to watch, were scratching lightly over the tie. But he couldn’t. Couldn’t close his eyes or draw his gaze away. Instead, he was trained on her fingernails, on her furrowed brows, on the way her own pupils darted across the accessory that he’d quite honestly grabbed for blindly on his way out the door that morning.

“I bought you this tie.”

It was as simple as The sky is blue or Pick up milk on your way home, please.

But with this statement came tears in her lashes and fear in her eyes and question in the creases of her forehead.

He swallowed, doing his best not to jump at her recollection, not to kiss her forehead and praise her like a toddler who was finally able to write her ABC’s, doing his best to just shake his head up and down rapidly, to wrap his hand around her shaky fingers and let his throat rumble Mhm before he could actually form words.

“Yeah. You did.”

His voice had a slight chuckle, but it was also thick and laden with tears, and if she could see through her own eyes, she would’ve been able to tell how hard he was trying to hold them back. It was something about putting her hands to the tie that had her fingers pulsing with remembrance.

“I did it to make you fun of you, didn’t I?”

“You said soft shell crab is your favorite, but I didn’t have enough time to get any, so I figured this was the next best thing?”

“Kind of.”

“Yeah, but how am I supposed to eat this?” He chomped his teeth jokingly and overexaggeratedly around the silk, and she groaned and rolled her eyes back.

Her lips closed finally, a tight smile that was trembling slightly with an outpouring of memory and emotion.

“Ugh. Seriously, Jim. I was trying to do something nice and…”

“Hey, hey. I’m just teasing you. Don’t worry about it. If anything, you’ll just owe me now.”

“Oh really? When?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugged, “Tomorrow. Next week. Seven months from now.”

He rounded the island in his kitchen, plucking a handful of peanut M&M’s from the bowl that sat in its center.

Her sudden wide smile, the one that replaced the distress over dinner that he actually found incredibly adorable, made him cock his eyebrow.

“What?”

Her teeth were showing now, her lips stretched to capacity across her face.

“What? Seriously, Beesly, what?”

“Nothing. Just...don’t call me a dork, okay?”

“I’ll do my best.” His hands were up in protest between them.

“I just...I like the fact that we get to have a tomorrow. And a next week. And a seven months from now.”

His grin fell from intrigued to one that reached his eyes, and he had his arms wrapped around her in a second, his lips in the crook of her neck as she squeezed him back.

“Would it make you feel better if I called you my dork?”

“Do you...do you remember, Pam?”

Her hands were now in a vice grip around the tie, her eyes clenched shut as if trying to will the memory into reality, to solidify its existence, to hold it and cherish it.

“I...kind of?” she breathed, her eyes still locked, her expression tight. “It’s...I can see it in the store, on the shelf. And I know I was really excited to give it to you. You put it in your mouth?”

“I did,” he exclaimed, tears brimming as he scooted the chair even closer, tightening the grip he had around her fingers.

“Soft shell crab is your favorite.” She exhaled, covering his hand with her casted fingers and squeezing as well as she could. “I don’t know why that’s so important but suddenly it’s like the most valuable piece of information I’ve gotten all day.”

It was the heat of the moment that had him pushing their foreheads together, their noses scrunched in the middle, the air between them thick with quick moving oxygen as he wrapped his fingers around her more tightly.

“It is,” he breathed, “it is, and it’s probably the most trivial thing in the world but it is, and you remembered it. You remembered.”

“I did.”

His was so close now that when she opened hers and blinked back the tears, the gold in his eyes was shining.

Of course the night nurse chose that precise moment in time to come in with her nightly round of medications, but it gave him enough time to wipe the snot away with the back of his hand and take a few deep breaths. When he looked back up at her, she was smiling in his direction, one that said I can’t believe this, can you? and he could only shake his head, smiling, too.

Before he left, he flipped open her cell phone.

“Hey, uh...if you have any other, I don’t know, groundbreaking revelations, feel free to let me know.”

“Oh, right. Are you...I mean I have to assume you’re in here somewhere, right?”

“Yeah, I think I’m...right here,” he said, scrolling through her contacts.

“Why are you in my phone as Pickles?”

He chuckled, finding the wonder that had started to appear in her eyes again and holding onto it as tightly as he could.

“That is a story for another time.”

As he was lying in bed, awake that night out of pure giddiness rather than a heavy heart this time, his phone buzzed on his dresser.

1 New Text Message From: Swiss Cheese

Apparently tonight is the night of trivial remembrances. On the edge of sleep, it suddenly popped into my head that Spud Webb is the shortest man to ever win the NBA dunk contest. Why, exactly, you chose to bother me with that sort of information is beyond me, but what’s even more beyond me is the fact that this is what I happened to remember. You are a goof.

He clacked back Hey now, do not drag the name of Anthony Jerome Webb through the mud! Lol. You’re such a dork, Beesly. Get some sleep.

Her belly was warm and her head was a good kind of fuzzy.

She remembered.

She remembered that Jim Halpert’s favorite food was soft shell crab, and that she bought him a tie, and that Spud Webb was the shortest man to ever win the NBA dunk contest. It didn’t matter to her, but apparently eight-year-old Jim Halpert was floored with this information, and somewhere in the creeping recesses of her memory, that made her excited, too.

It was one of those strange sensations where her body took over, and she didn’t know why, but the blush overwhelmed her when she started to type back Yes, but I’m your dork.