Sometimes Pam wished she were a little…thicker? Not physically, no (that kind of language always brought her back to some very unhappy middle- and high-school days she had no desire to relive at all), but in that very British way of talking about someone’s mind. She wished she didn’t pick up on things; didn’t think about them afterwards; didn’t notice people and their emotions.

Right now, sitting in her bed next to her snoring fiancé, she wished she weren’t awake. And that, since she was awake, her subconscious mind hadn’t taken this as the particular moment to unveil some things that it had noticed over the evening’s festivities. And if it had to pick now? She wished she were a bit thicker. A little less aware. Because she could already tell she wasn’t going to get a lick of sleep.

Why did she have to choose now to notice how drunk Roy had been last night? Well, she could actually answer that one. Roy was drunk…a lot. More than she’d been letting herself realize, really. She thought back to the Dundies (ignoring, for the moment, the time she’d spent with Jim that evening—she knew she’d come back to it, she always did, but it wasn’t the point right now) and remembered that even at an event with alcohol, he’d been itching to move on to the next place they’d serve him more beers even before the awards themselves were presented. He’d gotten his two drinks and Chilis had told him to wait and then he’d been gone. And he was spending more and more nights out with the boys, not always playing poker or video games or basketball (how long since he’d been out to the Y?) but always, always drinking. She didn’t notice it most of the time for two reasons: first, and most obvious, it had somehow become the baseline for his behavior, the standard by which she judged him (and how sad was that? Why was it that the time her mother visited work and he’d dressed up with a sweater had been the highlight of the year in terms of his care and consideration? Why wasn’t that expected? How had she gotten here?); the second was that, to be honest, and when was a good time to be brutally honest if not three a.m. on the day you set the date for your wedding, she didn’t spend a lot of her time thinking about Roy.

Well, scratch that. She spent a lot of time thinking about Roy. About how he liked his food cooked, about getting home in time to do it, about what he’d want to do and how they could do it, about how wheedle him into doing something important to her (and about how to deal with it when she failed to do so, like that internship). But she didn’t think a lot about Roy as Roy. She realized that for all she wanted to pin her current dark-of-night dissatisfaction on him, she couldn’t do so exclusively. What kind of fiancée was she if she didn’t care about her fiancé’s well-being? If she let him (or didn’t object to him) slob off his responsibilities and go get drunk? Not to say that Roy’s problems were her fault—he was his own adult, after all—but what did it say about their relationship that she didn’t really think about him as an independent human to interact with? He wasn’t the climate, he wasn’t the traffic—he was Roy. And she ought to think of him as Roy. Why didn’t she? When did that stop?

But noticing how drunk Roy was was only the start. Had he even known she was in the room when he’d…well, not proposed, they’d been engaged for three years, but, actually, in his mind it was probably proposed, because he seemed to forget that all the time…but anyway, when he’d set the date? She’d just stepped in from talking to Jim…would he have noticed if she hadn’t? Or would he have swayed in a way that she thought then was emotion plus the boat’s rocking but might just have been alcohol, brayed out a date into the cabin, and blinked uncomprehendingly when she didn’t appear to take him up on it? She’d jumped at it, practically leapt out of her seat, because it was a day she’d been longing for for three long years…but should she? Why was it an accomplishment to get Roy to set a date, like marrying her was a chore equivalent to taking the last gas out of the mower in the winter before the cold set in so it wouldn’t oxidize?

And while she was at it, what was going on in that moment with Jim? She hadn’t been cold. Well, she had been but it hadn’t been from the weather. It was from staring at him and realizing that if he kissed her…she might not have pulled away. Hell, she wouldn’t have pulled away at all. And she’d shivered. Because he really looked like he might do it. That long, interminable silence had been so intense she’d felt a chill run down her spine and she’d chickened out and fled.

And why was she thinking about Jim kissing her? Why was she so sure he was thinking about it too? It was probably silly, at least on that end: he’d brought Katy to the cruise, after all, and while she’d teased him about dating a cheerleader (and don’t even get her started on Roy’s excitement when he’d learned that little tidbit) she couldn’t help but feel like…well, like she hadn’t felt since before Roy Anderson, football star, asked her out in high school. Like the cheerleaders got who they wanted and life was unfair. Like even someone like Jim (and when had Jim become her “even someone” example?) preferred them to her, and there was nothing she could do. So when he’d looked like he might kiss her she hadn’t really let herself believe it was true, because the counterexample was right inside the cabin, doing shots with her own example of why she couldn’t possibly be interested in the kiss herself, both using some sort of scuba mask to do something idiotic together while she and Jim stood on the deck.

But for all Katy’s cute, gorgeous, cheerleaderish qualities, she’d seen something in Jim’s eyes…something she’d seen when he showed her the bonus gifts in her teapot (and that she’d carefully avoided seeing, she now admitted, when she initially chose the video iPod over that same teapot); something she’d seen when he’d noticed she was hanging back in his room at the party at his house (and what had possessed her to do that? Or rather, why was she possessed of this insatiable curiosity about Jim Halpert, since that was clearly what had motivated that choice?); something that had blazed out visibly and frighteningly when he’d joked about their “first date” on the Dunder Mifflin rooftop. There was something there.

But it wasn’t something she was sure of, comfortable with, familiar with like what she had with Roy. For all his flaws, he was her rock, and Jim was…Jim was a breath of air, to be sure, but was it the kind of air you drew in to savor the freshness, or the last gasp before you drowned? Roy had been her dream for a decade, and she wasn’t sure what Jim was. He was still together with Katy, for gods sakes, and if even Roy had made it clear he’d “jump on that” if he weren’t with her…what about the man who was probably jumping on it right now as she thought?

Her cheeks flashed crimson as she turned over. It was all stupid anyway. Maybe Roy had been drunk off his ass. Maybe Jim had been staring at her just willing her to kiss him like she thought he wanted to kiss her. Or maybe she was just getting jitters now that she had the actual date set (oh my god, June 10, so close and yet so far). Maybe this was what they meant by “cold feet,” the sorts of thoughts you had to overcome to make a marriage work and last. Or happen. She finally had what she wanted from Roy. Why was she over-thinking it?

Thoughts like these consumed her night, with neither conclusion nor rest in reach. This would all be so much easier if she didn’t notice things.