Pam pulled into the office parking lot and found a parking space—not a difficult task on a weekend, but made more so by the unspoken compulsion she felt to avoid the spot where she and Jim had spoken the night before. She unlocked the doors and felt rather than saw Larissa (who had quickly realized that in a bench-seat pickup the middle, not the shotgun, was where she had to be to keep Jim’s and Pam’s eyes off each other) pushing her brother out the other door while Pam herself hopped down from the driver’s side. She exchanged glances with Jim as Larissa took off like a rocket to the front doors of the office. He shrugged, a “what can you do” expression on his face, and leaned against the truck watching not his sister but her.

Something about watching Jim lean against Roy’s truck felt wrong to Pam, but the wrongness wasn’t with Jim—it was with the truck. She tried to imagine him leaning up against a smaller car—maybe a Honda Accord, or one of those little Toyota Yarises she’d recently started seeing around—and the feeling was...domestic. She remembered her great aunt, who had married a farmer years ago and, on the day of his funeral, had sold the farm, the farmhouse, and the pickup truck and moved immediately to the (still small) nearest city. She, like Pam, was a petite woman, and she’d said something about “owning a car and a house that fit her.” Pam had never really understood what she meant until now. Maybe it wasn’t just Roy who hadn’t been right for her. Maybe the life she’d been leading hadn’t been the right one either.

“Got it!”

Jim and Pam both started to hear Larissa’s joyful shout and turned to see her holding the door to the building open. As Jim gestured for her to go first, Pam heard Larissa whisper into her ear “it was already open, but don’t tell him.” She exchanged a conspiratorial wink with the other woman before pressing the button for the elevator.

“What are you doing?” Larissa hissed in a stage whisper. “Don’t you know that for a covert operation you always use the stairs?”

Jim closed the door carefully behind him. “She’s right, Beesly. Basic secret agent stuff.”

Pam looked between the two of them and decided she was not letting them leave her out of this. “Oh, you must both have missed the day in spy school when they taught us to call the elevator down first so that anyone watching will assume we’re coming up that way.” She turned to the stairwell and cracked the door open. “But I completely agree, the spirit of the thing still requires the stairs.”

They moved the stairs, Larissa doing a passable Charlie’s Angels-style kick-turn at each landing as if she were covering the stairs with a non-existent gun. Jim and Pam followed at a slightly more sedate pace, exchanging smiles at her obvious enthusiasm. “I see where you get it from, Halpert,” Pam whispered to him as Larissa ostentatiously gestured to them that it was safe to move forward.

“Don’t fall for Larissa’s propaganda.” He grinned down at her. “I’m the big brother, so I’m the original, after all.”

“But you know girls grow up faster than boys.”

“Would you care to rephrase that statement?” He gestured at Larissa, who was clearly having the time of her life, but whom not even Pam (not even to score a point) could accuse of acting in the most grown-up of manners right now.

She sniffed in what she hoped was quiet dignity. “I simply assumed that for a Halpert, that was adult behavior.”

“Careful, you’re starting to sound like Dwight.” Sticking his tongue out took any potential sting out of Jim’s words.

Larissa stuck her head out over the stairs. “Pam! Do you have a bobby pin?”

Pam stuck a hand into her hair—god, she still hadn’t showered or anything...what must Jim and Larissa think of her?—and pulled out one of the few pins that had survived a night on the couch and the ensuing morning. She hurried forward to the landing, where Larissa was staring carefully at the door to Dunder Mifflin.

“Great!” Larissa surprised Pam by sticking the pin into her hair, instead of using it on the door in any way. “Now, can you distract my brother so it looks like I’ve cracked this door too?” Following Larissa’s gaze, Pam noticed that the door was actually slightly ajar—just as she remembered leaving it when she’d slipped out after the kiss the night before. She grinned at the younger woman. “Leave it to me.”

Larissa made a face. “Just don’t tell me what you do.” The grimace turned into a grin. “Who am I kidding? Go make my brother’s day.” She pushed Pam gently. “Quickly, before he sees.”

“Before I see what?” Jim rounded the stairwell with a long, lanky stride. Pam let Larissa’s light shove move her in his direction, and his arm came very naturally around her shoulders.

“Before you see my super-secret technique.” Somehow Larissa had the pin back out of her hair and was kneeling in front of the door. “I don’t want you claiming you ‘taught me’ this like I don’t know anything myself.”

“Let’s leave her to it.” Pam wasn’t sure what had possessed her—maybe it was the way Larissa just assumed that she would distract Jim in a way that would “make his day,” maybe it was the realization that in a moment they’d be back in the same place where he’d kissed her just a few hours ago, maybe it was the heady feeling that as long as they were in between the parking lot and the office again they were somehow in a liminal zone where last night hadn’t fully resolved itself yet and she could rewrite history—but she surprised herself by practically dragging Jim back around the bend in the stairs, perching awkwardly on the horizontal part of the handrail at the landing below, and pulling his face down to hers.

Well. She couldn’t speak for Jim’s level of distraction, but she was certainly completely unaware of anything happening up by the doorway right now. And from the way he was reacting—initial shock followed immediately by bringing his warm, strong arms around her to steady her on the railing and leaning down to make it easier for her to ravish his mouth with hers—she was pretty sure he was at least moderately focused on her as well. She could get used to this, to being able to just kiss Jim like it was the most natural thing in the world, like she belonged right there in his arms...which, she considered, she did.

“Oh my god, you two, get a room!” Larissa was back at the top of the stairs, her arms crossed. Once the two of them had pulled enough apart that she was apparently satisfied, she mouthed “good job” down at them. Pam would have assumed it was at her—after all, Larissa had told her to distract Jim—but Jim obviously thought it was directed at him, since he responded by mouthing back “thanks.”

What could she say, she liked looking at his lips.

Once they were into the Dunder Mifflin offices, it was a simple matter of booting up Pam’s computer, logging into the remote company directory, and dialing Jan’s number. Pam abruptly felt awkward about listening to that conversation—did she really want to know how much Jim would divulge about why it was he was staying?—so she dragged Larissa across to examine which of Dwight’s possessions they could most profitably send on a trip to Stamford.

They’d just decided on his nunchucks, which he wasn’t supposed to have in the building anyway and which would therefore be the most amusing to make him admit that he’d lost (having discarded the bobbleheads because, in Larissa’s words, taking one would “make the others lonely” and his actual work stuff because “he’d just replace it”) when Jim finally hung up the phone.

“Well?” Pam was too focused on what Jim had or hadn’t just learned that she didn’t even bother to call “jinx” on Larissa when they said the word at the same time.

Jim ambled towards her and Larissa. “So, what are we kidnapping?”

“Jim.” Pam glared. “What did Jan have to say?”

“Oh, that?” He took the nunchucks out of Larissa’s hand and looked them over before handing them back. “Nice choice.” He slid between the two of them and leaned on Dwight’s desk. “I’m staying.”

“Oh thank god.” Pam collapsed against him and felt herself being folded into his warm embrace. She hadn’t wanted to admit quite how nervous she’d been that something would go wrong—that somehow they wouldn’t get Jan, or that she’d say it was impossible to cancel the transfer, or something. She looked up at Jim as he continued. “Jan was disappointed but she reminded me she’d told me yesterday to talk to people here, and she’d always figured I’d find a reason to stay if I took her advice.”

Jan had said that? Pam’s respect for their boss’s sensitivity to the world around her rose several notches. Apparently she’d been paying attention around the women in the workplace seminar, or on one of the occasions when she’d followed up with Pam about the internship she’d never managed to convince her to take.

“Aww, that’s awesome.” Larissa was grinning ear to ear. “Now, let’s blow this popsicle stand.” She swung the nunchucks around and headed for the door, and Jim and Pam followed—or at least she thought they were going to. But Jim still had his arm around her shoulder, and he sudden stopped short.

“Just...right there.” She realized he’d stopped her at his desk, right where she’d been last night. She saw a dark light in his eyes that she thought she recognized, and thought she might just know her cue.

“Listen, Jim...” As she’d thought, he didn’t let her finish the thought this time either, and his lips were on hers. They kissed again, sweetly this time, until she put her hands on his chest and he drew back.

She could see him tense to ask the same question he’d asked last night, but she forestalled him.

“Jim, I’m in love with you.”

A giant grin broke out over his face, and he leaned in for another kiss.

“Come on you two.” Larissa’s head popped back around the doorway. “These nunchucks won’t take themselves to Stamford.”

Pam looked up at Jim. “I’m glad you’re not transferring there.”

“So am I,” he whispered in her ear. “But how do you feel about a quick overnight visit? Just long enough to visit a certain storage locker with a certain piece of weaponry?”

She pretended to ponder the question. “It is still early.”

“Just the start of the weekend, in fact,”

“Let’s do it. But first...”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to change out of this dress.”