“I just think I should tell you that I’ve sort of started seeing someone.”

The air is cold. Her hands are cold. Her ears are cold. The keys she clutches are cold. She makes a gesture, something she intended to be nonchalant but doesn’t quite come out that way. He is looking at the ground, at his shoes in the snow. His hands are in his pockets in that familiar way he has. She can see him leaning against the counter in the kitchen, hands in his pockets while he watches her make her tea. She can see him in Michael’s office, hands in his pockets while he nods and accepts a joke that falls flat on the desk. She can see him now, hands in his pockets while the air between them grows stiff and awkward. When did they stop knowing what to say around each other? When did he become so unsure of her?

“Oh, that’s totally fine,” she hears herself say. What else is there to do? She tries to smile but it doesn’t feel right. “You can do whatever you want.” She doesn’t regret the tinge of animosity that laces her words, doesn’t regret the hot flush of anger that colours her neck beneath her scarf. She only regrets the way his mouth twitches up in that awkward way of his, when he doesn’t know what to say or how to think or what to do. She only regrets that she has made him feel like she is someone he can’t talk to. But if she’s honest with herself, that happened a long time ago.

“Oh,” he says. The sound falls like dead weight. “Okay. Good.” He exhales, and she thinks it is supposed to be a laugh but it doesn’t quite fill the space like she knows his laughter does. This space between them that feels too wide, too deep, too insurmountable. She used to know what to do with all this knowledge about his three types of laughter, his seven types of smirks and the one way he used to look at her. But now she feels with terror the weight of this knowledge sliding into the space between them, useless, unwanted, gone forever.

She looks at him, sees the way his nose has gone pink against the cold. Sees the way his hair still falls into his eyes and sticks out behind his ears. Sees the way his eyes dart around her, over her, through her, resting on anything but her face. She pulls at the memory of the way he used to take her in from the other side of her desk, the image tucked away like a guilty pleasure. He does not do that now. She wishes he would.

“We’re friends,” she says, and it is the only true thing she can bear to admit in this moment. The only true thing she thinks he could hear without being lost to her forever. “We’ll always be friends.” She studies his reaction, making sure he knows she is sincere. She expects relief, or a smile, or a soft nickname uttered into the crisp winter night, but she watches as his face closes and his eyes fall somewhere to her immediate left.

“Right.” The single syllable uttered with a nod of the head and a step backwards. Away from her. She feels the sting of rejection pulse through her. Feels the immovable weight of knowing she has done something wrong.

She feels her legs take her away, move her through the snow and the cold and the dark to her car. She glances behind her, sees him turning away, doesn’t want him to leave.

“It’s good to have you back,” she calls, and this is a small truth, too. She doesn’t quite catch his reply as he turns his back to her. Maybe too small.

Her car is cold and her hands are stiff and she knows she should just drive home but she can’t bring herself to put her key in the ignition, Her stomach rolls with the boiling anxiety she tries to fight off with slow, even breathing. Tries not to analyse what just happened, the instantaneous degradation of a friendship through words saying the exact opposite. She has waited all this time, made all these excuses, wondered what it would be like to set eyes on him again. And she has been sorely disappointed.

The weight of her mobile in the pocket of her coat is suddenly hot against her. She digs it out, finds his name, calls his number. If only she could tell him, if only she could ask him to come back, come back properly, completely, truly. His car is gone and she doesn’t know if she wants to hear his voice or not, but then the recording is telling her that the line is engaged and she feels the prickle of tears in her eyes and nose. He is gone, like he never came back in the first place, like he was never the only person to eat the jellybeans at her desk or the only person to ask her how she was doing or the only person to look at her and truly see her, see her and value her and love her for what she was.

The drive home is short and silent. The darkness seems to encase her on all sides, pushing against her, threatening her with the truth of her loneliness. She sits in her car space beneath her apartment building for a moment and bathes in the blurred orange glow of the dashboard. She catches the image of her forehead in the rearview mirror, sees her pale skin and fuzzy hair, feels the unfamiliar weightlessness of her left hand as she pushes open the car door and tugs her handbag out behind her.

She takes the stairs tonight, all six flights to get to her apartment. Her tiny, one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen and a living room and a balcony that looks out over a parking lot. She is so tired, nudging the door open with her shoulder, and it is only six o’clock. The darkness of winter hangs over her even as she turns on the lights and draws the blinds. Even as she lights a candle, slips out of her pencil skirt and arranges the blanket comfortably around her on the couch. She is seeing the figures move on screen but cannot distinguish them inside the blurry fog descending over her eyes. She blinks, sniffs, lets a pathetic tear escape and dangle from her chin. She wipes it away in a huff. She will not cry for him, not here alone watching a program she doesn’t even recognise.

Her mobile is buzzing. It is tucked somewhere within her blanket, and she can feel it vibrating through the whole couch. She snatches it up, answers without checking the caller ID. Feels her breath catch in her throat.

“I saw your missed call,” he says. Waits for her to respond. “What’s up?” Fills the silence.

“I, uh...” She doesn’t know what is up or what is down or what is anything. “I just forgot to say, before, that I miss having fun with you.” It is out and said and irrevocable by the time her honesty forces a blush up into her cheeks. She is frozen with the fear that he will exhale, utter some sort of goodbye and hang up, leaving her here alone again. She doesn’t know what to read into his silence, doesn’t know if she should be reading into anything at all.

“Me too,” comes his voice. She doesn’t breathe. “Remember that time we threw assorted items of office stationery into Dwight’s mug when he wasn’t around?”

She smiles. Remembers that he can’t see her. Forces a laugh. “I still do that sometimes,” she admits softly.

“Well, with your aim, Beesly, I’m surprised he doesn’t just write you up for littering.”

There it is, a soft nickname uttered into the crisp winter night.

“Excuse me, Mr Halpert, but I don’t remember you being much better. What was your average, one out of five?”

He laughs. It is a sound that fills her ear and her heart. It warms her blood. Makes her smile wider. “Remember that time we convinced Dwight to buy a handbag from that sales girl?” She remembers Katy more than she remembers the prank, remembers her red hair and her soft eyes and Michael’s assertion that she was ‘Pam 6.0’. Remembers the way she laughed when Jim tried to get her to. Remembers telling Jim he could just give her his extension.

“I have never seen a man more proud to be the owner of a female fashion accessory,” he replies, skipping over her deliberate slight at Katy with a finesse she didn’t know he possessed.

“And do you remember when-”

“Sorry, Pam, I’ve got to go,” he interrupts. Someone is knocking on a door outside in the hallway, and she jumps. There is a voice in the background, a voice she barely recognises. 

“Oh, okay, well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, and the words leave an acrid taste on her tongue, awkward and false.

“Yeah, see you.”

And she realises that the voice is Karen’s, and that she can still hear it from the other side of her door, that she can hear laughing and the jingling of keys. She stands, uncertain, unwilling to believe. And through the hole in her door, she can see him and that coat he has owned forever, and blocking him is Karen. And he opens the door wider and invites her in. And she doesn’t know what is worse, the fact that he brought her home or that he lives across the hall.