Jim was swimming in the open ocean. That was how he knew it was a dream.

He would never swim in the open ocean. He would barely swim, period. A pool was fine—but he never really swam in them. You existed near them. You dipped into them for relief, or to hang with friends, or something like that. Something chill, relaxed, easy.

Swimming was the opposite. Not that he couldn’t swim. Betsy and Gerald Halpert had been insistent that none of their children were going to drown, thank you very much, not when the YMCA was just down the street and had such reasonable classes. Tom and Larissa had taken to water like baby turtles finding their way down to the beach and never looking back; Pete had been a normal swimmer; Jim had been like the eggshell left behind on the beach. But like a turtle eggshell, he still could float, and if the tide pulled him out to see he probably wouldn’t go under immediately. His parents had decided that was enough, and so had he. He could swim competently enough that if the Wallenpaupack Princess had gone down he could have saved himself, and maybe someone else if that person also knew how to swim.

Pam Beesly did. He knew because he’d asked her once, in passing, about the dangers of a pirate life, oddly enough (he’d been singing Gilbert and Sullivan under his breath and she’d called him out). She’d mentioned that she knew how to swim “as long as I start on top of the water,” which was something like his own experience, and he’d avoided any further followup because even at that point (fairly early in their friendship, actually) his mind had immediately filled with images of her dressed for that activity, and he’d needed to change the subject or not stand up for an hour.

As if his subconscious had conjured it up, and of course it had since he was aware this was a dream he was apparently incapable of waking up from, there was Pam, dressed not in the lascivious (or even vaguely revelatory) costumes he’d fantasized about for days after that conversation, if not years, but in a Victorian bathing costume that he recognized from a prank he’d pulled on Dwight with her help. The prank itself had not involved the bathing costume per se, but it had involved convincing Dwight that the most recent fashions among the Hollywood set were a “return to modesty.”

He’d even convinced Kelly to keep a straight face and assist them when Dwight grew suspicious of his and Pam’s assurances and had turned to her for information. He’d had to slip her Ryan’s cellphone number on a Post-it, but it had been worth it. Dwight had believed it for a full day until apparently his cousin Mose had printed out a picture “the true nature of which he did not choose to reveal in public” but which had fully disproven Jim’s thesis.

Why Dwight hadn’t bothered to Google it himself was not Jim’s problem.

So here was Pam, dressed head to toe in a modest and thus frustrating bathing costume and shouting something. His name, in fact.

Wait.

That wasn’t in the dream.

**

“JIM.” She shook him again. The man appeared to sleep like the dead—although she had probably been doing the same a moment ago, or else they wouldn’t be in this situation. She was somehow tangled up in him, the sheet, and her own clothes in a way that simultaneously put pressure on her bladder and prevented her from in any way getting out of the bed.

This was at least partly because, although she had not really processed it before falling headfirst into it, Jim’s bed, like hers next door, was a true single bed. Not just “only one bed in the room” single, but “what comes before twin in mattress size” single. So not only was she twisted and turned and really in need of a bathroom break, but she was also pressed up against the wall.

In any other situation, being in the same bed with Jim Halpert pressed up against him and the wall might not have been so bad. Would not have been so bad. Would have been pretty darn amazing, especially given the muscles she could feel under his clothes and the way she knew he looked at her when he thought she wasn’t paying attention. But it was almost noon according to the radio clock on the table, the sun was shining through the blinds exactly into her eyes, and her bladder was screaming that she hadn’t emptied it since basically dinnertime last night.

“JIM.” She pushed again and his eyes slowly opened.

“Pam.” It was like watching a room fill up with light after hitting the switch. “PAM.” He tried to sit bolt upright and only succeeded in tumbling them both out of bed onto the floor, precisely the outcome she had been trying to avoid by waking him up. Though to be fair, she could escape to the bathroom now.

But she found herself curiously unwilling to do so. Instead she lay on top of him and looked deep into his eyes, thinking to herself how she had never had any such inclination with Roy. Well, not since they were like seventeen, and only a little then.

“Pam, what are you doing in my bed?” He looked adorable when he was confused.

“We aren’t in your bed,” she pointed out.

“What are you doing on my floor then?”

“Lying on top of you. Or should that be laying? I never can remember.” She leaned over and whispered in his ear. “Kissing you.”

“No you ar…” the rest of that quarrelsome sentence was swallowed when she did as promised.

All in all, she decided as she skipped away in his befuddlement to take care of her bladder, not such a bad morning.