She'd said she needed time. She was not kidding.
Time. Lots and lots of time.
And time she got. Jim knew better than to push her. He knew that change was not something that came easily to Pam. It's why she'd stayed at Dunder-Mifflin for so long, despite a great desire and even greater talent that would have made it easy to escape.
It's why she was reluctant to change her relationship with Jim, even after she had ended things with Roy.
It's why it had taken her so long to end things with Roy. She'd started slow, unsure of whether breaking up with Roy was really what she wanted. Maybe she just needed a change, something small. After Jim left her house that day, she spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about her life, how things had ended up the way they had, so far from the dreams she'd grown up believing would become her reality. She knew that if she kept meandering down the path she was on, she would become unrecognizable to the girl she had been. This was the motivating factor in her decision to speak to Roy. She'd known that she had been happy, really happy, once, that that girl had known what she wanted and had the ability to obtain it. She wanted that back.
She decided to speak to Roy the following morning. She'd have preferred to do it that very day, but he had been at the bar with Darryl and the rest of the warehouse guys. Drunk Roy was not exactly a great conversationalist. If it was hard to talk to Roy when he was sober, drunk Roy was even worse.
So she'd waited until he woke up the next morning, waited until he'd had his coffee, waited until he'd showered and dressed. She waited until she could no longer stand it. He'd been sitting on the couch watching golf, of all things, when she sat across from him, in the very chair Jim had folded his long frame into the day before. She took comfort from the memory of him sitting there the previous day, confident in her ability to do something more. She drew strength from the fact that someone was so whole-heartedly convinced that she had the ability to change her life, had the ability to make herself happy.
She waited until a commercial came on and looked Roy square in the eye, asking him to turn the television off, telling him they needed to talk. He looked at her, the protest ready on his lips, silenced only by the grave expression on her face.
She saw him pale and knew what he was thinking.
"I'm not pregnant," she said quickly, flatly. The relief on his face was so quick to appear, so great, that her heart broke a little. To think that the idea of having a baby with her gave him that pale, anxious, nauseated look was almost too much to take.
She had taken a deep breath and forced herself to continue.
"Roy, I'm not happy."
It was the first time she had ever said this to him - to anyone, really - and she was afraid to look at him, afraid to see the expression on his face when he finally figured out what she was trying to say.
She looked up, exasperated, when she heard his response.
"Oh, you want to change the channel? This is almost over."
She had been so caught up in what she was about to say, what she was about to do, that she hadn't realized the television was still on. She sighed a deep sigh and, in a move so unlike her, grabbed the remote and turned the television off herself.
"No, Roy, you don't understand. I'm not happy with this." She gestured back and forth between them, willing him to understand, to make it just the tiniest bit easier for her.
She explained to him that she was unhappy with her life, that she wanted more. She told him that she had spent the last two days thinking about what she wanted out of her life, wondering when she had fallen into the life she was currently living, and left her aspirations behind. She left out the parts about Jim kissing her, visiting her. She'd wanted to spare him the hurt that would surely accompany the idea that another man had made her doubt him and the life they were creating together.
Because it wasn't about Jim. Not really. It was true that he was the one who had started it, yes, but it was really more that he had helped her see something she should have been seeing all along. She knew she'd been unhappy for a while, that she would have needed to change things sooner or later. In a way, Pam was grateful to Jim because she knew it was better to question things now, rather than in another ten years when she was married, possibly with children to think about.
This thought, this idea that it was better to do this, to realize this, now than ten years from now helped Pam. It made the conversation easier for her, made it bearable. But when she shared it with Roy, it only made him angry. He hated to think that she might one day consider their marriage a mistake.
Pam calmed him down, put him at ease, by explaining that she didn't want to break up, that she just needed time to figure out what she wanted out of her life before they both became even more committed, if that was even possible. She told him that she wanted to postpone the wedding.
That was when he realized just how much trouble their relationship was in. And it scared him and Pam could see that. For the first time in a long time, she was reminded that Roy really did care for her, much more than everyone, including her, gave him credit for.
They both knew they were each partially responsible for what was happening - him for not supporting her dreams, her for not demanding of herself that she follow them.
So they postponed the wedding and Roy vowed to try harder to make her happy, which he did, for a while.
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When all was said and done, Pam and Roy ended things much as they began. In the way they had just sort of fallen together, they just sort of fell apart. After the wedding was postponed Pam realized she had never lived alone, never really learned to rely on herself. She had thought that may have been part of the problem, part of why she was unhappy. She had never really learned to make herself happy. It was about six weeks after the postponement and three weeks after the would-be wedding that Pam told Roy she needed to experience life living on her own. He agreed, though he didn't want to. He had been trying to be supportive, trying to help her though what he considered by then to be a temporary lapse in judgment, cold feet of the worst kind. But the truth was, deep down, he was scared. He felt her slipping away from him, felt their relationship cracking and breaking.
It was two months after she moved out that it really ended, once and for all. As much as it would seem anything but, the split was a mutual decision. Roy had felt that it was too much work, that being together shouldn't have been so hard. Pam had pretended to agree with him, though she secretly thought that if they were supposed to be together it wouldn't have felt so much like work. She thought it kinder to agree with him than to tell him that she believed to just didn't fit together anymore. That they were not just mismatched pieces from the same puzzle, but that they had come to belong to entirely different puzzles all together. She knew she was no longer in love with him, that he was no longer what she wanted or needed. But she still cared about him and knew she always would.
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Through it all, there was Jim. He'd ended up staying in Scranton, the decision to transfer taken out of his hands when the Stamford branch was closed unexpectedly after losing it's two biggest clients in the same week.
They did their best to remain friends in way they were before Jim's confession, before the kiss, before life became so complicated. He eventually told Pam about his almost-transfer and she'd been sad at the thought of losing him, but inspired by the lengths to which he was willing to go in order to improve his situation, even if the situation that needed improving was his proximity to her.
If was after this conversation that Pam went back to school. It was three weeks after Jim told her that watching her live a life she hated, that watching her with someone else hurt enough to make him change his entire life, and two and a half months after Roy told her he didn't think she was worth the effort, that Pam began illustrating and graphic design classes at Marywood, the school she'd attended after high school, when she was young and still believed in dreams. She worked at Dunder-Mifflin by day and came alive at night, taking in her classes and swallowing them whole.
Shortly after Pam began her classes, Jim followed her lead and enrolled in classes of his own. He'd realized that he loved meeting new people, loved creating something from nothing, loved making even boring things seem interesting. So he began taking evening classes in marketing and advertising, thinking it would lead to a career he could actually love.
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Pam had said she needed time and time was what she got. Jim had promised both Pam and himself that he would give her all the time she needed. That he wouldn't push her. They were friends and she was taking steps to make herself happy and that was enough for him, for now. It was all he could reasonably expect.
And so it happened that it was almost a full year after Jim's confession that Pam gave in to what she had by then come to identify as a very deep love for Jim. It was after a year that Jim finally got the one thing he knew he couldn't live a satisfying life without.
It happened after Pam started doing freelance illustration work on the side, building a portfolio she would one day use to make her passion into a career.
It happened after Jim began a part-time internship at an advertising agency and cut his hours at Dunder-Mifflin to part-time, as well, Michael only agreeing because he'd been unable to stand the thought of losing his "bff" all at once.
It happened once they both knew what they wanted, knew, finally, how to make themselves happy.
It happened after Pam realized that the one thing missing from a life she loved was the one person who had made her believe that such a thing was possible.
And suddenly there had been too much time.
Too much time spent hiding feelings.
Too much time spent pretending to be something they weren't and pretending not to be something they were.
Too much time wasted.
They knew it wouldn't be easy, knew that the transition from just friends to more than friends was almost never a smooth one. But they also knew that it would be worth it, knew they would be happy. Maybe not always, because no couple ever is, but that was okay. The hard times would be worth it, too. Because they had never really been just friends. They'd loved each other long before they'd admitted it to themselves, long before they'd allowed themselves to think those thoughts.
Long before they realized that the moments they spent laughing together, talking together, just together, were the moments they lived for.
Smurfette729 is the author of 14 other stories.
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