“Michael’s acting really strangely,” muttered Pam Beesly to herself as she narrowly avoided stapling her own finger one Friday morning.

In fact, Michael Scott always acted thus, and Pam had whiled away many an hour, guessing why and how he had become regional manager.

It was Friday at Dunder Mifflin Paper Products, a chilly Friday in Scranton. The kind of Friday where the wind hisses, and bites cheeks, noses, and fingers, and stings the eyes. Not for the first time did Pam stare longingly at the clock, willing its slovenly hands to reach four-fifty-nine pm, the minute of salvation.

Of course, Michael chose this Friday for spring cleaning. Perhaps that explained his strange behaviour, worsened when he sent the resident busybody, Dwight Schrute, to investigate why Oscar Martinez had pulled a sickie.

The question of why Michael had scheduled Spring Cleaning Day in January went unanswered.

Michael had left his office again, manic grin in place, hands in his pockets like a bum. He stood behind junior salesman and her best friend in the office, Jim Halpert. The latter was hunched over his computer, only his mop of untidy brown hair visible, as well as his forearm. Click, click, click. Jim’s work was lethargic, although he spoke pleasantly on the phone to clients, and constantly visited her desk in search of jokes and mischief. Such visits were the highlight of Pam’s day, although she sternly reminded herself that if her fiancé, Roy Anderson, worked here instead of downstairs in the warehouse, then his visits would brighten her day too.

“How’s it hanging, buddy?” asked Michael, chortling as Jim feigned surprise. “Any updates on what we just discussed?”

Jim was shaking his head. His green eyes, just visible under his fringe, were glazed over. “I don’t really know what you mean.”

“4-11,” Michael said, leaning down until his chin touched Jim’s shoulder. “4-11 on the ‘p’ situation—”

“You know what?” said Jim quickly, “I need to get a stapler.”

Michael stood up again. “Ah, right. Cool. Catch ya later!”

Pam was utterly puzzled by this display. Her real work, that is, moving paper from one pile to another, lay untouched. She glanced at a few of her colleagues. Dwight sat adjacent to Jim, an arrangement that displeased both. But Dwight was tap-tap-tapping away, and his screen was reflected in his wire-framed glasses. Behind Dwight sat Phyllis, with her back to him. Her head, brown hair streaked liberally with grey, was bent. Pam craned her neck and saw Stanley Hudson, likewise engrossed.

Nobody seemed interested in Michael’s sudden chumminess with Jim. But at Dunder Mifflin, nobody was much interested in anything.

The next time Michael caught her attention was when he offered to go to lunch with Jim. She had been copying a list into her notebook, and nearly dropped it. Since when did Michael do lunch with employees-- aside from that time he’d barged in on her, Jim, Oscar, and Kevin at lunch because he was miffed that Jim hadn’t invited him to his BBQ night? Michael had dropped hints about how professors attended student parties at his university, while Jim ate Doritos and avoided Michael's eye. Was today’s invitation another such charade?

“Uh, no,” she heard Jim reply. “Thank you, though. It’s… I gotta do some cleaning. I should probably stick around here.”

But Michael persisted. “Hey, you know what we could do? Spread out a blanket in the break room, have a little picnic, order some ‘zza…”

At that moment, Pam glanced up, just in time to see Michael look behind him. Michael had green eyes, like she did, only hers had the same glazed look as Jim’s. Michael’s had the intensity of a flashlight.

Was Michael watching her? She couldn’t tell, as Kevin Malone blocked her view when he dumped a box in front of her desk.

All she heard afterwards was “Talk about you-know-who…”

I’m missing something, she thought. But Jim stood on cue, for some reason agreeing to the very offer he had just declined. Jim was tall, casting Michael in shadow. Pam was reminded of a dog and its owner; Jim had an unofficial duty of handling Michael’s capers, frisks, and emotional incontinence. What could either man have in common? They’re both salesmen. Pam thought some more, watching Jim’s attractive lope to the coat rack near her desk. But she was distracted from her speculation when she noticed that Jim didn’t shrug or smile at her before leaving as usual.

Her shoulders sagged. Then she shook her head and returned to work.

By and by, Michael and Jim returned. They were laughing.

Pam could no longer restrain her curiosity. She leaned forward and asked Jim, “What did you guys talk about?”

“Oh, just politics and literature…” He held up a white t-shirt emblazoned with the word ‘Hooters’ in red and a brown owl, and he shrugged.

Unable to help smiling, Pam nodded. “I hate you.”

All quiet on the Michael front, then. Pam was able to reach such feats of productivity as are rarely seen in an office. She emptied a drawer of paper, rubber-band balls, found a hairdresser’s receipt, flicked through a stack of paper, and then stuffed it all into the recycling bin. She emptied the shredder likewise, emptied the scrunched up paper that the copier had spat out last Tuesday, and then emptied all the receipts in her handbag for good measure. All the while, the phone would ring and she’d scrawl messages with one hand. Other salesmen like Stanley Hudson lumbered to the front of the desk, holding their green and white boxes of waste paper like sacrificial offerings.

An hour or so later, she heard a few whispers, and someone snickering. It sounded like Kevin, or maybe the ancient Creed Bratton, whose employment at Dunder Mifflin remained an eternal mystery. Pam paid them no mind.

Instead, she lifted her own sacrificial green and white box, and sauntered to the kitchen. Her route took her past Jim’s desk, where he was in conference with Kevin. But as she passed, he turned and smiled at her. It was one of the little nice things, as she called them, things that made Jim so valuable as a friend.

She grew even more pleased when, within minutes of her entering the kitchen, he appeared. He had no box, though, just a coffee mug. She was wrestling the contents of hers into the office recycling bin.

“Hey!” she said, smiling as old fax covers fell into the bin with a thump. “Did you find anything good in your desk?”

Jim picked up the cafetière. “Uh, coupon for a free sandwich.”

“Score!”

“It expired in August, and my cellphone charger from two years ago.”

“Big day.”

“Big day.”

She laughed a little at their banter, and began walking out of the kitchen. But then Jim interrupted.

“Hey—” He was leaning against the worktop, staring into his mug. “Uh, listen…”

Concerned, Pam turned back. For some reason, Jim said nothing for a while. First an “um”, then a pause, looking down at his brogues. She returned to his side, eyes fixed on his pensive expression.

“I…” he held the vowel for longer than necessary “told Michael on the Booze Cruise-- I’m so stupid—” another pause “I told Michael that I had had a crush on you—”

Pam felt her stomach drop.

“—when you first started here,” he finished.

“Oh,” said Pam in the middle of this. She was staring; she was silent; she was confused.

“Well,” said Jim, readjusting his position, “I just thought that-- I figured you should hear it from me, rather than, I mean, you know, Michael.”

His smile was awkward, begging for her immediate agreement. Pam finally looked down. “Right,” she said, but she hardly understood her own words. She now collected scraps of conversation from hours ago and assembled them like a  jigsaw puzzle inside her scattered mind. Michael’s odd chumminess with Jim, the dinner, Jim’s caginess…

“And, seriously, it’s totally not a big deal. OK?”

Pam forced herself to nod like a child that had only just learned the movement.

“And when I found you that you were engaged…” Jim was leaving her another hint, which Pam accepted quicker this time.

“No, like, I know,” she said, her voice surprisingly clear. “Like, I kind of… Like, I thought that maybe you did. When you first started.”

Jim’s eyes were open, vulnerable. “Oh, you did?”

“No,” said Pam, rushing to save his ego, “just because we got along so well—”

“No, yeah. No, you saw through me.” He looked away from her. “Great.” With a slight chuckle, he sipped some more coffee.

Pam took this as permission to laugh a little. With renewed confidence, she peered up at him and asked, “So are you gonna be, like, totally awkward around me now?”

“Oh yeah!”

Now Pam could safely laugh. Her ordinary Jim had returned, quick with the rejoinder, the sarcasm, the dismissal of anything deeper than a sheet of recycled letter stock paper.

“Hope that’s OK,” he added.

She nodded again, and walked off. But he called her back.

“And Pam?”

She paused, her arm resting on the black doorframe.

“It was, like, three years ago. So, I am totally over it.”

She nodded again, her lips pressed together. “Cool.”

“OK,” said Jim, laughing nervously as he turned to the sink.

And Pam suddenly had an urge to escape. But she couldn’t work. She couldn’t clean. She couldn’t think. The words “crush” and “on you” were written everywhere she looked. From a fax dated yesterday, she saw the words “on you” and imagined them being read in Jim’s baritone voice. Then her eyes slid over to a flyer for a skip company which, sure enough, promised to crush all waste dumped inside. Crush-- on you. She pictured herself trapped on a mount of rubbish and staring at the bottom of a metal crusher that would turn her flesh and blood to toothpaste.

Brringgg!

Pam jumped. She grabbed the phone and stuttered her name. The message on the other end of the line was garbled; she felt her hand slide across some paper and reach for a pen. She jotted down a date, two times, three instructions, and four requests, all without understanding a word. The call finished with an “all right,” yet everything was as far from right as it could possibly be.

Jim had a crush on her. Click. She put the receiver down and imagined it crushing the telephone set. Had had a crush on me, she thought. Past tense, perfect aspect. The action was complete, done, never to return again. Good thing nobody else at the office knew, except the very worst candidate for Secret Keeper: Michael Scott. Even Peter Pettigrew would’ve been ashamed to spill the beans so quickly.

But there it was, that fact she’d suspected-- known-- for the last three years. Jim’s green eyes became softer, lighter, when he arrived at her desk or she at his. His words were slower, and he leaned closer as though sharing some big secret.

“Some big secret,” she whispered. And she had kept it for him. Why?

Pam stood abruptly, meaning to get a coffee. But a coffee in the kitchen would only bring back memories of Jim’s white mug, his white shirt, and his white lies. Politics and literature at Hooters. Ha. She really fell for that one. In all the time she had known Jim, she had never heard him opine on either topic. What had the pair really discussed? Her?

She shook her head and made for the break room instead, fishing in her cardigan pocket for a couple of quarters, and taking a route that didn’t require passing Jim’s desk. She waited for Angela to buy a peach ice tea and for Kevin to get a Coke. Her turn came, and why oh why did grape soda, Jim’s favourite drink, have to look so appealing? She rarely drank the stuff, and she wasn’t about to start now.

“Cristal it is,” she sighed, and traipsed back to her desk.

Jim had a crush on her. Emphasis on the word “had”. She began working on Michael’s schedule, tap-tap-tapping away on her computer, and finding various other “had” sentences that made equal sense and produced no consternation. Like, Mrs. Meacher from across the hall had an affair, a fact that Pam knew because she’d seen the former at the outlet mall, kissing a bearded man with a Trump combover. So Pam wasn’t shocked. Doris Warden, who lived two doors away from Pam’s parents, had a fall in her bath and broke her hip. Mrs. Warden had refused to get a friction mat and rails for her bath, so the news hadn’t shocked Pam either. Meanwhile Roy, her fiancé, had promised to make her a romantic chicken dinner last night; it turned out he bought a ready meal. Well, it was the thought that counted, right? The chicken could have been done tender, and had a little flavour, but Roy had said multiple times that he couldn’t cook.

There. Michael’s schedule was finished. She swivelled her chair to face her printer, and watched the sheet slide out. Michael would glance at his schedule and then proceed to be late to at least three meetings; Corporate would remind him that said meetings had been booked-- didn’t he have a schedule? And Michael would turn to Pam and repeat the same question, after which she felt no shame in exposing his laziness to his superiors. It was the same game Michael played with his faxes, his message slips, and his voicemails.

“Still,” Pam said with a sigh. She walked to Michael’s office, which was behind Jim’s desk. Just like that, she remembered: Jim had-- emphasis on the “had”-- a crush on her. Not any more. Totally not a big deal, he said. But he revealed said crush to Michael Scott on the booze cruise, when Roy had finally set a date for her wedding! How was that meaningless? She tried sorting through her hazy memories from that night, a whirl of shrieks, the odour of Coors Light on Roy’s breath, but his strong arm around her waist as they swayed to the band’s mood music. Where was Jim?

It occurred to her that she couldn’t remember; she never even searched for him.

“There’s your schedule for next week,” she said to Michael, dropping the sheet into his in-tray.

After the shock of that revelation came another: that she never asked Jim about his former girlfriend, Katy, after that night. She understood implicitly that they’d broken up. But when? Up until today, she’d had no idea, and Jim never said. But now, she could guess.

Michael was facing away from her. When he turned around, he revealed puffy green eyes and a red face. He was rubbing his left eye.

“Are you OK?” Pam asked, forgetting her uncharitable thoughts in a moment.

“Yeah,” Michael said gruffly. “Listen, about you and Jim—”

“Oh no, you don’t,” she said quickly, wondering if behind her, Jim had returned to his desk.

“Just as your boss slash friend—”

“No, really, it’s OK. I know that Jim had, like, a crush on me when he first started, but that was a long time ago.”

Michael’s eyes were wide as he leaned forward. “It wasn’t that long ago. It was on the booze cruise.”

Pam’s mind went blank. “Jim had a crush on me on the booze cruise, or he told you abut it on the booze cruise?”

Her heart was racing now.

“Oh. Shuut it, Michael,” her boss said. “I’m out.”

And a dazed Pam Beesly, feeling the edifice of her beliefs crumble, wandered out of Michael’s office. She both did and did not notice that Jim hadn’t been at his desk. She both did and did not notice that it was almost time to leave. But when a shadow crossed her desk, she awoke and began pulling on her coat and scarf.

Now Jim came, wearing his messenger bag and looking at her expectantly.

“You ready?”

It was their five o’clock ritual, each waiting until the other was done with work, collecting their coats and scarves, and heading slowly, always slowly, for the elevator.

This time, Pam gazed at Jim as he left the bullpen. She was trying to read in the lines of his face proof either of his honesty earlier, or his lies. Why had he confided in Michael Scott, of all people? Why on the very day that Roy sealed his commitment? Why had he suddenly broken up with Katy?

She gazed at his four o’clock shadow, the rounded curve of his jaw, the way his brown hair flicked upwards over his ears, his Adam’s apple, the collar of his shirt, his broad shoulders. Anything and everything. Why had this old crush come out three years later, rather than back when they first met? And how on earth did Jim call this “totally not a big deal”?

They reached the elevator, and Jim turned to her with one of his awkward smiles that made his cheeks bulge. Elevator’s taking an age to reach their floor, was his silent message, and Pam could have smiled back in other circumstances.

Beige doors opened; they entered. Pam could feel Jim looking at her briefly, but she was careful not to meet his eyes until she could feel him look elsewhere. Only then did she resume her earnest gaze as her heart raced; the elevator gave a ‘ding’ as it shut, and Jim Halpert only smiled to himself on the way down.