***

It had ended badly. Meaning, he had cheated on her. Twice. Both times with her.

Looking at him now across the room she hears vague echoes of a vodka bottle crashing a few inches from his head. The ex. Their bedroom. Her sheets.

Her footsteps on the stairs had seemed oddly out of place, even when welcomed by the familiar creak of the second stair from the top.

They hadn’t heard. She didn’t expect.

She wonders whether she would have taken off her shoes, avoided the squeaky stair if she knew where she was going.

But instead it had ended badly. Meaning the ex, in their bed. In her sheets. Second strike serving as the third.

Fool me once shame on you.
Fool me twice and I’m a fucking fool.

***

They used to fight constantly; Both relishing in the competition of one who didn’t know how to back down. Fierce. He beat her in video games the first time they played. She practiced for two weeks straight before she let him play her again. He still beat her by two and when she almost burst into tears he laughed at her and took her right there on the living room floor. They didn’t touch the video games the rest of the weekend. When she became good enough to beat him they rarely made it through a whole game before their taunting and surprise smoke grenades had them abandoning the game for tiny shivers of fingernails on the couch.

He loved the whole concept of the corporate ladder. He was proud of his social skills, his ability to read people. To him it was the ultimate game of manipulation. She loved the drive home after those parties, when they would systematically psychoanalyze all the other attendees, making top five lists of their coworkers. He would tell her stories of some of the ridiculous things he had said -golf strokes he had only read about in some magazine, foreign policy positions recycled from last week's newspapers. Five points for every person he formed life long cocktail party friendships with. Ten points if he got invited to a corporate function or golf game. Negative five points for any mistakes with names, places etc. He never scored below a 55.

She used to like to watch his face when she would slap him in the middle of a heated argument. He would grab her wrist and pull her roughly towards him, until they would both fall to the floor with lips biting, his other hand tightly pulling on her hair. After his brother found a long deep scratch down his back at Christmas his family took to calling her “the tigress,” which she found publicly humiliating. In private it made her sway her hips.

***

It wasn’t perfect but neither was she. So the first time he cheated on her she knew she might deserve it. She was too much. She wasn’t enough. It was out of his system now. She didn’t open up enough. They pushed each other too much He loved her enough to try. Maybe it was her fault for asking too much. Maybe she was a little crazy sometimes. Maybe it was her fault for seeing too much.

***

Six months later she had to let it end badly. A year and a half maybe wasted. Footsteps on the stairs, the squeaking step. And he was there, lost. Buried in her hair. The name they rarely spoke, smirking, on her bed, contaminating her sheets. “I’m sorry. You know I love you. I still want to be with you. Doesn’t that mean something? That I can sleep with her but still want you?” But her face covered every inch of his skin.

The vodka bottle missed by probably half a foot. She thinks he might have been a little disappointed in her for such a bad throw.

***

It was seven months, two weeks and three days later when he joined the branch. She only felt cold and competitive. He only seemed turned off by her. Slowly warming, exploding paper clips, a half smile and she found herself a little surprised. And now for something different? Maybe different was what she needed all along.

So she doesn’t move for him, she moves because she doesn’t want to lose her interest in something different. And she's happy in this quiet. She wants to keep it. If she sometimes misses the intensity she remains intrigued by the challenge. When she says “I moved here from Connecticut” she means to say ‘I've worked for this. I'm trying to become this. This is different. Please be different.'

She doesn’t want to be a catalyst or a roadblock. She doesn’t want to be part of someone else’s story. She just wants her own. She doesn’t want to again be the girl who isn’t the girl. She doesn’t bother telling him why -she thinks if they focus enough on fighting off his demons, they’ll cure hers.

The day she tries to pull the art show flyer off the cabinet in the kitchen she feels sick all afternoon. After she spends twenty minutes rationalizing how its better for everyone if he doesn’t know, if everyone could just really finally move the fuck on, she knows once and for all she is a selfish bitch. She is a woman possessed, afraid that she already knows the ending. She never mentions the flyer to him and makes an excuse not to see him that night. She spends it just looking in the mirror.

She doesn’t deserve something different.

***

She spends most of the cocktail party trying to feel his eyes on her. She realizes the absurdity of never mentioning him before tonight but she also knows this relationship has never really been about her.

She is in the middle of being the perfect girlfriend when she realizes she has somehow engaged in a staring contest with him across the room. She refuses to blink. When he shakes his head at her and raises his eyebrow she tries to repeat to herself 'fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...' She breaks eye contact to close her eyes on her new life. She feels misshapen. When she looks back he is still staring. She crosses her arms. She feels naked.

***

“I think he might still have feelings for me.”

“You’re kind of like, my first.”

A relatively easy deflection and a relatively genuine laugh –a glance from far away maybe sees a couple in a moment. He was bored, her shoes uncomfortable and she wants to make this work. She wants to fit this. And secretly she’s always taken pleasure in a little lying, her preferred poison of pranking.

So she takes a second to be part of what she thinks is a real couple and she feels proud of him for securing the basketball game. It’s the kind of opportunity he would have killed for. She thinks of all the cocktail parties she spent alone, making small talk with these men, trying to ignore their wandering eyes while he was off securing friendships that never fully materialized. She wonders now how she never before sensed the desperation in his handshake.

"What the hell, have you dated like every guy here?”

“So none of them?”

It takes her exactly one glass of wine to realize how sad it is that he doesn’t know her enough to guess what’s true; Sadder still to realize how he might not really want to know.

“Well it was before I knew you, so, it's fine."

She wasn’t hoping for jealousy. She was waiting for him to discover that he just didn’t know. That he had never even asked. That she could answer that question any way she wanted and deep down it wouldn’t matter. The honest answer started at the beginning, only Drake, during the separation.

The footsteps on the stairs. The ex, in their bed. Smirking.

She rationalizes that “none of them” referred to all the other men at the party, odd acquaintances from her last cocktail party era, and decides to assume he meant the same. It was an attempt to push him a little that seemed only to disgust him a little –a prank in disguise, to cover her tracks a little.

She is playing at ridiculous but she doesn’t want to be stuck being what he wants rather than what she is. Ok yes, she got involved with a man who was separated from his wife. Retrospectively a very stupid decision but she was young and he was persistent and she believed that love. She doesn’t want him to see her now as tainted. She already had to suffer her own punishment. So she keeps going, keeps pushing and turns her past into a joke –something they can laugh at together, since that's what he seems to need.

Because he loves his pranks. And although she knows that she is sometimes helpful she also gets the feeling he is condescendingly accepting her help, that she isn’t quite doing anything right. She feels like he is doing her a favor, which might be fair since she views pranking as a favor to him half the time. The other times it's a strategic defense.

A cell phone hand off. Sombreros. Giggling.

So here she is kind of pulling her own prank and the second he walks away she knows it doesn’t quite fit right. He seems surprised and the laugh seems genuine but her execution is a little off, the idea too desperate, too based in her own history and insecurities to be legitimate. He never laughs with her the way he laughs with her.

So when he walks away she can’t even tell if he thinks they just had a little moment or if they are just one step farther apart.

Across the party she can see the ex -the wife -smirking, while giving him the once over as he crosses the party to the basketball court. They make eye contact but this time she can’t hold it. She doesn't want to know that person anymore. She finishes her glass of wine and tries to disappear into the crowd, looking for one of the friendly male faces to distract her for awhile.

The car ride back starts mostly quiet. She rarely gets drunk, not anymore, but she has had just enough wine to take the edge off her settling anxiety. He seems preoccupied, proclaiming his exhaustion from the strain of being Jim Halpert, Assistant Regional Manager (said in his very best Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration voice). After her few attempts to discuss or analyze the party are only absentmindedly acknowledged she lets the quiet settle in, allows both to retreat to their own thoughts. She counts mile markers on the road and months in the relationship. 3 months. 90 miles. Every 3 miles she claims a tiny victory and surreptitiously glances over at him, claiming extra points if she escapes unnoticed.

She drifts off to sleep somewhere between miles 33 and 39, stirring awake only to realize there has been a constant gentle buzzing. Then a cell phone snapping shut. She waits until mile 63 to look over at him.

“Everything ok?”

“What? Oh wow, yeah. Sorry. Thanks for rejoining us here on Halpert scenic tours.

“I should get a discount, considering. What are you sorry for?”

“What? Nothing. Sorry. I was just spacing out a little. It’s a long drive. I guess I deserve a refund too.”

Something oddly familiar in his inflection, another long night of conversation ahead? –she’s standing in between “Do I let it go or push ahead,” when she hears the vibrating again.

Instead of checking his phone he looks directly at her.

“Were you trying to make me jealous tonight?”

“Why, were you?” She tries to hide her words in coy, teasing, but they land somewhere around anxious.

“It felt like you were.”

“I just knew you didn’t want to be there.”

The vibrating joins the conversation as she is about to continue her thoughts, elaborate on her reasons. She pauses to stare at the blinking light on his phone so he answers instead.

“I didn’t need you to make me want to be there less.”

“Fine. I'm sorry. Who keeps texting you?”

“I’m just saying, it was surreal to have to consider whether you had actually dated half of the company. I’m not quite sure where you were going with that.”

“Really? I think it’s surreal that you actually thought to consider it. It was a joke. To be funny. I was teasing you, Michael. Who keeps texting you?”

“Karen, something happened tonight in Scranton and it might involve me. But I don’t know details and I don’t want this conversation to be about that yet. Right now I want this to be about us. I want to understand this.”

She turns away to glance out the window, because she is starting to suspect she only has one chance and the 30 miles to Scranton to answer these questions correctly. His phone vibrates again and she watches him flip the screen open, reading the message quickly before snapping it shut and turning the phone on silent. They maintain eye contact until the car swerves a little and he turns his head to look back at the road.

“Is this about her?”

"Don’t make it about her.”

“Is what happened, is that about her?”

“Karen.”

She turns back to the window and tries to get the Clash out of her head. Should I stay or should I go

She’s irritated when it takes them almost a month to fully sort things out, all nervous glances and flushed cheeks, mirroring each other's tiny tentative steps towards rediscovery, reconciliation.

Their slow movement winds up like a lazy rubber band so it manages to be both finally! and suddenly! when everything snaps into place, everyone becoming a little brighter and shinier after they both step into softer versions of themselves, people she has never really met before. After that she spends 11 days rediscovering her embarrassment (she calls it anger) at serving as their roadblock, the catalyst she had once feared becoming. But by day 12 their covert happiness has become annoyingly infectious and although she still can’t get too close she finds herself letting out a reluctant and shy smile for them once in awhile, when she is pretty sure only he can see.

Because she feels an odd affection for him, as long as it’s from a distance. They share a couple of conversational glances from time to time and it’s amazing to her that they can communicate now the way she has always wanted to, with anyone.

She likes that Pam never once looks at her with anything that feels like pity or anger or even gratitude or appreciation. On day 17 she decides it might be closest to respect. It almost makes her want to try out the friendship again but then Michael makes his new favorite joke about the situation, involving a blow up doll and a cage match, and her momentary impulse is suppressed by the third sexual harassment training of the week. She figures she’ll try to do her best with silent communication and hopes it will all end up somewhere understood.

***

Everyone expects her to transfer right away, she thinks even him, and she tries not to find that too offensive. She wants to announce, I’m better than that, than rearranging my life for some guy, but she knows that in itself is a relatively new discovery and a little hollow in light of how she got to Scranton. After the surprise wears off she’s a little bitter at her previous transparency.

So now she’s trying to figure out a way to secure her role in their story as neither the tragic supporting heroine nor the ill fated mistake. Watching their faces, the radiance that comes from truth, she suspects she would feel best if she could erase herself altogether.

That car ride was the most honest self she’s been in awhile and she decides she means it when she thinks she is done serving herself up as the victim.

***

It is during this self imposed solitude that she realizes how little she knows the rest of the office, how little she bothered to know them before. When she looks around she senses they noticed that long before her. So she's extra friendly when Kelly takes to hanging out with her in the break room and manages to only snap at her once, after which she feels so guilty that she chooses to view Kelly’s inexplicable need to fill her in on all things Jim and Pam as penance.

“I’m soooooo sorry no one told you sooner! No one told you sooner right? I mean you totally wouldn’t have been with him so long if you knew. I mean hello?! The whole thing was always kind of ridiiiiiiiiculous. Not that you guys weren’t cute though. You guys were totally cute! I mean he’s so tall and pale and you are so short and mysterious. Kind of like me and Ryan. But Ryan’s not that tall. But don’t tell him I said that, ok? I think he’s completely perfect. And 5’9 is average! And totally taller than Tom Cruise! Well without his heels on. And like I told him ten times that someone should mention it to you, you know, just in passing, so you knew what you were up against but he said it was nobody’s business and that I shouldn’t get involved. It was so so hard but I didn’t and he said it was probably for the best. And that I was proving I could so keep a secret, after that last time when...”

***

In the end she waits a full two months before giving notice. In the end she realizes it doesn’t hurt that they are the better fit because in that end it isn’t really about him, it isn’t about them, it is about what she should have done all along.

Because she did deserve something different but she’ll be something a little different next time.

So she packs up her things and says her goodbyes. She’s surprisingly sad when she walks away from both of them and thinks in their own way they are two of the best people she has ever met. She wonders whether that makes her an adult or a little twisted. She’s hoping for a combination of both because lately she’s been believing it could be the twists that define people. She has some good ones she thinks, mixed in with the crazy -which who knows, might be good ones to someone someday.

She moves back to where she once let her past life fade away, but into a new building with a view of neighboring rooftops and a hint of the city skyline when she's precisely positioned on the windowsill. Her apartment is next to the stairwell and through the thin walls she falls asleep to people coming and going. Every night the sounds invade her slumber until finally the once haunting memory of footsteps on the stairs fades and footsteps just blur into her dreams as waves in the ocean.