It all started with a rainy day and Angela’s birthday. At least that’s what Pam told herself at the time. Later she’d admit (just to herself) that it began a bit earlier than that: with whispered conversations, shared smiles, maybe even a lunch at Cugino’s. But at the time, she wasn’t thinking of that. She was thinking of Angela’s birthday, because she’d noticed on the office calendar that it was next week, and of the rain, which was making everyone depressed—and irritable. Especially Angela. She had snapped at everyone all day. Well, she usually did that, but she had snapped…more than usual? Harder (that’s what she said)? Something like that. Anyway, Pam was thinking of her birthday, and of the snappishness, and of the rain, and she wondered what she could do to improve the situation. Maybe a birthday present might take Angela’s edge off—and her own? Something simple, of course, and wholly wholesome, or Angela would go from snappish to waspish to just impossible. She idly typed a few ideas into Google, just to see if anything would pop up that she could rush order in time for the start of next week.

Definitely not shoes.

Clothing is out too.

A prayer-a-day calendar? She’d tried that before, 2 years ago. Angela had marched up to her three days after her birthday, deposited the calendar in the main recycling bin right in front of her, and said something about “ridiculous liberation theology.” That was out.

Maybe something to eat?

Chocolate? Too hedonist.

Shortbread? Too rich, too buttery.

Jam?

Pam’s eyes had been half-closed as she mused to herself about her ideas, but they flew open at the alert that flashed across her screen:

ERROR: ACCESS DENIED. ERROR CODE 4178

Pam gaped at her browser window. She knew what 4178 meant, of course. They all did. 4178 was the code on the office computer system for content they weren’t allowed to access because it related to the documentary they’d been filming for the last couple of years. It was the code you got if you typed in your own name (she quickly searched “Pam Beesly” to confirm), or “The Office documentary,” or even “Dunder Mifflin” (a real problem when you didn’t want to look up the company directory directly: she’d had to unlearn the habit of just Googling extensions for employees at other offices and remember to use the slow-but-official internal Outlook directory). Why was it coming up now?

Pam racked her brains for any reason “Jam” would trigger a 4178, but came up empty. She glanced over at Jim’s desk, wondering if two heads might be better than one on this problem, but then remembered he was out on a sales call and wouldn’t be back that day—and since it was Friday, that meant he couldn’t help her until Monday morning. She glanced a little further and saw Dwight hard at work at his desk. He could probably help if anyone could. After all, Dwight had been keeping a record of all the unusual incidents at Dunder Mifflin—well, except the ones he instigated, she thought, since he didn’t think those were unusual—in an effort to document Jim’s (well, her and Jim’s) ever-escalating prank war against him.

The memory of her own role in those pranks reminded her that Dwight might be less eager than she had initially thought to help her out with the question of what Jam might mean. Instead of asking him, she slid open the bottom drawer of a small cabinet beside her and flipped through its contents. Manual for the kitchen microwave, contact information for the copier that broke down two years ago and was replaced, random receipts…here it was. The instruction booklet they’d all been issued when they signed up for this stupid documentary in the first place, reminding them what they could and could not do.

She cracked it open and flipped to the table of contents. Scranton Blackout Zone, Nondisclosure Agreement, Information Embargo/Spoilers…she thought that last one looked good, and opened to page 143.

Then 144.

And 145.

Finally, on page 146, she found what she was looking for.

INTERNET EMBARGO: All Dunder Mifflin Co. computer systems and Involved Employee personal electronic devices (as well as other devices as agreed) shall be equipped with software that prevents access to Internet sites that may reference the Show. This embargo shall be monitored and enforced by NBC Universal and its affiliates, and is not subject to review or arbitration. Inquiries as to specific site access, if necessary for work-related functions, may be made through the Producer on Site.

Damn. Buying Angela a jar of jam was hardly a work-related function, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to bother the production staff with this anyway. Asking them questions was a sure way to get dragged into a talking head moment, and for some reason Pam felt like she didn’t want to have to answer questions about why she was so interested in jam. It was just a condiment after all. Not even her favorite one. Better to let it go, and see if time would provide an answer on its own.

At least that’s what she told herself.

For Pam it began with rain and Angela’s birthday. At NBC Universal, it also began with a birthday—but on a bright sunshine-y day a couple of years before. The birthday in question belonged to an intern in the IT department named Dave, and he was only too aware that his friends had planned a really great party for him that night. Unfortunately, it was already past 7, and he had a stack of requests from PR left to deal with. He burned through them at record pace, his own excitement and the fact that these were really easy requests combining to help him through. Finally he reached the end of the stack, the final request between him and a keg of his favorite craft beer (though he secretly would have preferred Natty Bo, being a Baltimore native). He looked down at it and saw:

“Hey Dave,

I know we finalized the embargo software for that new documentary last week, but PR just reminded me of one last loophole we need to close: the fans. Can you set something up that stops the subjects from accessing fansites of the show?

Thanks in advance,

Joe”

Joe was his boss. Joe was full-time and salaried. Why wasn’t Joe dealing with this himself, so that Dave could take his part-time, undercompensated self to his own party before the keg was entirely tapped? Dave sighed. Then he had a brilliant idea. He repurposed a bot he’d already written for a PR request last week (Dave, can we get something that helps us find out which of the Office characters people are responding best to? The camera guys can’t cover everyone equally) that skimmed major existing fan and review sites for the favorite tags and keywords people would use to reference the show, slapped it into the embargo software, and headed for the door. Now the software would find those key terms and block access to sites and searches that came too close—meaning he wouldn’t have to create a fansite blacklist himself. Instead, the keywords would do it for him. Easy-peasy.

Dave drank well that night, woke up with a giant hangover, lingered on in his internship for a couple of months, and was working for Amazon in Seattle before Pam ever typed the word “jam” into Google.

 **********************************

As the clock meandered on (honestly, sometimes she would swear the thing went backwards), Pam tried not to think too much about jam, or what it might mean. It should have been easy. It was already three-thirty, after all. But at four she heard a crunching noise from the copier beside her and looked up to see the word itself flashing brightly at her:

JAM

JAM

JAM.

She was saved from staring by the face of Dwight Schrute peering down at her.

“Pam, why is my report not printing?”

“Um…I think it’s jammed.”

“Pamela. Because Jim has been out of the office for” (he checked his watch) “two hours, twenty-seven minutes, and eighteen seconds, I do not believe this is his handiwork. If, however, you have graduated from participating in his juvenile behavior to initiating it yourself, I would appreciate if you would cease and desist from it immediately.”

She sighed.

“No, Dwight, I think it’s just a jam.”

A thought occurred to her.

“Does Jim usually use paper jams to prank you? I didn’t think it was his usual approach.”

“It is not one of his preferred tactics, but it has been used in the past. Rarely, however, I will admit."

She hesitated.

“What about…other kinds of jam?” She faltered a little at his inquisitive look “…not paper ones? Does he use those a lot in pranks?”

“I am not certain of the reason for your interest.”

“I just…heard…something about jam, and I was wondering if it might be prank-related.” At his look she quickly added “Not from Jim! This isn’t a prank itself.” He seemed satisfied.

“Well, assuming you are referring to jellied comestibles, I will have to consult my documentation.”

“Would you?”

“Only if you, Pamela, will treat this distinctly papery jam with the respect it deserves. I expect to come back to a working copier when I return with your information. It is, after all, your job.”

Pam sighed and reached into the copier. It was a relatively simple task to pull out the offending paper (Dunder Mifflin standard 20lb copy paper, no finish), press the correct buttons, and restart Dwight’s print job. As the copier spat out two sheets of sales reports, Dwight returned to the desk.

“I have found two such incidents on record. In one, I came back to find my phone attached to its base by a sticky gelatin-like substance, which visual inspection suggested might be jam, jelly, or a related food. In the other, the sheets of my weekly sales report were stuck together with a similar substance. Neither is properly categorized as a prank—the first is under “minor nuisance” and the second “work impediment”—but they appear the closest to what you inquired about.”

She shrugged.

“Guess it wasn’t a prank I heard about then.”

“When did you hear about it?”

“Today?”

“Then perhaps” (here he bent over to whisper to her almost conspiratorially) “you heard about our plans at Schrute Farms for our new beet jam.”

“What?”

“Fact: the jam and jelly market is an expanding proportion of the overall condiment sector. Fact: jams and jellies are preserved fruits and vegetables with added sugar. Fact: the beet has the highest easily accessible sugar content in a vegetable. Therefore, Schrute Farms is preparing a new beet jam, to appeal to the health-conscious and beet-aware consumer.”

“…that sounds…delicious?”

“It will be. Thank you for your interest, Pam. With your permission, I will consider you as a test taster when we begin production next month.”

“…thank you?”

“Thank you. And thank you for fixing the copier.”

With that, he turned back towards his desk with a superior look in his eye.

Pam was pretty sure that Schrute Farms beet jam was not the reason jam was blocked on her computer, and now she knew that it wasn’t some prank she had missed. She was also sure that she now had three things to talk to Jim about on Monday: the error code, Dwight’s new jam, and the fact that he (Jim) was definitely insufficiently inventive on the jam-prank front. Really, just sticking items together? There had to be something more interesting to do.

She looked up at the clock. Her jam conversation, the copier error, and her musings had whiled away another hour and it was time to go. Seeing no one urgently flagging her down, Pam turned the phones to voicemail, grabbed her coat from the rack and her Tupperware from the fridge, slipped out, and headed home.

Pam sat in her car watching the taillights and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She had taken her normal route home, forgetting the construction on I-81 that was pushing everyone off onto surface streets. She turned up the radio, hoping against hope for some good news from the traffic reports (every 10 minutes, on the 5s!) but apparently nothing was moving for miles. Her mind wandered to the day’s events, in reverse order: her talk with Dwight, the paper jam, the error code, Angela’s birthday, the rain…and then back further, to her lunch (grabbed quickly in the break room, laughing with Jim before his sales call), her morning (spent covering yet again for Michael, who had failed to send something important to corporate), and breakfast (a dry bagel eaten alone because Roy had an early shift at the warehouse and had forgotten to get cream cheese). She was tired, and annoyed, and she couldn’t concentrate. She found herself wondering if this traffic was somehow conjured up by Dunder Mifflin—if the forbidden jam she could not search for was a traffic jam. Maybe the paper plant exploded. Maybe Schrute Farms had suddenly spiked in popularity because of rumors of a new beet jam. Maybe one of the sales people on a call had crashed their…

She couldn’t finish the thought. She knew Jim was the only salesman on a call this afternoon, and she just couldn’t imagine him crashing his car. For some reason her thoughts just shied away. Jim wouldn’t…Jim couldn’t…well, maybe Jim had planned the traffic jam as a giant prank against Dwight. That was more reasonable, surely, than the idea that he had crashed? She realized all at once that she had never really been in his car for more than a few minutes. She had no idea if he was a good driver or not. But in her mind he always was, and this was all in her mind, so there. She mentally stuck her tongue out at herself and looked up, noticing a few carlengths of space had opened up in front of her. She pulled forward, slid over into the newly emerging right-hand lane, and pulled off at her exit.

Opening the door to the apartment, she looked at the couch expectantly, only to find it empty. Then her mind caught up to her instincts and reminded her it was Friday night: Roy was out with the guys, probably at Darryl’s playing poker. She took off her shoes and jacket, stuck her Tupperware in the sink, and sank down into the couch cushions. Well, if Roy wasn’t here, she’d just have to make the most of it. Picking up the remote and glancing at the clock, she was surprised to see how late it had gotten. Traffic really was bad. But on the plus side, it was time for her two guilty pleasures: Wheel of Fortune followed by Jeopardy. She clicked on the TV.

Ten minutes later she was utterly engrossed. “PICK A C!” she yelled at her screen. “It’s obviously CHICKEN CACCIATORE!” When the unlucky (or stupid?) contestant said “H” she shook her head in disgust and smiled. Roy never wanted to watch this with her, because he said she got too into it. As far as she could tell, her outbursts were mild compared to what happened when a Phillies pitcher gave up so much as a walk, or a Sixers players missed an open shot, but she supposed she could be a little loud. “OH COME ON, AN F? ARE YOU BLIND?”

The contestants finally got it, and the game moved on. As the final puzzle came up for the lucky winner, she glared at the TV, daring it to be difficult. Vanna turned over RSTLNE, giving the shape of the bonus puzzle, an “event”:

_ _ _

S E S S _ _ N

"I need three consonants." “M B C” “And a vowel?” “I”

_ _ M

S E S S I _ N

Pam looked at the screen with a shock. The damn word was haunting her now. She almost didn’t hear the unlucky contestant fumbling with the words. For her it was clear as day, quickly confirmed by a sympathetic Pat.

J A M

S E S S I O N

Pam watched the entire episode of Jeopardy after Wheel, whooping when she got an answer none of the contestants did, shrugging when she had no idea on a daily double, and generally having a good time. Despite what she would admit was a subconscious expectation by this point, no category touching on jam came up: no “In a Jam,” no “Jamming Out,” not even—what had Dwight called it?—“Jellied Comestibles.” She had a great time. And she was pretty sure she would have won—if she had ever done something as frivolous and self-indulgent as try to get on Jeopardy. Not that she hadn’t tried the online test, but her home dialup connection had punked out halfway through. Twice.

She looked up at the clock and noticed it was already 7:30. Her stomach rumbled. She went to the kitchen to fix something for herself. Just a sandwich or something. Nothing fancy. Maybe PB&J, given the theme the day seemed to have acquired. But when she opened the fridge she saw:

A case (24 cans!) of Natural Ice.

A jar of sour cream.

An unopened jar of pickles.

Two sticks of butter. Well, two and a quarter.

And a few half-empty condiment bottles. No jam, though. It really wasn’t her favorite.

Well, maybe toast? But then she looked on top of the fridge and saw there was only the other half of her bagel from the morning.

“Roy” she muttered under her breath. He hadn’t just forgotten the cream cheese, had he? He hadn’t gotten anything but that beer and (she looked around) the chips and Twizzlers sitting by the toaster oven. Nothing substantial. And he’d acted so proud that he’d remembered to do the shopping.

She sighed, grabbed her car keys, and headed back out to get some groceries, and maybe something to eat on the way. She decided on the fly that this was a Wegman’s night, instead of Price Chopper; after all, they had a good deli, and really a good ready to eat section in general, so she wouldn’t be caught spending an hour cooking after she got home again. And besides, she loved those little chocolate chip muffins they sold. It was definitely a muffin kind of night.

She pulled into the Wegman’s parking lot, picked up small cart, and pushed her way through the aisles. She swept through the ready to eat section, grabbing some salad, a sandwich, and (on a whim) a four-pack of California rolls. As she walks by the cash registers on the way to the grocery section, she grabs a $25 Amazon gift card from the impulse buys—she can use it to buy art supplies later, and Roy will just see it as part of the grocery budget (if he even cared enough to look). She grabs peanut butter and debates between two kinds of fancy jam before choosing raspberry Smuckers because it reminds her of elementary school lunches her mom used to pack. Thinking of this afternoon, she also grabs a fancy lemon curd (from England!) for Angela. She loads up on staples (pasta, freezer meals, rice, some produce) before heading for the aisle that has the cheese and packaged bread. She’s deciding between Wegman’s generic and Wonderbread when she hears a voice behind her:

“I always prefer the King’s Hawaiian myself. Goes great with ham and cheese. Or” (a hand reaches around her to point at the contents of her basket) “peanut butter and jelly, if that’s more your speed.”

She turns around with a grin and finds herself smiling up at a pair of bright green eyes from a very short distance.

“Hi, Jim.”

“Hi, Jim.”

She tears her eyes away from his eyes, manages to slide them away from that familiar smile, and notices that this is very definitely not work-Jim. She has work-Jim itemized, catalogued, identified. She knows every one of the shirts (fairly numerous), pants (fairly few), and ties (fewer still) he wears to the office. She knows which he wears together and which she’s only seen apart. She can even predict his mood a little by the combinations she sees: most basically, if it matches, he’s probably in a good mood, because he got up in time to choose it; if it really, really doesn’t match, he’ll be in a better mood, because he’s probably doing it to distract Dwight; and if it’s just a little off, he’s in a hurry and probably a little pissed off. She doesn’t really know why she knows these things—maybe it’s just a best friend thing, obsessively taking note of everything you can see?—but she does.

And this is none of those work-Jims. This Jim is wearing a thin cotton t-shirts with unidentified stains on it (is that…mustard down the left side?) and sweatpants (baggy, but not too baggy, oh why did she have to check if they were too baggy, he’s definitely going to notice why shouldn’t he notice oh shut up Pam you know why). This Jim is carrying a shopping basket instead of a messenger bag. This Jim is…actually looking at her with the exact same expression he always does, head cocked a little to the side, grin spilling onto his face as if it just slipped out and he isn’t quite aware of it yet. Which calms her. This is still Jim. Just…a new side of him. More Jim to go around. The more the merrier. I mean I didn’t mean that I just meant…

All this goes through her head in the time it takes her to clear her throat, and him to say “Hey.”

Then she processes what he actually said to her first, and glances towards the King’s Hawaiian on the shelf. On the way her eye catches another label that she can’t resist teasing him with.

“Really? I’d have picked you more for a Bimbo man myself.”

Did she really say that? Her brain has just listened to what her mouth decided to say, and she’s embarrassed. She tries to stop herself but she’s already as red as one of Dwight’s beets—and given that he spent a whole afternoon extolling the perfect red-purple shade and how Schrute Farms beets achieve it, she really knows what she’s talking about here. He cocks an eyebrow at her.

“Woah, Beesly, are you trying to tell me something?” (she did not think it was possible for her to redden further) “You get sassy when you get out from behind that desk! But I believe its pronounced BEEEEEEMbo” (he deliberately overemphasizes the E sound until she snorts, and the tension lifts. How does he always do that?).

“You can believe what you want, but I know how to spell.”

“I’m sure you do. Anyway, what’s the occasion? Why Wegman’s? I always thought you were a Price Chopper girl.”

“What? Why?” Why would he think that? More importantly, how does he know that? Because she does usually shop at Price Chopper. Partly for the price—she and Roy are trying to save for that wedding, after all—and partly because, well, she always has. But how does he know?

“Really, Pam? Every day you bring your lunch to work, and it’s always in a blue Price Chopper plastic bag. Every. Day.” He notices these things? But then, she realizes, she’s noticed his is always in a paper bag, with his name written on it in Sharpie at the top. On the days when they don’t eat together in the break room, she’s thought about pulling it out and doodling some picture for him on it: all that blank space going to waste, a perfect canvas for…something. She hasn’t done it yet, but maybe…

“How do you recognize a plastic bag?”

“They’re blue, Beesly. Giant is yellow, Wegman’s is white…c’mon, you’re an artist. I don’t believe you really don’t know these things” And she realizes she does. Of course she does. But she’d never have thought to use it to tell what store he shopped at—not that she could, with his lunch hiding in those paper bags. But while she may not know, she can always make a joke, and it’s time he got as good as he gave. After all, he’s still staring down at her with that smirking grin on his face (she still hasn’t looked away).

“Speaking of which, Halpert, if I’m a Price Chopper girl, you’re definitely not a Wegman’s boy.”

“Oh really?”

“Yeah, shouldn’t you be with your own kind?”

“And what exactly is my own kind?” Another grin, this one the special one that eggs her on, that tells her he believes she’s at least as funny as him. She likes this grin.

“Well” (she waves a hand up and down) “shouldn’t you be at Giant?”

He throws his head back and laughs (the tshirt rides up again) and she feels as tall as he is in that moment. She puts the two breads she was deciding on back and pulls out the Bimbo, dropping it in her cart. He asks her which of their coworkers is a Wegman’s girl or boy (Oscar, she decides) and where Dwight shops (nowhere, he doesn’t trust food he didn’t grow himself) and Michael (the convenience store on his corner, mostly for candy). Without conscious decision they turn and walk through the aisles together, continuing the conversation. She realizes that she really likes not-work-Jim exactly as much as she likes work-Jim. She tries not to think too hard about how much that might actually be, and ignores the fact that she’s already done all her shopping and should really be heading home.

As they pass by the endcap for the aisle with the jam, she remembers to tell him about Dwight and his beet jam, and he can’t breathe for a moment and she feels a warmth deep down inside. Then the conversation naturally leads to why she knows this, and she’s telling him about Angela and jam (she picks the jar she bought for her birthday up to show him) and the error code, and he’s pulling out his Dunder Mifflin-issued Blackberry and typing into Google and there it is again, in small but legible black and white:

ERROR: ACCESS DENIED. ERROR CODE 4178

When Jim tells the story, he usually says it started the day he met her. Pam giggles and swats him (yes, even now, she can’t help it), and tells him he doesn’t get to count the extra time he pined for her He has to start later. And when he does, after what Pam has dubbed the ceremonial eye-roll, this is how he tells it.

For Jim, it started with the wind, the rain, and a broken box lid. This is the same day Pam looked up the jam. We’ve already established it was a rainy day, but Pam wasn’t out in it the way Jim was. He had three sales calls all in a row in the afternoon, so he left the office in the early afternoon and didn’t come back. He brought with him a box of sample paper, since he’s found most prospective clients won’t buy paper they haven’t seen. There’s something tactile about printer paper; people really want to know the feel, the texture, the weight. He doesn’t care. He only uses Dunder Mifflin in his home printer because he gets it pretty much free. But the clients care, and so he brings the box.

The sales calls do not go well. Really, this is just the continuation of a pretty bad day for Jim; he’s outside in the rain and the wet, the traffic is terrible, Pam was dragged into a meeting with Michael that morning and he barely got to see her, and when he did the jellybean dish was full of regular black. This last one is probably his fault for picking the others out over the week, but he doesn’t really want to admit that because if he does he’ll have to admit how often he goes up there with no other purpose but to chat her up, using the jellybeans as an excuse. It’s not like he’s in denial—he knows he might as well have “Unrequited Love” tattooed across his forehead, as well as “Utter Idiot” because he’s very aware she’s engaged thank you very much—but he’d like to avoid the complete embarrassment of counting his trips, even in his own mind.

So it’s been a pretty bad day. And the calls don’t help—no bites, only one “maybe” of a nibble, and he lugged a big box of paper around for no reason. And then on his way back to the car after the last call, just as he’s opening the door to put it away, the box lid breaks, and the paper comes flying out. Not falling, flying. The wind picks it up, and the rain smacks it down, and before he can react he’s caught in a vortex of paper (very absorbent paper, his subconscious notes) and it’s plastered all over him and ugh that was not what he needed. When he can finally claw it off his face, he sees his whole work outfit has basically been replaced by Jim Halpert, Human Paper Mache Model, and the interior of his car looks like a natural disaster hit it. Which he supposes it did. He gets into the car (why bother cleaning it if his whole body is just going to repaper it anyway) and drives home through the terrible traffic. At home he cleans out the car as best he can, changes into casual clothes (super casual, the kind where the paper mache layer he recently acquired would be a distinct improvement), and heats up a frozen dinner. It burns his mouth. Typical.

He watches Wheel and Jeopardy, crowing to himself when he gets Final Jeopardy right immediately (“What is Fifth Avenue?”). He imagines himself chatting with Alex right after (“What will I do with the winnings? Well, you can believe I won’t be shilling paper anytime soon.”). Then he returns to the reality of his actual life, where the frozen dinner, in addition to burning his mouth, isn’t sitting too well in other parts of his body, and along the way realizes he’s out of toilet paper. He takes a quick gander around the apartment, jots a few mental notes of other things he’s out of (bread, better frozen dinners, paper towels) and things he wants (he would kill for some Moose Tracks right now) and heads out the door. Wegmans is the nearest grocery store, so Wegmans it is. As he gets in the car, he remembers that he didn’t exactly dress to go out, but who’s going to see him? He drives off, mentally rechecking the grocery list on his way to the store.

At Wegmans he grabs as shopping basket and heads for the paper goods. On the way he figures he’ll grab the bread when he notices a familiar face (well, more accurately, the back of a familiar head). He sneaks up behind her without thinking and thinks of how nice it would be if they were there shopping together. His mouth moves on autopilot (he needs to break that habit; there are definitely things he should not be saying to her without thinking them through all the way) and makes the suggestion he would have made if they were together (not in that way. Well, also in that way, but that’s beside the point).

She spins around. He’s hit by the same emotion he’s always hit with. Holy shit. She’s gorgeous. She’s staring up at him from a little closer than he realized he had gotten, and he really just wants to lean down and kiss her. He pushes that back (not out of his mind, it’s never out of his mind, but back) and tries to have a normal conversation. But it’s hard. Harder even than at work, where there’s always the veneer of professionalism—a thin veneer, but present—to make sure he behaves himself. And the cameras. His eyes shift left and right and he realizes this is the first time he’s seen her in forever without cameras around. Now he’s really worried.

She’s making a joke about Bimbo bread and his mind is racing trying to parse it. It’s racing so fast he almost doesn’t notice how red she is—but he does, and that makes him even more desperate to figure out what’s going on. Did she call him a bimbo? Insulting, sure, but aren’t bimbos supposed to be…like…attractive? Does she think of him that way? Or is she still teasing him about Katy? He’s not sure he’s actually told her they broke up, and she was definitely amused to find out she’d been a cheerleader…Or is there no message here at all and he’s just overanalyzing as always? He can practically feel his autopilot kick in, and he’s teasing her about her pronunciation, and he can see something in her eyes drain away as she registers the joke. Something he wasn’t even fully aware was there before it left. He thinks its some kind of stress, but what kind? He’s not sure he wants the answer to that, actually.

The rest of the conversation moves into a less tense register, but he can’t help but hope she’s flirting when she calls him a Giant. After all, he’s seen Roy. But he pushes that back too, and as he turns to walk away she turns to walk beside him as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. He can see she’s already finished most of her shopping, but she seems content to walk the same aisles with him that she’s already been through, and he’s absurdly pleased at the opportunity to pretend they’re just doing the weekly shopping—together. She tells him a story about the office when he was out and he can just imagine all the things he could do with the knowledge that Dwight is making jam, but he keeps listening. When she gets to the error code he pulls out his Blackberry (he keeps it on him even when he’s not at work, not because he’s a workaholic but because there are definitely times when the ability to respond to an email immediately has allowed him to prank or otherwise inconvenience Dwight, and he doesn’t want to miss those chances. Also, sometimes she emails him after he’s out of the office, and he definitely doesn’t want to miss those). He follows her direction and sees what she saw

ERROR: ACCESS DENIED. ERROR CODE 4178

He’s immediately laughing, and then so is she, and he’s looking over at her laughing and she’s just so damn beautiful. She’s redder than red again, this time with glee, and he vows at this moment that he’s going to figure this out for her, whatever it is, just to see her laugh like this again. As her laughter subsides, he can’t help himself from trying to start it up again by joking about what kinds of jam this could refer to: maybe Kevin’s music career is taking off, or Corporate has devised a plan to simultaneously jam all the copiers in the world so everyone needs to buy replacement paper, or it’s meant to block searches for Jan and someone messed up. She’s not guffawing anymore, but she’s giggling like a five-year-old, and he can’t help it, she’s just too adorable. He bangs his head against the endcap of the aisle to dislodge those thoughts. She looks up at him with a strange expression on her face.

“What are you doing?”

Shoot. He’s violated self-preservation rule #1: don’t let Pam notice you’re going crazy about her. He flails around for an excuse, and ends up going with a partial truth.

“I’m just trying to get myself to think clearly” about something other than you.

“What, is your mind jammed?” She grins up at him and he can’t help but flick his eyes to her lips and back up again into those eyes and then up further so he’s not even looking at her because otherwise he’s going to betray himself right the hell now.

“Um…something like that, yeah.”

“Well, you better be sure it’s not Janned. Don’t want to see you going the Michael route here.”

Thank God she didn’t say Pammed. He’s not sure he could have autopiloted his way out of that, and he’s definitely not up to anything more than autopilot right now, because all his brain cells and nerves and everything are focused on her.

And she’s still talking.

“I’m just kidding” (she swats him) “I don’t really see you going for that kind of awkward interoffice romance thing anyway.”

He wishes she’d just said Pammed.

It would not be accurate to say that Pam doesn’t notice the effect her words have on Jim. It would also not be accurate to say she does. It’s more like her brain shuts down, because she honestly can’t believe she’s said the words “interoffice romance thing” to Jim, of all people. She was going for light, airy, fun. She’s pretty sure she only hit awkward. She doesn’t really want to admit why it felt so awkward, she just knows it did, and now she’s desperately trying to backpedal. The two of them manage to find some new, much safer ground to talk about (he makes some kind of crack about having jam on his mind, demonstrating with a jar from the shelf) but the moment is definitely broken (not that she’d admit there was a moment) and she finds herself at her car without really knowing how. She’s pretty sure she paid for her groceries—they’re definitely in sacks, so she probably did?—but she has no recollection of it. She turns to him, trudging out to his own car a few spots away, and waves.

“See you Monday.”

“Bye, Pam.” She can’t be sure, but he seems about as out of it as she feels.

“Bye, Jim.” She watches as he sketches a final short hand gesture, almost too small to be a wave (but not too small to raise up his shirt a little) and gets into the car.

She gets into hers, and drives home.

Home is boring. The PB&J is good (the Bimbo is surprisingly tasty bread) and she feels better once she’s restocked the fridge with at least a few of the things she wanted. Her phone buzzes and she has a text from Roy. Once she decodes the typoes (which are their own kind of evidence of how he’s doing), she figures out that he’s not coming home tonight. Sometimes she thinks Darryl’s couch gets more action than she does, not that she particularly minds tonight. She sits up for a while eating sandwich after sandwich—most of the jam is gone by the time she lets herself go to bed and sink into a food-coma-assisted sleep alone. She does not remember her dreams.

She wakes up early the next morning, which she did not expect. Usually when Roy is away she sleeps in, but she got a surprisingly early night last night because of the jam. Jam! She sits up with a start. Glancing at her phone, she realizes she’s up so early that Roy probably won’t be back for several hours—assuming he and Darryl don’t just start up a game of Madden as soon as they’re both awake. But the local library is open early on Saturdays (just don’t try to go after noon, when they’re closed) and she has an idea brewing in her mind.

She pulls up to the library and logs into one of the public computers. She doesn’t usually do this, because they have perfectly good internet at home, but she remembers letting those IT guys install that monitoring software on her home computer just like the office ones. She’ll just have to chance it that they didn’t think of the library, just as she wouldn’t have until now. She sneaks a glance around her to check for cameras. Just her, a couple of kids clearly working on a homework assignment, and…is that Creed? She can’t quite be sure, but she’s not really concerned anyway. She takes a deep breath and opens the browser, typing in “jam” into the search bar. A large part of her expects to see another 4178, but the search actually loads. She looks with increasing disappointment at the first page of results.

Jam recipe.

Jam for sale.

Jam recipe.

Review of first jam recipe.

Nothing of any interest that she can tell. Why is this a blocked search? She clicks around almost randomly, and clicks over to Google Image Search. She accidentally double-clicks, so the first image in the results immediately pops up to fullscreen size.

Suddenly, she can’t breathe.

That’s because, suddenly, she’s looking at a very familiar face, at a very familiar desk, as well as at a somewhat unfamiliar but still recognizable back of a head.

“Is that really what my hair looks like from the back?”

She knows it’s an inane thing to think, but it’s the first thing that comes into her mind. Then she glances around to make sure no one is watching her screen, and starts clicking through the images. It occurs to her that she could make this faster by making them go back to thumbnails, but she doesn’t want to. She wants to see, and seeing and believing are both easier when the pictures are full size. She hurries past the ones of actual jam (oh look, strawberries!) but an alarming percentage of them are her. Or him. Or usually her AND him. They’re clearly still shots from the show—but why are they jam? Her head clears enough to realize she can actually click through to the origin page for a given image. She does this to the next image she recognizes (Jim, hanging over the corner of her reception desk, his hand in her candy dish, as she looks up at him) and she tries very hard not to let her brain process what she sees on that page.

Jam.

Jim and Pam.

JAM.

She immediately closes the window, like that will help anything, and sits in shocked silence.

JAM?

Jim isn’t sure how he got through the rest of that awkward, awkward Wegman’s run. He does remember sitting at home later, blindly watching whatever Mark had on and responding in monosyllables until his roommate looked over at him in concern. He blew it off, but he knew Mark was worried when he offered to go shoot hoops over at the Y the next morning. Mark never wanted to get up on Saturday mornings; if he was offering to, that meant he was seriously concerned. Jim tried to assuage the concern, but he didn’t think Mark was wrong—physical exercise would probably help.

So that Saturday morning they found themselves at the Scranton Y in shorts and t-shirts, scrimmaging two-on-two and three-on-three with the other guys whose Saturday morning priorities included sweat and stink instead of cartoons, food, or even sleep. Jim was actually feeling pretty good. The best game was when he had backed down a guy about his height but twice the volume, finishing him with a baby hook shot a couple times and defending successfully on the other end until he and Mark won 11-2 (make it take it, ones and twos). The guy kinda reminded him of Roy—just enough to hone the competitive edge, not enough to throw him off his game. Now he was shooting free throws to cool down, though, so his adrenalin was down, and the guy was sitting over there on a bench chatting with his friends. That was all it took to send his mind down the same paths it always traced. He thought repetitive routines were supposed to be calming, but this was anything but.

Bounce bounce swish

What was she doing right now?

Bounce bounce swish

She was probably in bed with Roy, maybe snuggling in on a warm Saturday, cuddling up and refusing to leave the bed.

Bounce bounce swish

Her hair was probably frizzing around like it did in any kind of humidity whatever, and she looked like—well, even more like—an angel.

Bounce bounce swish

What was that last night? “I don’t really see you going for” an office romance?

Bounce bounce swish

Like he was someone a sexless, romance-less being, with no needs or urges.

Bounce bounce clank

He looked up to see Mark (who had been feeding him the ball after every made free throw) chasing down a long rebound. Guess it was time to get out of there.

As he hit the showers he tried to think of better things. Of a better side of what she’d said. After all, she’d said he wouldn’t go for an awkward office romance. That meant she thought he was better than Michael and Jan, right? I mean, low bar, he thought to himself, but not completely pathetic? OK, it was completely pathetic. But he needed something.

And he was her friend. He sighed as he pulled on jeans and a (new, not-sweat-soaked) t-shirt in the locker room. He really was, even if he also wanted so badly to be more. So it wasn’t fair to her to punish her, even in his mind, for what was probably an innocent remark. It’s not like it was written on his face or anything—“I’m in love with you” (he winced as he thought the words)—he’d been working on being more discreet recently anyway. So she probably didn’t mean anything by it.

By the time they got home, he was feeling like he owed Pam some kind of restitution for the way he’d been feeling about her—even if she never knew it in the first place. Maybe he could figure out something about that “jam” thing she’d shown him and present her the news as a peace offering. Hell, maybe it really would be about Dwight’s beet jam and they could use it in a prank of some kind. He flopped onto the couch and glanced over at Mark’s new laptop on the coffee table and it hit him.

Mark’s new laptop.

Mark’s old laptop had the NBC Universal software installed on it when the camera men came over to shoot some establishing shots and realized Jim had pretty much unfettered access to Mark’s stuff as well as his own. But Mark had busted that one by dropping it on the stairs, and now a shiny new laptop was sitting right there in front of Jim with no embargo software on it at all. Everything after that realization was remarkably fast, though it would remain stuck in his mind forever.

“Hey man, mind if I borrow your computer?”

“Sure. Same password as the old one! Just don’t go downloading anything I wouldn’t download!”

He typed in Mark’s password and pulled up Google. A short search and a longer scroll later and he was looking at what was undeniably an Office-oriented site on the topic of “jam.” But while his eyes could acknowledge that fact, his brain was screaming in denial—and a totally different part of him was screaming in triumph. There it was right in front of him, clear as day: he wasn’t the only one who saw it. It was written on his face. And all these people were almost as invested in it as him.

And then he thought: “Pam’s looking for this too.”

And he started to panic.

It was literally all over his face. In all these stills, videos, supercuts even of every time he looked at her at work. And she was going to see.

Panic wasn’t enough of a word.

Pam’s half hour on the computer sped by quickly. She was…inundated was probably the right word. Flooded. Overwhelmed by what she was seeing. Jim looking at her, adoration in his eyes. Jim grimacing whenever Roy was mentioned. Jim for days. Jim was probably in love with her. Definitely in love with her. She really couldn’t deny it at this point.

But, if she was honest with herself, she kind of knew that. Or at least, it hardly came as a shock. She’d had moments before when she thought he might…she was very sure on that first day at Cugino’s that he thought it was a date…she was certain when he called their time on the rooftop a “first date” (though, she couldn’t help but thinking, he was totally wrong—it was at least their second…possibly more judging by these pictures she was seeing).

No, what scared her was not Jim looking at her. What scared her was herself looking at Jim. There were almost as many pictures of her stealing glances at him—her falling asleep on his shoulder—her grinning at him so wide she wasn’t sure she even had that many teeth—her blushing. Blushing blushing blushing. She didn’t think of herself as someone who blushed easily, but there she was, blushing all the time at the office.

Maybe that was the problem, she thought. She didn’t think of herself, full stop. Maybe a more introspective woman would have realized this whole mess earlier. Maybe a more introspective woman would have told herself to cut it out, that she was engaged, that outsourcing her daily happiness in a confidante (a male, highly attractive confidant) who was not her boyfriend was not the ideal solution to her discontents. But she was not a more introspective woman. So she did what she always did when she was worried. She called her mom.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Pam! Darling, how good to hear from you. How are you?”

“…I’m…actually, Mom, can I talk to you about something?”

“Always, dear.”

“Well, I’m at the public library now…”

“Pam, you know you shouldn’t talk in the library, people are trying to read!”

“Mom, it’s OK, I stepped out into the hall. Anyway, I’m in the library and I just looked up…well, the details don’t matter, but I found myself looking at all these pictures of…well, of Jim and me…”

“Which ones?”

“Um…pictures from the show, I guess…lots of them.”

“I know, honey. Which ones? The one when I came to visit the office is my favorite, but I think you might be partial to the one where you fall asleep on his shoulder. He just looks so happy, doesn’t he?”

“…you knew?”

“Of course dear! Aunt Marge sends me all the DVDs, you know, since we can’t get them here. She’s quite taken with your Jim, you know, says if she were twenty years younger”

“MOM! You knew and you didn’t tell me?”

“Dear, you told me not to tell you anything the relatives found out about the show! You said you didn’t want to know, wanted to pretend the cameras didn’t exist.”

“I know, but…MOOOOOM.”

“Well, it’s not like I didn’t try to hint at it. I haven’t been asking about Jim each time we speak since I met him for my own health you know! Though I suppose you haven’t noticed since you tend to bring him up on your own before I get a word in edgewise nowadays…”

“Mom, I’m engaged to Roy! I’m going to be married soon.”

“Are you, dear?”

“MOM.”

Pam hung up the phone. That was probably the first time she’d ever called home and ended up less composed than when she started. She slumped against the wall, sliding down to sit on the floor outside the main room of the library. Even her mother knew. Everyone knew. Except, apparently, her.

But what did they know? Obviously, everyone knew about Jim’s feelings for her. The cameramen certainly did, and if they did, well, everyone did now. But what about hers for him? Those were just as clear on the film—frankly, clearer there than anywhere else. What did she think of him? Just the thought brought back an image of last night…of shopping together, giggling and laughing, and of watching veeeeeery carefully to see a little bit of ab and hair peek out the bottom of that stained t-shirt. Then she remembers her embarrassment when she mentioned “interoffice romance” to Jim.

Oh.

Right.

“That might not just have been altruistic embarrassment, hmmm Pam?” she wonders to herself. Just so embarrassed for Jim. So worried about his feelings. Nothing to do with yours, hm? No personally applicable reason why you shouldn’t say the words “office romance” to James Duncan Halpert? No reason you’re still teasing him about dating a cheerleader? Doesn’t bother you, no, just embarrassment for him…

“Shut up brain,” she mutters to herself. “Shut up.”

She needs time to think. Hard. But Roy’s going to be home soon (well, he should, another corner of her brain pipes up. Never heard that one before). And she needs to be careful about this (why? another part of her murmurs. If you don’t want Jim, why do you need to be careful here?). She can’t tell Roy (tell him what?). She needs to think. Maybe coffee will help.

She’s about to head out to Dunkin Donuts when her phone buzzes twice:

Mom: you must be near a computer that lets you search freely

Mom: look up his reaction to the graphic arts internship

She is this. close. to continuing to the car and taking time to think. But her feet are already moving and she’s sitting in front of the computer and logging back in.

Half an hour later she logs in for a third session too.

Jim has stopped panicking, not that he’s calm. He really thought he’d done a better job of concealing his feelings. Not that no one could guess—he doesn’t think he’s that clever or subtle—but he thought maybe he’d have some plausible deniability. That’s totally shattered. Every single picture and video he’s looked at has reconfirmed his fears: he’s utterly transparent.

The only reason he’s not panicking is that, hey, if he’s this transparent, she’s got to have realized before this, right? She can’t have missed what everyone else can see so clearly. And that means this won’t be the earth-shaking moment he was afraid of. She won’t be shocked; she already knows.

Of course, if she already knows, she already knows. So he’s switched from panic to depression. If she already knows, and she’s still treating him this way, then he’s been living a lie. That vague idea he’d always had that if he ever really got up the guts to tell her how he felt she might reciprocate—gone. She already knows, and she doesn’t feel the way he does. If she did, she’d have said something. If she did, she wouldn’t still be engaged. If she did…but she doesn’t. And that pretty much breaks him, to be honest.

It’s not that he really had plans to tell her. And it’s not like he expected some fairytale pie in the sky ending where she drops everything to be with him in an instant. But he thought it would matter. He thought it was dangerous—that telling her would have been a make or break moment for them, whether they made or broke. Now he knows it wouldn’t change anything. She already knows.

Jim wonders how early on a Saturday is too early to start day-drinking.

It’s probably too early now.

But he’s not sure he cares.

He goes back upstairs and lies on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He thinks of all the times he’s imagined Pam in this bed—and the one time he had her here, though not exactly in the way he’d imagined. He wonders how you come back from something like this, and he thinks maybe you don’t. If it were a weekday, he’d probably put in for a transfer. Since it’s a Saturday, maybe he should start looking for another job entirely.

He left Mark’s computer down by the sofa, so he pulls out his own laptop. It may be embargoed from show stuff—now he kinda wishes Mark’s had been too—but it can reach job sites just fine. He’s doodling along between Indeed and Monster and Craigslist, not really sure what he’s looking for, and out of sheer habit he checks his work email.

1 New Message.

It’s from an email address he doesn’t recognize—hb123@yahoo.com—and from the subject line (“Call me when you get this”) he almost deletes it as spam. But he decides it might be one of his clients on a personal email address and so he doesn’t. But he doesn’t read it either. He’s not sure he can do work right now, and anyway, none of his orders are so urgent he really needs to deal with them before Monday. He marks it as read, even though he hasn’t, and flags it for follow-up. There are no real paper emergencies in the world, no matter what Dwight thinks.

He fiddles around on the computer some more and heads downstairs for lunch. If he’s going to start day-drinking, he’s not going to do it on an empty stomach.

He is, however, going to do it on a stomach full of ice cream, because that’s the only thing that really appeals to him right now. He opens the freezer and realizes that in his panic about the Janned/Pammed thing at Wegmans he totally spaced on the Moose Tracks he meant to buy. He curses and slips out the door, heading to Giant for reasons he is totally not going to admit to himself. He’ll pick up the ice cream and a sixpack and have himself a nice pity party once he gets back. He considers asking Mark if he wants anything but he’s not really in a talking mood right now, so he just gets in the car and drives.

The radio is really out to get him on the way there: even the NPR station is playing love songs, and the sports talk station is presented by 1-800-FLOWERS so he has to hear five times about their dozen roses for $20 special. He gets his beer and ice cream and heads home.

Two beers and 32 ounces of ice cream later, he’s finally feeling pretty good. For the moment. Mark has cleared out to go visit his girlfriend and Jim has a date with 4 more beers and another 32 ounces of ice cream. He thinks he’ll be seeing them very soon.

When Pam’s third session on the library computer times out, a very nice librarian is standing there to tell her that really, other patrons did occasionally need to use the facilities, and while they appreciated her enthusiasm for their services, she needs to wait four hours to log on again.

She takes this as a sign that she needs to go somewhere else to figure things out. She’s not sure what she’s figuring out—leaving Roy (terrifying thought, ten years down the drain)? Telling Jim off (her friend Izzy used to call that “kicking the puppy,” and now she’s thinking of Jim as a little tiny dog and she just wants to pick him up and squeeze him so much)? Running off into the abyss (this is right now seeming like the best option)?—but she needs to figure it out.

Of course, right at that moment, her phone buzzes.

Roy: where r u?

Roy: just got back from Darryl’s. Got a surprise for u

She guesses her mind is made up for her, as usual. She heads home. She can’t help hoping the surprise is something that will make up her mind for her: flowers! Some actual help with the wedding! Tickets to a concert! But she’s thinking on another level deep inside that it’s probably more boring, more Roy than that: a new laundry basket! Wrenches! A third freaking waverunner so Kenny doesn’t have to borrow hers!

She’s not prepared for what she sees when she comes home.

Or rather, she is. It’s a pretty normal scene, after all. Roy, sitting on the couch, beer in hand. Darryl sitting next to him. The TV on.

“Pammy!” He waves at her with a big grin. “Where were you?”

“Oh, just running some errands. Went to the library, stuff like that.” She is not telling Roy a lie exactly, but she’s definitely not going to tell him what she saw there. Not that he’s going to ask. He’s still got one hand on the Xbox controller, after all, and she can see half his attention already tugging back to the TV, where Darryl’s Madden team is executing some sort of pre-snap audible (spend enough time with a sports nut and some of it will rub off on you, she absently thinks).

Wait a minute.

They don’t own an Xbox.

They don’t own Madden.

Roy always goes to Darryl’s for Madden.

And there’s still this shit-eating grin on his face as he’s explaining, telling her how he and Darryl ran by the Walmart on their way over here and got an Xbox and Madden and they’re just christening it with their first game.

“See Pammy? You always get so grumpy when I stay over at Darryl’s to play, I figured this way we can bring the game to you so you don’t have to be so alone!”

He’s looking at her like a cat that just brought a dead mouse to her feet: he’s expecting her to jump for joy at it, and he’s already a little concerned that her face doesn’t seem to be mirroring his emotion.

“Roy. Where’d you get the money for an Xbox? We’re saving for the wedding, remember?”

“Aw, c’mon Pammy, that’s months away.”

It’s always months away.

It’s been years away.

And something inside her snaps to a new realization—one that feels like a very old realization.

“No, it’s not Roy. It’s not going to happen.”

And she’s up the stairs before he stops gaping at her, that wide wide grin still half-stuck to his open mouth.

As she walks into their bedroom (his bedroom? Hers? She figures it’ll probably become his) and starts packing the first bag she sees, she has the strange feeling that she’s watching herself from 1000 feet up. She wonders if this is really all about Jim—and if so, shouldn’t she have talked to him? But as she’s stuffing clothes into the duffle (shirts, underwear, socks, shoes…better bring some work clothes too even though tomorrow’s not a work day, who knows how long this is going to take) she realizes it’s not about Jim. It’s about her and Roy.

It’s about how he can’t remember to buy any groceries, but comes home with an Xbox. About how his big “surprise” to her is that he bought himself several hundred dollars worth of game equipment that will mean she has even less of his attention to herself even if they’ll be in the same house more often. It’s about how she’s been putting off things—like that art internship that they “couldn’t afford” because of the wedding—and he never puts anything off except their wedding. And it’s about how he doesn’t even realize he’s doing any of it.

He apologizes, sure. He’s actually apologizing right now, blundering into the bedroom with her and saying “Sorry Pammy” and “I didn’t mean it like that” and all the words he usually uses to defuse her moods. But he doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for, and she has neither the energy nor the patience to try to teach him. And frankly, if the last ten years didn’t…the next ten minutes aren’t going to either. Or the next rest of her life.

She’s moving now, into the bathroom, grabbing her toothbrush and her toiletries, and he’s still talking. Only now he’s angrier, uglier. She brushes past him and he grabs her arm. Hard. She shrugs it off and he’s so surprised that she did it that he actually lets go. But she knows she’s running on borrowed time here. He’s never actually hit her, but she usually folds before he comes anywhere close, and she needs to get out of this house now. She practically runs down the stairs to catch Darryl before he’s out the door. He’s getting up off the couch (has it really been that short of a time) but he’s still there, so she has a witness. Protection. Words she really shouldn’t need from someone who just a few minutes ago was her fiancée. Still is, technically. She grabs the Bimbo bread off the counter, stuffs it on top of her duffle (really squishy), and turns to talk to Roy.

She says, very calmly, “Roy.”

It stops him in mid-rant. He’s not used to her being quiet without being passive.

“Roy. This is over. It’s not just this moment. It’s not just this Xbox. It’s a lot of things. But I don’t think we’re right for each other anymore. I don’t think we have been for a while. And I’m going to go somewhere else” (an image of Jim flits through her head but she firmly turns it aside with a shake of her head) “and we’re going to figure out how to divide things, but this” (she gestures between them) “it’s…it’s over, Roy. I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t wait for him to react. She turns to Darryl and says “take care of him. Don’t let him do something stupid.”

And she’s gone. The car seat is still warm from when she drove up a few minutes ago. She starts it up and drives off…though she’s not sure exactly where she’s going, she knows she needs to keep this crazy momentum up. So she drives away. Not toward, but away. And it’s enough, for the moment, to keep her going.

Pam pulls into the diner parking lot and goes inside. She hasn’t had lunch yet, and her adrenalin is ebbing, and she’s not sure what to do now. It’s not that she thinks she made a mistake. She knows she needed to do this. But what now?

And how much of this is about Jim and Jam?

She hasn’t really let herself think about the photos since she saw the Xbox. There’s really only space for so many life-changing events in her mind at once. But she needs to think about them both now, needs to know how much of this is because of him, and how much because of her. Not because she’s going straight from Roy to Jim (would that be such a bad thing, her mind whispers?) but because she needs to know.

She sits in a booth and orders a tea. The waitress looks a bit oddly at her but goes to get it.

She thinks about the photos now. About the realization that Jim loves her. That she’d been too blind, or blinded, or self-deceiving to see it before, but he loves her. And that (while we’re talking life-changing events) his feelings aren’t entirely unrequited. She remembers the pictures shot from his perspective: the way she looks over at his desk even when he’s not there (she knew she did, but she didn’t know what her face looked like when she did). The way her eyes lit up when he spoke to her. The way she curls herself, entirely unconsciously, in his direction, like a plant reaching for sunlight, whenever they’re together (she didn’t even realize she did this).

She thinks about how supportive he is. How he never tears her down, only builds her up—or lets her do the building, like a sentient piece of scaffolding. She thinks about how he’s been the most important relationship in her life for years—how her mother reacted when she told her about him—how much hurt she saw in his eyes in the photos whenever they talked about Roy and how he treated her (how had she missed that before? Oh right, she always looked at her shoes when mentioning Roy, never his face).

She realizes that the life-changing event here is not that he’s in love with her. It’s that they’re in love together.

And that her breakup with Roy isn’t about Jim, or even really about jam; it’s about her, and her-and-Roy. She might not have recognized it if she hadn’t spent all morning looking at pictures of her and Jim. She might not have noticed if she hadn’t seen what it looks like when you’re in love and he loves you back, or if she hadn’t been remembering what it feels like to be supported and valued. But it would have been there nonetheless. The selfishness, the self-destructiveness of their relationship, the damage it was doing to her. She may have needed a little push from those photos and her memories, but it was like taking off sunglasses in a dark room and realizing the lights were on all the time. The glasses didn’t change the world, just your perception of it, and seeing Jim look at her—really seeing it—didn’t change how Roy treated her. It just made her realize maybe that wasn’t the best she could get.

And even if she never ends up with Jim—a prospect that she suddenly realizes frightens her—she’s grateful that he helped her realize that.

The tea comes in one of those little sets where they give you a teapot and let you pour your own hot water. She lets it steep a little, ordering scrambled eggs and bacon, and thinks about Jim. She starts smiling for the first time since she walked into what used to be her house, and twirls a spoon.

Pam sits in her booth playing with the last scraps of her food and thinks about Jim. She thinks how amazing it is how consistently her thoughts turned in that direction now that she doesn’t actively stop them from doing so. Jim, peeking up at her from his desk and flashing a lopsided grin. Jim, whispering excitedly in her ear as he—no, they—planned another prank on Dwight. Jim, barely touching her as their fingers kissed when she passed him his messages. She finds she remembered almost every time they’d ever touched, almost as if it branded her; she wonders what it would be like to touch intentionally, to want that fire.

But she also knows that fire is not a good basis for a relationship. Fires burn out. They choke. Fire is lovely, and warm and necessary in the cold, but it isn’t everything. She had fire with Roy, too. Not the same fire, but fire nonetheless.

No, what she really thinks about is not touching Jim, or kissing Jim, or having sex with Jim. Those were all wonderful thoughts, and she’s sure she would think a lot about them as time goes on. But she thinks about Jim remembering her on Valentine’s Day and Christmas; Jim, urging her to take an arts class or a graphic design internship; Jim, grocery shopping with her.

She thinks about a life together.

And she realizes that that is what she saw on the computer at the library. A chance for a life together, made up of two people (and she has to admit it’s two) who make each other better. She knows she needs more independence than she had when she was with Roy. She needs to be her own person. But she’s most her own person when she’s with Jim. And she’s not willing to accept a lesser substitute. She’s not going to reach for some socially acceptable version of “independence” that’s actually a straightjacket—that requires her to act a certain way or avoid a certain thing because she shouldn’t be ready, or it’s not time yet, or she needs to mourn her old relationship. She’s been mourning that relationship for years without knowing it. She’s ready to move on, and she knows how she wants to move on: with Jim.

Assuming he wants to.

Assuming she hasn’t switched over from misreading him one way to misreading him another way. Maybe he just lusts after her. Or it’s a game to him, and once she comes running to him he’ll pull away and say “just kidding. Sorry you misinterpreted.” Or she was right in the first place and he’ll be completely flabbergasted that she thought anything more of this.

But even as she thinks these things, she knows this is the weakest version of her. She knows Jim. She knows what she saw, now that she’s finally seen it. She heard her mother on the phone. And she remembers that the whole reason she knows this, the whole reason she finally saw it and is in the position to do anything about it at all, is that there are hordes of people on the Internet who see the same thing. Who made fan sites and took screenshots and came up with the portmanteau “Jam”—made it so much of a thing that the NBC Universal embargo software thought it was a threat.

And they were, right, it was.

In fact, she’s going to prove it.

But she needs to figure out how.

She sits in the booth nervously scrunches her napkin in her hand, and suddenly it comes to her. She grabs the pen the waitress gave her with her receipt, takes a spare napkin from the table, and starts to draw. Really draw. Draw like the last ten years never happened, and Roy never squashed her faith in herself, and she’s still thinking, really thinking, of becoming an artist. She draws Jim. She draws him as she thinks of him: head half-lifted, sly smile on his face, green eyes staring at her with what she now recognizes as poorly concealed love. The first effort displeases her, so she grabs another and keeps sketching until, on the third napkin (and the second strange look from the waitress still waiting on that check), she’s happy with the result.

But she’s not sure when to give it to him. Or how. Or what to say. So she does what she always does when she’s uncertain and facing a major life choice.

She calls her mom.

Afterwards, she’ll never remember what, exactly, her mother said. She’ll wish she could piece the words back together and tell the story properly—tell Jim properly—but she guesses this is one of those moments where the emotion trumps the words. All she can say is that five minutes later she’s in her car and she’s heading to Jim’s apartment, with the napkin in her glove box and her bag in the trunk.

She turns the ringer on her phone to mute (Roy has tried to call six times, she’s answered zero, and she really doesn’t need any distractions right now) and she drives.

She pulls up to his front door and finds a space right in front. She glances left and right and sees his Corolla still parked in the driveway and she’s glad. Her heart literally lightens and she grabs the napkin and she’s at his door and knocking.

And knocking.

And just as she thinks she’s made a mistake and he’s out, maybe with Mark in Mark’s car or something (she realizes she doesn’t know what Mark’s car looks like), he opens the door.

Jim has passed beyond panic, beyond depression, and now he’s just tired. He realized fairly quickly (and for reasons that were, in retrospect, obvious) that beer and ice cream was not a particularly good lunch combo immediately after basketball, and after emptying his stomach the wrong way he’s now munching saltines and drinking Gatorade while watching TV. Nothing good is on, so he’s watching Family Feud. It’s not good, but it is distracting.

It’s not distracting enough, however, to stop him from flipping Mark’s computer back open and staring at the “jam” search again. He realizes this isn’t healthy, but he can’t stop looking at her—and every time he looks at her, he has to look at himself looking at her. And he recognizes that facial expression. It’s the same one that’s still on his face now. That mix of desperation, longing, and warmth that says “love me?” He hates it. Not because it’s a lie, but because it’s the truth. And he thought he’d been doing a better job of hiding it.

Not that he thought he was some sort of super spy, or amazing poker player, or any other profession that rewards you for keeping your heart out of your face. It’s just that he thought he had this “friend” thing down pat, and it’s really disconcerting to see how utterly he failed. How much she must have known the whole time. How pathetic he is.

He has to get out of here. He can’t stay at that desk knowing that she knows. Knowing that she can see every day how pathetic he is, how he brightens perceptibly every time she so much as deigns to throw him a glance. He knows she likes him, he knows they’re friends, but it’s clear she doesn’t like him the way he loves her. And that was never enough—he always wanted more—but he’d always thought it was just because she didn’t know. Just because he was being noble and not telling her and not interfering in her relationship with her (shitty, undeserving, asshole) fiancée. Now he realizes he couldn’t have interfered if he wanted. And losing that shred of hope is devastating.

It’s not that he would actually have told her, though it’s not like he hasn’t hinted at it occasionally. It’s just that he liked to think that if he had told her, she might have cared. Even if she stayed with Roy, maybe she would have been a little shaken, or a little affected at least. But now he can see how obvious he actually was—even without the hints—and that means it wouldn’t matter to her in the slightest because it’s already out there. She doesn’t care. She’s not shaken. She is how she is and it’s never going to change no matter what he says or how much he loves her.

The doorbell breaks him out of his self-pitying stupor and he wonders who it could be. He’s pretty sure Mark is planning to be gone all day with his girlfriend, and he brought his keys with him anyway. He didn’t order anything online, and it’s not anywhere near his birthday or the holidays. Maybe Mark ordered something, or some neighbor needs a cup of sugar. Like that ever really happens.

He stands up and spills the saltines on the floor and picks them up as whoever it is keeps knocking. That pretty much lets out FedEx or UPS—they knock and leave, unless they need a signature. Maybe that’s it. He makes his way to the door and throws it open.

He’s utterly unprepared for it to be Pam.

But it is.

She’s got some paper in her hand and her other hand is lifting to knock again as he opens the door. He’s gobsmacked to see her, and all he can muster is a weak “hi?”

This is because he’s suddenly incredibly aware that he hasn’t shaved this morning, hasn’t showered since his basketball game, and is still wearing the shorts and ratty t-shirt from the gym. He’s intensely grateful that he at least brushed his teeth—only because of the incident before with the beer and ice cream, but still—and put on some deodorant, but he knows he’s a mess. The alcohol has partly worn off, and the Gatorade and saltines were helping, but he knows he looks like death warmed over.

She doesn’t, though. She looks…well, she always looks beautiful to him, literally always, including that time she got sick at work and looked like the life was literally draining out of her with every little heave. But today she looks straight at him (she never does that) and her hair is fluffed by the slight breeze outside and he can’t hold her eyes or he’ll embarrass himself more if that’s at all possible at this point, and he just mumbles “hi.”

“Hey.”

She’s staring up at him and he’s intensely self-conscious. Or maybe she’s just staring past him…because God, Halpert, you haven’t even invited her in or anything. She’s probably wondering why it took you so long to answer the door (he glances over and the saltines are all off the floor, thank God) and why you’ve been standing here what seems like forever just looking at her.

“Wanna…wanna come in?”

“Thanks.”

She takes a couple steps into his apartment as he stands aside, and glances around the kitchen. He just stands in the doorway taking her in, wondering what she’s doing here—what would bring her over on a Saturday afternoon. He sees the paper in her hand (is that a napkin?) and the way she’s twisting her engagement ring and he wonders even more. Wild imaginings, mostly negative: she’s here to tell him Roy wants him dead. She’s here to tell him they’re getting married tomorrow. She’s quitting. He’s been fired and Michael didn’t have the guts to tell him himself. He’s off in his own vortex of depression so far that he almost doesn’t notice that she’s speaking again.

“I…I made…I have something for you.”

She puts the napkin down on the kitchen island and smooths it out. He walks over to her in a daze and stares at it.

It’s him.

It’s him as he’s just seen himself in all those pictures online, as he hoped he hadn’t been looking for all those years. He’s at his desk, glancing up at her with that loving idiot expression on his face, and that stupid grin he can’t lose. It’s a perfect expression of how he feels when he looks at her, so perfect it’s painful to see. Because it means he was right. She did know. She’s probably always known. She couldn’t not know and draw that. Because it’s amazing—she’s amazing, so of course it’s amazing—and it’s right and he knows he should be hurting (and he is) but he’s so proud of her for it. It’s the best thing of hers he’s ever seen—the only one featuring him, too—and he can’t stop staring even though he knows it’s got to be a bad thing that she knows.

“Pam, this is…this is really incredible.” He swallows. “I mean…”

She speaks quickly, like she’s trying to spit the words out before her mind can notice they’re gone.

“Did you ever figure out what ‘jam’ was?”

He’s shocked that she’s actually asked him that, worried by what it means. Does she not know yet? Is he going to have to show her and complete his humiliation? Not that she doesn’t already know it all, he reminds himself, staring at the napkin. He doesn’t know how to answer, so his neck does it for him. He nods. She goes on, very quietly.

“So did I.”

Well, at least he’s spared having to show her, then.

“And…I’m sorry.”

Of course she is. Anytime this…thing between them, or at least between him and his idea of her, comes up, she’s sorry. She’s sorry, but she can’t. She’s sorry, but Roy said. She’s sorry, but he’s not enough for her, she doesn’t love him, and he needs to move on. But at least it’s out there in the open now. At least now he knows, knows she knows, and that she doesn’t feel the same way. Maybe that’s what he needed to hear.

“I’m sorry too.”

He’s not entirely sure why he said it, but it feels like the sort of thing you say when you’ve been projecting feelings onto someone else for as long as he has. That’s not what friends are supposed to do, after all. If he’d just been the friend she thought she had, none of this would have happened. So he’s sorry—though he’s not sorry she’s in his life, or he in hers. But he’s sorry for how they are.

“I’m sorry I never realized…I’m sorry I never…”

She’s trying to tell him she’s sorry she never shut him down, isn’t she? Well, this is shutting him down, and he realizes he can’t really do this. He can’t deal with that last moment of hope, that last gasp of fragile possibility being torn away. He can’t let her say it. So he interrupts her.

“Yeah, well…”

“I wanted you to have this. I made it for you.”

She pushes the napkin towards him.

“Did I get it right?”

What is she asking? Deflect! Deflect! He can’t deal with this now.

“I mean…it’s me. Beesly, I’m pretty sure we both know what I look like.” He gestures at himself, and then at the napkin. “And that’s Jim Halpert, right there on the paper. A little smaller than life, but just as ugly.”

She doesn’t smile. This isn’t working. But she’s speaking again.

“Is this how you feel?”

Like she doesn’t know. Like it isn’t written on his face every day—like it isn’t in the paper she’s touching, or on his face this very instant.

“Pam, I…”

“Jim. Is it?”

She’s so serious. He’s not used to this.

“Pam, I…don’t know what to say.”

“Jim.” A little more heat. She’s fiddling madly with that ring, and she’s staring at him. “I need to know.”

“Why, Pam?” Why is she making him say this?

“I…” She glances down at the paper. “It’s important to me.”

And there’s the clincher. He can’t resist that, and she knows it, and it’s so unfair. He can’t stay still as he says it, so he flings himself across to the couch as he mutters “yeah. It is.”

As she turns to follow him, he throws up a hand.

“But I know you’re with Roy, and I don’t expect…”

“I’m not with Roy.”

He points, just points, at the ring on her finger. She looks down in surprise, as if she didn't realize it was there, and pulls it off. She puts it on top of the napkin. She turns and smiles fragiley at him.

“I’m not.”

Pam hears the clink of the ring hitting the table like it was a gunshot. She hadn’t realized she’d never taken it off when she stormed out of the house and left Roy. She’s not sure she’s really taken it off in years It became a part of her hand, she thinks, and taking it off ought to feel like cutting off a limb. But it doesn’t. It feels as if a weight has lifted from her heart, instead of her finger. She has to fight the urge to fiddle with the now-bare patch of skin on her left ring finger and looks up at Jim almost defiantly.

“I’m not.”

She used to think she could read his face like an open book. That illusion was destroyed when she realized she’s been misreading it all these years—or willfully denying what she read—like a magic picture that suddenly springs into focus. But she’s still pretty sure she generally knows what he’s thinking. But now she looks into his eyes and there’s just too much there. He’s been pushing her away ever since she came in; every time she tries to apologize for misinterpreting their friendship as a friendship, instead of love, he backs away from her. He’s literally in another room now, albeit one only a few steps away. Maybe she was right the first time. Maybe he doesn’t love her.

Then she remembers what he just said. It’s like an electric shock. “It is” what he feels. “You’re with Roy.” “I don’t expect.” She isn’t wrong now. He’s just…a bit slow, is all. Like she was for the past three years, she supposes.

“Jim.”

He’s still staring at her ring on the table. She skips across the few steps between them so she’s standing right in front of him. That’s when she notices the open laptop on the couch beside him, showing the same picture she first saw on the library computer, him staring up at her from his desk while she looks down. She gestures towards it, and his eyes follow her bare ring finger.

“You feel like that?”

He nods. She can tell he’s annoyed that she’s making him say it again, but this is important to her. Really important. She’s not sure why she can’t just say she loves him back. She thinks maybe the words aren’t actually enough. She needs to show him—and show him in a way where he won’t, or can’t, back away from her. If she kisses him and he pulls back she’s not sure what she’ll do. So she does something else.

“Well, I feel like this.”

She grabs the computer and clicks a few times, looking at the tabs he has open and opening a new one, where she does an image search, then flips it around. She’s showing him her face as she tells Jim about the graphic design internship. She’s not looking down at the flyer though. She’s looking right at Jim, and her eyes are sparkling. It’s the picture she found after talking to her mother, and she likes to think that if you could zoom in far enough into her eyes you’d see nothing but Jim smiling back at her. It’s not the moment she realized she loved him; it’s the moment that made her realize it. And now she’s hoping it can do the same for him.

His gaze pulls from her face to the computer and she can see that he’s puzzled. He’s staring at it intently, like there’s something hidden from his view. She rolls her eyes at him.

“Say something, Halpert.”

He looks from her to the computer and back again.

“Pam, I…I’m not sure what you mean. You feel…happy?”

She smiles at him, a smile that manages to say “yes” and “no” and “you’re an idiot” at the same time. She puts the computer down on the ottoman and grabs Jim by his arms (BICEPS, a small part of her brain cries out, almost distracting her from what she’s doing).

“Jim.”

He suddenly grins at her, his “why so serious” grin, and it’s breathtaking but also completely inappropriate because she is serious, dammit, and she needs him to understand.

“Pam.”

She smacks his arm, though it’s really just an indication of the intention to smack him, because she’s already holding his arm. My God, she’s already holding his arm. The feeling is electric, and it’s getting harder to concentrate on saying what she needs to say because all she wants to do is shove as much of his body onto hers as she can, to feel as much of this buzz as possible all over herself. But she knows she needs to say something first. Even if looking into his eyes and his grin is making it really, really difficult. She says:

“Jim, I’m saying I feel the same way you do. And I think I have for quite some time.”

Or at least that’s what she tries to say. Somewhere in that second sentence it all gets mooshed together because he’s kissing her. Jim is kissing her and she’s still holding his arms, and his hands are on her back, and the world just seems to stop for an indeterminate length of time. It’s not that she’s not aware of their kiss deepening, of them falling into each other. It’s more that she ceases to be aware of anything else, and the world can remember itself on its own time. She’s busy. With Jim.

When they finally pull apart for air he speaks first.

“Really?”

She stares up at him, seeing the happiness she’d been hoping to see since she first walked in battling with a little wariness, like he can’t believe she’s not a hallucination.

She’s pretty sure she’s not, so he’s going to have to get over that particular worry real fast.

“Really. And now Jim, there’s something I need to ask you.”

“Anything.”

“Why are you emailing with my mother?”

Jim runs his hand across the back of his neck. He can see the tab she’s talking about. He’s just grappling with two questions right now:

1)      How drunk was he that he decided to log on to his Dunder Mifflin email on a weekend, on Mark’s computer? Where did this productive Jim come from, and why now? Should he start drinking at work or something?

2)      hb123 is Pam’s mom?!?

He decides #1 is just something he’s going to have to deal with on his own time. #2, however, he’s going to need Pam for.

“Wait, that’s your mom?”

She giggles. It’s very distracting, especially with his arms around her (when did that happen? Not that he’s complaining).

“Yeah. That’s her personal email. And I want to know, mister,” she pokes him in the ribs and he can feel the warm spot long after her finger moves away “what you’ve been telling her.”

“Hey now, Beesly, slow down. She emailed me. I didn’t even reply yet. See?”

He shows her the tab, the email open with no reply.

“She wants you to call her?”

Shrug. “Seems like it.”

Her face lights up like a small child at Christmas, or Dwight when they announced the Hobbit movies (but not at all like Dwight when the Hobbit movies came out).

“You should totally call her back on speakerphone so I can hear!”

“I’m not sure that’s…”

“C’mon Jim! We need to prank her somehow to get back at her for emailing my boyfriend behind my back.”

There’s a long silence. Well, it’s actually like a second, but it feels long. Really long. Because she’s just called him her boyfriend and…

“Pam, I”

“Jim, I”

“You go.”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking, I just…”

“Pam.”

He puts his hands on her shoulders and looks deep into her eyes. OK, bad idea. He can feel himself getting pulled in, the urge to kiss her is rising, and so he forces her to look at her nose instead. He still thinks it’s adorably cute, just like all of her, but he can concentrate a little better this way. He takes a deep breath.

“Pam, you know how I feel about you, and you told me you feel the same way.”

She’s about to interrupt and he puts up a finger to silence her, mouthing “my turn” before putting his hand back on her shoulders.

“And I’m extremely willing to be your boyfriend”

She brightens.

“But I think we need to address three things first.”

She nods and throws this look at him that he knows means “go on.” She mimes zipping her lips to emphasize that she’s going to let him say what he needs to say. He grabs her hand as she throws the key away and keeps staring at her nose.

“One, I need to know this isn’t a rebound. I…I don’t think I could handle that. I can’t just be the guy you use to get over Roy. This is…this means…you mean too much to me for that.”

She’s bouncing up and down and he gestures for her to speak.

“It’s not. You’re not. I’m in this for you, Jim, I really am. This…I know I just broke up with Roy but this isn’t a rebound. I promise. This is real, Jim, at least for me. You’re my best friend, but that’s not it, you’re more than that, or at least I hope you are, and I want to be more than that for you too.”

He smiles at her and without meaning to the smile widens to a grin. She’s smiling up at him and it takes real effort to go on.

“Two, I also need to know: did you break up with Roy just for me? Because I don’t want to be that guy who’s stealing you” (almost true) “or have that kind of baggage hanging over us, whatever us is” (very true).

This time she almost interrupts him, hurrying over his words.

“No, no, no. Or rather, yes but no. I didn’t break up with Roy because of you, I broke up with him because of him, and me, and us. Not this us,” she gestures between them “but him and me us. I realized he didn’t really care for me the way I wanted to be cared for, needed to be cared for—and more importantly than that, I realized I didn’t care for him that way either. I don’t think I would have realized that without you, without seeing you, really seeing you; I’m not even sure it would have happened if I hadn’t met you and discovered what things could be like. But I didn’t do it for you. I want you; I want us; I want this. But I did what I did and I’ll be happy I did even if this doesn’t happen, or doesn’t work out.”

She’s looking so worried at him that he has to grin, has to twinkle at her just to improve her mood even if he didn’t feel like doing it. But he does feel like it, so it’s not exactly an imposition.

“Bite your tongue, Beesly. This’ll work out. I just needed to know. That leads me to Three: how long have you known?”

“Today. This morning.” She glances at the computer clock “about eight hours.”

“That you liked me?”

“That you liked me. That I liked you, this way? Maybe six or seven.”

“Wait, what?”

“I think I’d known somewhere inside for longer; probably months, maybe years. But I figured it out today. It became real for me today. And I just…I broke it off with Roy because I realized he was never going to give me what I needed. But I came here because I recognized in myself what I saw in you. And I’m sorry it took so long, and I’m sorry if I hurt you along the way, and I’m sorry I…”

“Sssh, ssh, it’s OK. We got there in the end, didn’t we?”

“We did. And now it’s my turn for questions.”

“Oh really? Who said you got to ask any? This is my question time, Beesly, not yours.” He loves calling her that. It’s a constant reminder that she’s not just Pam, she’s still Beesly. She didn’t marry Roy. She’s not going to marry Roy. She’s here, for him. For him.

“Suck it, Halpert.” His heart flips. “My turn now. First: how long?”

“How long did I know I…felt this way? Six seconds after we met.”

She smacks him on the shoulder.

“Seriously, Beesly. Although I won’t deny I feel it more than I did now. As for the other half, I’ve known you felt this way for about five minutes. Maybe six now.”

“Well get used to it.” He thinks he could do that. “Second question: what do you want this to be? Because Jim, I’m in. I’m sorry I called you my boyfriend before, but….”

He cuts her off. “Stop apologizing, Pam. I’m in too. Whatever you want to call it. Boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. I’m in.”

“Jim, you’d make a terrible girlfriend.” She sticks out her tongue.

“Suck it, Beesly.”

“Maybe later.”

While he’s trying to comprehend what he just thinks he heard, she pipes up again, looking mischievous.

“Third question: are we going to prank my mom now, or what?”

After a little more pestering and the bribe of another (slower, deeper) kiss, Jim agrees to prank call Pam’s mom. She’s glad—she hopes it’ll be like bringing the good parts of work home with her while leaving the bad parts at work. Since the good parts are pretty much Jim, that doesn’t seem too difficult, and honestly, she could do with a laugh right about now. It’s not that she didn’t mean what she just said about her, or Roy, or Jim, but she’s not used to being this direct or determined, and she just needs to relax. Putting her two favorite people in touch with each other in the form of a prank seems like the ideal way to do just that.

Jim dials her mom’s number, and she lies back on his couch and looks at him. She knows there will be days, weeks, maybe even months of awkwardness and stress ahead. She’s going to have to talk to Roy again, get more of her stuff from him, divide up their possessions, give him closure. She’s going to have to get an apartment. She’ll need to figure out this whole dating thing, though at least she doesn’t need to find the person she’ll date. He’s right within arms’ reach, a thought which makes her reach her arms out and touch him to make sure he’s real. He looks over at her with a fond grin (how did she not notice how fond, how adoring his glances were before? Was she really that blind? It’s like putting on glasses for the first time in the second grade: everything that she thought was fine and clear turns out to have been blurry, and the new perspective completely dominates the old) as the phone rings. She’s struck again by how different he looks outside of work clothes, and how happy she is that she’ll get lots and lots of time to explore whole new kinds of Jim.

Her mom picks up as Jim presses speaker.

“Hello, this is Helene Beesly, may I ask who’s calling?”

Jim winks at her and turns on his best salesman voice—a little deeper than normal, full of cheerfulness, just inviting the other person to smile back at him—and replies:

“Ah, yes, this is Jim Halpert from the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. I’m calling in regards to your email this morning. I understand you’re in urgent need of some paper products?”

Pam stifles a giggle. He’s really good at this, and treating her mom’s email (which was transparently not about paper) as a sales inquiry is not what she expected him to do.

“Oh! Hi Jim. No, this isn’t a business matter. I’m calling about my daughter, Pam. You may recall we met briefly when I came to visit her a little while ago?”

“Pam, Pam…yes, the name certainly rings a bell.”

He’s grinning at her like the Cheshire Cat right before it disappears—all teeth—and she has to try to stifle another giggle that turns into a snort.

“I would imagine it does.” She can hear her mother’s smile through the phone. It’s good to know she’s not the only Beesly who can fall victim to the Halpert charm. “I’m calling because…well, Jim, does the word ‘jam’ mean anything to you?”

“Yes, Mrs. Beesly, it certainly does. I have a jar of raspberry Smuckers in my fridge right now, as it happens.”

Pam snorts again and wanders into the kitchen to check whether this is true, keeping an ear out for the phone. A quick perusal of the fridge reveals that Jim has told nothing but the perfect truth, and her heart warms to note that they apparently prefer the same jam. Not that it’s her favorite condiment, or anything, but still, it’s nice to know.

“Well, Jim, I have a feeling you know what else I might mean by that as well. In fact, when I first emailed you I had some information to pass on regarding that point, something I thought you might need to be aware of for your own good, but since then I’ve learned some new things that rather change what I have to say to you.”

“Oh? And what might that be, Mrs. Beesly?”

“First of all, you can certainly call me Helene. And second, I’ve learned that speakerphones go both ways, Pamela.”

Pam stops short in the kitchen, letting the fridge door swing closed. She didn’t laugh that loudly, did she? But it’s impossible to tell now, because Jim is laughing loudly enough for them both, and she can hear her mother joining in.

“So tell my daughter that I’ve done my meddling in your lives for today, but that she definitely needs to call soon so that her father can talk to her about going with her to Roy’s to get her things tomorrow.”

“Helene, you know I’ll…”

“Jim, I’m sure you’d be more than happy to go with her, but I expect this is something Pam needs to do for herself, or at least without your support. Isn’t that right, Pam?”

She walks back to the couch and sits down next to Jim, rolling her eyes at him. “Yes, mom. I’ll call tonight.”

“That sounds good to me, dear. And congratulations on getting the nerve to tell him. I owe your father five dollars.”

Pam can’t resist asking. “Why’s that, mom?”

“I bet it would take you until tomorrow to work yourself up to show up at Jim’s door.”

Jim guffaws on the seat next to her as she sticks her tongue out first at the phone and then at him.

“Now you two be good. I’ll talk to you later tonight, Pam. Jim, you’re always welcome to call too.”

“Thanks, Helene. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye Jim. Love you Pam.”

“Love you, mom.” This with a final eyeroll at Jim before her mother hangs up.

Jim turns to her.

“So, your mom seems nice.”

She smacks his arm. “You’re just saying that because she likes you.”

“She likes me?” He pumps his fist. “Score one for Halpert.”

“Shut up.” She wanders back into the kitchen, but not far enough to miss hearing his stomach growl. “You hungry? I heard a rumor that there might be some raspberry Smuckers somewhere in here, and I noticed a jar of peanut butter on the counter. And I just happen to have brought” (she unzips her duffel, sitting by the doorway, and pulls out the Bimbo) “some bread you might recognize. We could do PB&J.”

“Sounds perfect. I haven’t really eaten since…well, really since yesterday.”

“Two PB&J coming right up. And then I’ll figure out what I’m going to eat.”

His laughter is music to her ears. She pulls out six slices of bread, layering on the peanut butter and then pulling out the jam. As she opens it, Jim slips off the couch and slides up next to her, slipping his arms around her. She decides, on reflection, that jam definitely is her favorite condiment after all.