She had always prided herself on knowing the next course of action. Quick thinking. Being able to rationally formulate a plan. She was rarely caught off guard, rarely out of control. She could survey the situation and like connecting dots in her head, follow the due path like it was a physical road in front of her. Trace the solid line on the right and the broken on the left, she repeated in her head, and you can’t go wrong.

This situation was no different. The problem was in Scranton, so she had to leave Scranton. They had to leave Scranton. The city, with its bright lights and its sophistication, its defined geometric patterns of street and sky rises, trumped the drab slug-like existence here, any sane person could see it. And Jim was a sane person, she reminded herself when she began to show doubts. This corporate job was the next dot, and like jumping protruding stones in a brook, it was there that they were meant to hop.

Solid line on the right, broken line to the left.

She now had what she needed; the guy, the attitude, the appearance, all that was left was the job. She needed it like it was completing her, the final cog in a fully functioning machine.

Solid on the right, broken to the left.

It was so close down the road, she could see its hazy perfection out of the din. She sat across from David Wallace, her future boss, and she fit into the role as if a cold hand adjusting inside a glove. The words spilt out of her before she had completely formulated them, but is seemed like some other part of her had taken over, a past life as a corporate tycoon whispering to her what to say and how to say it. The other man looked impressed, if not a little scared. That was good, she thought, fear eventually evolves into respect. This was right, she was almost there.

Solid on the right, broken to the left.

But then it stopped. She stopped. Her phone rang, piercing her bubble like a pair of scissors.

He was going, gone, long gone.

And here she was trapped between dots, stones, destinations, her tank running on empty in the desert with no one within shouting distance. It was shocking, to say the least. She was almost too startled to yell, just slack-jawed and tongue-tied, on the brink of blinking and having it all wash down the drain of her morning shower, just a dreamy stupor. Because this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. She’d done everything right, followed the plan, and it had always brought her what she needed before. Her mother would tell her it was because she didn’t go to church anymore, didn’t light the tiny tea lights or spill her guts to the local priest in the stale wooden box that smelt like old lady and pine, but she knew it had to be something else. She just couldn’t quite figure it out right then.  

Solid on the right, broken to the left.

But she wasn’t moving anymore.

-------

The problem was, he didn’t exactly know what he was doing.

He knew the basics like he knew he needed water, shelter and sustenance to survive; get out of New York, shake it off like it was a poison lake he’d just swam in, and get back to Scranton.

That was the what. The how, however, was slightly more complicated.

The steering wheel gripped tightly in his hand bit back angrily, turning his knuckles white as he thought and pondered.

For a moment he evaluated his actions in the past five hours as the stupidest of his life. Turning down a high paying prestigious job and dumping his beautiful dedicated girlfriend for a maybe, the glint of possibility in a woman’s eyes that had broken his heart a million times over.

But he quickly shook his head.

There was more than chance flickering across her face when she’d turned to him, taken the reigns of gravity and shook him upside down until he thought his keys and wallet would fall out and the blood was rushing to his head. And perhaps more (or perhaps grossly less) importantly was the fact that the job didn’t mean squat to him. He had tried to forget the words he’d repeated like a mantra in his head for the four years leading up to meetings with Jan and I’m in love with you. Pretended they’d never existed. But the truth had stubbornly remained there, under the surface, like a stain in the seam of a favorite shirt. If he let himself climb further up that ladder, built from paper sides and human rungs, this would be his career, and it was only a matter of time before it became his life too.

But those facts died under the scrutiny of inner pain that had become more than his chest could handle. Yet not dead, he corrected, just waiting.

Like the antagonists in video games or the story book cats of a simpler time, these truths had nine lives, counting down in the corner represented by animation hearts and ticking down slowly. But not slow enough.   

He finally decided that this time it wouldn’t be his hand, his weapon that squashed them. No, he was done trying to make them false, he didn’t have the strength left.   

But before he knew it he was pulling into the Dunder-Mifflin parking lot, sliding into the spot beside Pam’s car as an automatic reflex, and he still had no idea what he was doing, what he would say. Yet his feet trudged up to the office, almost like a little boy who knew he had to tell his mother he’d smashed the baseball through the front window, because it had to be done, he just wasn’t quite ready for the aftermath. There were no obstacles now, and he was sure that’s what scared him the most. What if, after all that time, there was some deeper flaw there, something they’d passed off as fiancés or girlfriends or stubborn silences or unwanted interruptions. What if they just weren’t meant to be?  

He nearly collapsed on his way into the front door, if not just to knock his head against the wall to clear his mind. Surely, amid blinding pain, everything but that right answer would become obvious?   

No, that was a stupid idea. He had to go and do it.   

He could just make out her curly hair through the half-drawn blinds of the conference room, and he heard her faintly laugh at a joke the camera man made, kind of like the sound of ice tinkling down in a glass, when he knew no major head injuries would be necessary.   

But still, as he approached the room, the slats in the window jiggling as she moved her head back too far, he figured to readjust her mike, that damn door handle kept staring at him. He could hear her inside talking about the uncertain future. He stared down the slender metal piece, as if by some Jedi-induced power it would open on its free will.   

Steady, he whispered to himself, placing his clammy hand onto the lever, landing stiffly there because it'd been his arm and not his hand that had moved it. The appendage felt like a dead weight.   

He closed his eyes, images of her smile, his heart beating rapidly in his chest at the sight of it, their history, flashing like light catching off of a twirling ribbon on the movie projection screen of the back of his eyes lids and he wrenched the door open.   

He was done pretending.   

--------  

She chided herself for biting her nails for the second time that day, gazing ashamed and frustrated at the jagged edge protruding from her pinky nail.   

I mean, what kind of fifth grader chews her nails, right?   

It was really sad because she loved this color, and she’d only manicured them that morning. She sighed, reaching for the mauve shade she’d bought on a two-for-one special along with the pale pink. Ballerina’s Slipper, she thought they named it. Just when her mind was drifting her into an inner monologue over who had the job of naming such things, the phone on Ryan’s desk rang behind her. She really wasn’t trying to ease-drop. Or at least not exactly.   

But when he greeted the caller in his professional voice “Mr. Wallace, hello… David then,” she just had to know what was so important to force Ryan to have that tone. The kiss ass tone. He usually saved it for when he wanted something or when he had met her parents for the first time. Of course maybe the latter had just been imagined.   

But it was dripping from between his lips just then, as he laughed stiffly at what she could only assume was a horrifyingly unfunny joke. But when she twisted around to face him, or rather his back, there was something in his voice, the bob of his head, that made her sure something awful was about to happen. Like in a horror movie, when the creepy music starts playing and you can just see the outline of the killer’s body in the shadows? Like that. Only with less blood. Because suddenly his shoulders were loosing some of their ever-present tension and he was spurting excitedly “Wow, that’s great.” And using his signature ‘I’m only laughing because it would be weird if I wasn’t’ chuckle and he was smiling, she could tell by the way the skin pulled taught across his neck.   

“I’m excited too,” he paused then, “Bye.”   

When the black plastic of the phone clicked against the receiver, she thought it was odd that he didn’t resume his regular office work, because he usually hurried near the end of the day to avoid getting stuck there one second after five.   

But her mind was already returning to the miniature brush of glitter polish waiting on her desk when he blurted out “You and I are done.”   

And he almost sounded happy about it, and not at all conflicted like in all the romance movies she’d seen.   

“What?” 

She was reeling from his words, the sting of their nonchalance. He wasn’t moving to comfort her or to take it back which was kind of disturbing and completely ungentlemanly. Because then he was leaving without even looking at her, grabbing the handle of his coffee mug with one finger and he had this loopy smile on his face.   

The bastard.   

So she didn’t think she was at all out of line to run into the bathroom wailing, her mascara trailing ink tears down her checks, when he had the nerve to huff like he was annoyed behind her. She almost turned around and slapped him. Almost. But that would only give him satisfaction, that every time he’d “forgotten” about plans or made her watch shoot-‘em-up exploding shit movies without even offering to see a light romantic comedy that he’d been totally justified because she was completely loony. Or at least that was her logic.   

So instead she bended over the sink in the woman’s bathroom, letting the black stains fall onto the porcelain, because who wants to ruin a perfectly good shirt over an ass that didn’t ever appreciate what he had when he had it, right? She was thinking she’d play all her sappy breakup music on the way home in the car and that she knew the perfect mourning outfit to wear the next day when she glanced down at her nails, still depressingly unfinished.   

Maybe bright pink would be a better color after all.  

----------  

He had always known that one of his many strengths was his loyalty.   

Some would laugh at the virtue, especially Jim who had likened the trait to that of a dog. But the comparison wasn’t wholly unwelcome. He respected dogs, their fierce devotion to one person, man’s best friend.   

In fact, his dog was one of his only companions during the two years that his parents and close relatives shunned him to the shadows of family events. He often thought that he could telepathically communicate with the canine, after staring into his grayscale-seeing eyes and picturing gnawed off bones and scurrying felines.   

Walking down to the swimming hole and back on his young legs, scouring the fields for old Civil War memorabilia and reading aged dusty books in the barn stuffed like a scarecrow with hay became his daily ritual. He filled the silence with routine, with written words and dirt and swishing tails. It was the cane he braced himself on, clung to. Time became his mother and fact-riddled fiction his father, until the point where his actual parents were like strangers that he saw only for meals.   

On his sixth birthday he was startled to hear their words directed at him, for on the last occasion that they had, he’d been so young he barely remembered. Yet he’d never forgotten the loyalty his dog had shown him, and he felt badly when he was forced to shoot the animal after he contracted rabies from a local raccoon.   

So it was really no great shock when he himself was rewarded for his continued service to Dunder-Mifflin with the position of Regional Manager. No word games, no silly semantics to hold him back. This office was his.   

This was also perhaps why he was so shocked that Michael came back, not with a victory bottle of alcohol and the glow of promotion about him, but with a verbal slap on the wrist as, once again, his direct superior.   

This he didn’t understand.   

He would defend the company against outsiders, just as he would the earth against alien invaders, with his life. So how could he not be catapulted into management, as was his right? It, he thought, made no sense, because despite his mistakes and his inner-office quarrels, he was still loyal and that should’ve counted for something.