While he’s cleaning, he finds a picture of the two of them in one of his drawers. It’s from the time Michael took them bowling. It’s a posed shot and he silently thanks Phyllis for always carrying around a disposable camera and insisting on taking these cheesy posed shots. He has his arm around her and she’s smiling really widely. She’s wearing a bowling shirt with the name Eileen on it. He’d refused to call her anything but Eileen for the entire night. She’d beaten him terribly and called him Gutter Ball.
The corners are curled up and there’s a crease down the center. He’d carried it around in his wallet for months before he started dating Katy and then took it out to avoid questions. In his hands, it feels the way good memories should feel. All worn and comfortable. The sort of memory that’s played over and over, trying to recapture the feeling of it.
And he can remember the way she felt pressed against his side as Phyllis said, “Okay, you two, stay still for a second so I can take a picture.” And she smiled at them like she was their mother, warm and loving. And Pam had been wiggling even still because she was, for some reason, extremely hyper that night. She was always sort of that way whenever Roy wasn’t around. Whenever it was just the two of them. And he can remember the vibration of her laughter through his entire body and how she’d slid around in her bowling shoes. He can remember the way she jumped up and down and threw her arms around his neck when she’d gotten her first strike. And so he’d started losing on purpose just to see her light up.
He goes over to her desk and lays the photo flat on the surface. She looks up, surprised and then smiles softly when she sees it.
“Oh, precious memories.” She pauses for a second, pretending to consider something. “Didn’t I beat you really badly that night?”
“I let you win,” he says, trying to take the picture from her hands. She grips harder, not wanting to give it up just yet. It pulls at his heart a little to see her eyes running over it like she’s committing it to memory.
“Uh huh.” She looks at the picture for a little longer and then says, “You look strikingly handsome here.” And then she laughs, “Get it? Strikingly?”
“Spare me, Beesly,” he says, barely managing to keep the grin from spreading across his face.
He watches her shoulders shake with laughter and then she looks up at him with shining eyes.
He opens his mouth to tell her everything then. He thinks he probably does this every time she looks at him like that. But now he means it. He’s going to say it. Because Michael surely won’t hold the secret in for long and he doesn’t know what he has to lose anymore. He’s going to say, “I broke up with Katy because when Roy set the date for your wedding, I really, truly realized that I never wanted to be with anyone but you.” Or just, “Don’t marry him. Please.”
The phone rings and he snaps his mouth shut.
Later, at Hooters, one of the waitresses (Cindy, her name tag will say) will stop him on his way out and ask him out. He’ll smile and turn her down gently. She’ll say, “Oh, are you seeing someone?” And he’ll tell her with a little laugh, “Uh, yeah, sort of.”
Author's Chapter Notes:
After I wrote this, I realized it doesn't really fit so well with the episode because of the scene where Pam asks him if he found anything good while cleaning. But. We can pretend. Anyway, I'm not sure how I feel about this one, but it had been a while since I updated this and nothing else was coming to me. So.
