~
Karen keeps asking him how he’s feeling.
He really wishes, not for the first time, that she wouldn’t do that.
He shrugs and lies. He tells her he feels fine. He smiles, the sort of half smile she fell for, the one that’s not even real. And she believes him. It’s easy.
Hers is a pointless question.
He feels nothing.
He is going through the motions, living his life on autopilot.
Sometimes he feels a flicker of something like life in his heart. He can’t seem to ignite much else.
He tries to think about the beach. About the coal walk and about how the firelight sparkled in her eyes when she spoke to him. About how he ignored her all day and then couldn’t take his eyes off her.
He tries to remember the feeling: the rush of warmth and pride, but weak, strangled by guilt and regret.
He tries to remember what she said.
He can’t.
It’s a numbness he used to long for.
He hates it.
At odd moments, he remembers. When she tells him his hair looks good, he thinks she said she called off the wedding because of him. When she laughs with him about Jan’s ‘improvements’, he thinks she told him to come back. He thinks she showed him just how much she understood about the move and the return and the parts of him he left behind in the parking lot last year.
At times like these he thinks he ought to respond in some way.
At times like these, the job in New York seems more like settling than progress.
Then Karen says something, or smiles, or laughs from three desks away and he loses his hold on the frayed thread of thoughts.
He wonders when Dwight’s ridiculous fantasies became such a good metaphor for his life. Welcome to Hotel Hell indeed.
He leaves for New York with a backwards glance and a fleeting smile.
She’s sitting in her usual spot behind the desk, the place he thinks she’ll always be when he remembers her.
She wishes them both luck with a weak shadow of a smile. He remembers how she said she missed him, and having fun with him.
He remembers how she asked him to come back.
It’s only in the car that he realizes he might have just left for good.
As they leave the parking lot, he thinks about last year and tries to remember how wrong it all went. For the tiniest second, he lets himself think that really that was the last time everything was right.
He looks back at the office and thinks this final exit, if that’s really what it is, should have been grander, more memorable. He sighs. He adds another point to his list of regrets.
All the way to New York the image of her hangs behind his eyes, haunting him with every blink. He decides maybe the exit was memorable enough after all.
New York is loud and busy and Karen is more alive on its streets than she ever was in Scranton. She takes his hand and tries, a little too hard, to show him the life in New York he could lead. She won’t let him be just a tourist.
He thinks he might have liked to be just a tourist.
“You get it right? There’s one too many people in Scranton.”
He agrees.
He doesn’t tell her that there are moments when he thinks that one person too many might be her.
Karen thinks he’s nervous on the morning of the interview. He’s not. He knows David Wallace has taken a liking to him. He knows he can get this job. He just can’t decide if he really wants it anymore.
He sits in the stylish offices of Dunder Mifflin Headquarters and doesn’t like it.
He thinks the sofa in Scranton is more comfortable than this stiff leather couch that probably cost more than his last car.
The artwork around the building is all bright colors and abstract shapes. He can’t stop comparing their cold, sharp lines with the image of a soft watercolor that he’s been pretending not to notice for weeks.
Jan might be out of control but he can’t laugh at the way they treat her. He turns his eyes away from her humiliation.
His head should be full of figures and statistics and impressive questions to ask. It’s empty, save for the echo of his own words from months ago.
“Say what you will about Michael Scott, but he would never do that.”
He realizes he’s been underestimating this. He thought everything would be the same and only a little bit different. Everything is different and he starts to think that he’s not different enough. The few similarities only make him uneasy, only remind him of the way things used to be, the way things should be. The way things still could be.
“Dunder Mifflin, this is Grace.”
He thinks it might be the person behind the Reception Desk that’s bothering him the most.
The interview begins well. The part of him that’s still got a hold on the new Jim knows he’s practically being handed the job. The majority of him is wondering if Jan is alright.
Pam’s note slips out as he hands David his statistics. The gold yoghurt lid winks at him as the sunlight hits it.
It’s nothing really.
It’s everything really.
“So, long haul. Where do you see yourself in ten years?”
He glances at the note and remembers. He remembers everything. He remembers the Office Olympics, the medals and the paper decorations, the closing ceremony and how she had smiled at him; the Health Care questionnaire and her invented diseases, Dwight’s annoyance and his own delight; the cell phone in the ceiling and the funny hats, the first real laugh in months; the CIA mission and the teapot that was better than an ipod; the coat stand and the umbrella; the sudden silence after he told her he loved her, the pain of putting one foot in front of the other and leaving her and the best parts of himself, behind.
He remembers the Beach. He can see her clearly now, no effort required to force the memory. She’s all he can see now. She is beautiful and desperately sad, she is brave and fearless and angry and still, completely, undeniably, Pam.
She is everything.
It might be the note, or the yoghurt lid, or the artwork, or the sofa, or the way they treated Jan, or just the question. It might be her words, her bravery, finally breaking through to him. It might be the memories.
It’s probably all of it, when he answers, “Not here.”
Another sort of autopilot takes over now. He’s out of the office before he realizes it. He’s breaking up with Karen when all she asked was how the interview went. He should feel guilt, and he knows guilt will come, but right now he can’t muster much. She might understand eventually. She was never with him, not the real him. She wouldn’t even have liked the real him. He was an invention, the man she fell for and it’s hard to feel guilty when he feels like someone else entirely, barely recognizable as the man she followed to Pennsylvania. It’s hard to feel guilty about who he was when he’s too caught up in who he’s just become.
A part of him wants to break the speed limit and the sound barrier to get back to Scranton.
He knows he doesn’t need to.
She’s waiting for him.
She’s better than him, he realizes.
She’s waiting for him like he couldn’t wait for her.
She’s had her Casino Night, her moment of desperate truth, and she’s still sitting behind the same old desk, waiting to see if he wants to approach.
When it was his time, he hadn’t give her a moment to think, too wrapped up in his own pain to think of hers.
He ran away when she hurt him.
She’s waiting.
She’s braver than he is.
Her desk is abandoned when he returns. In the time it’s taken him to get back from New York he’s imagined a thousand scenarios for his arrival and within five seconds they are all wrong in a detail he couldn’t have foreseen. He laughs. He likes the unpredictability of this. It reminds him that it’s real.
For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t think over his actions. He doesn’t wonder whether the new him, or the old him, would do this, he doesn’t wonder if it’s foolish or reckless or brave or honest.
He just opens the door.
~
She’s exhausted when they call her in to do one more interview before the end of the day.
She’s been laughing off her colleagues’ lighthearted attitudes to the most serious thing she’s ever said. She’s lied to the camera, but not to herself, about how the silence from him feels.
She’s exhausted because she thought she was done pretending after the beach.
She marvels at how easy it is to love someone and to hate them a little bit too.
She wishes he was here so she could tell him about Dwight’s crazy plans. She wishes he has here so she could slap him, hard.
She never hated Roy. At times he infuriated her, upset her, demeaned her, but she never hated him for it.
Right now, she loves Jim.
Right now, she hates him a little bit too.
She can’t understand why he seemed to hear what she said on the beach and yet has barely acknowledged her since.
She thought they finally saw each other, without the smokescreen of regret and pain, for the first time in months.
She remembers how his cap left his eyes in shadow.
She wonders if she saw what she wanted to see.
She expected a response and she’s frightened that he’s becoming the coward just as she finds her courage at last.
The memory of last year, when roles were reversed, is all that keeps her quiet. She remembers, more than anything now, the agony of that moment of indecision, as he demanded an answer of her.
She gives him the time that he couldn’t bear to give her.
Even so, she hates him for taking it.
The aftermath of the truth is nothing like she imagined it would be.
There is relief, as she had expected. There is embarrassment, though she tries to hide it. There was hope, but it is stifled more with every passing moment.
And yet, for better or worse, she thought he’d at least say something.
Of all the things, she didn’t expect silence.
She doesn’t much like the unpredictability of it.
Then again, she tells herself, the unpredictability of it all means it’s real.
She really did say all the things she’s been thinking for years and that is enough to sustain her for now.
“If he never comes back again, that’s okay.”
She lies.
If he never comes back, if this is really it, if the moment he left yesterday turns out to be the moment he left, it is anything but okay.
They were never supposed to end like this, with a whimper.
When she told him everything, he was supposed to say something.
Her words were supposed to be a catalyst, supposed to ignite something, anything, between them.
“But you know what? It’s okay. I’m totally fine. Everything is going to be totally...”
The door opens and she falters because he is standing there and she can’t end the sentence when she doesn’t know what everything is going to be anymore.
She thinks the spark she wished for just ignited, finally.
~
“Pam.”
She looks so shocked, so pained, so desperately, desperately hopeful, that he knows one of the first things he’ll do if she says yes is apologize for making her wait to hear this. He remembers how she told him to come back and he knows she’ll understand. He loves her for it.
He looks so different, so alive, so desperately, desperately hopeful, that she knows he’s going to want to hear about her apartment and her art classes and her day long tenure as secret assistant to the regional manager. She remembers how she told him to come back. He’s back. She loves him for it.
“Are you free for dinner tonight?” (Hello)
“Yes.” (Hello)
He thinks, finally.
“Alright, then it’s a date.”
She thinks, finally.
He leaves the room and sits down at his old desk. He loosens his tie, rolls up his sleeves and tilts his chair back. He smiles.
They’re not exactly as they were.
They’re more than that.
She faces the camera and tries to end her sentence. She smiles.
“I’m sorry what was the question?”
All she can remember is the question he just asked.
All he can remember is the answer she just gave.
Finally, the timing is perfect, the future is unpredictable and wonderful and completely theirs and, from a wall apart, they smile. Together.
Author's Chapter Notes:
“Are you free for dinner tonight?” (Hello)
"Yes." (Hello)
Chapter End Notes:
Thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed this story. This was my first Jim/Pam story and also my first multi-chaptered fic. The response and welcome from this fandom was lovely. Thank you :)
shootingstars is the author of 10 other stories.
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