The first morning I'm back, I go to replace the stale jellybeans but I find with a smile that someone's been restocking them.
The second I sign on to my computer, the number of messages in my inbox starts to climb and doesn't stop until two hundred and forty seven. At least ninety-eight percent are--of course--from Jim. The most recent, dated five minutes ago, has a subject line of "I don't mean to push, but . . ." The rest of the message is short and oh-so-sweet: "Has time passed yet? I miss you."
I feel his eyes on me as I crinkle up a sticky note bearing a single scribbled word--stairwell--and toss it to him, and I feel him behind me as I walk out the door.
The coolness of the stairwell is soothing to my flushed skin and fluttering stomach because as much as I'm wanting and ready for this I'm nervous.
"Jim," I say, begging him to be serious in case of a mischievous twinkle in his eye, but as I turn I see his face looks like death.
He's scared, just as I am, but I feel the overwhelming need to put him to rest, because I've seen enough pain, more pain in his eyes than any in my life combined, and how he must hurt--
"Jim, no," I gasp, desperate, as his face falls again, triggered by my misinterpreted silence. "Jim, I--"
My arms are around him before I'm conscious I moved at all. It's instinctive, the way he affects me, and he is oxygen itself to my starved body.
"I don't know if this will work," I mumble softly, so softly, to his tie. "But I'm willing to try."
He looks down at me carefully, calculating me, before a grin touches his lips. "Isn't that your cue to kiss me, Beesly?" he asks, and so I do.
As a teenager, I was the frequent recipient of the "copout hug".
Jim's hugs are not, in any way, copouts.
He presses me against him like I'm his very life. He's solid, and warm, and I matter when his arms are around me. His hugs are not soft, not weak, not loose. He loves me and I'll never be the victim of the copout again.
Jim proposes to me ten months, twenty-four days after Casino Night. We're in the park at sunset, having spent all day on a picnic blanket in the newly revealed spring sun. He caresses my shoulder, kisses my temple. "Pam, where do you see yourself in ten years?"
"Two kids," I say. "Brown haired girls with large noses and dainty fingers."
"That's a good sign. However, I think the girls should be red haired with cute little bird noses."
I flick him and act like I care. "I do not have a bird nose."
"Do too, bird freak."
"Okay, whatever you say. Potato nose."
"Point well taken. Anyway, is there anything else in this future of yours? A father, perhaps? Or are these brown haired, potato nosed girls genetic mutations with only a mother? Or, god help me, it's Dwight isn't it?"
"Gross. Mental pictures. And also, it's you, you dork."
He pulls me closer, and I feel his smile in my hair. "Well, that's a relief. I was worried I'd have to take this back."
"Take back w--?" I start to say, but before I finish there's a rock in my face that sparkles in the waning sunlight like a star, and he's on his knee in front of me and I'm crying before he even starts to speak.
"Pam, I love you, and I always have loved you. More than anything in the world. Marry me?"
My life amazes me.
Sometimes, at night, I dream that I left with Roy at Casino Night. By the wedding, I'm screaming and crying for Jim and it's amazing when I open my eyes and he's there.
"It's a dream, Pam," he says low in my ear, "just a dream. I'm here. I love you."
I smile, and he kisses my drying tears.
"I love you, too."
There's adoration in his eyes and solidity in his touch that melts me into the sheets, and him.
