I’m Karen Filippelli and, contrary to popular belief, I’m actually not an idiot.

It seems like it. I mean I know that it seems like it, I’ve watched the show and the editors are really talented, so.

I understand that I was basically cruising toward failure when I started dating the American public’s beloved Jim Halpert. I started flirting with him and was automatically destined to stand beside all those other famous ‘what the hell are they thinking?’ television women like that brunette on cheers - what was her name, something like Rachel or Becky or…I don’t know, but it wasn’t Diane, I’ll tell you that right now.

And my name is definitely not Pam.

America, let’s clear this up: I’m not Pam Beesly and I get that.

Trust me, I get it. I do not need to receive anymore hate emails telling me that Jim and Pam belong together and I’m wasting everybody’s time. I know that moving to Scranton was a mistake. I really know. I have the invisible bruises to prove it.

The problem is that when a girl is a certain age (that we won’t mention) and has a certain sort of mother (constantly purchasing baby clothes – just in case) and is living a certain kind of lifestyle (mind-numbing and tedious) it is way too easy to jump head-first into a tunnel of doomed romance.

That is my defense. I jumped head first. With my eyes closed and no net or parachute or landing gear of any kind to help me out in any way.

I packed up all my shit and I moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania for a guy with floppy hair and super casual feelings toward me.

As in - he said: “Scranton’s pretty cool,” and I said: “Great let’s move in together,” …and now that I’m thinking about it this is actually sounding less and less like an argument that I’m not an idiot. It’s sounding more like me listing the ways that I am an idiot. All of the millions of ways. All of these words like Dunder and Mifflin and Halpert and Scranton and paper salesman are all gelling in my mind’s eye to form a big old neon sign that just says: idiot.

But seriously, come on. I swear to you on bibles and gravestones and Torahs and Korans that I’m not an idiot. I honestly knew this relationship was bound for a breakup. Deep down, I definitely knew. Girls always do, right? We know early and that’s why we stay up all night having ‘talks’ or making pacts or writing down lists of ways we can get closer to our man.

I knew early.

But I am excellent at deluding myself and sticking to my completely misdirected guns, no matter how wrong a situation turns out to be. I just kept coaching my inner Karen, reminding her that moving to Scranton was her own idea and nobody forced her and she was going to make this work even if it killed her in the end. Which would be a really pathetic way to die, but I’ve heard that Scranton has killed before, so you never know.

Eventually I knew for sure.

Eventually I knew without a single solitary doubt that I was about to be single and solitary.

Eventually the delusions I’d had were erased from my mind along with all of the imagined wedding pictures and imagined birth certificates for Alison and Lucas Halpert (names negotiable of course.)

And, yeah, that moment of clarity happened – you guessed it - on that stupid field trip to the beach.

But it wasn’t the moment you’re thinking of.

It was a different moment.

An even more embarrassing, more private, more ‘wow is this really happening right now’ moment.

After Pam’s stupid announcement she went to the water to cool off her feet and Jim followed her, and I still didn’t get it, or see it, or choose to see it. Whatever. I was still hearing my mother’s “This dining table would be so much more joyful with grandchildren” speech in my head and maybe that was drowning out the whole “I called off my wedding because of you” thing. Maybe I was hearing the overwhelming ticking of biological clocks or maybe I was busy having daddy issues and I couldn’t focus on Pam’s drama because I was living my own drama poorly enough to warrant giving myself all of my attention.

I don’t know.

But whatever the case I still just thought, good. Follow her, Jim, and explain that she should shut the hell up.

That is not at all what he did.

But it took me about fifteen minutes of waiting for him to come back to realize that.

I checked my watch and thought I didn’t like all of the many minutes that had gone by forcing my delusional comfort in my relationship to start to drift out into Lake Whatsitcalled, giving me a really solid glimpse of that ‘hey, wake up, your boyfriend is in love with the secretary and you are now officially a cliché’ truth that was underneath.

Long winded truth, but still the truth.

So I got up from my seat and I wandered casually (always important to stay very casual in these situations) toward them, and I of course stayed far enough away that they wouldn’t notice me. Not that they would’ve seen me anyway. I could’ve stepped on Pam’s coal-burned feet and she wouldn’t have noticed me with all the staring into eyes and serious conversation going on. I held my breath (I remember because I had mentally thanked my life-guarding license and my daily yoga routine for the ability to hold it for impressive stretches of time) and I listened hard.

And I heard them talking.

And that was the moment I knew for sure that the grandbabies were not going to have floppy hair (a blessing really, in the end, because who wants children that can’t help but look homeless?)

Despite the fact that even after this moment I closed my eyes and sprinted my post-beach-day Hail-Mary-New-York-City- 20-Yard-Dash for conquering Love in the time of Pam Beesly, really I knew. New York wasn’t going to happen and getting married wasn’t going to happen and the dining table was going to be disappointing to my mom on the fourth of July just the same as it had been on Mother’s Day. I could tell by his tone of voice when he talked to her that nothing could be done.

I could tell by the way he looked at her like he had never seen any other woman before.

“This isn’t how I wanted all of this to happen, you know?” he said quietly and she nodded, thinking, watching her feet and crossing her arms around her waist.

“Yeah I know,” she answered and I knew there was something unsaid in that.

“The Karen thing sort of just…” he sighed and shrugged his shoulders.

The Karen Thing.

The thing with Karen.

The thing called Karen Filippelli sort of just…?

What?

I swallowed and nodded down at the sand the way Pam had nodded at the lake, and I pursed my lips to keep from interrupting them with a cry of defiance.

“She’s really great,” he offered and Pam nodded again and I wondered if things went this way in life, all awkward and unfortunate and two wrongs coming together to piss all over a right. At least, I thought bitterly, at least from then on I could be sure to list “great” on my relationship application.

“I didn’t mean to make things awkward with you guys just now, I wasn’t really thinking clearly,” she said, sounding self-deprecating and genuine and I remember thinking we would’ve been friends in other circumstances. The thought made me even angrier, of course, and I glanced over my shoulder to see if anybody else was hearing this. They weren’t because they were all listening to Michael telling dirty jokes about tiki torches.

That would’ve been a better choice of my entertainment for the evening.

“Look, Pam,” Jim sighs, “I don’t want to make this about that,” that Karen thing, I filled in mentally, “I just want you to get that I didn’t mean for this to happen. I didn’t want to make you feel like…” and he shook his head and he looked genuinely distressed and Pam reached out and touched his arm and I watched Jim’s face muscles twitch and I watched him lean back, away, reacting immediately like he’d been burned.

I knew without a doubt. Karen Halpert would never exist because Pam Halpert was written into the stars or the earth or something really schmaltzy like that.

“Sorry,” Pam murmured, and I rolled my eyes.

“Yeah,” he answered, “I’m um…this is all just kind of...” I strained to hear this part because their voices had dropped even further, mumbling low and falling down below Michael’s bellowing imitation of Eddie Murphy. “I miss you too,” he told her, his voice breaking on ‘miss’ and his eyes still refusing to meet Pam’s in that Darcy and Bennet kind of way that I always found myself resenting. “Every day,” he added. “I just…”

Now, if I could’ve found it within myself to throw up quietly then I would’ve done it. But I happen to lack any amount of grace when it comes to vomiting, so, I just stood there, pale and shocked and mouth agape like a goldfish in a tank with no water.

The silence stood in the air as Pam watched Jim’s face and I definitely got why hate mail was showing up in my inbox. These two and their…whatever…destiny, or their lingering touches and glances, at least, could melt any general public’s heart.

Eventually Jim lingeringly glanced up at her and they stared and stared and their cheeks got all rosy and their eyes sparkled and they were in love and I knew it. And I tried really hard to ignore it but god was it getting impossible.

“The others are probably wondering where we are…” he told her without looking away and she nodded, grinning, shrugging, acting all Scranton and cute.

“Yeah, ok.”

And he leaned in to hug her and I walked away.

And I kept treading that invisible, pretend-you-never-saw-that water for like a week, hoping, wishing, praying that somebody out there in the universe would throw me a line, but eventually everything snapped into place like a jigsaw puzzle and I was that extra piece that you can never really figure out.

I was the spare puzzle piece.

Where does it go?

Why is it here?

The puzzle is a perfect rectangle with no holes or mistakes or questionable fits, it’s done, and still there’s this stray bit of ambiguous green or blue or brown, and you look at it, and you shrug, and you just leave it there to find its own way home, to stew in its own uselessness.

The puzzle, without it, is perfect.

I get it.

I have bowed out gracefully and I promise you, I, Karen Filippelli, am definitely not an idiot.

Contrary to popular belief.

Contrary to popular belief, I am not as strange as I seem on television.

Well, I’m sort of strange. But I’m not as strange as they make me out to be. I don’t sit alone in my apartment and cry all the time or anything, and I… I know that’s how it seems in all the episodes. I watch them on my TiVo.

And just so you know before I tell you this uh…about this, I’m not so strange that I didn’t feel sort of guilty for eavesdropping. I felt a little guilty and I felt kind of…I don’t know. But I couldn’t leave. I mean I couldn’t get myself to leave.

Everybody had come back from the beach kind of quietly and I was still at the office because I was…waiting. Just for…logistical reasons. I don’t blame them for being grumpy, I would’ve been too. Michael has that effect on people. But this grumpy wasn’t the normal kind, it was more awkward. And when I asked how it went Phyllis just shrugged. Then she picked up her bag and left with Bob Vance. Basically everybody picked up their belongings and headed out again without saying a word, except Jim who mumbled to Karen that he was going to stick around and get some work done.

I never remembered Jim being so motivated, but I just sighed and went back to my desk to pack up my stuff, ready to go home and hunker down with my Nintendo for the night, hoping when I got back from the annex Pam might be at reception.

I was just hoping, I guess, that Pam would be at reception.

She wasn’t.

In fact the entire place was empty which I thought was strange since apparently Jim had work to catch up on. I scanned the room twice but realized that looking for something that wasn’t there…someone who wasn’t there was pointless. I turned and stepped into the conference room without turning on the light and I reached over to grab the box set of Lord of the Rings that I’d left on the table (I wasn’t going to do work if I didn’t have to, good a time as any for a marathon) and when I turned back around Jim was standing out in the office.

I opened my mouth to speak.

“That wasn’t all I had to say,” I heard, and the voice wasn’t mine and it made me pause…

It was Pam.

It was Pam and…just…the last thing I wanted to do was walk out of the pitch black conference room now like Jesus walking out of a tomb, or like Frankenstein’s monster or something. I’m not as strange as I seem on television. I didn’t want to seem strange. Creepy. I didn’t want to be creepy. So I just…

Well.

“Before…that wasn’t all I had to say,” she repeated. Jim just stood there, so she went on, “and I’m sorry because I know you’ve already had to listen to me and I honestly don’t deserve it,” she said and I thought that was wrong. I thought I would listen to her any day. I wondered if that would be a creepy thing to lead with when I saw her (hopefully in the parking lot) later.

“Pam,” Jim sighed, and I kind of hated him, “Come on, don’t.”

I leaned toward the window in the conference room and I quietly pulled the cord hanging there so the blinds shifted and I could see them both standing in front of Phyllis’s desk. Pam was looking down at her feet nervously and Jim was wearing his stupid baseball cap, looking down at the ground, and something was weird.

I’m in HR. I’m trained to notice these kinds of things. And I noticed then that I must have missed something big that happened at the beach. I had definitely missed something.

“Please,” she pushed out and Jim inhaled a breath like she’d punched him in the stomach but didn’t say a word. I held my breath and tried not to move. “You don’t owe me anything but I owe you…um…” She looked up at him and I thought about how someday I would tell her that she’s beautiful. “Casino Night,” she whispered and his head jerked up and he met her stare, “…I wanted to.”

I had no idea what they were talking about but I assumed it was some kind of romantic confession. It sounded romantic.

They really should’ve filed any romantic relationship with HR, I thought to myself, annoyed. Just, if Pam was in a relationship I should know about it. For Human Resource purposes. Plus, I thought, Karen…it could get complicated and messy. They should’ve filled out paperwork.

“You said no,” he accused and I could hear that he was angry and I could also see it in the way his fists were clenched by his side and the muscle on the side of his jaw jumped afterward like he was grinding his teeth together. That’s not healthy, I thought, bad for your bones.

“I know that and I just want to…” she sighed, “I said no because I couldn’t let myself even think anything like that. I was engaged and you were supposed to be my best friend, so I said no. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel what you felt. I did feel it,” she promised and I was only half listening at this point, cause I was too busy wondering what her two-piece looked like earlier. Probably good. “I mean…I do feel it,” she amended and this was barely phonated, I could hardly hear her. But I did hear her.

And so did Jim.

His body went totally motionless and he looked at her hard, his eyes all dark and stormy and his hands falling out of their fists to just hang by his side. I squinted in thought and wondered what exactly they were talking about.

Then Jim let out a chuckle and I tilted my head. Not what I’d expected.

“What are you…” he said through a laugh, shaking his head at the carpeting beneath them, “You told me I… misinterpreted,” he said, and again it was like I needed a hearing aid to get every nuance but he sounded hurt.

I wasn’t glad or anything.

Jim and I were buddies. I just kind of thought that if one of them had to sound that way it should be Jim.

Not Pam.

Pam was nodding at him and taking a step toward him and she shifted and I thought I could almost see a stripe of her stomach, but then it was gone. Jim took a step back and held a hand out toward her in warning.

“You told me I misinterpreted our friendship,” he said. “You kissed me and then you picked Roy anyway. You always picked Roy, Pam, how was I supposed to know you...”

My brain shorted for just a second. She kissed him? They had kissed? I tried not to imagine what the scenario could have been, because despite my wanting to know every detail of Pam’s…

Well, sometimes it was best for HR to stay out of the loop.

Logistically.

But then my mind started to wander and imagine what exactly kissing Pam Beesly would be like.

It wasn’t that I thought I would ever have the chance; it was just that I thought I could maybe think about it sometimes and that would be close enough.

I wasn’t delusional or stupid. Just…she’d always been nice to me.

Kissing her would probably be nice.

She was biting at her lip, then, looking like she might cry any second and I felt my inner, braver self wanting to step out of this stupid conference room and defend her. Jim Halpert was a jerk. Starting right then, in my book.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” he told her. She narrowed her eyes at him.

“I have to apologize,” she told him and he reached up and adjusted his hat.

“Well you did, don’t worry about it anymore, it’s fine.”

She took a step toward him and she reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck, stretching onto her toes, and a whole strip of her skin showed up and my eyes started to water. I let them wander down across the back pockets on her shorts and then up to the showing-skin again. I remember thinking she would never want me but if she did I was ready any time.

Once she had her arms around him, his face softened a little, not that I noticed for that long because I was really watching her.

God, I was watching her.

Not in a creepy way, just in a normal…guy kind of way.

“It isn’t fine,” she whispered to him, and his eyes slid closed, and I imagined her whispering something to me like that. I would probably close my eyes too. “It isn’t fine and I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”

His hands reached up and wrapped around her then and they hugged the kind of hug that definitely warrants paper work from Human Resources. Hips touching. His forehead landed against her shoulder and her fingers spread out and up into his hair, and I thought if she touched me like that I would tell her she was amazing.

I wouldn’t make her cry.

“I’m sorry too,” he offered eventually and that was all he said so I rolled my eyes at him.

Whatever had happened on the beach, I thought, I’m sure he hadn’t reacted properly.

Sometimes Jim was a jerk.

“Jim,” she breathed and his fingers tightened against the skin I was still really trying to memorize.

And then she pulled back and she pulled the hat off his head, and when he grinned, embarrassed by the mess of his hair, she smoothed her fingers through it and she looked sad. He was always making her look sad and I hated him for it. She touched him gently like she was afraid to hurt something and I wondered if that was how she touched everyone, or if this was an ‘I’m sorry I was engaged to Roy’ type touch. I secretly hoped it was just her way, in general. She’d probably touch everybody gently like that.

His fingers drifted back and forth against the skin of her back and I could see the tie of her bathing suit at her neck, brown and probably adorable, and Jim looked like maybe he was going to say something for a second, but he didn’t get the chance because she kissed him.

She kissed him, and I watched her do it. All gentle and heartfelt and pressing up against him and his brow furrowed as she did it, his muscles twitched and he grabbed onto her shirt and he kissed her back, like he’d been imagining it, wanting to do it. I wondered what Karen would think of that, and I also felt a little sorry for him.

I’d been imagining it too, wanting to do it, and I knew what that was like – wanting Pam Beesly.

It wasn’t an easy job.

When she pulled away, she let her arms fall down, drifting to the front of his golf shirt and hanging there, suspended.

“I’m in love with you,” she whispered unhappily, and just like that hopes and dreams of mine were dashed.

Not that they were ever very likely to come true anyway.

She said I love you and Jim Halpert flinched, because, I thought, he’s an idiot.

“I…” he sighed, shaking his head, letting go of her, stepping back and away, “I can’t,” he said and it sounded weird, it sounded like it meant something else, something way more significant than the stupidest contraction I’d ever heard another man mutter before.

I didn’t have the energy to translate it right then.

“I know,” she answered, nodding, pulling back and clasping her hands in front of her chest like she was trying to hold onto something. I watched her and thought she should never have to look so quietly distressed. I had practice with quiet distress, too, and Pam deserved way better. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she told him.

He nodded and he turned and he picked up his bag and walked away like he couldn’t escape fast enough. What about all that work? I’d wondered. The work he’d had to do.

Not that important, I guessed.

Pam just stood there, sad, leaning back against Phyllis’s desk and seeming deep in thought and it crossed my mind that I could walk out there. I could have walked out there and said I’d been napping in the conference room and where was everybody and was she ok? I could tell her I hadn’t heard anything, but she seemed upset and was there something I could do?

I could have talked to her. Right then.

Instead I just watched her until she seemed to come to some realization and her shoulders straightened with what looked like pride (I’d never really seen her proud before) and she turned and left the office.

I could have talked to her.

My therapist says I have masochistic tendencies.

I guess she’s probably right.

The day before Michael and Jim and Karen went to New York?

I saw Pam taping this yogurt lid to a message paper and I was all “Hey Pam, what are you doing?” and she was all “Mind your own business Kevin,” and so I was mad and when she was in the conference room doing an interview I snuck behind her desk?

And I stole all the jelly beans.

When she came back she was like “Hey, where’d all the jelly beans go?”

Me and Oscar laughed sooo hard.

It was classic.

I got stuck in traffic on Eighth Avenue.

If I’d been living in New York then I would have known never to take Eighth Avenue during a work day and I would’ve known that that particular day there was going to be some kind of fucking parade marching somewhere that was going to have everything in the universe sitting at a dead stop for the entire afternoon.

Parades.

So fucking stupid.

Anyway, I wasn’t living in New York then, I was living in the hellhole that is Scranton, so I had no idea what the hell I was doing because nobody from Scranton ever does. So I ended up stopped somewhere between Chelsea and midtown for like an hour and a half, listening to Green Day and trying not to flip anybody the bird.

The interview had gone well.

I mean it had gone really well.

I had totally rocked that interview so hard it was going to beg me to come back at three AM and rock it again.

But I could read David Wallace like a book and I knew he was holding back, hesitant to admit to himself that I was the guy he wanted, because he had it in his head (I was sure) that he wanted to hire fucking Jim Halpert.

Jim Halpert is a total douche.

Let this be known to everybody who has ever worshipped him, you are worshipping Satan. Or at the very least someone really lame like Kenny G or R. Kelly or some other idiot who got famous with an initial in their name. He’s just not a cool guy. He’s boring. And he plays a lot of air hockey and he reads a lot of Charles Dickens and he’s just dull and stupid and I have absolutely no use for him.

I have no idea why the world finds him so funny.

I definitely, at the time, had no idea why David Wallace would want to promote him. He hardly ever did anything at work, his numbers were mediocre, and his attitude was awful.

I didn’t have any numbers because I’d never made a sale, but that seemed beside the point.

The point was that I give good interview and David Wallace was probably wondering, right at that moment, whether Jim Halpert was really his guy. I didn’t think so. I didn’t think so at all.

So, I was stuck on Eighth Avenue, imagining David thinking wonderful things about me, when I glanced to my left and watched, amazed, as Karen Fillipelli pushed her way out of some girlish café that Jim had probably picked out for a late lunch. I checked the clock. 2:30. She’d already gone for her interview. So had fucking douche Jim Halpert who came pushing out of the café after her looking all forlorn and apologetic and I thought about how my mother always used to shake her head and say the world was a tiny place.

It definitely felt like it right then.

Once I moved to New York I would come to realize that it’s the kind of city where whoever you absolutely don’t want to see, ever, under any circumstances, gets vomited out by the powers that be and you literally bump into them on the sidewalk while the City laughs in your face. I didn’t know that at the time.

I also didn’t know, at the time, that it’s the kind of city where you can have an absolute blow out fight on the sidewalk and you won’t cause a scene because everybody will just step around you and ignore it, or else push you and tell you to get the hell out of the way. Lucky for Jim Halpert, it was nearly impossible to cause a scene.

I cracked my window and prepared to be entertained.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Karen yelled. I turned down American Idiot and leaned back in my seat.

“Karen, come on,” Jim tried. Unsuccessfully. Because you can’t ask a girl to come on in the same tone of voice you ask her to pass the salt, a lesson Jim Halpert had yet to learn.

“No, you come on. You come on, Jim, because I brought this up a thousand times to you and now it turns out you lied every single time,” she accused, hot and bothered and kind of sexy. I wondered if this was about Pam.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” he offered feebly and Ryan watched as a guy walking by shouldered him and grumbled some kind of obscenity, making Jim’s brow furrow in distress. I chuckled.

Beyond entertaining, I thought happily. Fucking gold.

“I really don’t care if you’re sorry,” she spat and I mentally applauded her. I would always be on the side of the hot new girl, no matter how much the rest of the country vowed to spike her bottled water with arsenic. “I don’t, because you’re a jerk. You’re such a jerk and you’re all dressed up like some kind of nice small town guy who’s quirky and cute, but really you’re an asshole. I can’t believe this,” she said this last part kind of to herself but I nodded as if she’d said it to me.

“Crazy,” I commented. “He’s totally crazy.”

“This is it,” she told him firmly, “I hope you know that. If you go back there and whatever you’re planning doesn’t work out you cannot come knocking on my door. And you’re going to have to deal with what you did to me every single day because I am not quitting my job, so you’ll have to just deal with this. I will hate you forever, Jim Halpert, and you’re going to have to deal with it.”

Damn, I thought, she is totally hot when she’s angry.

I wondered when it would be too soon to call her after this breakup. I wondered when it would be too soon to call her after my breakup that hadn’t quite happened yet, because god knows a guy cannot be dating Kelly Kapoor in New York City.

I really hoped this fight meant Jim was doing something stupid and had maybe turned down Wallace or acted like a goddamn idiot in the interview. I really really hoped…

Jim shrugged and I raised my eyebrows, watching as Karen’s blood pressure visibly rose. She paced the street and flipped off some homeless guy who asked her change. And I was in love with her right then.

“Fuck you,” she eventually spat. “Go home, I’ll find some other way back.”

And I laid on my horn. I laid on my horn hard like saying I will be that way for you, Karen Filippelli, I will be the way and I will give you angry break up sex with no strings attached. But when I laid on the horn so did like forty five other cars so she didn’t even notice and she turned and walked away and hailed a cab two blocks south and I watched Jim Halpert shake his head at the ground.

And then I watched him smile.

And I officially thought he was a total and absolute douche.

She should’ve slapped him.

When the traffic started moving it actually wasn’t that bad, the George Washington Bridge had been pretty clear sailing (for the George Washington Bridge) and I made excellent time, so I stopped at The Crossings on my way past because I thought I should start shopping for new suits.

I thought I might need them.

And then I stopped at Taco Bell and I pulled into the Dunder Mifflin parking lot before the work day had even ended, reaching into the bag for a burrito and cranking American Idiot happily, my mind drifting from David Wallace to a corner office to hot New York women to Karen Fillipelli and to Jim Halpert’s monumental failure and I thought it might be a really good day for me. It seemed to be heading in that direction.

As I was eating my burrito I glanced up in the rearview mirror at myself, reaching up to fix my hair, deciding that I should have it cut a little shorter if I was going to be a big business man. Fuck Michael Scott, I thought happily. What an idiot that guy was.

Then I adjusted the mirror a little and, to be perfectly honest, I choked on some refried beans.

Jim Halpert.

The guy followed me everywhere, apparently, because there was no way he should’ve made it back to Scranton before me. When I left the city he was standing on the sidewalk in front of Kathy’s Bistro or whatever, and no here he was back at Dunder Mifflin. How had this happened?

He was leaning against the building and I could not believe my eyes. The douche was still smiling to himself. Still seemed happy despite the heart he’d apparently broken earlier.

I reached into my pocket and fingered my cell phone, wondering how far from town Karen was and if she’d want to meet for coffee.

But I got distracted from that because a few seconds later Pam showed up, and she came out of Scranton Business Park like she was looking for something and I figured that something was like three feet away leaning on the building with a stupid new haircut that was probably a huge waste of money. I leaned closer to the rearview mirror and felt vaguely like Nicholas Cage in a G rated version of 8 MM or something as Pam saw him and stopped cold, grinning, shaking her head and probably saying something cutesy and stupid like I was looking for you. I chewed my burrito.

He shook his head back and he said something, which I assume was also cute and stupid, and she laughed and they gazed at each other and I felt the burrito coming back up. These two were disgusting.

Then disgusting turned into a more interesting version of the word because after the long period of gazing he reached out and he grabbed her, basically. He wrapped his hand around her neck and he pulled her to him, hard, like impressively demanding, and she just went with it, landing flush against him and tipping her head back so she could kiss him properly, with tongue. A good amount of tongue.

I watched, amused, as her hand drifted down just past his hip and his hands settled on the dip of her lower back, inching toward fantastic territory that I’d watched walk by about a thousand times.

I remembered that Pam Beesly was kind of hot, too, and I kept eating while these two went at it.

Hard.

I mean he definitely got to second base, and I’m pretty sure she did too but I’m not really clear what the version of second base would be if it’s a girl doing the touching. If it’s running her hand along his zipper, she hit second base with a slide. I raised my eyebrows, impressed, because I did not expect Pam Beesly to be the exhibitionistic type. Although, to be fair, she had no idea I was sitting there, so.

She ran her hand across his zipper and she swayed toward him and her body turned into curves and peaks and valleys as I sat there watching her, all smoking hot and obviously turned on, and his head fell back against the wall and his eyes slid closed and I totally felt his pain. He reached down and wrapped his fingers around her hip, pulling her toward him again so that her hand was replaced by her pelvis and he was the one rocking against her and she was the one swooning, then, his mouth chasing the slant of her neck and his thigh pressing in between both of hers.

She was blushing.

So was I.

Holy shit, I thought, Jim Halpert was the man.

Halpert right then was totally the man and I knew for a second why women wanted him, and I was jealous for a second of his height and his charm and the things deep down I knew he had that

I definitely didn’t.

Whatever, I thought angrily, I was good enough to get promoted and good enough to get laid in a parking lot if I felt like it. I was better than Jim Halpert at plenty of shit and I had no reason to be jealous.

The guy’s a douche, after all.

So I shook off the inferiority complex that sometimes reared its ugly head and I watched them inch toward third base, his fingers toying with the button on her pants and her hands planting themselves flat against the wall because I was sure she couldn’t quite stand up on her own, and he kissed her, and she kissed him back, and I clicked open my car door and watched, amused, as the two of them leapt apart like they’d been caught dancing in Beaumont. Jim shifted and wiped his lips and Pam tugged self-consciously at her sweater and I tried not to laugh at them.

“Hey man,” Jim greeted, glancing at Pam and sharing some kind of cutesy stupid look.

“Hey,” I answered.

And then I went inside, and when I got to the annex I grabbed Kelly without saying a word and I kissed her. Hard. Just to prove that if I wanted to, I could.

And then I broke up with her.

And then I got promoted.

And then I went to jail.

But whatever. The point of me telling you this was just to make sure you’re aware of this really important bit of information that nobody seems to get no matter how many times it’s been proven to them, which, in my opinion has been about five million times since our show hit the air.

Pay attention, because I know things that most people don’t and I’ve been around the block quite a few times. I’ve been to prison. I did not drop the soap. I know enough to tell you all this:

Karen Filippelli is hot. I am fucking awesome. And Jim Halpert, ladies and gentlemen, is a total absolute douche.

You can trust me on that.

“It’s wrong, we know, to spy on others, but after all aren’t we always voyeurs when we go to the movies? Here’s [Rear Window], about a man who does on the screen what we do in the audience – look through a lens at the private lives of strangers.” – Roger Ebert