Disclaimer: The Office and its characters do not belong to me.

i.

It’s cold the night they talk.

They used to talk all the time, about anything and everything, though that was something Karen expected and Dan had to get used to. She loved that he would open up to her and in time she came to love him. He knows that it took time, that he had to win her over. That she had been hurt deeply and that she had quietly entertained a childish hope that the one who did the hurting was going to swoop into Utica someday to beg for her forgiveness, to beg her to take him back, to forgive him.

Dan remembers how it filled him with queasy rage in those first few months, when the mailman would step onto her porch and she would glance at the door, eyes full of anticipation. (he never said anything, that was the secret he allowed himself to keep from her) But she got over it, the looks faded, the mailman’s arrival became commonplace and uneventful as it always should have been.

She knows, though, just like she knows that he avoids coming home these days. They are more similar than either of them would like to admit. She remembers how his eyes flashed fear like a lighthouse when she mentioned that Michael Scott was coming to lecture the Utica branch and he was bringing an assistant, and she knows she didn’t do much to assuage his concerns when she snuck into the bathroom to call Corporate to see if there was a name attached to Michael’s itinerary.

(she knows how insecure he is and that’s one thing she misses about Scranton, that even when he was falling away from her he seemed so sure of himself and she followed him unquestioningly)

But he kept it to himself, he hid everything behind a warm smile and a bowl of ice cream slathered in peanut butter and olives (disgusting now, but then…) and a simple “So, how did it go?”

And she forgot all about Jim Halpert and the spray of a fountain mixing with salty tears. She knows now that she fell in love with Dan for his empathy, for the way he looks at her and knows what she is feeling.

But empathy isn’t really enough, not for this. Not for sudden bleeding and an ambulance to St. Elizabeth’s and (he’s not crying why isn’t he crying) a dark, vicious scar along her belly that reminds her of everything that’s wrong in the world.

Dan tells her that it will be okay, but she looks at herself in the mirror and she hates what she sees, hates that her own body would do this to her. And she cries, and she drinks, and he puts her to bed but she doesn’t feel him lie down next to her.

She knows he isn’t cheating but she also knows that whenever he touches her she recoils, and she wants to cry and tell him it’s not his fault that it’s her, her fault, she feels so ugly and worthless and that goddamn scar but she says none of these things because the silence is too loud to scream over.

And the chasm widens as the leaves turn and then the snow falls, and he spends more time at work and she does too because they’re talking downsizing again, which means layoffs, and they’ve all been there before. She starts looking at jumping ship and he asks if maybe she would want to stay home for a while, since his practice is doing so well lately.

Why, she says, we don’t have any kids. And she claps her hand to her mouth and he looks like she just punched him in the gut and she’s crying and he just drifts out of the house and it’s finally out there and she hates herself for how much it feels like nothing.

Weeks go by like this, they orbit each other as their lives collapse around them and she wonders if he feels anything at all and he wonders if she still loves him. But time doesn’t heal all wounds equally and she knows it’s not his fault, it really isn’t, because he’s been amazing and he has done everything right. But everything isn’t always enough and sometimes amazing only works in comic books.

Karen shivers. She left the window open, and now it’s nearly freezing inside their tiny kitchen. She pulls her sweater tighter to her body. It’s a cardigan. Pink, like she used to wear.

(because Karen neither forgives nor forgets, and in that way she is more like Jim than she would ever admit)

She pours herself a whiskey, more than she should probably drink. But what the hell, she thinks ruefully, it’s not like she’s pregnant.

He slips inside just before midnight, and she resists the urge to issue a biting volley of accusations. She knows he isn’t fucking around, but more than that she knows it doesn’t matter. He sits down at the table without a word. They are across from each other, him staring at the amber liquid, her at the table.

They can’t meet each other’s eyes.

(she wonders whose eyes their son had)

There is no point in preludes or pretenses.

Addressing the pale wood of the table, she asks him for a divorce.

ii.

It’s cold the night she leaves.

It starts long before that, of course, because nothing happens overnight. It starts with a joke, with a stupid fucking joke. (free at last, free at last) It’s not that it’s not funny or that it’s particularly offensive but she’s tired and hormonal and she’s getting sick of how everything has to be so goddamn funny all the goddamn time. She snipes at him on the drive home, he soothes her. They make up.

But it’s like telling Michael Scott curses them, brings a pox upon their house, because the bleeding starts and something is wrong (wrong wrong) and then there is crying and she curls up in their bed and doesn’t move for days. He brings her things. Soup. Sprite. Like she’s a kid staying home with strep. He doesn’t linger next to her. She knows that if she opens her eyes, she will see that his are rimmed with red. He cannot stay by her side without being so utterly reminded of what they lost together, what was taken from them. She doesn’t blame him, but she wishes he would hold her again, arms tight and full of hope.

(he is too gentle now, like she’s going to break. like she’s already broken and he’s just trying to mitigate the damage now)

Jim is not a crier. She wonders if he ever really was. Despite how sensitive he seems, Jim doesn’t really express grief. He can do disappointment and apprehension like he learned them in school, but long, hard grief buries itself behind quirky smiles and the sterile whiteness of iPod earbuds.

And eventually, she gets up and he stays next to her and everything goes back to normal, but there’s something between them now, something that distorts the connection they’ve always had, like static on a radio.

She squints when she looks at him sometimes, like he’s floating away and she can just barely make him out at the horizon. But she’s searching for something. She thinks she sees betrayal in his eyes sometimes, and she knows she’s imagining it but she wonders if he hates her, hates her just a little bit, for taking that fatherhood away from him. One night she has too much wine at dinner and she asks him, point blank, and there are tears in his eyes when he pulls her into his arms and tells her no, never, how could she say that? And they are both sobbing and she believes in her heart that they are going to make it.

But the static roars between them, a lion both of them are afraid to confront.

Eventually, they stop trying to talk over the silence and she feels him slip away from her, just as he sees her shrink away from him. They fight over petty things to hide the deep discontent that they both unknowingly share, the feeling that it just wasn’t supposed to be like this, not really. They were supposed to be the couple that gets married in the fall and lives happily ever after, not the couple who postpones their wedding because the bonus that they were relying on to cover the cost of the venue gets slashed in half when Blue Cross/Blue Shield halves their order.

Soon, the space between their desks feels like a chasm that neither one of them are particularly inclined to bridge. And still, she sees betrayal in his eyes.

She starts seeing someone without telling Jim. Not a boy. Well, yes, a boy, but a therapist. He asks her if she’s happy at the beginning of each session. She says the same thing each time: yes, of course. Why wouldn’t she be? She has a fiancˇe who loves her, a job (however long that lasts), and her health.

They postpone for three months, but his numbers don’t really rebound and there aren’t a lot of new clients coming in and three months becomes six and they have another Valentine’s Day as an engaged couple and even though she says she understands she knows he feels like he’s betrayed her. She hates that her assurances aren’t enough for him. It seems like nothing is enough, that the closer they get the more it hurts.

Her client list stays stagnant and Corporate starts talking about a ten percent salary cut to forestall branch closures and they start to feel the walls closing in, because at night he holds her so tight she almost can’t breathe but she doesn’t complain because she needs to feel him there. At work, she watches him wilt. No, not wilt. Burn. He used to be so bright, so vibrant, so full of fire, but now it seems as though his life has burned through him. Now he is embers, ashes, and she doesn’t know what she can do to help.

(she’s not enough, she starts to think)

She makes lists when he’s not looking, lists of things that he loves and she loves and things she loves about him. Ways she can make him feel like he matters. She just wants to fix it.

(but she makes other lists too, ones she keeps hidden, like things she thought she would have accomplished by now and things the girls before her had that she doesn’t)

A month later, the therapist reminds her that unhappiness is not the same as ungratefulness. That it’s okay to reach for more than you have in order to be satisfied. And in that moment, he sounds like Jim. She cries for the rest of the session. She tells him things that she would never tell anyone else, not even (especially not) Jim, like how she wishes Jim would get angry with her, would fight with her, would do something other than crack a smile and a joke and disappear behind that wall of his. How she feels like she can’t do anything to bring him closer, make him feel better.

The doctor prescribes an antidepressant. She stares at the scrap of paper for hours after she leaves his office, but in the end she throws it in the trash. That night, she finds Jim asleep on the couch, still in his work clothes, a beer in his hand and the Phillies game on the television. She hates how familiar he looks there, how much like Roy he seems to her at that moment. And she hates herself for thinking that.

She tells her therapist about it, and he asks if she thinks she might be able to bring Jim into their sessions. It’s been six months and she still pays cash and she just looks at him. He asks if there’s a reason she thinks Jim will react poorly to the idea of her talking to a psychotherapist.

She shakes her head. Then she bites her lip. And she says that he waited for her for so long and he seems so happy sometimes and she feels like it’s almost mean to show him how unhappy she has been lately, especially because work has been so hard for him lately. That she can’t always be dragging him into her problems, even though he would never, ever complain.

The therapist hesitates. It is the first time Pam has ever seen him do anything like that. And then he asks if that sounds like a marriage to her.

So one December night, she sits him down and asks if he’s happy. He looks tired and stressed and rumors of layoffs abound in Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch. She knows he’s spent hours with Michael and David Wallace and even Charles Miner, trying to keep the gun away from Scranton and away from her particularly. She’s the most junior saleswoman on staff, she knows, and he is burning his credibility with Corporate by protecting her this long.

He says yes, of course, he has her. It’s exactly the right answer and exactly the wrong one too. Because that can’t be enough.

And then he realizes what’s going on, because his voice breaks when he asks if she’s happy too.

She tells him the truth. That she’s so afraid of going down the same road she went with Roy, and she knows how special he is, and how much she loves him. And that maybe they’ll be able to try again, some day, when things are different. When she feels like she can tell him what’s wrong without feeling guilty.

He says he never meant to make her feel that way.

She says she knows, that it’s not him, that it’s her and them and that they need to be apart before they can be together, she thinks.

He almost gets angry and she watches the word bullshit die on his lips, and she thinks that if he had just let it go, if he had just stood up and fought with her and yelled and screamed, maybe she would stay. But he doesn’t. And neither does she.

She tells him she’s seeing someone.

He freezes and gasps and a tear almost escapes his eye before she realizes her mistake. A therapist, she clarifies. Since the miscarriage.

It’s the first time either of them have used that word.

(she almost lets the ambiguity hang there, wondering if that might end things, might let them both be free, but she knows that she cannot burn their bridge so completely, not on a lie)

He asks why she didn’t tell him.

She says he wouldn’t understand.

The hell he wouldn’t, he insists. Like he’s never seen a therapist, or been on antidepressants, or felt like he was completely alone in the world. The difference, he says, is that she always had him to talk to, even about talking to someone else.

It’s not the same, she says even though she doesn’t quite believe it. She never knew about Jim’s history with that--it just wasn’t something he talked about, not that she tried to open those wounds. She knew there was something. She just figured that he would talk about it when he was ready.

And that, she thinks, might have been their problem. Might have been why it took them six years to get together and three more to have this conversation. Because they both thought the other was too fragile to be pushed, and they were more than happy to stay put and settle instead of fix it.

She tells him that she appreciates all the effort he’s put forth to keep them from laying her off, but she’s already given Michael her two weeks notice. She can’t watch that place tear him apart, and she won’t let him burn his career for her.

He would, he says, and she knows it.

And that’s why she has to do this. Those are the words he needs to hear, and he visibly sags. Like he’s been defeated. She almost breaks, almost loses her resolve and stays despite everything. But she doesn’t. And she thinks he accepts that.

They are surprisingly calm, though she knows Jim is just barely holding himself together, and he helps her bring her things to the car. And neither of them say goodbye because neither of them want to admit that this is it, even though they both know it kind of is.

See ya, Beesley, he says. His voice doesn’t crack and she loses it and throws herself into his chest, crying, and tells him she loves him so much, that they’ll find each other, that it will all be okay.

He smiles at her sadly.

(don’t do that. come on, i don’t want to do that)

The memory comes unbidden and unwanted and she feels exactly the same as she did those years ago, crushing his hopes because of what she thought she needed to do.

She’s right this time, though. And she will come back to him, she promises herself.

But as she drives away, she sees him standing on the porch in her rearview mirror.

Through the haze of tears, he looks like a pillar of ashes.

iii.

It’s cold the night he sees her.

Runs into her, really, at a nice spot in the city that pretends to be a dive. He is closer to forty than thirty now and he looks it. His hair is shorter, the few gray hairs he found six years ago just the first of many, and he wears glasses all the time instead of just to read. His mother says it makes him look sad. Even now, a suit and tie still feels like dressing up in his father’s clothes, and he thinks everyone looks at him like he’s ridiculous.

He doesn’t sell paper anymore. He doesn’t sell anything, really, he just meets with clients and persuades them to pay the company and hands off their demands to another department. It’s different than Dunder Mifflin but refreshingly similar, and he doesn’t miss Scranton at all.

(he tells himself)

He dates a bit, here and there, mostly to keep his coworkers from foisting their wives’ single friends onto him like handmade oven mitts, but he’s almost happier by himself. He just hasn’t found someone, he tells them, that he really wants to spend time with.

(almost happy is the new happy, he tells himself)

The woman at the end of the bar is engrossed in a conversation with a blonde he’s never seen before, and he sees her drain the last of her drink. He buys her next one, the bartender flitting from his bill-clasping hand to the woman’s glass like a twentysomething carrier pigeon.

She turns to look and he sees her face for the first time. He can only imagine that he looks as shocked as she does.

Karen makes her way over through the crowd, and he loses her several times over in the teeming mass of neurotic, inebriated bodies. When she reaches him, he freezes. In his head, it was never her he runs into in a crowded bar.

(that’s a lie, he thinks about her on those lonely nights and the way she once took his tie and bound his hands to the headboard and--) he shakes himself mentally, swallows hard.

They express token surprise that masks genuine shock. She tells him she’s in town for a conference--she’s Staples Corporate now, a big deal in the paper world--and he tells her he lives here now. He’s in advertising now, but not in anything that makes it advertising, he jokes. She doesn’t laugh, but she smiles like she did when he told her he was glad she moved to Scranton. It twists in his gut, remembering that smile. Remembering being a dumb punk kid who thought he had nothing to lose, dragging other people’s lives behind him.

She looks good, though. Older, just like him, but the black dress fits her nicely and maybe it’s the liquor but he can’t help but take her in.

You’ll catch flies with that mouth of yours, she ribs him gently, and he snaps his jaw shut. And maybe he’s fooling himself, but he thinks he catches the hint of a sly smile at the corner of her mouth.

She asks how that works, how the job is, and he replies with the usual platitudes before asking what it’s like working for the Evil Empire. And she laughs but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes and he remembers that Utica went onto the chopping block. He doesn’t ask if she went down with the branch or if she jumped ship. She appreciates it.

Karen barely recognizes him to begin with, he looks so much older and it isn’t just the glasses or the hair, it’s the leanness in his face and the wornness in his eyes. He looks like he’s been hurt and she notices his left hand is bare and feels like a slut for so blatantly scoping his ring finger. She bites her lip.

He doesn’t ask about Dan, but he definitely notices that she’s not wearing a wedding ring and the guilt boils inside of him and he’s not sure why.

It’s just like dating him again, she thinks. She’s always between them. But they’re not dating and if she pisses him off, well, she never has to see him again. They’re not even in the same industry anymore, this is just some freak occurrence.

When she asks about Pam, he jumps in his seat. She watches him shift uncomfortably, squirm like he used to when they had those long, long talks.

She’s about to drop it when he confesses that they’re not together. And she’s shocked in some ways but utterly not in others, because she knows what it’s like to have expectations and stake everything on them, only to find out that the person you bet on was just that, a person.

He glosses over certain facts, just like he used to, and the miscarriage somehow escapes mention. He just says that things happened and they decided to spend some time apart, to see if they really belonged together. She nods understandingly and tries not to feel victorious.

She pushes him when he trails off.

And they hooked back up, a couple of years later, and figured out they didn’t fit as well as they thought they would. They grew in the years between, and not necessarily together, and he still cares about her. They just don’t really work together, anymore. He says it without rancor, or bitterness, or even regret. It just is.

Karen feels something in the pit of her stomach and she represses it. Instead, she rubs his forearm like she used to do.

And when he gets up to get another round, she watches the back of his neck like she used to watch the other woman do and she knows exactly why Pam fell in love with him, even if that wasn’t enough to keep them together. They never aired it in the documentary but after she settled into Utica and got over everything a bit (and seeing him in a women’s warehouse uniform didn’t hurt this whole progression) she told them that she got why he fell for Pam too and why they were good for each other. But she’s a child of divorce so maybe she just subscribes to the belief that there’s more than one someone for everyone, that it’s about more than just love, it’s about circumstance and work and if it’s effortless, someone isn’t saying something. And that’s the way she believes in love and princes and happily ever after. That’s her fairytale, love you hammer out on an anvil.

(she cried herself to sleep more than once, fantasizing about him finding her, all apologies and professions of love and devotion and Pam is just not for him, but even in her head it rings false)

When he comes back, she asks how long it has been since he talked to her. He tells her. Three years is a long time and she acknowledges it with a whistle, and she just comes out and asks if there’s been anyone else since then.

He shrugs and she takes that to mean yes, but nothing serious. And she knows if she asks him that same question (do you have feelings for her? yes) she will get the same answer, but different. Different because he seems like he’s changed, but maybe it’s her who is different now, who can recognize that he’ll always have feelings for her and that doesn’t mean he can only have feelings for her. Maybe she’s grown up enough to practice what she preaches, enough to keep herself from losing her mind over what-ifs and are-theys.

He notices that she doesn’t say much about herself, and she knows that he knows that she’s hiding herself behind a Manhattan and an even face, but she still doesn’t mention the baby and (oh god there’s so much blood and the doctor he won’t say anything and it’s so quiet) doesn’t mention the months of decay. She just says that sometimes loving someone isn’t enough and she lets him think that she’s talking about him and Pam. He nods more sagely than he has a right to, but she can’t hold it against him.

They drink together for hours and by the third, fourth (fifth?) round she starts to feel like she’s a twentysomething again, twirling her hair around her finger and thinking of paperclip explosions. She giggles when he makes a joke and once of his faces but he’s only mugging for her now, no cameras, and she’s scared by how much she wants to kiss him again and forget the last ten years ever happened.

But she’s read enough Shakespeare to know that past is prologue, and he knows he’s hurt her and he wonders if being stupid and twenty-eight and leaving her crying by that fountain meant he had everything coming.

They’re done before last call and walk out together, and she stomps through the slush to the curb, waving her hand like a true New Yorker. And he looks at her and her bare shoulders and she’s forgotten her coat and she’s shaking and he grabs her arm and suddenly she’s turning in his grip and he’s kissing her. She is warm and wet against the cold and his shoes mush the snow beneath the soles as his arm slips around the small of her back and pulls her close.

She pulls back suddenly, looking at him, her eyes plagued by uncertainty and doubt and he kisses her again and he is sure, more sure than he ever was before, and when the cab rolls up she gives the driver her address. She nestles against him as the car begins to move and he can’t keep the smile off his face.

The hotel isn’t the one they stayed in all those years ago, when she was trying to impress him with her worldliness and her taste and her culture (and trying to be everything a Scranton receptionist was not). It’s less ornate, less concerned with the finery and dazzle of the other one, and he thinks it is almost like her. He prefers it like this, he thinks. The elevator is small and they’re pushed shoulder to shoulder, she smiles shyly at him and then she pulls him out the door and down a hallway and he kisses her neck while she fumbles with the card key.

His hands feel big and bold as they slide across her back and hers are small and quick, tiny fighter jets across the buttons of his shirt and his neck and his face. She is kissing him back, tearing at his shirt until she can see his chest, covered in hair that has yet to be touched by the graying she can spot even in a darkened bar. The years and others between them fog their recollections of hurried nights in rented houses. They have forgotten things over time, like how she almost hops to kiss him when he’s about to lean down (their teeth clack together and he laughs a little when she smiles bashfully) and how he pushes her against the wall with surprising strength like he’s Peter Pan hunting his shadow (she yelps but he kisses her quiet and she lets him, loves the feel of his tongue against her lips, her teeth, her own tongue). He never was the deftest boy with a dress zipper and he murmurs something about it being stuck and she moans at him to just fucking break it already and he does. It slides down her body and pools on the floor all inky black and she remembers that she’s not in her twenties anymore that it’s different now and her hands rush to her stomach and suddenly there are miles between them, the cold of the night seeping between them like blood.

He doesn’t say anything but it’s like he knows and he kisses her again, slowly and softly. Gently, he takes her hands and lifts them away. The scar is still there, faded from its earliest ugly glare but still so visible against her skin, dark and snarling and she wonders if he’ll be thinking of Pam when he’s inside her.

But he draws her hands up, over his chest and around his neck and he’s got one hand running down her belly until it covers the scar and he swears he feels her heartbeat through it, pounding against him. His fingers trace the line and he looks at her like she wished he would all those years ago.

“You’re beautiful,” he says, and though they’ve been talking the whole night it feels like the first thing he has really said. (deep inside him there is a spark amongst the ashes)

It’s sex, both less and more than it was before, she lets him lay her on her back and fill her and he wonders if she can feel that he isn’t searching for anything anymore.

(she can)

It’s too tender for fucking and too new for making love, and she shudders her way to climax and for once, maybe for the first time, he’s looking deep into her eyes when he comes.

And just like he used to, he collapses next to her, pulling her to him and she feels so tiny in his arms and she feels his kisses brush against her face, her shoulders.

They fall asleep like that, together despite everything, despite the cold lingering just outside.

The sun wakes her up and she doesn’t know what time it is, but he’s still asleep, his glasses somewhere on the floor and clothes everywhere. She lets him rest and it doesn’t escape her how much more peaceful he looks now. When she saw him sleep before, he was fraught with tension and regret and secrets, but now he is free. She hopes she helped free him, as selfish as it sounds, even though he was still chained to himself the last time she was next to him.

(she did)

When he wakes up, she mentions that she left her coat at the bar. She knows it is probably gone by now, either appropriated by another patron or thrown out, but it’s not terribly expensive and she’ll live, probably. He did too, he says.

“We can go together, if you want,” and she is talking about much more than a trip back to the Lower East Side and he knows it.

He tells her he’d like that.

And they get dressed and take the too-small elevator down and they can’t help but share a smile as they walk out the door.

They don’t know what this means or where this is going, and it’s imperfect and hesitant but maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s enough to think you might love someone and be loved in return, even if you’ve been wrong before.

Their hands brush together.

It’s warm outside today.