Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
He has a dream where she’s dancing. She has her eyes closed and her arms in the air and she spins and spins and spins and laughs until she falls dizzily to the ground, and when she opens her eyes, he opens his.
He picks up the phone to call her, but always ends the call before it even has the chance to ring. He has both about a million things to say to her, and nothing at all. He doesn’t let himself wonder if she’s doing the same thing hundreds of miles away, her fingers poised over the “send” button, her courage waning and her heart hurting.
He has a picture of her, creased and kept in the back of his wallet behind the library card he never uses. He tries not to look at it. Tries not to trace the outline of her smile, frozen in time, and pretend that she was smiling at him. He forgot what she looked like for four and a half seconds a few days ago and he didn’t pull out the picture to remind himself.
He considers that progress.
He wishes sometimes that he had never met her. He could still be out there, wondering if soul mates exist, wondering if there truly is one perfect person for everyone. He could be talking to his friends about how he just hasn’t met the right person yet, about how he thinks that love at first sight is kind of for suckers, laughing about how he just can’t commit to anyone. Instead he knows that there is one perfect person for him, he knows where she is, who she is, and he knows what kind of yogurt she likes and how she takes her tea. And he can’t have her. And sometimes he hates her for that.
He hates his apartment. He keeps thinking that it’s temporary, even though he knows that it’s probably not. It’s cold and has white walls and he doesn’t hang anything up on them. He has approximately five pieces of furniture in the whole apartment. His mother comes to visit the second week he’s there and drags him to Target to buy him some curtains and a bedspread.
“There, it looks so much better in here,” his mother lies and he pretends not to notice that her eyes are suspiciously wet. She gives him a hug that seems to last extra long, and she lingers for a few minutes in the doorway her eyes darting across the sparse apartment and her mouth opening and closing like she wants to say something, but she isn’t sure how to.
“I’ll see you soon,” Jim says, ushering her out, he can’t take her concerned looks; he can’t take her sympathy (or is it pity? He’d rather not know); he’d rather her just leave so that he can go back to watching mindless television and drinking the beer that he bought at the grocery store (one perk, he decides, of not living in Pennsylvania). He’d rather go back to pretending that moving here was his choice, and not a last ditch effort to save himself.
Karen is sweet, but he replaces straight hair with curly and starch, button-up shirts with cardigans with a button or two missing.
She smiles at him, and he smiles back, and he wonders if she notices that his smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
When she asks him to dinner, he decides that either she didn’t notice, or she didn’t care. He says no at first, but wonders how long before she gets him to say yes.
She looks the same, and when she throws her arms around him, she feels the same too. It makes him hurt in places that he had thought were starting to heal. Her grin is giddy and her enthusiasm contagious. He can almost forget standing in the parking lot months before, her arms wrapped around herself, her voice quietly saying, “I can’t.”
Almost.
He knows he’s being kind of cruel and more than a little vindictive when he tells her that he’s seeing someone. He knows that knowledge would be as much news to Karen as it would be to Pam, but he remembers all too well those first few months in Stamford, and it’s his turn. He can’t.
He starts to dream of her again. This time she’s frowning. Her eyes are still closed, but her mouth is turned down and she’s not dancing as much as spinning out of control. She falls to the ground, but she doesn’t move, she doesn’t open her eyes. He wakes up in a sweat, Karen curled up next to him, and sometimes he picks up the phone to call and check on her, but it’s really not his place, and so he sits in silence in his living room until his breathing evens out and presses his palms to his eyes and wishes.
Sometimes he thinks maybe he can move on. Sometimes, when he doesn’t dream about her, or when Karen is laughing at one of his terrible jokes and her hand is warm in his, he thinks that maybe he can get over Pam. Maybe he is getting over Pam.
“She’s just a girl,” his roommate Mark had told him.
Maybe she was just a girl. A girl he had a thing for once.
Sometimes he repeats this to himself, and sometimes he convinces himself that it is true.
The bus bounces along the road and unlike on the way out to the beach, his co-workers are silent. He doesn’t dare look for Pam, keeps his eyes out the window watching the darkened Pennsylvania scenery flying by.
Karen doesn’t talk. She has a magazine in her lap, but she’s not reading it. He knows because she has been on the same page for about a half an hour. He wants to say something to her, but he’s smart enough to know that this is the wrong time and the wrong place.
If he knows Pam, and he thought he did, she’s probably embarrassed. He has an image of her at the back of the bus, tears silently slipping down her cheeks, face red, feet hurting.
He finds out later that she didn’t shed a single tear.
He finds out later that when Kevin made a crack about how embarrassed she must feel, she straightened her shoulders and told him she wasn’t sorry at all. That it needed to be said.
He’s so proud of her that he might burst, but he wonders what her new confidence means for him, and he wonders what it means that he’s worried about that.
He’s not proud of the way that he’s treated her since he got back to Scranton. He realized, probably far too late, that he probably should have given her more than a few minutes to decide whether or not to call off her wedding. He doesn’t like to admit it, even to himself, that he was kind of a coward and a jerk.
When he sees the note in his folder, his heart jerks and a smile tugs at the side of his mouth.
She wasn’t just a girl, and he wasn’t ever going to get over her. And as much as he tried, Karen wasn’t what he wanted.
He doesn’t know how he got through the rest of the interview with David Wallace, and he’s only half aware of the words coming out of his mouth when he tries to break up with Karen as gently as he can. He asks her if she needs a ride back to Scranton, and she sort of gapes at him, her mouth slackened and her eyes glistening.
He thinks that this is probably how he looked when Pam told him that she couldn’t and his heart breaks for Karen.
She wears a pink dress to dinner and smiles at him and tugs at her earrings nervously. She tells him how often she picked up the phone to call him and put it back down again, not knowing what to say.
When they leave the restaurant, the spring night is warm and it begins to rain. Infamous Two Drink Pam is a little drunk. When she starts babbling about how nervous she is and how much she wanted this, he knows that she’s more than a little drunk. He searches fruitlessly for an umbrella in his car so he can walk her to her door, but she waves him off and appears unconcerned that the rain is making her hair frizz and droplets of water are dripping off the ends of her curls and onto her sundress.
She giggles a little and he thinks that she’s the most beautiful sight he’s ever seen. His heart expands as she throws her arms out to the side and she spins around laughing giddily. And she spins and spins and laughs and laughs and falls dizzily to the ground, pulling him down with her.
And when she opens her eyes, he opens his.
Story Notes:
I do not promise that this will be the last time I do a retrospective on Jim and Pam's dark period (because I do not think I could keep that promise) but this is it for a while. Something about this part of the annals of Jim and Pam intrigues me.
Author's Chapter Notes:
This was totally inspired by the Mountain Goats song. Even though in the end, the song really didn't fit the song at all...semantics. So you can blame the Mountain Goats for this, and also the holidays and Woodchuck Cider for making me look back at the past with a melancholy view instead of a nostalgic one.
bashert is the author of 37 other stories.
This story is a favorite of 7 members. Members who liked I think I need a new heart also liked 2133 other stories.
