While a weight may have been lifted following her closure with Roy, Pam still wasn't feeling wholly brave enough to face the rest of the office the following day. She's sure Dwight will give her crap on Monday for taking a long weekend ("If you don't present a doctor's note verifying illness, your sick day will be considered invalid!") but she's grateful to herself for managing to collect a spare few sick days on hand if it means she can avoid judgmental glances, curious stares, and snarky whispers from her colleagues.
Pam spends Friday and most of Saturday curled into herself on the couch in mismatched pajamas, her coziest blanket drawn up to her nose, while simultaneously marathoning romantic comedies and wallowing in anxiety. She knows, knows, she's building Monday up in her head. But there's a deep dread welling in the pit of her belly that she hasn't been able to fight off.
Especially when she considers facing Jim again.
The heat in her cheeks is unbearable Saturday evening when she finally caves and flips her phone open, and Pam speed dials the most comforting number she knows.
It rings once, and she sighs in relief.
"Pam, sweetie! What are you calling me so late for?"
Pam smirks, already feeling lighter, and shakes her head. "Mom, c'mon, it's only 7 o'clock."
"Well, you never call me at this time." Her mom pauses, then asks with a waiver of concern, "Pam, is something wrong?"
Pam catches her lip between her teeth. Already, her eyes are stinging and lashes blink wet. There's nothing she wants more than to unfold unto her mother, but there's a part of her still hesitating. "No- I mean, I don't know, mom…"
She can almost hear her mother's lips thin through the phone. "Honey, what is it? You never keep things from me."
It's true. When Pam began to address the second thoughts she was having about marrying Roy, her mother was the first she confided in - the one who encouraged her to follow her intuition. And after Casino Night, when Jim had cornered her in the parking lot…
Her heart swells and crests at the memory of his broken face, and for the millionth time she wishes she could take it all back. Pam tightens her fingers around the phone and ducks her chin closer to the receiver, voice small. "I don't know what to do, Mom…"
"...Is it Jim?"
Her face crumples just the slightest at the sound of his name, and Pam only permits a single tear to slip by unbidden. "Yes," she huffs wetly. "I think I messed everything up…" she rolls her eyes and sniffles. "Again."
"What are you talking about?"
"I kissed him, Mom," Pam confesses and blushes furiously through the myriad of emotions that rush through her. To her mother's credit, she says nothing on that matter. "The other night, and he kissed me back, but…"
Her mom gives her a beat, before breathing a quiet, "...But?"
"Roy saw us," she swallows as she hears her mother's sympathetic 'oh no'. "He was- he confronted me about it. ...And Jim."
"Oh, what did that boy do?"
"Roy hit him," Pam almost whispers, deeply ashamed of being a participant in all of this. "They fired him-"
"Are you okay?" Her mother interjects.
"No, I'm fine, he hit Jim, and then they fired Roy and Jim went home, and Mom, I just don't know what I'm going to do on Monday," Pam rushes out over her mother's concerned register. "I- I don't think I can face him."
It takes a moment, but Pam assumes her mom must be choosing her words carefully. That's what she always appreciated when it came to talks with her mother. Her consideration bolstered Pam's confidence.
"... Listen, sweetie," her mom starts. "It's not going to be easy. But after everything you've told me about Jim, I don't think for one second he's going to hold you responsible for this. He cares about you, and he knows you care about him, right?"
Pam's quiet. Her mom 'hmms' and drags it out of her. "... Yeah, Mom."
"You and he are both adults. What Roy did was stupid and brutish, and just because it was about you doesn't mean you condone it." As she listens, her mother's words knit thickly in her chest, warming her from the inside out. "But you should talk about it."
"How do I do that, Mom?" She doesn't feel courage or bravery at all, anymore. Pam feels infinitely small. "What if he doesn't want to talk to me?"
Her mother sighs heavily. Pam knows that sigh; it's the 'things don't always work out the way you want them to' sigh. She's heard it a few times - when she was teased for wearing glasses in the first grade, when she didn't make the volleyball team in middle school, when Roy left her at the hockey game on their first date … when she decided to leave Roy.
"Pamela … things don't always work out the way you want them to," Pam smiles wryly at her mother's advice and nods silently into the phone. "And that may happen. But is your fear of rejection worth the risk of not talking to him about it?"
Something triggers inside her, and Pam's breath catches in her throat. That's the definition of their relationship, isn't it? Both of them vacillating on risking all or nothing to keep a place in each other's life.
"I just wish it was easier," Pam settles, and she isn't comforted by her mother's sad chuckle on the other side.
"We all do, honey. We all do."
XxX
The rest of the weekend, Pam tries to prepare herself for Monday. She wakes up early Monday (an hour and a half before her alarm, of course), so she spends her extra time reciting affirmations she found on Google to herself in the mirror, tries to tame her hair and overall appearance into something someone who was mad at her might maybe want to stare at during a difficult conversation, and gives up and just clips her hair back in its usual manner.
For a solid five minutes, she stares absently at her clogs and her Keds, imagining various ways the day is going to play out, and all of them make her shudder in apprehension.
Ultimately, there's not much else for her to do at home besides chew her nails down to the quick, so she heads to work early - besides, she's sure that there's some faxes or papers that need sent or filed that no one bothered to do on Friday. It always happened on her vacations, why wouldn't it on a sick day?
When she unlocks the office and flicks on the light, something seems off. Pam glances around for the source of her unease and finds it quickly - Karen's desk has been completely cleared out. There's not so much as a pencil or post-it left behind.
Her stomach rolls over, sick all at once, and for a frantic moment, Pam twists to Jim's desk.
Relief so strong she could sob washes over her, and she has to catch her hip against the Reception desk as her knees go weak at the thought of him just disappearing, again. She takes off her coat and drops her purse at the foot of her desk, rounding the counter when her eyes find a leaf of paper on her keyboard-
A request of transfer, from Karen, to David Wallace, CC Michael Scott and Toby Flenderson.
Reason? "Unsatisfied with Workplace Environment - See HR submission"
Pam flinches and rereads the request several times over. She doesn't realize she has sunk into her chair until the wheels creak beneath her and then door to her left jolts open forcefully.
Dwight bursts in, frazzled and confused, a can of mace brandished at arm's length. He looks around wildly, and Pam jerks far back from his reach as he aims the canister in every direction.
"Dwight- Dwight! What are you doing?"
When he seems content with his brief inspection of the bullpen, Dwight clips the canister into his (Pam tries to disguise her snort as a cough) utility belt. "I should ask the same of you," he responds dryly, giving Pam a skeptical once-over that makes her sneer. "You don't appear to be sick."
"That's what the sick day's for," she reminds him blandly, swiveling in her chair to boot up her desktop. Maybe there's a forwarded email she might've missed...
"Hm. Well, did you bring your doctor's note, then?"
"Ah, shoot," Pam says, not chagrined in the least. "Must've left it at the doctor's."
She can sense his glare, tries not to let her lip curl up in satisfaction when he moves on. "Why are you here so early? Typically, you arrive just five minutes and forty-two seconds before the beginning of your shift. You're at least…" Dwight steals a glance at the clock, then his wrist watch, then the beeper on his hip. "...Thirty six minutes and thirteen seconds earlier than that."
Pam shakes her head and double-clicks into Outlook, and she's dismayed to find no new relevant emails. "That's... really weird, Dwight."
"Michael has asked me to keep track of staff-"
"He really didn't," she sighs and glances over at him wearily. Her eyes light up in sudden realization though, and she holds up the memo from Karen. "Hey, what happened on Friday? Did Karen leave?"
Dwight snatches the paper unceremoniously from Pam's fingertips and scans the contents, before casting it back over the counter top. "Unsurprising. She called in, too. Said something about a 'family emergency' she had to take care of. Clearly a lie."
"What, uhm- did, did anyone else call off?" She attempts to sound only vaguely interested, her heartbeat accelerating beneath the facade. "I sorta feel bad that-"
"You should feel bad," Dwight scolds without much intensity. "But no, it was just you two. Michael, Ryan, Jim, and Creed all left early, however." Her heart pounds harder, as Dwight scowls at something above her head. "Although, I have suspicions that only Michael's had been pre-approved."
Before she can ask any further questions about Friday's comings and goings, the door opens again, and Toby and Oscar enter. Pam throws them both a timid smile, and both greet her plainly, as though it were just another day that ends in 'Y'. Perhaps she really had been overthinking everything, and she mentally kicks herself for possibly wasting a valuable sick day.
She busies herself for the first part of the morning with the faxes she definitely found left for her, all the while aware of each head as they enter the office. Her insides wind tightly as she waits for Jim's appearance, going over all the scenarios she had practiced on the drive to work. When she comes across the transfer request again, she can't stand it anymore; Angela's been eyeing her for a while over the top of the divider, and Pam knows Andy's just biting his tongue until it bleeds.
However, she's not going to go for their bait. Pam knows where the real resource is, here. She hits 'send' on a copy of the request and Karen's last three monthly sales records to Utica, and she makes a beeline for the Annex.
Her mission proves futile when she finds Kelly sobbing into her keyboard. Pam rushes over and kneels next to the shrill girl, trying to find a comforting position that doesn't also feel supremely awkward.
"Kelly, Kelly! Hey," Pam attempts to soothe her, settling for a soft grip on the other woman's forearm. "Hey, what's wrong?"
"H-He s-said we-we would always be toge-" she hiccups wretchedly. "-Ether! Why would he just leave me?"
"Oh, Kelly... Is it Ryan?" Pam asks gently.
"What?" Kelly snaps and pulls her head up, her face screwed up both in heartache and annoyance. "Of course it's Ryan! Duh, Pam!" She snatches a tissue from the side of her desk and dabs at the corners of her eyes. "He accepted some dumb promotion in New York and he just left!"
Pam balks as Kelly dissolves once again into near hysterics.
Over the divider, she can hear Toby feebly call, "Hey… Hey, Kelly? If you … uh, if you need an off day, maybe you should just … go home?"
"I can't go home," Kelly wails and Pam backs up to slink out of the Annex, hopefully undetected. "Not when everything in my apartment still smells like him, Toby!"
A gag dies in the back of Pam's throat as she skirts back through the kitchen, feeling like she needs a healthy dose of hand sanitizer after Kelly's outburst. But that bubble of bile threatens back up as she nearly bumps into Jim behind the refrigerator door. His face cants up, and she can't help the sharp breath she draws at the ugly, mottled purple around his eye and cheek. Jim looks just as surprised as she does, initially, but it morphs into something unreadable in the fraction of a second. His lips flatten, and his jaw sets with a curt nod.
Oh, yeah, he's still mad.
"H-Hi, Jim," Pam stutters, blushing, she's burning up from her scalp to her toes.
"Hey." He turns away and shuts the door. "Good weekend?"
But clearly Jim has no intention of listening to her answer, as he makes for the bullpen.
"Jim, wait." She holds her breath, exhaling only when he pauses just by the door. "I- I wanted to talk about-"
Jim shakes his head, and he doesn't meet her gaze. "Pam, don't-" When he does finally look up, his eyes are pleading with her. "Just... Not here, okay?"
Pam freezes up, her fingers unconsciously, fretfully knotting together. "Okay, okay," she backs down, swallows, and tries again as bravely as her heart will allow. "...Lunch, then?"
If he hesitates much longer, Pam thinks she might sink through the floor in mortification, but Jim grants her an imperceptible nod that makes her lungs fill to near bursting. He doesn't respond further, sparing her just one last cautious look before retreating back to the safety of his desk.
By lunch hour, Pam has completed almost nothing. Not even so much as a single round of Freecell. Instead, she's been trained on the back of Jim's head, as has been the fashion for the last few months, and she knows he's staring hard at the emptiness of Karen's desk.
She doesn't know what to feel about that. What happened between them? Did he tell Karen what happened at Poor Richard's? Did they break up? At the thought of such a thing, her face rushes crimson and her stomach drops, and she thinks she might cry knowing there's someone out there who has been wronged by her, that hates her.
There's the rapping of knuckles on her desk, and Pam sits immediately upright. Jim still won't look right at her, and she does her best to focus on the collar of his shirt rather than his face.
"You, uh, going on lunch soon?" He tries to ask as indifferently as possible, both certain that there are multiple sets of eyes trained on them.
Pam nods mutely, opens her mouth, but he's already turned to grab his coat and bag from the back of his chair. She waits and watches as he clicks out of his tabs on his computer, pushes his chair in, and heads for the exit without so much as a glance her way.
She's about to second guess herself, until her phone buzzes on the desk next to her sketchbook. Pam flips it open and exhales at the text revealed, from Jim:
Meet me in the stairwell
If she doesn't throw up today, it will be a miracle. Pam snaps her phone closed and throws it into her purse, completely forgoes her coat, and tries not to be too obvious in her haste to follow suit.
Sitemap | Terms of Service | Submission Rules | FAQs | Disclaimer | Donate | Contact Us |
© 2006-2023 More Than That | Skin created by Kali
© 2006-2023 More Than That | Skin created by Kali