It takes her a while to get up the strength to pull out of bed. Pam lies there on her back, sighing slowly, relieving herself of morning grogginess, as her mind begins to lurch forward and roll over her life so far.
It’s been two nights since Phyllis’ wedding. Pam glances across her room to find her dress still hanging on the closet doorknob, looking all pretty and inconsequential. Not at all like the one has she kept tucked far, far behind everything else in her closet and out of her mind. She exhales again and lolls her head toward the window, where new light is filtering in from the outside.
Another plus of the single life? She can leave the blinds open and let the dawn wake her up on the weekends. Roy used to hate that; he’d roll over and moan, shoving her in the shoulder, reprimanding her in a slurred, sleepy voice that she’d left the curtains open again and, “Babe, how many times…”. And she’d climb out of bed, pad over to the window, and grudgingly she’d shut out the morning light. She doesn’t have to do that now. She can wait and stare as the line of sunlight inches closer and closer toward her bedspread.
Sometimes, she thinks that Jim wouldn’t mind. Sometimes, she imagines he’d smile as soon as the sunlight touched his face.
Pam’s up and out of bed, showered, and at her kitchenette by the close of the ninth hour. Hair curling up in what she hopes will be smoother ringlets (that is, if that fifteen-dollar serum does what it’s supposed to!), she’s still warm and damp as she listens intently to the voice chattering from her cell.
“.... is all I’m saying, Pam,” Isabel sighs. “You just don’t wanna go there. You left him for a reason, right?”
“Yeah, no, I know,” she murmurs and sniffs, riveted by the milky swirl in her coffee, thinking just of those reasons and how only one of them ever meant enough. “That’s what I told him, too. But you know Roy. He just kind of pouted and looked all defeated. I have to say, a part of me did feel really bad for him.”
“Points for effort, I guess,” her friend muses, and Pam quirks a smile, her memory tickled pleasantly.
“Hey, that’s what Jim said.”
“Ohh? We’re having conversations of the Jim variety?” There’s a teasing lilt to Isabel’s voice, and Pam can only roll her eyes. “Do tell.”
She laughs at the restrained urgency there, and she shifts a little as she tries to recreate an unbiased account of two evenings prior. “It’s nothing, really. I just, you know … I guess he saw me start to leave, because he followed me out—“
“Oh, so there was following involved?”
“Knock it off,” Pam blushes and laughs despite herself. “Anyway, so…” She hesitates, thinks back, and her hand comes over her reddening cheek. It’s as though she’s fourteen again, it’s the week before Sadie Hawkins, and this moment is painfully rife with nostalgia of the vicious kind. “God, you’re gonna hate me.”
There’s a pause on the other end, and Pam bites her lip. “…what did you do, Pamela?”
She grimaces and bows her face further into her palm, her head shaking all the while, as though it would alleviate her embarrassment. It doesn’t. “I … I told him.”
“You what?”
“Oh, stop! I mean, I told him, like … that I missed him—y’know, being friends with him—and that … that I was sorry,” her voice starts out on a giggle, but winds down into a demure place. Pam imagines his face again, shock and confusion, and she feels that sweep of guilt rush over her again. “It was actually really good to get it out.”
“I cannot believe you,” Isabel sounds scandalized, and Pam is grateful, because her spirit was beginning to swoop down again upon the recollection. “That was not the plan.”
“I don’t care,” Pam says it, and she means it, she even gives a defiant little tilt of her chin to go along with it. “It needed to be said, and I said it. It’s just, I’m so tired of having to do the run-around with him. It’s been this way since he came back.” She dips her coffee spoon in and stirs again, suddenly having lost her appetite and thirst as silence stretches on the other end.
“And … really, if I were to have any expectations of what is to come from it, above all else…” she breathes in and lets it go, her hand pushing the lukewarm mug away from her. “I just want my friendship with him back. I really miss him, Isabel.”
It’s quiet for a few short seconds more, before Pam listens to Isabel inhale and hears the rustle of her nodding. “Yeah, I know. Just … don’t worry so much about it, okay? I hate that you kill yourself over this stuff.”
“Well, what else am I supposed to do? I mean, it’s kind of difficult when—“ Her ears vibrates with her cell phone’s abrupt buzzing, and Pam jolts in surprise. Withdrawing it from her face, she scans the face of the instrument, her eyes saucering in surprise. Quickly, she moves it back to place beside her ear. “Hey! Uhm, Iz? Jim is calling,” she ignores Isabel’s gasp on the other end, plowing forward, “You mind if I call you—“
“Dude, go!” Isabel hurries, and Pam barely has time to bid her friend farewell before the line clicks and she’s flashing over to the other call.
When it connects, there’s no one there.
The face of her phone reads: Missed Call. Jim. 9:52 AM.
She knows it’s stupid of her to do so, but her eyes burn terribly regardless.
--
His phone stays on the counter and away from his hands for the rest of the afternoon, except for when Karen comes by that night for dinner and a movie. He deletes his call log before she arrives, just in case. Not that Jim doesn’t trust Karen – she doesn’t seem like the kind of girl to rifle through his cell – but there’s an agonizing voice in his ear that compels him to do it anyway.
It’s the same one that nagged him this morning, until he hit send on her number. Then sanity roped him back in and his thumb dove for the red end tab.
Even still, even despite Karen’s big eyes and silky smiles and good lasagna and a Hitchcock DVD he hasn’t ever seen, he can’t stop his mind from processing and reprocessing her words.
And he remembers looking into the camera, his mouth and stomach fluttering at the very notion, “If I thought that Pam was interested, I…”
Jim just tries not to think about it at all. He enjoys the movie with Karen, actually lets everything go for about five minutes throughout. As she gets up and rounds the couch, her fingernails graze the back of his head, and her soft footsteps carry her into the kitchen behind him. It’s a soothing moment, and he’ll be sad when it passes.
“Hey, you want a beer?” He hears her call from the fridge.
“Of course,” he replies, as though it were the most obvious thing. Jim’s satisfied with her giggle.
He listens to the cap fzz open and Karen saunters around the arm on his side, and he sees her settle there. A silent alarm goes off in his head, there’s something that tips him off, he’s not sure what. It's how she sits, or the angle of her hand, but Jim looks all the way up to her face, and he finds what he expected - Karen staring down at him with this hard sort of look. He swallows.
“What did you and Pam really talk about the other night?”
Her question is spoken with a quiet resolution. Karen’s not afraid, he doesn’t think, but she’s definitely not stupid either. As she passes him the beer, Jim takes a quick swig and makes an uncertain, if not confused, face up at her. “Not much.”
Karen snorts and he winces. (Can’t get anything by her, can he?) “Not really the best answer, Jim.”
She shifts away from him and as he sighs, she deposits herself on the couch beside him, still wearing that determined expression. He bows his head and picks at the label of his brew, mulling over the variations he could give her that would either postpone or prolong this inevitable conversation.
In the end, he decides that the truth would probably do him best. To her credit, Karen is open to his explanation of the exchange, sparing him of her typical interruptions as she listens with probably more intent than he can really ever recall since their time together. When he concludes, he looks up, hoping he won’t find her fierce and bitter.
Instead, there’s a bemused look there in her pretty face, as though she finally understood the punch line of a joke. But he can see her eyes soften around the edges, and he thinks he knows what’s coming before she’s even said it. “Do … you miss her, too?”
The only way he knows to diffuse this is to lean into her mouth and kiss away her doubt. She moans relief and Jim tries to detach himself from Cary Grant, Brazillian Nazis, and Pam Beesly. Karen is happy to oblige him.
While Karen is pressed soundly against him late into the evening, he does his best not to fully construct all the different scenarios that spring unwanted in his mind. Ways where they could have reconciled completely and not so halfheartedly, ways he imagined in the dark of his room only years ago (really not that long ago), and ways that would’ve ended the evening in tears, for both of them.
A part of him wishes that she would’ve just let her phone go to voicemail, but he doesn’t know what he would’ve said.
--
Pam’s smile is devastating when he wanders into the office a couple minutes late on Monday. It’s the same welcoming grin she’s always given him; the one that he likes to think she shows only to him. He doesn’t think Pam has ever shown that kind of enthusiasm for anyone else in the office.
Maybe that’s just his ego. Maybe he needs to slow his role.
“I mean, it’s not like she declared her love for me, or anything,” he nonchalantly brushes it off to the camera during his interview that morning. “We just agreed that we’re good friends and, uh … that we shouldn’t let ‘certain events’ get in the way of that.”
He pats his knee, cants his head, and twists his mouth to the side for the camera. “And there you go.”
--
“Yeah, we talked for a minute,” Pam interviews with her head bobbing vigorously and her eyes darting everywhere but the lens as it focuses in on her. “I mean, it was nice. We’re good friends, you know, and we always have been, so, uhm…” She trails off, her train of thought taking a shortcut and rerouting itself when she makes eye contact with the unconvinced camera crew. She blushes and shrugs as innocently as possible.
“Really, though, I don’t want to elaborate on it? Not ‘cause, uhm—“ Pam shakes her head, starting over as she tilts her head toward her right shoulder, “I just think, we’re good friends, and I don’t want to make this seem like it’s something it’s not.”
Her fingers wrinkle up the edge of her skirt as she locks her ankles together. “That’s … that’s kind of it.”
--
Roy comes up at noon and asks how she is, what’s she doing later. Pam sighs and forces out a smile, one she hopes says no. It seems to do the trick, since he’s backing out of the office in under a minute. She thinks she sees Jim’s head move out of the corner of her eye, but then again, she could just be fooling herself.
Personally, though? She's pretty sure that she's getting really good at understanding him from this angle.
--
“She, uh, didn’t really say much about Roy,” Jim shrugs and makes his ‘dunno’ face, pulling is mouth down cluelessly as his eyebrows soar high into his bangs. “I guess he tried to woo her or something with a song at Phyllis’ wedding?”
He shrugs a shoulder, really bites hard into his cheek to keep from grinning even just the tiniest bit. “Yeah, I, uh, I don’t know. That’s between them, I guess.”
He’d never admit it, not even to himself, but when Pam doesn’t return Roy’s goodbye as he leaves the office, Jim gets a similar rush like that of winning a blue ribbon at Field Day in elementary school.
Yeah. Old habits.
--
Pam decides to go on break before Jim and Karen do. It would just be awkward, and that’s not exactly a scenario she’d like to entertain right now. Sure, she hasn’t said more than four words to Jim (literally, “hey, how’s it going?”) since the other night and maybe she is getting a little worried, but adding Karen to the equation probably wouldn’t make things better.
Especially since she’s sure Karen’s been eyeballing her from across the room all morning, and not in a curious ‘where’d she get that blouse?’ or 'what did she do to her hair?' kind of way.
So, Pam just makes her tea and she gets her yogurt and she sits in the break room with Oscar and Toby.
They have a nice, thorough discussion about Marjane Satrapi and her graphic novel Persepolis. She really had no idea how insightful they could be, or that they have so much in common when it comes to literature. It’s one of the most fulfilling conversations she can ever remember having in the office.
Well, one that wasn’t involving Jim, of course.
--
They’re laughing together when they step into the break room, Karen pushing good-naturedly at Jim’s back as he drags his heels in front of her. “God, stop acting like you’re five, Halpert,” she reprimands weakly, brandishing her forefinger at him around her Soup at Hand.
“So harsh,” Jim mumbles in artificial shock, all around a smile and a jangle of his handful of quarters. He returns her playful scowl with a wink as he ducks between the tables, headed for the farthest vending machine. He slides each piece of change in hastily, every one clunking loudly as they are deposited.
For half a moment, he is sorely tempted give in and pick out the Grape.
“Whose is this?”
Karen’s query lifts his head, and Jim is caught immediately off-guard.
She turns the teapot around in her hands, admiring its shiny turquoise paint, the daintiness of the handle, and she is unaware of Jim’s awe. “It’s cute,” she muses, setting it down and opening the lid. Her face pulls downward in a frown at its contents. “Oh, there’s water. Someone’s using it.”
An unconcerned noise filters from her throat as she leaves the teapot abandoned on the counter and pops her soup cup into the microwave. There are a couple of obnoxious beeps before the appliance begins to hum, and Karen says something to him as she backs out of the break room. But all Jim can make out is the white noise that surrounds that unassuming little kettle.
Before Karen comes back, he decides, and he lets the pad of his index finger press the purple button at the top.
