Pam sighs deeply, her pen tip tapping at the printer paper splayed in front of her. She’s oblivious to the world around her, with glazed eyes set somewhere at the farthest inch of Jim’s shoulder. Beneath her fingertips, she’s got a half-finished sketch of the bullpen, with Dwight and Ryan carefully omitted. She just hasn’t gotten around to them is all.

She doesn’t start until Michael’s pounding childishly on her desk, demanding her (and the rest of the office’s) attention. Immediately, she levels a wary look upon him, her mouth hanging open in momentary dismay as she slips a manila folder covertly over her handiwork.

Then Michael’s moving his mouth, but she only sees his red shirt and tie, and that’s when she remembers. Her heart sinks.

As the camera zooms in on her face from the right, she shoots them a beseeching look.

Help me, she mouths desperately.

She’s can easily make out Jim’s shoulders shaking with quiet laughter as he turns back around to face his computer monitor. It makes her feel a little better.

--

“So, I guess David Wallace, the CFO?” Pam looks at the producer for recognition, then the camera once again. “Uhm, anyway, he’s having this … party-soirée thing and, uhm…” She trails off, shaking her head as she does so. Her shoulders lift almost inordinately so that she can fill her lungs to capacity before she lights up and pretends to be merry. “I get to be Michael’s chaperone for the night!”

She pauses, glares at nothing in particular, then gives the camera a weary frown. “I really don’t know why I’m going. Michael said he needed ‘arm candy’ until Jan gets there, and I--” Pam breathes out through her nose, shrugs a shoulder, and seems completely lost as she searches for an appropriate follow-up through the window across the room.

Her eyes drift back to the camera lens, and it’s painfully obvious that Pam is fighting a losing battle with herself. “I guess I’d feel kind of responsible if something really awful were to happen to Michael.”

Pam hesitates and the furrow of her brow increases as she adds, “Or to anyone else, because of Michael.”

--

“Pamanama Canal,” Michael sugars inappropriately, and his peek at the camera and suggestive arch of his eyebrows do not go unnoticed by Pam. “Canal, because you have a—“

“Michael…” Pam exhales a weak warning, her eyes shutting against the inevitable. Already she can feel a throbbing behind her eyes, and it’s not even lunchtime.

His laugh is dying out and he clears his throat, another flat palm slapped against the countertop, and Pam jerks back again from the noise. “Are we ready to go? Evidently not,” he shuts Pam down before she even has a chance to reply, ignorant to her surprised expression, “since you are not even near sexy enough to attend a gala at David Wallace's manor. Is this—“

Michael stops to crane his neck and peer over the top of reception, and Pam scoots her chair closer toward her counter to obscure herself from his vision. With a full grimace, Michael glances toward the camera and back. “You’re not really going like that, are you? Where’s the cleavage, Pam? We have to dress to impress!”

Pam sighs greatly as she tugs her cardigan around her midsection tighter, almost protectively so. “I have my dress and stuff in my car, Michael.”

“Well, then someone needs to go down to the parking lot, get naked,” he breezes, missing everyone’s sharp head-turns and Pam’s vibrant blushing, “and put on their hottest little number.”

Her attention falls quickly across to Jim, horror expressed eloquently through wide hazel eyes, and he obliges her with his signature stare of amusement-meets-surprise.

“Aaand that someone is not going to be me,” for the camera, Michael grins and continues. “Because I am already wearing mine.”

“Uhm, isn’t it … I mean, it’s still pretty early,” Pam does her best to diffuse this situation, and secretly she’s already disliking her ensemble choice for the party – particularly when she thinks of wearing it in front of Michael. How could she not have considered this dilemma before now? “Don’t we still have a few hours?”

“Pam, no,” Michael points at her, waggles his finger. “Everyone knows that the early worm gets the … worm, so—“

“Wait, another worm?” Jim queries abruptly from his desk, already angled to better survey the happenings at reception and offer his witty two-cents. “Like, are they friends, or—“ He looks past Michael, catches Pam’s eye and quirks a smirk at her. It’s all she can do not to redden much further.

“It’s ‘the early bird gets the worm’,” Dwight corrects and rises from his desk. “And Michael, I must tell you, I think you are making a terrible mistake bringing Pam with you. I think you should reconsider and take me in her place.”

“Dwight. I’ve already told you, in the event that my wonderful girlfriend, Jan,” he turns purposely toward the camera lens upon her name, as though to remind them, “cannot make it tonight, I need to have a back-up with me at this party, and that person requires high heels, boobs,” Pam lets her face fall into her hand as Michael gestures not-so-subtly toward her chest, “and … some kind of lip gloss.” He stares again at the camera, noting in aside, “Preferably strawberry flavored.”

Jim widens his eyes at the camera, knits his brow, tilts his head for effect. “That’s … not—“

“I can acquire and match all of those criteria, no problem,” Dwight assures even before Michael has fully completed his sentence. “Michael,” he starts again, this time much more earnestly, “ I can be your right hand, your wingman. You don’t need to bring an ignorant woman with you--”

“Thank you, Dwight,” Pam deadpans from her desk.

Jim turns his chair a bit and squints up at Dwight uncertainly. “Hold on. Did you just say you can acquire boobs, ‘no problem’?” He affects quotations with his fingers, which promptly elicits a surround-sound snort and giggle from Karen and Pam, respectively.

“Of course. It’s easy. You just pour some cow fat and a little bit of grease into a smoothened sack, possibly made of lamb’s skin, then insert it--”

Over a chorus of disgusted groans, Michaels is the loudest, and it effectively halts Dwight’s hand movements toward his chest. “Ew, ew, gross! Dwight, enough of your sick farm talk! Do you see why I’m not taking you?”

He waves furiously toward the salesman, motioning for him to sit again, and Dwight does so with a downcast expression. “Just-- look, you’re not coming! So deal with it, okay? Pam,” he’s moving toward his office now, sparing her a second glance as both of his hands throw up a ‘1’ and a ‘5’, “you got fifteen minutes before we move out!”

“But, Michael, I’m not--!” Pam’s shout barely has time to travel across the bullpen before Michael has slammed the door against her denials.

--

Pam steps out of the downstairs bathroom and rearranges the skirt of her dress, thinking all the while that her cleavage looks far too high up and definitely too full for those to really be hers. Did this dress look like this when she tried it on? Sure, she was aiming to impress – not, y’know, Michael or anyone like that – but … did they really look like this?

She looks up and notices the camera. Pam naturally flushes a sweet pink. “Maybe it’s the fluorescent lights?” That’s her hopeful suggestion, and she’s sticking to it.

“Pam?”

Awkwardly, she twists on her heel, noticing Roy hesitating near the entrance of the warehouse. He looks a little more awestruck than she can ever recall him, perhaps with the exception of senior prom. She’d label his look ‘adorable’ if it were worn by any other man.

“Oh, hi,” she shifts her arms so that they come up over her middle and under her chest, like she has something there to hide, but when his eyes dart down and back again, Pam becomes aware of the effects of her stance. She immediately straightens, her limbs falling to her sides, and she offers an uncomfortable look between the camera lens to her right and her ex-fiancé looming ahead. “This is for that … thing, tonight. With Michael. He, uhm, he invited me along, so-”

Not that she’s keeping count.

“Uhm, thanks.” She feels suddenly red and burnt all over, and Pam self-consciously tucks a defined curl behind her ear. It’s a rewarding feeling, Roy’s renewed appreciation of her and her talents (quotes or no quotes), but Pam just doesn’t know what to do with it.

“Hey, just, uh,” Roy pauses and scratches at the back of his neck, his gaze straying somewhere around Pam’s necklace. She lifts a hand to her throat, and his eyes speedily find their way back to her hazel ones. “Just be careful with that dude, okay? I don’t trust him.”

While his tone is bordering on playful, Pam does take his sentiment to heart. She remembers in that second the very few instances in the past where Roy’s protective streak had come through, albeit never once with Michael, and it manages to warm her from the toes and upward.

A moment forgotten flips up in Technicolor; Jim holding her shoulder and her hand behind her desk, they’re laughing, and Roy’s voice is loud and aggressive from the side—

Pam ducks her head and clears her throat, throwing up the quickest version of a smile that she can. She has to get back upstairs, so that she can look at Jim before he leaves with Karen, so she can not feel guilty right now, so her stomach can stop making these frustrating curly q’s when she thinks of such dynamics like the past.

--

“Why are you pouting?”

“I’m not pouting.”

“Well, you look like you’re pouting.”

Karen glowers across the car, and Jim tries not to let his smile hatch. “Believe me, you’d know if I was pouting, Halpert.”

“Oh, would I?” He counters cleverly, and he is rewarded by a slug to his shoulder. “Hey, hey! There is no call for domestic abuse.” He steals a look askance and notices she still is not budging in her resolute expression. The allotted moment has passed, that time-frame when he can turn Something into Nothing, and he knows she’s likely being serious now. The very idea of it makes his shoulders sag. “C’mon, seriously, Karen. Right now?”

“Then when, Jim? When is good for you?” She huffs and crosses her arms, her hair tossing as she turns to stare hard out the window. “I just don’t get why you didn’t want to come with me.”

“Look,” Jim begins heavily, already feeling worn out and this conversation hasn’t even fully formed. Then again, this is like the seventh rendition of this argument that they’ve covered in the last two days, and it’s getting a little played, in his humble opinion. But he grits his teeth and grips the steering wheel and pretends with the same line he developed while ‘hashing’ things out over the phone last night. “There is a time for me to meet your parents—“

“Which would’ve been last weekend, but,” Karen bites out and Jim has to really hold on to the wheel. “Obviously, I’m guessing you have another time in mind?”

“Can we not?” It escapes him before he’s fully contemplated the consequences of such an abrasive request. He looks over and sees her tense, then release. She seems defeated, and while he should be relieved, it’s not a look her appreciates on her. Instantly, regret fills him.

“Whatever,” comes her terse mumble after a several pregnant seconds.

Jim sighs and flexes his fingers. “We’ll talk about it when we get home tonight, okay? I just don’t wanna do this now,” he half-whispers when he recognizes that she’s trying hard not to pay attention to him. In her reflection off the window, he can see her glassy eyes riveted blankly on the nothing that passes them by.

He glances at his radio clock and notices the time and, with an unconscious tipping at the corners of his mouth, he thinks instead of the ways that Pam has perhaps kept herself occupied for the last handful of hours with Michael.

Jim wonders if they played I Spy or the Alphabet Game.

He hopes she’ll say ‘both.’

--

Thus far, Pam had not yet been proven wrong for a single one of her assumptions in the days’ events. Upon sight of her cocktail dress ( that is, what it did to the rest of her body), Michael giggled and gawked like a sixth-grade boy at his first dance. It didn’t subside until halfway to New York. About the time that Jan called.

“Please, don’t get me started on that,” Pam groans to the camera crew as she taps her toe impatiently outside the Wallace mansion. Prefacing with a cautious glance over her shoulder, her expression turns quite dire as she stage-whispers to the camera, “I’m not exactly sure, and I don’t really have a reason as to why, but I think maybe Jan hates me.”

“What? Is Jan here?” Michael questions, perhaps a little too loudly or abruptly for Pam, as he looks wildly across the lawn for a sign.

“No, no, Michael,” Pam hushes him and rises from the stair she has been perched upon for the last twenty minutes, a sigh of discomfort already passing through her lips. “Just—“

The door opens at the front of the home, revealing to both of them a disheveled, bath robed, and not at all camera-ready Mrs. Wallace. The woman startles at the sight of the boom mic, Pam, and Michael, the latter of who unceremoniously presents her with a Tupperware container of something yellow and mushy.

Pam can only fold her lips tight until they feel like they may bleed, and she bows her head from sight as Mrs. Wallace uneasily invites them into her home.