You set your purse down behind your desk and head over to the kitchen before you change your mind. This is just damage control, you tell yourself. There’s no reason to be nervous.

Jim is bent over, digging in the back of the fridge. You almost duck into the bathroom when Jim stands up, but you make eye contact before that can happen.

“Hi.”

Jim smiles thoughtfully, as if he’s reacting to everything that’s ever happened between you two rather than your simple greeting.

“Hey. How you feeling?”

How are you not feeling? You shrug a shoulder. “Okay, I guess.”

You want to pretend that it’s just a normal Friday, but there are several reasons you can’t do that. The least of which is your lingering hangover. Jim is still looking at you expectantly, knowing you have more to say. You take a deep breath.

“Um, listen,” you continue. “I wanted to--”

The kitchen door opens and Angela walks in. She gives each of you a look and puts a small paper bag in the fridge before going into the ladies’ room.

Jim glances to the door and then back at you. “Not here.”

“Stairwell?”

You thank God that Kelly isn’t here yet, and you follow Jim into the annex and down the first flight of stairs.  You lean against the wall and immediately recoil from the cold surface.

“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry if I made things weird for you,” you say to Jim. “I mean, you know how our office gets.” You attempt a chuckle, but Jim doesn’t look at you. “Can we just forget it all happened?”

You’ve always had this organic connection with Jim, a connection that never needed to adapt or evolve or do much of anything to stay strong and unobstructed. For the first time in all the months you’ve known him, you have absolutely no idea what he’s thinking. 

He brushes a section of hair off your shoulder and lets his hand linger for a moment. Your heart goes to drop, but instead it changes its mind and swoops back up again, as if you heard an animal rustling and it turned out to be a sweet little rabbit instead of a rabid raccoon.

“What are you doing?”

He sighs gently, still averting your eyes. “I’m trying to feel the same way I felt last night after you kissed me.”

You stare at him, in denial that he meant any of what he just said. But he doesn’t correct himself. You’re suddenly in an entire new dimension of a situation you thought you had thoroughly explored, and you’re beyond unprepared.

You feel your face crumple, and overwhelmed tears start leaking out of your eyes. This whole conversation is having the exact opposite effect of what you wanted. There’s no way you’ll be able to just move on from what happened last night. Not if Jim is trying to replicate the effects of what was supposed to be an accident.

Jim looks up, and your stunned silence finally inspires him to break his.

“Oh, Pam, I’m so sorry. Please don’t cry.”

You shake your head, trying to catch your breath so your voice doesn’t crack. “No. It’s not your fault.”

“It’s not your fault, either.”

Well, you’re not convinced of that. But you just nod once and fixate on the end of the railing like it’s the most fascinating thing in the world.

“What do you want?” Jim asks softly.

You shake your head. “I don’t know.”

You’re not convinced of that, either. But you can’t admit what you want. Not even if you thought you deserved it.

Jim opens his mouth as if he’s going to say something, but instead he shakes his head, turns around, and walks up the stairs. You wait a moment, knowing it’s time for the workday to start. You brush away the dampness on your cheeks, then follow Jim’s footsteps back into the office.

Less than ten minutes ago, you were worried that the Dunder Mifflin grapevine would turn your intoxicated lip slip into the story of the workplace affair of the year. And now you learn that Jim might have legitimate feelings for you. It strikes you that your coworkers who witnessed the kiss don’t even know half of what’s going on.

But then again, no one does. Roy doesn’t know, although that’s not really surprising. He doesn’t know how tired you are of going to the same hangout spots, watching the same football games, drinking the same beer. He doesn’t know that some of the comments he makes about his friends, especially his female friends, make you feel insecure. You wouldn’t expect him to know that you wonder what life would be like if you had more input in your romantic relationship.

Jim doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that you go home every day thinking about some offhand comment he made about a drawing you did or about how he liked the color of your blouse. He doesn’t know that Roy is starting to get a little suspicious of how well the two of you get along.

Hell, you don’t even know everything that’s going on. You’ve spent the entire morning playing peekaboo with the top of your desk and Jim’s side profile, dissecting the last sentence he said to you like it’s a grammar exercise and you’re one point away from failing.

It’s so frustrating that you could cry again. You want to undo what you did, unlearn what you know, and have everything go back to how it was before.

You want him to find his way over to you like he always does at this point in the day. You would pretend to be absorbed in a game of solitaire so it didn’t look like you were waiting for him to come say hi. He would make a joke about Michael or tell a story about a client, and then you would ask him what you should draw, even though he always suggests Dwight.

“I’ve told you before. I’m not good at drawing faces.”

“Not yet,” he would say. “You’ll get there.”

You want Michael to call a meeting just so you have the excuse to sit next to Jim. Michael might do an offensive impersonation or tell a story about how he thought he met Elvis, but you could tune it out and focus on the closing distance between your left shoulder and Jim’s right shoulder, the physical closeness reflecting a comforting sense of solidarity.

If the meeting were long enough, Jim would probably lean over and ask for advice on a prank. “Should I tell Dwight that his fly is down?”

“Is it?”

“Does it matter?”

You smile, then and there at your desk. Then you feel a bit unsettled when you realize that your automatic daydreams are about Jim, that you have to think about him if you can’t spend your entire evening and workday together. If you could bring yourself to think about it more, you would realize that you don’t think about Roy like this, even though the amount of time you spend together has only decreased since you got engaged.

Jim and Roy are just different people, you tell yourself. It’s always easy to get along with Jim, but Roy has a lot of good qualities too, even if they have to be coaxed out of him sometimes. Jim also hasn’t been part of your life for all that long. You didn’t know him in high school or college, and you don’t live with him. You just don’t know him as well as you know Roy.

Okay, that last one is a lie, but the point still stands. The light, happy feeling that you get when you think about your friendship with Jim isn’t grounds for abandoning your future marriage.

You almost laugh when you think about your relationship with Roy from the perspective of being married soon, even though that’s what being engaged means. At least, that’s what it should mean. Over the years, Roy seems to have developed his own definition of “engaged,” synonymous with “dating,” “forgetting to save money for a wedding,” and “doing nothing to advance the relationship.”

The odd thing is that even though your engagement seems to have no end in sight, you have this pinprick of a desire for everything in your life to stop so you can figure out this mess. You and Roy haven’t even set a date, and suddenly the wedding seems far too soon.

What if I just called it off?

The thought startles you even though you knew it was coming. It’s certainly not the first time you’ve had that idea. He’s made comments about other girls even if you were there, dismissed your contributions to the relationship, and discouraged you from anything remotely ambitious. You’ve been talking yourself into a sort of cautious optimism for the past year, ignoring any suggestion that you needed to take a more serious look at your relationship.

Following that pattern, you ignore the relief that accompanies the idea of ending your engagement and decide to see what happens when you talk to Roy about all this. You figure he should be there when you make the big decision.

You go to the break room to get a Coke and a Diet Coke before you face your fate in the warehouse. You know that a can of soda is a measly peace offering for what you’re about to do, but you’ll feel better if you have a sense of purpose other than possibly ending your ten-year relationship.

The break room is empty except for Jim, sitting alone with his usual ham sandwich, and Kevin, sitting alone with a huge container of leftover spaghetti. You hope it’s leftover, at least. Kevin has been known to cook real meals in the office kitchen.

Jim watches you pull two cans of soda out of the vending machine. Your eyes meet before you turn around and walk away with both of them. His face, seconds before a crash of disappointment, lingers in your mind even as you try to dismiss it for now. One thing at a time, you think.

You find Roy loading up the last of a shipment, and Darryl lets the two of you sit in his office during the warehouse lunch break.

Roy opens the can of soda you gave him and takes a sip, nodding to the Diet Coke in your hand. “Where’s your lunch?”

“Oh, um…” You turn the can over in your hand and scan the nutrition label for an idea of what to say next. Finding it unhelpful, you begin, “I actually wanted to talk to you.”

He looks up from his sandwich and eyes you suspiciously. “You sound serious. Are you breaking up with me or something?” he asks with a chuckle.

He said it first, you think, biting your lip to stifle a nervous, ironic smile. You try not to think about the fact that this moment might bring a huge chapter in your life to a close.

“Do you still want to get married?”

Roy blinks in surprise, then looks over at the other warehouse workers and their lively lunch break. “Are we seriously having this conversation here?”

You shrug a shoulder, as if you hadn’t spent the last three hours thinking about how you were going to bring up this topic. “I just… I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I guess I just want to know how you’re feeling.”

“Well, we’re engaged, aren’t we?”

“That’s not what I asked you,” you mumble under your breath.

“What?”

“I didn’t ask, ‘are we going to get married?’ I asked, ‘do you want to get married?’”

You expect Roy to hesitate, but he doesn’t. Not for a second. “Yeah, of course I do!” He stands up and tosses his sandwich onto Darryl’s desk. “Are you… having second thoughts?”

No, of course not is on the tip of your tongue, but you push that sentence away, knowing it’s dishonest. You almost feel like you had to breathe in twice in a row as you held back, and suddenly everything you’ve been thinking all morning comes out in a single exhale.

“After what happened last night, I just started thinking about things. I know last night was bad, but it’s not out of the ordinary for us, is it? I mean, we fight all the time, and when we aren’t fighting, we aren’t really doing much of anything. We’re in the same place now as we were last year.”

You grapple over what to say next, unable to think of anything that advances the conversation slowly enough to allow you to retreat if necessary.

“I didn’t know you felt this way,” Roy says, in a softer tone than usual. “Let’s, you know, start planning a wedding, then.”

Yesterday you would have been over the moon to hear Roy say that. You’d been waiting literally years for him to show some sort of initiative, some sort of desire to get married and invest in your relationship. But all that time has given you space to see where Roy’s priorities lie. How he wants to spend his time, what he’s really aiming for, what thinks about when he wakes up in the morning.

It’s all been proof that maybe, just maybe, you made a mistake saying yes.

Marriage has been so important to you for as long as you can remember, but that might be because you can’t really remember what your life was like without this long-term relationship. It’s been your center, your identity, your goal and motivation all at once.

And, truth be told, you’ve always been a bit scared of navigating life alone. But now it hits you that you’ve been doing almost exactly that for months, and you never noticed because you were too distracted by the little diamonds on your finger.

Roy’s been watching you think this whole time, and he finally speaks again. “Are we… good? We’re still getting married?”

You can’t keep holding all this in. You shake your head slowly and bite the inside of your cheek to keep from crying. “No. I’m sorry.”

You pull the ring off your finger and set it on Darryl’s desk, freeing yourself of the sterling symbol of promises and unity that evolved into a symbol of complacency and limitations.

Roy looks at the newly unoccupied ring and turns his gaze to you. “You’re serious? You don’t want to get married? Tell me who out of the two of us has always been talking about planning our wedding and setting a date.”

“Tell me who has to be reminded every so often that we’re not dating if we’re engaged and has to be coaxed into interrupting his schedule for one evening so we can do something together?” you fire back with more intensity than you intended.

Roy blinks in surprise. “Okay, well… I won’t do that anymore.”

“It’s not that simple,” you say to the floor, suddenly feeling timid again.

“So what do you want me to do?” His voice catches at the end of his question, and it makes you look back up at him. “I don’t want to break up.”

“I just think it’s better for us,” you say, trying to play off your hesitancy as gentleness. “We’ve grown apart more than I think you realize. We’re living two separate lives. And I just feel like we never listen to each other anymore. So many of our conversations end with us fighting.”

“All couples fight.”

“I know.” You don’t feel like explaining why that isn’t a valid reason for allowing your relationship to continue like it had before. “I think I’ve been wanting this for a while,” you continue. “Last night just made me… reconsider things.”

Once again, you’re leaving out part of the story. But you remind yourself that your kiss and ensuing conversation with Jim were just the push you needed to climb up the ladder, and you made the decision on your own to jump off the high dive.

“I’m not happy anymore.”

Seconds, perhaps a full minute, goes by. Roy takes a step backwards and sinks back into his seat, looking more stunned than upset at this point. You wait a few more moments, wanting nothing more than to run away and not look back. But he looks so dejected that you try to soften the blow. “Thank you for… my first relationship.”

He lets out a humorless puff of air, the outline of a scoff.

“I’ll talk to you later.”

He nods. “Okay.”

And with that, you scrape together the last of your courage, turn on your heel, and walk out of Darryl’s office.

The hard part is over, you tell yourself, even though you’re not so sure that’s true. There’s baggage to deal with: your families, finances, future comments from coworkers. Not to mention figuring out who you are without the identity fallback plan of a nine-year-long relationship.

In a bit of a daze, you head up the stairs and pop into the restroom to calm down before walking back to your desk. You just need a moment to yourself, even though it looks like your future is going to be full of moments to yourself.

After a few deep breaths, you give your reflection a nod of approval and walk back into the bullpen. You sit back down at your desk, assuming your typical position with Jim in your diagonal line of eyesight from your computer. You lean forward to get a better look at him; you’re not sure why. Maybe if you get close enough, you’ll be able to hear what he’s thinking.

It’s probably wiser to keep quiet about the situation, but you need to tell Jim that things are over between you and Roy. You think about sending him an email or an IM, but you really want to tell him in person. You settle for staring at him until he glances in your direction.

It’s not a long wait.

You gesture towards the elevators with a tilt of your head and stand up, motioning for him to follow you. Jim raises an eyebrow, his chest deflating with a silent sigh.

Please? you mouth. You know there’s no way for him to know how different this conversation will be from the one you had in the stairwell or the one you had last night. There’s no reason he should interpret your soft smile as anything but pity, anything but a final shove into the friend zone. But he finally nods and follows you down the hallway.

You grab his hand and pull him to the side as the door closes behind you. A few butterflies gently flap in your stomach as a moment you didn’t have the foresight to anticipate unfolds before you.

Jim looks down, away from your eyes and away from your loosely joined fingers. “Pam, I don’t--”

“I broke up with Roy.”

“Oh.” Color returns to his cheeks, light to his eyes. He smiles tentatively, visibly reining in his true reaction. “How are you feeling?”

You don’t have much of an answer for that even though it’s all you’ve been thinking about today. You still feel a bit conflicted and as unsure as ever about the future, and you still haven’t decided if you’re going to be fully honest with Roy about what prompted you to end things today. But you’re not as afraid of it all anymore.

“The same, I guess. But better.”

Jim chuckles softly. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know.” You laugh at your own comment, knowing that just because it didn’t make any sense didn’t mean Jim didn’t understand. He understands you perfectly, and all you have to do is sit across from him. “I need some time, though, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” he says quickly. “Whatever you need.” He squeezes your hand once before letting it go, in that moment holding you closer than he’s ever let himself before. “Should we go back in?”

“I guess we should.”

You set up your post at reception for the third time today. The phone rings just as you take a seat, and you transfer the call to Kelly.

As you go to hang up, Jim glances in your direction and smiles. Your cheeks flush as you finally let yourself indulge in the feeling of flattery that a look from Jim evokes.

You look down at your bare left hand. Seeing your engagement ring always made you think about the night you and Roy got engaged, never your future wedding. You always tried to imagine it, but there was nothing in place to give you inspiration. It was just easier to think about the past.

Now you have a lot of uncomfortable moments ahead of you. You have to face Roy again, find somewhere to stay tonight and somewhere new to live, tell all your family and friends that you called off your engagement.

But now, as you watch Jim take a phone call, type an email, trick Dwight into kicking a dent into his filing cabinet, and talk Michael out of buying a dog for the office, it’s already easier to think about the future.

THE END