You know talking to Dwight is always unpredictable at best, but you follow Dwight into the conference room anyway, finding him crouched in the corner of the room.

Upon hearing your footsteps, he jumps to his feet and spins around, handing you the end of a measuring tape. “Here. End of the wall, please.”

“Hello to you, too,” you say, taking the measuring tape and walking to the doorway.

You help Dwight measure both sides of the conference room and the diagonal.

“You know you could just calculate the diagonal,” you suggest.

Dwight shakes his head. “I can’t waste the batteries on my calculators.”

“Then why do you have them?”

“In case I need them in a survival situation.”

“Right, of course. Silly me.”

Dwight clips the measuring tape onto his belt. “Thank you, Pam,” he says with a salutatory nod.

“Wait,” you say, taking a small step in front of the door. “Um, can I ask you your opinion on… something kind of personal?”

He rolls his eyes and sighs heavily. “You don’t look fat.”

You can’t help but crack an amused smile. “Okay, thank you. Not that, though.” You glance into the bullpen and, finding it sufficiently empty, continue. “What do you think of Roy?”

Dwight tips his head to one side as he considers. “Well, he’s of a good height, good build. Do you know if baldness runs in his family?”

“No.”

“Well, I’d still say he’s a suitable mate for you. Depends on how many children you want to have, I suppose.”

You just nod, unsurprised that Dwight chose to focus on the most primitive aspect of the human relationship. “Did you see… what happened last night?”

“I saw everything. You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Like did you see anything that, maybe, people wouldn’t want others to know about?”

His face turns even more serious, and he takes a step towards you. “This is highly classified,” he says in a low voice. “But I have strong suspicions that Michael’s hecklers from last night were planted spies from a rival paper company.”

You decide the best way to respond to that idea is to ignore it. “Yeah. I just meant that… Well, I meant that I fought with Roy. Loudly. In the parking lot. I don’t know if anyone saw that.”

“I see.”

Dwight, for once, doesn’t know what else to say. You’re not sure if that comes from lack of experience or lack of human empathy, but one guess is as good as another.

“You don’t need to be embarrassed,” he finally says. “Men and women always want different things from a relationship. It’s just biology.”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“Like how a lioness hunts and watches the cubs and stays with the same pride her entire life. The lion moves from pride to pride and fights with other lions.”

“Right. Okay. Well, thanks for…” You struggle to come up with a reasonable ending to that sentence. “Thanks.”

Dwight nods again and strides out of the conference room.

Well, that was productive, you think as you turn to walk back to your desk. In your hurry, you don’t look where you’re going, and suddenly you find your face smack in the middle of Jim’s button-down shirt. With Jim inside it.

“Oh, sorry,” you groan, pulling away from him as quickly as you can.

“Better watch out there, Beesly,” he replies with a rosy-cheeked smile. “Didn’t you learn to look both ways before you cross? I thought that was a pretty standard kindergarten lesson.”

“Um, maybe I was absent that day.” You make eye contact with Phyllis, who smiles, then Angela, who frowns. You mumble something about leaving your lunch in the car and duck out of the office before anyone can say anything else.

You try to calm yourself down in the room by the elevators, reminding yourself that no one ever cares about what happens here and no one pays attention to you for more than a few minutes at a time.

For a moment, you marvel at how you were able to kiss Jim in the middle of the restaurant and sit back down like it never happened, but today you bump into him accidentally and you’re too embarrassed to even think about it. There’s sort of a key element missing, though. Maybe you can catch Meredith before she comes in and take a swig of her Big Gulp.

Although now that you’re thinking about it, you’re sort of… always like that around Jim. You talk to him more than anyone else in the office, and there’s only so many conversation starters that can come from a day at Dunder Mifflin. This awkward feeling of mild regret from crossing the line only feels unfamiliar because you’ve never reflected on it before. How had you gone this long without noticing it?

The door to the office creaks open and Jim walks out. “Hey,” he begins gently. “The phone rang.”

“Oh!” You start to run back into the bullpen when Jim speaks again, holding up a hand to stop you.

“I answered it.” He continues in a falsetto, “Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam.”

Your cheeks flush as you smile. “Yeah, you got it.”

An unstructured silence follows. Jim shoves his hands in his pockets, stands on his toes, and clears his throat twice.

“Listen, are you okay? I’m sorry if I said something--”

You dismiss the suggestion with a wave of your hand. “No, you didn’t say anything.”

He doesn’t look convinced.

“I promise. I just… I don’t really think I can talk to you about it.”

Even to you, the words ring a little hollow. Knowing better than to talk to Jim about a personal issue has never stopped you before. You know you’re not being fair to him as you slip past him and go back to your desk.

As you predicted, no one seems to have even noticed you were gone. You open up Spider Solitaire on your computer and wait for the phone to startle you.

It turns out that it’s hard to be startled when you’re preoccupied, and right now you’re more alert than you’ve ever been in this office building. In the aftermath of pretty much any other situation, you could probably just grit your teeth and wait for life to move on. But you can’t move on from the head-on collision between your favorite relationship and your strongest relationship. You can only hold your breath as you watch it unfold.

And something else has been bothering you, too. As unintentionally insightful as Dwight can be, you refuse to believe that men and women always want different things from a relationship, even though you know there’s some truth to that. Just look at you and Roy. The two of you hardly ever seem to want the same thing.

It’s always the little differences that stick out to you first, like how you never agree on who needs the car or how to spend your weekends. Things that distract you from the bigger issues like your never ending engagement, the fights that ensue anytime you ask him to help with the housework, how Roy seems content to live the same week over and over while you’re longing for something new.

You feel absolutely no sense of resolution after three more hours of thinking about this, so you head to the kitchen to grab your lunch and two sodas before walking downstairs to have lunch in the warehouse. You don’t know if Roy wants you there or if you want to be there, but it’s better than facing anyone upstairs.

Roy and most of the other workers are gathered by the open warehouse door. The conversation dies down as you walk over to them, and that’s almost enough to make you run back upstairs.

But you don’t. You find Roy and hand him the soda to indicate a reason for your being down here, because, you know, being his fiancée isn’t enough for that.

“Hey, what’s up, Pam,” Darryl says around a bite of his sandwich. “We missed you last night.”

You and Roy glance at each other, then look away. “Yeah, thanks,” you reply. “You didn’t miss any quality entertainment, though, that’s for sure.”

The other warehouse workers laugh.

“But I did win a Dundie.”

“Really? What’d you win?” Roy asks.

Your cheeks turn warm despite the cold breeze flowing in. “Whitest sneakers.”

“Huh,” Darryl chuckles. “That’s cute.”

Roy’s brow furrows slightly. “Weird Michael didn’t stick with what he’s done before.”

You don’t wait for Roy or anyone else to comment on why it’s surprising that Michael changed his favorite award. “Yeah. What did you guys do last night?”

The guys tell variations of the same stories and jokes about booze and quick decisions, and then you decide that twelve minutes of that is enough.

“I’m gonna head back up, okay?” you say to Roy under your breath.

“Go ahead. Oh, hey, listen.” He follows you a few steps away from the group. “The guys were thinking of going to Mickey Gannon’s tonight to watch the hockey game, and I told them we’d be there too.”

You gape at him. There’s no way he’s serious. But he is.

“Really? Even after what happened last night, you thought it would be a good idea to agree to plans without asking me?”

“Oh, come on. You got to stay at Chili’s last night. We’ll do something together tonight.”

“Right. That’s how it works.”

You get the sense that nothing you could say would advance this conversation any further. Maybe you’ll both be in a better headspace by the end of the day. But for now, you just turn on your heel and walk away.

“So we’re good?” Roy calls to you.

“I don’t know,” you yell back down the stairs.

Okay. There’s probably a way that could have gone worse, but you think you’d be feeling about the same. Maybe even better, since you’d have a clearer sense of what to do now.

“Ugh!” you groan in the auditory confines of the stairwell. You’re too frustrated to cry and too upset with yourself to pass it off as Roy being a jerk. All you can feel is completely and utterly stuck.

It wasn’t like you thought Roy had changed. He couldn’t even vocalize what he had done wrong, let alone have the foresight to do things differently.

No. That wasn’t it. You did think Roy had changed. Because you always think he will. You’re constantly hooked on a drug of cautious optimism, thinking that this moment, this conversation will be the turning point for your relationship. Roy would abandon his dismissive, discouraging comments in favor of real support and genuine compromise.

You forget that at the end of the day, Roy doesn’t change, doesn’t apologize for it, and doesn’t understand why you’re making a big deal. And you’re left riding the waves of alternating hope and disappointment, indicative of your deep investment in a relationship with dwindling returns.

You give yourself a moment to breathe at the top of the stairs before going back to your desk. Finding your inbox empty and nothing adequately distracting, you resort to drawing flowers on Post-It notes as you silently stew.

Part of you feels like you need to give Roy an ultimatum and give him a chance to save your relationship, since he has just as much of a say in this decision as you do. But you know deep down that you’ve given him so many chances over the course of nine years. Every day you were together was a chance for the two of you to grow.

It seems as though you’ve grown without him. And even if Roy changes one day, you can’t stay in this relationship. You just can’t.

Your heart drops in your chest, as though that realization jolted you from a hazy dream. You look around the office, somehow expecting your coworkers to react the same way you did to your silent decision. All around you are the clicks from keyboards and the hum of printers and a single telephone ringing.

As the shock wears off, a strange sense of relief washes over you that solidifies the rightness of ending things with Roy. Then you look out into the bullpen, just a hair to your left, and suddenly you’re questioning it all again.

You kissed Jim less than 24 hours ago, and now you’re thinking of ending your engagement to Roy. It’s not going to be difficult for people to draw the connection, and they won’t be wrong. They won’t have the full story, but they won’t be wrong, either.

Are you really going to throw away a nine-year relationship in exchange for that?

You’re not really sure what you’re supposed to do at this point, other than just wait for the day to be over. That’s often what you do anyway, especially on a Friday, but you’re usually hoping for time to go faster than for it to stop entirely.

At some point, Michael calls a meeting. You sit next to Phyllis and quickly start a conversation with her to avoid suspicion. But Jim just sits on your other side, like he always does. So much for avoiding suspicion. You’re not even sure how to sit in your chair as you try to balance the attitude of not caring or even noticing that he’s next to you with the way you always feel four inches away from your best friend.

Michael begins talking about a possible new client before switching to dinosaurs (apparently he had dino egg oatmeal this morning), and you let your mind wander off. Well, back to where it was before.

It occurs to you that if Jim weren’t in your life, you probably wouldn’t be making this decision. But it’s more because he pushes you in ways that other people don’t. Not your friends, not your family, certainly not Roy. The more you think about it, the easier it is to understand that you need to break up with Roy because it’s the right thing to do. You’re not purposely ending things with Roy to be with Jim.

That’s just an added bonus, you think, contorting your lips into an odd smile to prevent an audible laugh. Okay, one thing at a time.

Michael keeps you all a few minutes late so he can get back to the original purpose of the meeting, and everyone trails out of the conference room at 5:06. You take the moment to look out the window and see if Roy is waiting for you at the truck yet.

He is.

Your stomach does a little flip as nerves and cumulative self-doubt collide in your stomach. You can only wait here so much longer before you’re forced to make a decision one way or the other.

You hear footsteps behind you, and Jim appears at your side.

“What are we looking at?” he asks, assuming your same position at the window.

You smile and shake your head. “Nothing.”

You weren’t planning on telling him. He’s probably more involved than he wants to be.

“I think…” you begin. You could still change your mind. You could still not tell him. “I think I’m going to break up with Roy.”

“Oh.”

You look over to him for the first time since he walked over. His eyebrows are slightly raised, lips slightly parted. His eyes are devoid of any expression other than mild surprise, but you have a feeling he’s doing that on purpose.

A few seconds go by. Jim doesn’t know what else to say, and you know you wouldn’t either if you were in that position.

“I’ve just been thinking about it, and--”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says quickly, patting the air. “It’s okay.”

Telling Jim made you feel more at ease, but you can’t help wanting to stay behind and milk every second you can get with him. You have a long night ahead of you.

“Will you say, ‘Go get ‘em, tiger?’”

He pauses just enough to grin from ear to ear. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

Your cheeks flush, and the two of you laugh without making eye contact. This is your cue to leave. Your cue to go face the world.

“Um, well, have a good weekend,” you say as you turn to head out the door.

Jim nods. “You too,” he says sincerely.

You take the elevator down and watch the number change. This is your time. Your time to stay strong, stay brave, and stay honest with yourself.

Three.

Two.

One.

THE END