Dwight was wearing a tux. Honestly, in the grand scheme of things, this wasn’t all that weird; Pam had certainly seen him in more bizarre attire, like the time he and Michael showed up to the office in matching coal miners’ outfits after a misadventure involving a mine shaft, a ream of canary-yellow copier paper, and several dozen raccoons. 

Jim zeroed in on the tux immediately, of course. The second Dwight peeled off his jacket and hung it on the coatrack, Jim was up and out of his chair and standing in his familiar place beside Pam’s desk. “Excuse me,” he asked Dwight with a self-conscious glance at Pam, “how long is the wait for a table for two?”

Pam bit her lip to keep from smiling. It didn’t work. Serious Jim was too funny, especially when paired with Dwight’s contemptuous expression as he spat out his rejoinder: “I would never, ever serve you. Not in a million, billion years.” He punctuated his words with sharp little jerks of his chin, like a large, oddly proportioned bird pecking at some seeds. 

“It’s a nice tux,” Pam said, trying for a conciliatory tone. A part of her always felt bad when Jim played around with Dwight like this; Dwight was just so painfully sincere, so perfectly gullible. He was almost too easy to rile. 

“I know,” Dwight said with such a cocky expression that Pam’s impulse towards goodwill evaporated almost as quickly as it had come. “It belonged to my grandfather. In fact, he was buried in it, so…family heirloom.”

Pam choked on her own spit and had to duck under the desk, coughing violently into the sleeve of her pink cardigan. When she emerged after about a minute, Jim was still standing there, face entirely devoid of expression. Dwight, meanwhile, was busying himself by rearranging the bobbleheads on his desk, seemingly completely blasé about the fact that he was sporting a dead man’s clothes. 

“Earth to Jim,” Pam said finally. “Did Dwight finally succeed at body-snatching you?”

Jim turned to Pam and leaned forward onto the desk, his hair falling messily over his forehead, his expression shifting from blank to panicked. “That’s the least of my concerns right now, Pam. Do you think he washed that suit after pulling it off his grandfather’s corpse?”

“Oh god, I didn’t even think of that.”

“My guess is no—I doubt they have laundry services at Shrute Farms. Which means that by the end of the day, the formaldehyde fumes will have seeped out of the fabric and poisoned everyone in the office—don’t laugh, Pam! This isn’t a laughing matter.” 

Pam tried to stifle her giggles. “Well, here’s hoping they opted for a natural burial instead.”

“That's even worse—can you imagine the smell?” Jim shook his head violently. Not for the first time, Pam was seized with a bizarre urge to brush his bangs out of his eyes. Instead, she sniffed the air experimentally. All she could smell was paper, printer ink, and the warm, slightly musky scent of Jim’s cologne.

“I don’t smell rotting flesh. Maybe Mose took it to the dry cleaner’s.” 

“Hm. I may just have to camp out in the break room all day,” Jim sighed. “Can’t sell any paper under these conditions.”

“No! You can’t leave me alone up here!” Pam was going for a joking tone, but it ended up sounding much more serious, like that time she’d told Jim she would literally blow her brains out if he left Dunder Mifflin. But Jim didn’t seem to mind—in fact, a wide, dazzling smile suddenly spread across his face, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Pam ducked her head and stared at her desk, her cheeks flushing slightly. She was afraid to meet Jim’s eyes. This had been happening more and more frequently lately—some casual word or phrase from their near-constant banter would suddenly seem very intense, imbued with a significance that Pam could not afford to fully acknowledge, even to herself. 

“I mean—” she started to hedge, but Jim had already withdrawn. 

“Don’t worry, Beesly,” he said lightly, drumming his long fingers on the top of the desk, and she dared to look back up at him. The smile was gone, replaced by a regular Jim expression—carefully neutral, but with a bit of warmth and mischief behind the eyes. “I’m not going anywhere.” 

Then, as if to bely his own words, he turned and strode away from her, heading back over to his desk. 

*

“So what’s the deal? We gotta pay for our own drinks? That’s lame,” Roy whined. He had come upstairs to talk to Pam on his lunch break because they were supposed to be making the final decisions about their wedding buffet. Officially, the options were chicken or fish, but Roy (and by extension Roy’s side of the wedding party) had been pushing for what seemed like glorified hamburgers. Pam was privately resigned to the fact that she would simply have to redo the entire menu behind Roy’s back. He wasn’t likely to notice, anyway. Nor was he inclined to make an appearance at Casino Night, Michael’s latest hairbrained scheme to raise money for “charity”. 

“C’mon,” Pam pleaded, “it’ll be fun! Besides, I’m a roulette expert.” Roy’s body language told her that he was about to make another complaint about the lack of free alcohol, but before he could, Dwight’s strident voice rang out across the office: 

“Impossible. Roulette is not a game of skill. It is a game of chance.”

“I can always count on winning roulette,” said Jim casually without looking up from his computer screen. 

“Oh, really?” Dwight asked, voice dripping with sarcasm. “How would you do that?” As if to indicate his doubt, he snapped his briefcase closed and stowed it beneath his desk. Jim abandoned his computer and stared Dwight dead in the eyes. After a moment, he shrugged. “Mind control.”

Dwight chuckled derisively. “You can’t be serious.”

Jim continued to stare at Dwight, whose expression of scorn turned to disbelief. “Are you serious?”

“Ever since I was a little kid,” Jim explained hesitantly, “like eight or nine, I could sort of…control things with my mind?”

“I don’t believe you,” Dwight said breathlessly. “Continue.”

Jim sighed. “It was just little things, you know? Like I could make something shake, or I could make a marble fall off the counter. You know, just little things.” He turned back to his computer with an air of finality, waiting for Dwight to take the bait. 

Pam could barely contain her smile. Practically the entire office had turned in their seats to watch the exchange. Stanley had actually stood up from his desk and walked around to Phyllis’s side in order to better see Jim.  Even Roy, who normally rolled his eyes at her and Jim’s escapades, seemed riveted by this particular experiment. Dwight glanced wildly around as if looking for the optimal way to catch Jim in a lie. 

“You know what? Why don’t you move… that coat rack! Excuse me, please,” Dwight announced, swiveling around wildly in his chair. “Everyone in the office! Jim is about to prove his telekinetic powers and he needs absolute silence—”

“That’s actually not—” Jim started to say, then thought better of it. “You know what, you’re right. I do need absolute silence. Thank you, Dwight.”

Dwight nodded imperiously. “Go ahead.”

“Okay,” said Jim, with the world-weary air of an undercover operative accepting an impossible assignment from the president of his secret organization. “I’ll try.”

Pam’s hands were busy under the desk—first reaching out for, and grabbing the handle of, the dark blue umbrella she kept on a small hook for rainy days; then keeping her upper body completely immobile and face expressionless as she spun the umbrella in her left hand and gently wrapped the hooked wooden handle around the base of the coat rack. She watched as Jim, who was undoubtedly not expecting to succeed in his mission, spun to face the rack and let out a theatrical breath. Like a Jedi Master using the Force, he held up his right hand and squinted hard. So hard, his entire face contorting—and then, wonder of wonders, Pam’s pink trench coat and Dwight’s weird gray woolen affair began to rock restlessly back and forth like a ship encountering rough seas. Pam stared at the coat rack for a few seconds and then whipped her head around to face Jim, schooling her features into an expression of shocked surprise as she continued to manipulate the umbrella with her left hand. She noted with satisfaction that Dwight looked as though he’d been hit over the head with a baseball bat. She nodded at Jim to get his attention, then winked. She was rewarded with a warm half-smile.

“Oh my god,” said Dwight softly. 

Later, in the break room, she overheard Dwight telling the camera crew that he didn’t believe Jim had moved the coat rack. But the way he said it made it sound an awful lot like he did believe it, which was pretty hilarious. Pam found herself continually amazed by how adept the people around her were at lying to themselves. 

*

By two o’clock, Pam was completely out of office-related work and free to focus on her real job: planning her wedding. Roy had gone back down to the warehouse after Jim’s telekinesis demonstration without offering anything in the way of a concrete opinion on either food or music, so Pam had decided to simply take matters into her own hands. They were going to have chicken and fish, with a nice variety of summer vegetables, and she was going to perform a careful analysis of all the wedding bands until she figured out which one sucked the least. To help her in this endeavor, Pam decided to first make a list of all the bands:

• You May Kiss the Bride (a KISS cover band)

• Wedding Party (primarily klezmer and Appalachian folk, with some show tunes thrown in for good measure)

• Till Death Do Us Rock (The Clash; The Cure; Death Cab for Cutie)

• Sledgehammer (they had promised her “bridal death metal,” whatever that meant)

• Time for the Wedding (string quartet)

• Scrantonicity (???)

For some reason, wedding planning had turned out to be extremely stressful. Pam thought it might have been more fun if Roy had wanted to be involved, but his primary interest seemed to be the bachelor party, with a bit of enthusiasm left over for the honeymoon (“I’m not letting you out of bed for the whole two weeks,” he had promised her, and she had tried to ignore the way her stomach twisted at the thought of an entire two weeks stuck with only a horny Roy for company). It was fun, of course—or at least it had been fun in the beginning, when she had been cutting dresses out of bridal magazines and looking up flower arrangements online—but it had sort of become like work, which was less fun and more never-ending nightmare. 

When Pam thought about the wedding, she could see it all so clearly in her head—the filmy ivory tulle of her dress, flickering candlelight, luscious bouquets of lilac and white roses spilling over the pristine white tablecloths and perfuming the air with their delicate scent. She envisioned her friends and family gathered around her, laughing and crying tears of joy, showering her and Roy with gifts and well-wishes. In this fantasy, even the people from the office were acting completely—well—completely unlike themselves, very normal, smiling and offering her their sincerest congratulations. But there was something wrong with this fantasy, and that was Jim. 

Pam could not for the life of her imagine where Jim fit into the image of her perfect wedding. He was her best friend in the world, far closer than any of her other acquaintances, and yet convention dictated that she couldn’t put him in her wedding party. Besides, he and Roy famously didn’t get along (and did she know why that might be the case? Best not to dwell on it). If Pam really, truly thought honestly to herself about it, the only place she could picture Jim in her wedding was in place of Roy, smiling that crooked smile at her from across the altar—and that didn’t make any sense whatsoever, because Pam didn’t want to marry Jim. She wasn’t in love with Jim. She was in love with Roy, had been in love with him since the age of sixteen, when he’d left her in the bathroom at a high school hockey game and she’d realized that she was capable of forgiveness.

So Roy didn’t want to help her plan the wedding, and fantasies were dangerous, murky mental territory. Making lists and checking items off of said lists was therefore the only surefire way for Pam to ward off a panic attack. Not that she was panicked. Far from it. She just had to calm down and make the (very difficult) choice of whether to go with wedding-themed death metal or a KISS cover band. 

*

Jim knew that he was essentially choosing to flay himself alive over and over again, but he just couldn’t help himself. Talking to Pam about her wedding was like pressing on a bruise: a deep, satisfying ache that took longer to dissipate each time. In the back of his mind, there was also a very real fear that he only had a limited number of days or weeks left before Pam got married, got pregnant, and decided to leave her shitty office job to raise a family with her one true love. What else to do, under these dire circumstances, but talk to her as much as humanly possible while he still could?

He knew she was working on wedding stuff from the way her head bent over her desk, her face set into an expression so serious it bordered on miserable. Wedding planning should not be this stressful, he thought automatically, then kicked himself for even thinking about what Pam’s wedding planning process should be like. Ever since the incident with Toby and the complaint to HR, he was trying really, really hard not to be that guy—jealous, small, resentful of other people’s happiness. If this wedding was truly what Pam wanted, he was gonna suck it up and be there for her. Even if it meant performing the emotional equivalent of seppuku every time he so much as glanced over at her desk. 

Under the pretext of checking his messages, he got up and wandered over to the Formica countertop that served to hide everything but her head and shoulders from his view. “What are you doing?” he asked nonchalantly, hazarding a glance at what looked like a stack of menus, a notepad covered in her adorably messy handwriting, and strangest of all, a small cardboard box stuffed with VHS tapes. 

“Oh—it’s nothing,” she said quickly, grimacing slightly. He hated the slight awkwardness of her tone. Undeterred, he abandoned the memo organizer and moved around the desk to scrutinize the VHS tapes, which were all labeled with strange strings of words scribbled in blocky white Sharpie. 

“‘Till Death Do Us Rock’,” he read, raising his eyebrows slightly. Pam flushed. 

“They’re, ah, they’re wedding…bands,” she said, looking at him as if he might start screaming or throwing things. He hated that uncomfortable expression on her face and the hesitation in her voice. Hated it. 

“Oh,” he said softly, trying to sound totally unbothered. He leaned forward onto the desk, wrapping his hands around his elbows as he stared at Pam’s familiar, painfully pretty face. She was wearing makeup today, some combination of light pink blush and violet eyeshadow that brought out the deep green of her eyes. Her bangs were falling out of their barrette to frame her face in a messy tableau, and he had a terrible, tormenting vision of what she would look like with her hair all the way down, maybe in his…he forced himself to refocus on what Pam was saying. 

“Roy was supposed to pick the band,” she admitted, “but he’s concentrating more on the bachelor party now.” There was more than a touch of resentment in her tone, but as always, he refrained from commenting on it. He did, however, reach out a hand to stop her as she made to pull the box off of the desk.

“Wait, wait, where are you going?” He made himself sound casual, friendly, as if they were talking about pranking Dwight rather than her marriage to a guy who couldn’t be bothered to pick a wedding band. “Beesly, even if you don’t pick a band, you still have to watch the bands.” When she looked unconvinced, he pressed on, feeling bizarrely comforted by his own ability to act as if nothing terrible was happening. “Pam,” he continued, “these are people who have never given up on their dreams. I have great respect for that.” He cracked himself up a little bit on the last line and was rewarded when she laughed along with him. 

“And yes,” he conceded, “they’re all probably very bad.” He picked up the tape labeled Time for the Wedding and held it like a talisman. “And that’ll make me feel better about not having dreams.” Which wasn’t true, strictly speaking, but no one needed to hear about Jim’s dreams. Least of all Pam. 

“There’s a KISS cover band in here,” said the girl of his dreams now, giggling. He gaped at her, mock-serious, and then shrugged as if to say enough said. 

“Let’s do it,” he said, turning towards the conference room. She was up and out from behind the desk, still laughing, clutching the cardboard box, and he turned away and strode quickly through the open door because it hurt too much to keep looking at her while she laughed like that, her face all open and rosy and glowing. 

Earlier that week, he had forced himself to get up early and make the two-and-a-half hour drive to New York to talk to Jan about transferring. For some reason the crew from the documentary had insisted on following him up there and filming him through a glass door as he explained his reasons for wanting to make the switch to a different branch—a chance to grow as a salesman by tackling a new market, the opportunity to advance to the not-so-coveted position of assistant regional manager for a failing paper supply company? He couldn’t even remember what he’d said, precisely, but Jan had seemed to buy into it. Maybe she just assumed he hated working with Michael as much as she did. 

“I have no future here,” he told the doc crew, and he meant it. It was either transfer to a different branch, or else—well, actually, he didn’t even want to think about what he would do if he had to, say, hear Pam talk about her honeymoon with Roy. He just wasn’t going to think about it. It was totally out of the question.

* 

The wedding bands were all exactly as bad as expected, with the possible exception of the KISS cover band, You May Now KISS the Bride, which was somehow even worse.

“Wow. I don’t know how you’re gonna decide,” Jim said, pulling the fourth demo from the aforementioned terrible band out of the VCR and replacing it with Scrantonicity. “They are all extremely good.”

“I think I should hire them all,” Pam replied. She had abandoned all efforts to take notes on each band after the second tape and was now just leaning back in her chair, dazed by the terrible vocals and lackluster arrangements. “Do like Lollapalooza, have three stages.”

“Yes,” breathed Jim, retaking the seat beside her. “Your mom would love that.”

When Pam laughed, he pressed on. “She would.”

On the screen, a pair of grainy hands began to pluck at a battered bass, while a fedora-clad man in the background banged out the beginnings of what promised to be an enthusiastic if unevenly-timed rendition of The Police classic “Roxanne”.

“Now, this band is called Scrantonicity,” Jim intoned like a radio announcer. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”

The asynchronous drumbeats and bassline resolved themselves into something resembling a song. Jim nodded his approval. “Nice.”

Pam gasped, her mouth forming a perfect O. “Wait!” she cried, suddenly filled with a deep certainty. “That’s Kevin. On the drums.”

“What?” said Jim skeptically, craning his neck to get a better look at the extremely badly lit man in the back of the shot. 

“On the drums! On the drums!” 

“Oh my god that’s Kevin.” Jim nodded in faux-approval. “Great song, Kev! Wow,” he added a moment later, “he’s the drummer and the singer. You don’t see that every day.” 

Pam panted, her entire body shaking with silent laughter. Before she had a chance to recover, Jim was on his feet and opening the conference room door.

“We have to sign him, Pam, we’re gonna lose him to another wedding!”

“No, no, no, come back!” She was pulling on his arm and trying to get him to close the door, and all of the wedding stress was gone suddenly, melting away as if it had never even been there in the first place, and why on earth had she and Jim even been fighting? It made no sense to fight with Jim—he was the only person keeping her sane. 

*

Jim had long ago fallen into the painful habit of maintaining a constant awareness of Pam in any given situation. Without even realizing it, he kept half an eye on her body language and her facial expressions. He could probably find his way to her while blindfolded, just from hearing her voice or catching a faint whiff of her perfume. And yes, he was aware that this was more than mildly creepy behavior, he just—couldn’t stop doing it. He couldn’t turn off his awareness of her. Not while she was still in his life. Which was probably another good reason to go far, far away as soon as possible. 

Michael was hosting this weird Casino Night thing for an imaginary charity, which was actually just yet another flimsy excuse to throw a mandatory office-wide party and flout the corporate rules about liquor licensing. Jim thought this might very well be the last time he ever attended a Michael Scott party, and he had already given up on the hope of enjoying any part of it. He had allowed himself to be talked into attending only because 1) he was actually good at poker and 2) he’d thought there was a chance that Pam might go to the party without Roy, since Roy never wanted to do anything with Pam, ever. Unfortunately, Pam didn’t seem to mind having a significant other who had to be begged and cajoled into hanging out with her. 

He was in a weird fucking mood and not at all inclined to interrogate why, so he decided to indulge in some decidedly un-Jim-like behavior and get mildly drunk to completely hammered with some of his less annoying coworkers. He had just sat down to drink a morose beer with Ryan at a weird little cocktail table in the warehouse when he heard her scream of joy— Oh my god!--- and looked up to see her wrapped in Roy’s arms, laughing and clapping at her winning dice. She was wearing a floaty purple dress and heels, and she’d done something sleek and shiny to her hair, and her arms were—no. He made himself stop, as he’d been doing so often lately. Quit while you’re ahead, Halpert, he told himself sternly. Just fucking stop it. He took a long pull from his beer, trying to think about betting, cards, Ryan, anything at all to stop his eyes and his brain from wandering back over to his engaged coworker.

*

Forty-five minutes and two vodka tonics later, Jim somehow found himself at a table with Oscar, Phyllis, Bob Vance, Dwight, Creed, and Pam. The game was no-limits Texas Hold ‘Em. Jim was feeling a little buzzed, but it didn’t matter—he seemed to be in the minority when it came to knowing anything about how to play. Bob Vance, unsurprisingly, was a shark, but the rest of this cohort was still in the holding-a-printout-of-the-rules category. Dwight was in top Dwight form, making all sorts of overconfident assumptions and adhering way too carefully to what he assumed to be the rules. The game had barely started, and he’d already gotten in a protracted argument with the dealer about whether aces were high or low (Dwight’s argument: aces should be low because that’s how the game was played in the 1950s, and God forbid we change anything from how it was in the 50s). 

In fact, Jim was having a lot of fun messing with Dwight, who seemed to think that he had figured out the “tells” of everyone at the table. He thought Pam might have caught on to it too, but he wasn’t sure. “It’s the weirdest thing,” he told the camera crew, smiling mischievously. “Every time I cough, he folds.” 

When he returned to the table for the next round, Dwight was glaring suspiciously at him, but that was nothing new. 

Pam turned out to be really good at poker. Jim didn’t know why that should be a surprise to him, actually—she was very intelligent and spent a lot of time playing card games on the computer, but he wouldn’t have pegged her as being so competitive. Unfortunately, and especially in his current slightly inebriated state, watching her smoke the competition was more than a little bit arousing. By the time they got down to a table that was comprised of just Jim, Pam, the dealer, and a disturbingly experienced Kevin, Jim’s pants were uncomfortably tight and he was starting to have a lot of trouble keeping his mind empty of what he called Pam Thoughts. His predicament was made even worse by the fact that Pam was seated directly across from him, and it was taking at least three-quarters of his brain power to keep himself from staring at all the creamy skin revealed by the low-cut neckline of her dress. That was why, as Kevin dealt the cards and Pam looked up with that adorable, completely transparent look on her face, Jim made the conscious decision that this would be his last hand. 

“Yeah, right,” he laughed at Pam’s expression. It was completely unfair. Her eyes were shining, and her hair…the game. He was focusing on the game, not on her. She was biting her lip and he forced himself to look down at his cards. 

“Yeah right what?” 

“What was this?” He imitated her little shrug and nod. The responding laugh he got came from deep down in her belly. 

“I have good cards,” she said defensively, teasingly. God. He loved her. 

“Really.” It wasn’t a question. Jim was dimly aware that Kevin was watching the two of them the way you would a tennis match.

“Mm-hmm,” said Pam, “and I’m gonna take you all in.” She stacked all of her remaining chips and pushed them into the center of the table. The movement squeezed her breasts together between her arms and it was all Jim could do not to stare. 

“Wow,” he said, for lack of anything better to say. Wow. He needed to do some light trash-talking, something to pull his mind out of the gutter. “I think you’re bluffing.”

Pam just shrugged at him, raising her eyebrows playfully. Jim mock-stared at her, leaning forward and squinting as if to examine her face under a microscope for signs of lying. He was pretty sure she was lying, actually, but he didn’t care. He actually wanted her to take his money. Masochist. I am a fucking masochist. He stared at her so intensely that she broke and started smiling at him again, really big and genuine, which made him smile back, and he could have stayed right there in that moment with her forever, but instead he cleared his throat and pushed all his chips into the middle with hers. 

“Yeah, I think she’s full of it,” said Kevin, reminding Jim that there were still other people at the table. 

Pam put all her cards on the table and grinned. “Straight.”

“Three nines,” said Jim lightly, laying his cards out opposite hers. She took her win with a quiet little shrug, lifting up her hands as if to say I told you so. 

“Jim Halpert, ladies and gentlemen,” said Kevin, clapping as Jim accepted his defeat and leaned back in his chair, taking another swallow from what was either his fourth or fifth drink. The alcohol burned on its way down his throat but left a pleasant numbing sensation in its wake. His whole body, and indeed his brain, was approaching the same state of very desirable not-feeling. “Thank you very much,” he said to the dealer—and to Kevin, who had taken on a strange aura of authority since sitting down at the poker table. “It was fun.” 

He deliberately did not look at Pam’s beaming face, or the hollow between her breasts, or the way her bare arms flexed and gleamed in the light as she gathered up her chips. Oh no. He was not aware of those things at all. 

*

She had actually never looked more beautiful, in all the time he had known her, which was saying something. A lot. Probably that he had overdone it with the beer and vodka and he shouldn’t have even come here tonight, not when he knew that she was going to be here, looking like that and laughing like that and still firmly, irrevocably in love with someone else. He should have told Michael that he had a bad case of rabies, or twenty-four hour leprosy, or something else equally fictitious and deadly. 

Needing a break from the casino and the party and the people and just herherherher, he decided to climb up all the stairs and use the office bathroom rather than accessing the warehouse facilities. The office was dark and cool, so innocuous-looking under the cover of nighttime. He felt a strange impulse to just stay up there rather than rejoin the chaos downstairs. But he still needed to keep up appearances at the casino for at least another hour, or else risk a barrage of questions, entreaties, and colorful commentary from Michael on Monday morning. Standing at the urinal, trying to force himself to pee out of his stubbornly semi-erect dick, he kept up a running internal monologue of made-up diseases to avoid thinking about—Pam and I made up a bunch of diseases to prank Dwight on that day like a year and a half ago, when Michael put him in charge of picking a new healthcare plan for the branch. Goddamnit. Every fucking thing led back to her. There wasn’t a single thing in his life, good or bad, that didn’t remind him of her in some way. Would it be different, could it be different, if he moved away and never saw her again? 

On the way back downstairs, a sudden impulse made him stop and look behind her desk. He didn’t know why—part of him felt guilty about intruding on her space when she wasn’t there, but a bigger part of him just wanted to see the traces of her, the little details that she left behind each day. The VHS tapes were still stacked beside her computer, languishing in their sad cardboard box with the Scrantonicity tape resting on top. The monitor was asleep, but a quick tap on the space bar showed him that she was three moves away from winning at solitaire. A little post-it next to her computer read “dnt let mchl call j”----well, that was pretty self-explanatory. Not to mention impossible. 

Pam had three framed photos on her desk. The largest was a child’s drawing of a large, squiggly creature, probably done by her three-year-old niece, Ally, whom Jim had never met but had had the pleasure of talking to very briefly on the phone about dinosaurs one time. The second largest was a snapshot of her and Roy standing on a dock at a lake, looking sunburned and happy, with two wave runners and Roy’s brother visible in the background. The third—oh. Jim’s treacherous heart gave a painful spasm. 

The third picture must have been added very recently, because he went behind Pam’s desk with some regularity for various Dwight-related projects (not because he wanted to hold Pam’s hand and lean over her shoulder and be close enough to smell her perfume, not at all) and yet he had never seen it before. It was a candid shot, presumably taken by Michael during that disastrous Christmas party, of him standing over Pam’s desk, beaming as she held up the teapot he had given her. Looking at the photo, Jim relived the joy he had felt when he realized Pam had traded her brand-new iPod to get his present back. That moment when she had revealed the teapot to him had honestly been one of the happiest of his life. And she must have felt something too—yes? To trade a four hundred dollar iPod for a lousy teapot just to make him happy, to put this particular photo of the two of them behind her desk where she could look at it every day, to laugh so hard at every fucking thing he says to her—

Jim suddenly realized he was clutching the photo so tightly his knuckles had turned white. He was also breathing pretty heavily for someone who was standing stock-still in a dark, empty office. He gently replaced all three framed photographs in their original positions and turned to go back downstairs, down to get more drunk and give away more of his money to a nonexistent charity. But before he could, something caught his eye—beneath Pam’s desk, hanging on a little Command hook, was a dark blue umbrella with a wooden handle. The secret behind his telekinetic powers from this morning. 

She is so fucking brilliant, Jim thought, and all at once he was hit with a wave of sadness and self-pity so intense he thought his knees would buckle. This was not working. Not at all. He needed to go to Australia and then he needed to fucking transfer to Stamford, and if that didn’t work—

If that doesn’t work, I will throw myself in front of a fucking train, he thought, and then he squared his shoulders and told himself to man the fuck up and get back downstairs and stop creeping around his engaged coworker’s desk. And he did. 

*

The warehouse was even louder and more rowdy than Jim thought it would be. The vast majority of his coworkers seemed to have reached a level of intoxication that would have made for dangerous odds at a real casino, but he figured it was fine, since most likely Michael would forget to even donate this money to anything. Maybe they could just redistribute it roughly among themselves at the end of the night, or something. If it came to that. Personally, Jim wasn’t too concerned about losing money. He was now pretty firmly convinced that nothing mattered in the slightest. 

With this resolution in mind, he returned to the bar to get his fifth—or was it sixth?—drink and found himself waiting next to Ryan. Ryan was ordering a beer and a cocktail so ludicrously complicated, high-maintenance, and terrible-sounding that it could only be intended for the consumption of one very specific person. 

“So, that’s still goin’ on, huh? You and Kelly?” Jim asked Ryan, not because he really cared but because it was his instinct to make conversation with everyone, even while wallowing in the depths of despair. Ryan did not reply; he just made a little face, compressing his lips together in a thin, bloodless line that was almost, not quite a smile. Not for the first time, Jim lamented the fact that even Ryan and Kelly had a more functional relationship than he and Pam ever would. 

A short time after that, Jim’s drink had somehow become empty and he found himself once again wanting desperately to leave Casino Night. Pam and Roy had disappeared and it was taking all his mental energy to avoid thinking about where they had gone and what they were probably doing at this very moment. He wandered outside and found himself face-to-face with Jan. She was leaning against the trunk of Oscar’s car, looking tired and sort of fragile in her severe business suit, the fingers of her right hand clutching a half-smoked cigarette. Of course, seeing Jan just made Jim think about the last time he’d seen her, when he’d asked her point-blank to please help him get the hell out of Scranton as soon as possible. Well, he hadn’t phrased it exactly like that, but that had been the gist of the conversation. 

“Do you smoke?” she asked him now. He politely demurred, moved to lean against the trunk of the car with her, then thought better of standing so close. 

To cover the awkward moment, he asked “Are you, ah, having fun?” 

He inclined his head towards the partially open door from which he’d just emerged. A pane of fluorescent light stretched from the crack between the wood and the concrete, bringing with it the sounds of their coworkers’ drunken chatter, squeals of laughter, moans of defeat. 

“Fabulous time,” Jan said, somehow managing to sound as if she were having anything but. Jim nodded fervently. “I drove two and a half hours to get here,” she continued, taking a long drag from her cigarette. 

“Yeah, we all really—”

“Left work early,” she interrupted him, “drove down here, and I—I am completely underdressed—”

“Well, I think you look great,” Jim said politely. Jan was tugging at her belt. He looked at her, really looked, and saw how much effort she had put into tonight, what a strange amount of hope she’d had. It was an oddly sobering thought. 

“Why did I hook up with Michael?” Jan asked suddenly. She puffed on her cigarette as if it could provide her with the answer. Jim couldn’t help it; he looked at the camera.

“Yeah, why did you?” he echoed, laughing a little bit, not sure what else to—well, he really wanted to know, actually. Jan-and-Michael as a concept still made absolutely no sense to him. 

“It was very late, Jim,” said Jan mysteriously. “Very late and, uh…”

Suddenly she seemed to tire of this line of inquiry. She switched gears so fast Jim felt his head spin. “Have you given any more thought to the transfer?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, surprised. 

“Good.” She seemed to be coming back to herself now. The softer, more vulnerable Jan of a moment ago was gone, and in its place was Jan as he had known her for the first four or so years of working at Dunder Mifflin: cool, distant, the consummate professional.

“Mm-hm,” he said, and he looked at the concrete beneath their feet, where a few straggling weeds had managed to force their way out of the cracks. 

“Have you told anyone?” Now she was the one staring at him while he avoided eye contact with her. Her cigarette came up to her mouth again and she held it there like a dare, like she was waiting for it to burn her. He bit his lip.

“No,” he said, and his voice sounded strange to his own ears, as though he were listening to himself from very far away. 

“Well, you should.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you’re right. I should.”

*

He was going to tell Pam. He was going to tell her he was leaving, and then she would know and he would know, and then—well, he hadn’t really thought that far ahead. He thought back to that time she told him to take the Cumberland Mills job, and how she’d been so excited for him because it was twice as much money, and how badly he’d reacted to her suggestion that he should take the job, and then her saying that she would blow her brains out if he left—not that she meant it literally, it’s just an expression—but what would she think now, if he told her he was leaving not for a better salary or to take a job he was actually interested in, but just to get out of Scranton? To get away from—her? 

She’d probably say she was excited for him, that it was a great opportunity. He knew her well enough to know that her first reaction would be the polite, socially acceptable response; if she was hurt by his decision, she wouldn’t just come out and say it. He’d have to drag it out of her. Unless—for a brief, shining moment, he allowed himself to imagine the same fantasy he’d been having about the transfer from the beginning. The one where he told her he was leaving Scranton and she broke down in tears and confessed that she’d always loved him, that it had taken the threat of really losing him for her to realize that he was the one for her. That particular fantasy usually ended in him kissing her, or her kissing him, or some combination of the two.

Yeah, right. And then we ride off into the sunset on a magical unicorn and live happily ever after. 

Jim scrubbed a hand over his face and forced himself to stop imagining what it would be like to kiss Pam. He wondered if he should wait until Monday morning to announce the transfer—maybe now wasn’t the best time, maybe he wasn’t in the best state of mind? But no, for some reason he really wanted to do it tonight, before she went home with Roy.

Jan had dropped her cigarette butt onto the concrete and gone back inside to continue her strange rivalry with Michael’s real estate agent. Jim began to walk around the perimeter of the building, intending to do a lap or two to clear his head. As he rounded the corner, a familiar figure came into view. It was Pam, leaning against the side of Roy’s monstrosity of a truck. The driver’s-side window was rolled down and he was saying something through it that was making her laugh, but not, he thought spitefully, in the deep, open-mouthed way she laughed when she was joking around with him. Jim ducked under the branches of the oak tree that grew next to the front door of the building and came up level with the window on the passenger side. Roy waved him down, his broad-cheeked, whiskery face open and unguarded. Friendly. “Hey Halpert,” he said good-naturedly, “keep an eye on her, would ya?”

Jim offered a weak wave. “Okay,” he promised. “Will do.” Roy gave him a thumbs up and then pulled out of the lot. 

“Bye!” Pam called, waving at the back of the truck. There was a brief pause, which Jim felt a responsibility to fill. 

“Hey,” he said uneasily. “How’s it going?” 

Looking at her had not gotten any less painful in the last hour. If anything, it was worse than before. Someone needed to invent a pair of glasses or goggles or something that could stop Pam from having this effect on him. Now there was a suggestion for the Sharper Image catalogue. 

Jim became aware that Pam had said something funny to him while he was busy staring at her. “Haha, yeah,” he said lamely. Pam was smiling up at him, holding her hands clasped in front of her, fingers interlocked and swinging lightly from side to side. “Hey, can I talk to you about something?”

Best just to get it over with just get it over with just man up and 

She pointed a finger at him, still joking, teasing. They were so rarely serious with one another. “About when you wanted to give me more of your money?” 

“No,” he said softly, once again hearing in his own voice that strange, hollow tone. She rolled right over him.

“Do you wanna do that now? We could go inside. I’m feeling kinda good tonight,” she continued in a funny voice, some vague idea of trash-talk with a little echo of Michael, of all people, and for a moment he was so tempted to just walk away, to go back inside with her, to forget that he ever tried to say something real. 

“I was just, um…” 

She was looking at him expectantly, and the words “I’m transferring to Stamford” stuck in his throat, choking him, blocking off his airways. But he had to tell her. He had to tell her he was leaving. He owed her that much, at least. 

He opened his mouth again to say it, but what came out was “I’m in love with you.”

It felt like all the blood in his body had rushed away from his extremities and converged on his heart, which was throwing itself violently against his ribcage. He could no longer feel his face, but he was hyperaware of his numb hands and feet. Pam’s smile extinguished itself so suddenly, it was like someone had thrown a bucket of water over her head. “What?”

“I’m really sorry if that’s weird for you to hear,” he continued, unsure where these words were even coming from, “but I needed you to—hear it. Once. Probably not good timing, I know, I just—”

“What are you doing?” 

The worst part was, they knew each other so well. She already knew he was in love with her—she had to. She’d have had to be completely oblivious not to know, not to have at least guessed, and Pam was not oblivious at all; in fact, she was intensely perceptive and empathetic, sometimes to a fault, and so—that made this worse, actually, that she knew exactly what he was saying. That she’d known all along, and what she objected to was not his pain but the expression of it. 

“What do you expect me to say to that?” she asked as if they were strangers, and Jim felt the knife in his guts twisting deeper, deeper. 

“I just needed you to know,” he said, and it came out sounding deep and flat and sort of slurred because his throat wasn’t working and neither were his lungs. He quirked his lips to the side, trying to hide how much it hurt. “Once.” 

Pam was staring at him as if he’d hit her. She shook her head slightly, looking past him into the dark carpark, grasping for words. “Well, I, um—” She shook her head again, breathing hard. “I…I can’t,” and her expression wavered for a moment, as if maybe she’d wanted to say something else, but then it was gone and there was nothing left but the I can’t.

“Yeah,” said Jim, looking down at his own feet, at his scuffed leather loafers next to her shiny purple heels, and that was it, he needed to leave, to get out of this conversation and get in his car and drive away and never look back. 

“You have no idea,” she began in a new voice, a voice he recognized from hearing women use it on guys who couldn’t take a hint, who overstepped their boundaries, who read completely one-sided romances into every friendship they had with a woman. But this isn’t that, he thought, and then with a fresh stab of pain he realized that to everyone else that was exactly what it would look like. 

“Don’t do that,” he said, but she was already doing it and he couldn’t stop her. 

“...what your friendship means to me.” God, it was so fake, this voice. This tone. It cheapened their whole relationship, made a mockery of everything that had come before it. He was trying to be real for once and she was falling back on convention, just like he’d thought she would, saying exactly what she thought she was supposed to say. 

“Come on,” he pleaded, “I don’t wanna do that. I wanna be more than that.” His eyes were stinging. He willed the tears not to spill over, to stay inside where they belonged. 

“I can’t,” she repeated, and he couldn’t look at her. “I’m really sorry if you misinterpreted things. It’s probably my fault.”

He shook his head slightly. The movement made a single wet droplet fall onto his cheek “Not your fault.” He couldn’t be still anymore, couldn’t keep standing there with her looking at him like that. He shouldered past her into the dark, wiping the tear roughly away. Inside him was a yawning chasm, completely hollow, frighteningly wide. “I’m sorry I misinterpreted our friendship,” he said, and then he was gone. 

*

Pam was actually losing her mind. 

She was. 

One minute she was joking around with her best friend, asking when he wanted to give her more of his money, and then—.

I’m in love with you. 

And she had said I can’t. And he had walked away. Maybe forever. 

She couldn’t stop twisting her engagement ring around her finger. The skin was starting to rub red and raw, like a burn.

She didn’t even remember climbing the stairs and walking into the office. Her purse was downstairs in the top drawer of Darryl’s desk and she didn’t have her cell phone, but she had to call someone. For some reason she couldn’t bear to even look at her own desk, but Jim’s seemed to exert some mysterious magnetic pull. 

Her mom picked up the phone on the third ring. Pam was surprised to find her still awake and answering a call from a strange number, but she couldn’t find the words to comment on it. Instead she said the first thing that popped into her head, which was 

“You were right.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Pam was almost certain that her mom would have absolutely no idea what she was referring to. But then she sighed, and her voice was so sad and knowing, as if she’d been waiting a long time for this night to come.  

“It’s Jim, isn’t it?” asked Helen. Pam couldn’t even form words; her throat ached and she felt hot tears prickling at the corners of her eyelids. She made a noise of assent. “Did he say—?”

“He told me he’s—that he’s in love with me.”

Her mom sighed again, softer this time. “At work today?”

“No, we…there’s an event tonight in the warehouse. We were outside, in the parking lot, and then he…and I just…” Her voice was tight and choked with the effort not to cry. 

“Just now?”

“About ten minutes ago.” 

“Oh, honey. Did you tell him you’re engaged?”

“Mom. He already knows that.” 

“So what did you say?”

“I didn’t know what to say.”

“But you’re engaged to Roy!”

Pam felt impatience creeping into her tone. “Yes, I know.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Um, I don’t know, Mom.” Abruptly, she was seized by a flash of irritation. Why couldn’t her mother just tell her what to do? What was the protocol when your best friend told you he was in love with you? “He’s my best friend,” she added unnecessarily. On the words “best friend,” one of the tears she’d been trying so hard to hold back managed to escape, starting an avalanche.

“Well, I know how close you two are, but—.” 

“Yeah, he’s great.” Pam used the hand that wasn’t cradling the phone to swipe furiously at her cheeks, sweeping away tears that were quickly replaced. She sniffled loudly. 

“Honey, are you…in love with him too?” asked Helen, sounding more concerned than ever. 

It was Pam’s first instinct to deny it the way she had in the parking lot. Hell, Roy had even asked her about it before and she’d brushed it off or gotten angry with him for assuming that a man and a woman couldn’t just be friends. But something about the darkened office and the surreality of the night had worked itself upon her like a spell, enabling her to momentarily see what she had never before had the courage to admit, even to herself:

“Yeah, I think I am.”

*

He went back into the office because he was planning on stealing the photo of the two of them from Pam’s desk. He knew it was petty, he knew it would just make him feel even worse in the morning, but he couldn’t help himself. He didn’t know what he would do with the picture once he had it. Burn it? Make a shrine? 

His thoughts were abruptly cut short when he got out of the elevator and heard Pam’s voice. For a moment he thought he was actually losing it, that the events of the night had finally driven him around the bend. Then he rounded the corner and pushed through the door into the office proper and saw her, leaning against his desk, using his phone to talk to someone (her mom? probably her mom) and something about the image of her standing there in his space made heat coil in his stomach, dark and deep, and suddenly he knew exactly what he had to do, because it was the only thing left, and he had to do it at least once or he would never forgive himself. 

“Yeah, I think I am,” she was saying, her voice taut and ragged, and he had half a second to wonder what she was agreeing to before she saw him and turned to hang up the phone, telling her mom that she had to go and that she’d call back later, and then she turned to him and started to say something reasonable, but he didn’t care, because suddenly his arms were wrapped around her waist and he was kissing her. 

He’d been imagining kissing her every day for so many years that he’d thought the real thing would pale in comparison to his fantasies. But it didn’t. Kissing her was even better than he’d imagined, because suddenly it was real and she was everything, the only real thing in the world, her face and her mouth and her flowery smell and her hands wrapping around his neck and around the sides of his face and tangling in his hair. He held Pam tightly against the desk, pressing her against him, and the feeling of her body against his was so intense that he felt his eyes prickling with tears once more. Jesus fucking Christ. It was just so good, so good, her soft lips and her mouth opening under his to give him just a hint of her tongue, and his hands sliding over the silk-covered skin of her back, and she was actually kissing him back, her hands coming up to anchor themselves in his hair and slide down his neck before coming to rest on his chest, sending shivers of heat throughout his entire body. She wants me too, he thought, and the thought was like a drop of hot liquid sliding down his throat and into his stomach, warming him from the inside out.

When he let her go it was because he wanted to make sure that she was real, and that she was actually okay with kissing him and he hadn’t gone completely insane or entered some sort of alternate reality, and because he had a vague awareness that there might still be cameras hidden somewhere nearby and he didn’t really want to fully make out with Pam in front of them. He stepped back from her ever so slightly and then marveled at the way her hands slid down from his neck to his chest and into his palms, so warm and small and soft. His own hands were shaking from a combination of adrenaline and disbelief and he had to hold onto hers to make them steady. He shook his head, smiling uncontrollably, and said “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that,” laughing as he said it, because it was pretty funny, really, to want someone so fucking desperately for such a long time.

Her face was flushed as she looked up at him, lips pink and swollen, and he couldn’t remember why he’d stopped kissing her. “Me too,” she breathed, sounding just as wrecked as he felt. “I think we’re just drunk,” she continued softly. 

Maybe Jim had been drunk twenty or thirty minutes ago, but now he was stone-cold sober. The expression on her face in the parking lot had done that. 

“I’m not drunk,” he demurred softly, unable to stop staring at her mouth. He’d seen her drunk, too, and he was pretty sure she wasn’t now. But that was a disturbing idea; what if she wasn’t in control of herself? What if she really didn’t want this? “Are you drunk?” 

“No,” she breathed, sounding surprised. Worries assuaged, he smiled and bent to kiss her again. 

“Jim,” she said softly. 

“You’re really gonna marry him?” 

He saw himself asking as if he were standing outside of himself, as if he were the one holding the camera. He felt strangely calm, no longer numb. The answer to the question was in her eyes, in the lines of her face, written all over lips still flushed pink from kissing him. 

She nodded, and he smiled, because he had known that she would. And because strangely, at least in that exact moment, he was certain that this was only the beginning of the story.