HUGE THANK YOU TO IDNAOJ80 FOR BETA-ING THIS CHAPTER, HELPING WITH PLOTHOLES, AND GENERALLY JUST BEING AN AWESOME HUMAN BEING!

seriously.

feel like i should preface this by saying that writing is hard lately - i know we're reaching the end of the fic and its always a little difficult to round things off in a sensical way, if that makes sense.

this fic is already 55k+ words long. its the longest thing I've ever written, and i just wanna say thank you again to everyone who's been reading so far!

title taken from: "Grace Kelly" by MIKA ;))

The strangest part was that they hadn't actually talked about it.

Not that that was necessarily a bad thing. Secretly Jim had been dreading seeing her again - having to speak to her and pretend as though he hadn't once been able to kiss her.

She was engaged.

And even if she weren't, well. She publicly rejected him. He might not be the best person at picking up subtle hints, but he'd have to be pretty dumb to miss that one.

So for the first couple days back at school, he keeps his distance. He eats lunch off campus or with Karen and walks the long way back to the dorm to avoid her and acts like the lessons in class are just too interesting to miss out on.

It's just a little surprising how okay she is with it all. Not once has she tried to actively seek him out. In class, she barely glances his way. Occasionally she'll say something, but it's always run-of-the-mill, polite things.

A calm "good morning" or benign "did you hear what the professor said just there?"

He responds, of course, he's not rude, but she doesn't seem to notice that he's never actually initiated conversation.

And of course there was Karen.

They seemed to have fallen into some sort of relationship without either of them really discussing it. Jim didn't particularly think of her as a girlfriend - more, somewhere in between. Not just a friend, but not a partner, either… At least not yet, anyway.

She was nice and funny and laughed at his jokes. She wasn't engaged and didn't seem ready to freeze him out at any moment.

But then.

Pam was his friend, right? And, sure, he missed that. He missed walking to class together and making fun of Dwight and sharing mutual bouts of second-hand embarrassment after every one of Mr. Scott's lectures.

He just didn't miss the rest of it - awkward silences, moments being intentionally ruined due to fear, the not-so-resigned knowledge that he felt something she just couldn't reciprocate.

Sometimes, Kelly tried to coerce Pam into meeting the old group (if one could even call it that) for lunch. Her roommate, though occasionally insensitive, seemed to understand that there was some weirdness going on, however, and thankfully dropped the subject without much complaint.

Of course, she missed the way things were before the break.

Class, for example, was infinitely more boring. Recently she'd been trying to give him some space - perhaps, she thought, he just wanted some time apart. God knows she didn't blame him.

Except she did, a little. When she took deliberate detours to avoid walking past his business class, she often thought of how unfair it was.

Really, it was his fault. His confession messed everything up between them. He loved her? How was she supposed to react to that?

Now Karen was in the picture. She knew her vaguely from around school and recognised her face from Art. She seemed nice enough. Why was there a part of her that hated the girl?

It was likely that he never truly loved her - what could any of them really know about love, after all, they were barely out of their teenage years - so really, the fact that he was able to move on so quickly shouldn't have shocked her as much as it did.

But it did.

So, yes - she wasn't engaged, after all. So what?

She was still way unavailable.

(It happened like this:

He was zoned out in class, thinking about his possible failure of a business pop quiz he hadn't studied for, and by the time he came to, he seemed to have missed quite a bit of important information, because the professor was speaking about an entirely different topic now and although most of what he said was garbage, Jim still really wanted to pass this class.

So he leaned over in his seat, fully prepared to just ask her if she had taken note of any vital stuff he'd said -

When there it was.

Her hand, her ring finger, minus the ring.

Huh?

She caught him looking and silently shifted her laptop in his direction, without the usual little smile and eye-roll, because those kinds of friendly things were exactly the kind of things they didn't do anymore.

He murmured some sort of thanks, copied out the couple of sentences worth of information. She caught his eye to make sure he was done, bobbed her head a little, and went back to staring resolutely at the professor's desk.)

And she wasn't engaged. Either that, or Roy was sloppy.

Most likely the former, right?

Sure, a part of him was a little annoyed. Wasn't her engagement - whether real or not - the whole reason for all the awkwardness between them?

Why didn't she tell him?

Of course, he already knew the answer.