5. Manabamate - the lack of appetite you suffer when falling in love (Rapa Nui)

Valentine's Day 2006

After taking out her contacts and brushing her teeth, Pam came out of the bathroom to find Roy sitting up in their bed. When she crawled under the comforter she noticed he had his arm behind his back. "What?" she said suspiciously.

"I got you a little something," Roy said, pulling his hand around to reveal an envelope. Pam opened the card, covered in red and pink hearts and filled with a nice message. Maybe it would have been a little nicer if she wasn't sure he just bought this card a couple hours ago at the drug store. A folded note dropped out, and Pam opened it to see it was a hand-written IOU for "an unforgettable night, redeemable at any time".

Pam laughed at the note, her period had started a little early and she asked to take a rain check on Roy's promised 'best sex of her life'. "Sorry my body has terrible timing," she said. She wasn't very sorry though, in all honesty she was relieved.

"It's fine, babe," Roy said, giving her a quick kiss before laying down and pulling the covers over his shoulders. "We have a lot of great Valentine's Days ahead of us, right?"

Pam hummed in agreement and picked up a paperback book from her nightstand. Roy had always been able to fall asleep quickly, even with lights on, and sure enough within minutes his breath became heavy, almost on the verge of snoring, the tell-tale sign he was really asleep. Pam found herself staring at the open book for several minutes, but she was unable to focus enough to actually read and replaced the book on the nightstand. She still felt very awake, so she slowly got out of bed and went to the kitchen, quietly tidying up. She briefly opened the refrigerator, feeling like she should be hungry after only nibbling on dinner, but she just wasn't. Instead she grabbed her purse from the counter and walked to the front door to hang it with her coat. Inadvertently she glanced inside her purse and her eyes fell onto a red envelope with "Jim" written in cursive.

With the envelop in hand, she sat on the couch and took out the card. She started working on it after the lake cruise when she found out Jim and Katy had broken up, drawing a silly cartoon of Jim with a Dwight-faced cherub flying above him ready to shoot his bow. She opened up the card and read her handwriting. "May Cupid Dwight's aim be true." Once she finished the card, she kept it in her top drawer, and every time she saw the red envelope, she thought about the bright smile Jim always gave her whenever she shared any of her drawings with him, and how much she was looking forward to Valentine's Day.

Not long after she finished the card, Jim confessed he used to have a crush on her. Despite his assurances it was years ago and he was long over it, Pam couldn't shake the feeling that something was up, that it was strange for this "old crush" to be coming out now.

The Friday night after that kitchen conversation with Jim was one of the more restless nights she had recently. For the first time she allowed herself to think about being out on the deck with him on that ridiculous "team-building" lake cruise. She was just trying to be funny, teasing him about dating a cheerleader, expecting a quick, witty retort. But he just stood silently, his eyes boring into her and his lips parted as if about to speak. Or maybe about to kiss her. She wondered what she would have done had he tried, had he stepped closer and leaned down towards her, barely able to admit to herself that in that moment she would have let him. That a part of her was hoping he would.

The next morning Pam suggested to Roy they take some time off and go to the Poconos for a few days, which Roy happily agreed to. They skied some in the mornings but mostly they stayed in their cheesy, faux-Alps decorated hotel room in what Roy later dubbed their pre-Honeymoon. It was nice; frankly sex had been rather routine the past few months, even verging on boring, but they switched things up and got adventurous. Some positions and techniques were more successful than others, there was a slippery hotel shower incident that gave her a bruised elbow and Roy some stubbed toes. But even that was fun, them naked and laughing hysterically on the bathroom floor, there was an intimacy to it that Pam didn't realized had been missing for a while.

All Pam really wanted from the trip was to get her mind off of everything, and it was mostly successful, even if there were a couple times where she found her imagining the figure moving above her was a bit thinner, that the hair she was running her fingers through was somewhat longer, that the voice saying her name in her ear was a little deeper and a touch huskier.

Despite those strange fleeting thoughts, Pam came home from the Poconos feeling like things were better with Roy than they had been in years. But it quickly went back to the same old when not a week later, they argued about the graphic design program at the corporate offices. Or, rather, Roy listed the reasons why it wouldn't work out and Pam didn't challenge him. He wasn't wrong: it was not good timing, with the wedding they weren't going to have the money for her to stay near New York, even just in a hotel on the weekends, and it wasn't guaranteed to lead to anything.

"You gotta take a chance on something sometime." It felt like Jim was challenging her, was referring to far more than just the internship. She snapped back that she's fine with her choices, but he saw through her instantly. It always scared her a little, these moments when she realized how well he knew her, how he could tell when she was lying even to herself.

Roy caught her crying in the bathroom that evening and thought it was about him shooting the internship idea down so fast. And it was partially, but it was more about the way Jim looked at her the rest of the day. She could handle Roy, she had nearly a decade of experience with his reluctance to anything new and different, but feeling like Jim was disappointed in her was somehow unbearable. Roy offered to convert the spare bedroom into an art studio as a wedding present to her, to which Pam put on a smile and said that sounded good, even though she had a nagging feeling it was not going to happen, at least not without a lot of prodding from her.

She was noticing how things had been just a little off since the "booze cruise". Jim of course still chatted and joked with her but it somehow felt different, more restrained. She wanted to attribute it to his breakup, but he and Katy really weren't that serious. Pam tried not to think too much about the fact that none Jim's girlfriends over the last three years had been "that serious".

Her silly card almost went forgotten in the back of her top drawer until she happened upon it this morning. It oddly didn't feel appropriate to give to Jim anymore, but she decided she would give him the card as long as he gave something to her first. Turned out all he would give her was a "Happy Valentine's Day" as he was halfway out the door.

Pam closed the card and felt her eyes begin to sting as she studied her drawing. It was really starting to feel like something was broken between them, something small but significant, something Pam didn't have the first clue how to fix.

Spotting a pen on the coffee table, Pam scooted to the edge of the couch, grabbing the pen and flipping open the card. Under her signature she began to write.

- P.S. Are things awkward now? I thought we were just kidding.

She bit her lip and pressed the pen tip back to the paper.

- Because right now, I kind of need my best friend.

Her eyes kept passing over the words "best friend". She had considered Jim to be her best friend for years now, and like any relationship, best friends had their ups and downs. This just happened to be one of their "down" periods, she told herself. She wished she was more confident that things would get better, because sometimes best friends just drifted apart too.

She slid the card back into the envelope, unsure what she was going to do with it now, aside from being certain she wasn't going to give it to Jim. She stood and walked back to the kitchen and started to sort through the pile of mail on the table. "Oh," she said quietly to herself when she saw a box from the custom stationary shop. Her Save-the-Dates had arrived yesterday much to Pam's excitement, but today all she could think was how long it was going to take to hand-address every one, a task Roy already weaseled out of by claiming his handwriting was terrible. She slipped Jim's card into the box and carried it to the entry table, deciding she would have to address the save-the-dates during slow times at work.

She was sure plenty of her coworkers would be willing to help, and she quickly listed in her mind who she might ask.

Her best friend was not one of them.