A/N: Takes place sometime during what could have been Jim and Pam's senior year at college. I put them both at Penn State just because I could, and made them major/minor in subjects that sounded vaguely like ones they might actually choose if they were college students. Totally A/U but what fun, anyway! :)

Jim takes his social cues from those around him. He isn't a willing leader, although when called upon he rises to the challenge and usually does very well for himself. For the most part, Jim fits in because he observes, he notices, he adapts.

This is why, at 7:30 on a Saturday night, he is leaning up on one arm in his narrow single bed in the small dorm room he alone occupies, unable to bring himself to wake the sleeping beauty next to him. She is content, and even though they are meeting friends for drinks in an hour, he can't bring himself to rouse her because her contentedness is first and foremost, and at the moment is his entire social reality. He tells himself it would be the same no matter who it was snuggled against his body; but he knows that his motives are partly driven by his secondary desire to squeeze as much time together with her as he possibly can.

She's facing him, lying on her side, wearing a pair of faded denim jeans and a worn varsity sweatshirt he bought for her in freshman year. He knows he has to wake her. But when she sighs in her sleep – there's that contentedness again – his heart melts and he silently promises five more minutes.

He wants to kiss her to wake her, but he knows he can't. It breaks his heart that she can't be his. It is another reason he has for not wanting to rouse her. When she's asleep and he's awake next to her – the way they've done it so often, in his dorm room or hers, sharing their space intimately without intimacy – he can pretend that the circumstances are different. Waking her forces reality back, breaks that spell, and he doesn't want that. He never has.

But he does it, wakes her. He takes his fingers and gently brushes the hair off her face. She frowns and stirs a little at his touch, and he lightens the pressure of his fingertips as he pulls his hand away from her hair and down the line of her jaw. Her eyes open, languid and slow.

"What time is it?" she asks, her voice the texture of cotton candy. She yawns.

"Almost a quarter to eight," he replies.

"Why didn't you wake me?" she groans as she stretches now, the sounds escaping her throat sounding more like growls than anything and Jim forces himself to think of something, anything, to get his mind off of how sexy it is, what she's doing. Then she smiles at him. "You weren't doing that creepy watching thing again, were you?"

Jim sighs and smiles. "Come on, Pam. Let's go."

--

"I wish I'd taken Bracken's course on ethics," Mark says, eyeing Jim and Pam on the other side of the table. "Epistemology blows."

"I don't know if it does or not!" is Pam's exclamation. "I don't even know how to pronounce it!"

She tries, and they all laugh. Jim files it away in his memory, one more thing Pam has done that is so impossibly adorable he can't believe it's happened. He wishes there was a camera around to catch it, to catch everything. He has to settle for memories.

"Whatever," Mark's girlfriend remarks, "It's all bullshitting anyway, right?"

Jim raises his glass and looks over at Pam, "That's the spirit. When in doubt, bullshit."

A chorus of "Here Here" resounds from their table as the four of them make their toast to bullshit and slam back their drinks.

"So where's Roy?" Mark asks suddenly, even though he should know better. His words drop to the table along with his pint glass, and he shoots a look at his friend as if to say 'I'm sorry' almost as quickly as the words flew out. Jim feels his stomach turn; he had managed to make it well into the day without reminding himself that the only reason Pam had been able to spend so much time with him was because her boyfriend was away with the football team on a road trip. He rolls his eyes at Mark and takes another swig from his own pint.

Pam clears her throat, "The team's playing Northwestern this weekend," she announces calmly, though her face registers her discomfort at talking about her absent boyfriend.

Maybe she didn't want to be reminded either, Jim thinks, letting himself hope for a split second that she might be having doubts about Roy altogether. He looks back at the table and smiles, reading the crowd's mood and deciding a change of subject is in order. "I'm telling you, I'm still not looking forward to Monday's exam. I'm so much more comfortable bullshitting about the psychology of advertising than I am about justified true belief!"

Mark breaths a sigh of relief, and Pam's shoulders relax. Crisis averted, Jim thinks as his eyes lift to the door of O'Byrne's Pub... and he sees the Lions D-Line come walking into the room.

Pam doesn't see them right away. "I totally know what you mean. If I could blab on about the aesthetic qualities of abstract expressionism compared to French impressionism, I'd be a much happier student!" she remarks. She notices that Jim isn't listening, follows his gaze to the door. Her voice drops and Jim is certain he feels a vacuum as she inhales sharply.

Roy spots them, makes his way over to the table. He smiles as he approaches. "What's this, Halpert? Making a move on my girl while I'm away?"

"Why are you back so soon?" Pam asks. It does little to break the tension.

"Some wussies on Special Teams wanted Sunday to study for midterms," Roy says to Pam, never taking his eyes off of Jim. "What are you doing here?"

Jim isn't sure if the comment is directed at him or Pam. He opens his mouth but Pam replies, "We were studying and wanted a break. Roy, you remember Mark and his girlfriend?"

Roy nods; his eyes are still on Jim. Jim clears his throat, "Wanna join us?" he asks.

"No thanks, man," Roy smiles, "I thought I'd take Pammy out to a movie or something to celebrate me gettin' back so early."

Pam takes another drink from her Coke glass, "I'd rather stay here. Why don't you pull up a chair?"

Roy makes a face and shakes his head. "Nah, let's get out of here." He finally breaks his gaze with Jim and walks around to Pam's stool. He throws his arm around her shoulder and kisses her on the cheek, then again on the lips. She attempts to push him away both times.

"Roy, careful!" she says, holding onto the table to keep it from wobbling, "You're gonna spill Jim's drink."

Roy eyes Pam, then the table, then Jim, then looks back at Pam. "Yeah, let's not get pretty boy's suit all dirty, eh?"

Jim isn't wearing a suit. He doesn't even own one. He knows Roy is jealous of Jim's education and potential for a career once he graduates; he knows Roy is more than a little bit insecure about Pam spending so much time with him. He probably also knows that, if Jim did own a suit, he would look much better in it than Roy would. The thought makes Jim smile.

"Roy." Pam's voice has a soft, pleading edge to it that brings Jim out of his head and back to the dimly lit room.

"No, I'm serious," he says, turning back to Jim, "We wouldn't want our big shot executive here to call his lawyers on us, would we?"

Jim shakes his head and finally turns to face Roy, "Is this really necessary, Roy?"

"I don't know, Halpert," he says. "You tell me?"

They stare at each other for a while. Mark is quiet and his girlfriend has excused herself to the ladies room. Pam flushes red with embarrassment as heads around them turn to watch the scene that is sure to unfold. Two of Roy's team mates – both defensive tackles, Jim recognizes them from their profile in the student newspaper – hustle up behind Roy and tell him to back down and not cause a scene, remember our agreement with Coach about no fighting, let's go grab a beer somewhere else man. Jim sneers – inwardly, of course; he doesn't have a death wish – and takes another pull from his mug.

"No guys," Roy shrugs off their warnings, putting his hand on Pam's lap. "I'm here for a date with my girlfriend. No. Big. Deal."

He makes a move to pull Pam's chair out from the table. Pam crosses her arms across her chest, obscuring the Penn State logo emblazoned across the front. "I don't want to go. I made plans and I'm keeping them. We can go out later this week, okay?"

Roy looks down at her, not expecting her response. He looks as if he's ready to explode, but can't decide which person is most deserving of his wrath, or how exactly it will take shape. He takes a step back. "What are you saying, Pam?"

Pam shrinks against the small, round table, as if willing herself to become part of the tabletop itself, she is so embarrassed. Jim feels his hands ball into fists at his side as she swivels again on his seat to face Roy.

"She said she wants to stay here," he intones. "Is that going to be a problem?"

Jim knows he's got about six inches on the two guys standing behind Roy, but he's also well aware that they outweigh him by about four times, at least. Still, he watches as they try once again to pull Roy away from the table. He may not respect athletes like Roy very much, but he's grateful that at least his two friends have the sense to try and stop this even if Jim can't.

Jim can see the vein in Roy's neck pulsate as he considers his options. His eyes blaze and his own fists are pumping as they hang at his sides. He turns back to look at Pam. "You're choosing this guy over me?"

"I'm not choosing anyone," Pam says, her voice small. "I just want to have a drink. Jim said you could join us."

Jim interrupts, "I think that invitation expired." His gaze is levelled at Roy, and he can't believe how ballsy he's being.

Roy laughs and Jim fears that he's going to take a swing. He doesn't. He rocks a little on his feet, then turns back to Pam, spitting, "We're done, Beesly. I'm not taking this crap from you anymore."

When he turns back to Jim, he points a dirty, knobby finger in his face, starts to say something, then runs his hand through his hair before storming out of the bar. They – the whole bar – can hear him yelling outside. Then people slowly get back to their drinks, casting furtive glances at the table at the centre of the show.

Pam shakes a little, steadying herself by sitting on her hands. Mark tries to comfort her and she smiles a little but it's faint, so faint Mark gives up, thinking he's not helping any. Really, she's waiting for him to notice her. But he's too keyed up to do anything but chew on his lip and stare into the amber liquid in his glass and she finally excuses herself and goes to the bathroom, tears brimming against her lower lashes. Mark's girlfriend is on her way back to the table when she sees Pam, but she goes back to the bathroom with her arm around Pam's crying, quivering shoulders the minute they meet each other. Jim looks up just in time to see that she is gone.

"Shit!" he mutters, kicking himself for not doing anything sooner.

Jim is good at reading social cues. You might even call him a natural. But he missed a big one at O'Byrne's Pub, when Pam wanted nothing more than Jim's shoulder to lean on and he'd fumbled the ball.

A/N: I just want to clarify -- I haven't written this chapter as a continuation of the last one; really, none of these chapters are meant to connect to one another in the way chapters in other stories build a narrative. They're totally separate, almost like individual stories anthologized as chapters in a larger work, or like membranes in a multiverse (for those of you theoretical physicists out there!). This means that events that happened in previous chapters have not necessarily taken place in the past of the current chapter.

Of course, it doesn't mean that it didn't happen, or couldn't have happened, and if you have been reading them as if they are connected and filling in the blanks yourself, that's totally cool. But if it was confusing you, I hope that clears it up!