The shock of having Pam Beesly in his home was never going falter in Jim's eyes. He had to catch his breath as he watched her remove her coat, barely registering the softness of it between his fingers as he took it from her to hang in the hall closet.

"Sorry for dropping by so unexpectedly," she began as he closed the closet door, still facing away from her. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything." Judging by the quickness with which he had invited her inside, Pam hadn't figured she had been intruding on his night. But as she followed Jim into the living room, a pang of guilt twinged in her stomach. Their coffee table was covered in various empty beverage containers and potato chip bags. Mark sat perched on the edge of the couch clad in pajama bottoms and a raggedy t-shirt, Playstation controller clutched in his fingers as his thumbs moved swiftly from button to button. As he thrust his fist into the air, "Fuck yeah, Halpert, I owned your ass!" ringing off the walls, and Mortal Kombat characters falling to the ground, she realized immediately that she definitely had interrupted something: boy's night.

It wasn't that she hadn't crashed one of Jim's boy's nights before-Valentine's Day had certainly been a "boy's night" to remember. But this time was different. He had actually invited her the last time. Tonight, she actually was crashing, intervening, impeding on his home life.

Jim could sense her tension as they entered the living room, and he chose to act as if nothing was wrong with the situation that she perceived to be an alien to.

"Okay, asshole. I wasn't even playing. This round doesn't count. Start the rematch. Pam's gonna buy us a pizza."

"Excellent. Breadsticks, too?" Mark's eyes lifted momentarily from the television screen, meeting Pam's with a grin.

Leaning against the wall that ended the openness of the foyer into the living room, Pam let a grin of her own curl onto her lips. Jim had taken what she presumed to be his spot on the couch next to Mark, their poses almost identical as the two grown men transformed into teenage boys before her eyes, their thumbs dashing hastily across the controllers. Finally, the tension in her shoulders relaxed, and she found herself sitting cross-legged on the floor to the side of the couch, feeling like a giddy kindergartener.

She shifted right into their evening like she belonged, adding to the unmindful conversation that accompanied video game playing, throwing in the occasional quip that had even Mark impressed.

"You know, Jim, maybe if you put as much effort into your video gaming as you do into procrastinating at your job, you'd be winning more."

"Wo-ah!" Mark chuckled, setting his controller on the table. "Halpert! You really gonna take that, man?"

Jim stood, propping his hands on his hips as he let out a sigh, eliciting chuckles from his taunters.

"Alright, that's quite enough of that." He slapped his hands simultaneously against his sweatpants clad thighs before continuing. "Anybody hungry? I think the lady with the smart mouth still owes us dinner."

Waggling his eyebrows as he watched her smirk and roll her eyes, he cocked his head towards the kitchen and followed her into the tile. As she dialed the number and listened to the ringing on the other end, a reminiscent chill creeped up her spine from the last time they were in this situation. Jim leaned ever so casually against the kitchen cabinets, watching her profile as she placed their order. As she hung up and handed the phone back to him, he let his fingers linger against the back of her hand for just a second longer than he had to.

"Don't worry, Scorpion, your nourishment will be here in thirty minutes or less."

"Hey now, I'll have you know that my fighting skills are going to suffer severely without proper sustenance."

Eyes travelling to the floor, she enjoyed the giggle that filled her lungs, eventually tapering off. The silence echoed throughout the kitchen, only broken by the background sounds of Mark firing up a new game in the living room.

"So, Beesly, did you make this crosstown trek just to make good on our little pizza bet?"

Slowly, her eyes found his, waiting with a deeper green than normal. She bit her lip, drawing her gaze back to the tile that she was becoming all too familiar with before responding to his inquiry.

"Um, actually, Roy and I kind of had a fight earlier today and I, uh... I kind of just wanted to get away. You know?"

His thoughts immediately flashed to their argument in the office the afternoon before. He'd been so proud of her in that moment, but their argument obviously hadn't ended there. He gave himself time to consider their situation: once again, she was fighting with her fiance. Once again, she was running to him. Once again, he felt the overwhelming urge to scoop her into his arms, tell her to leave him, and confess the feelings of paralyzing love that he carried for her. But as her tiny body shrunk ever so slightly into his kitchen cabinets, he realized that he was her solace, and in that moment, he swore that he could feel his heart growing.

His smile was apologetic and sad, but warm and reassuring. He would spend his entire night making her forget every part of Roy that made her feel inadequate.

"Well then, consider this the stress free Beesly Night of Fun!"

She grinned sheepishly up at him, nodding her head a few times before she noticed his outstretched hand and took it graciously, letting him lead her back into the living room, where they stumbled upon Mark bent awkwardly behind the television.

"I figured we could switch to something we could all play," he said, looking proud of himself as he offered up two N64 controllers and loaded Super Smash Brothers onto the screen. An hour later, they were sitting side by side by side on the small couch, empty pizza boxes now joining the mountain of garbage on the coffee table, with a makeshift scoreboard propped against its lip. According to the tally marks, Pam was definitely in the lead.

He didn't so much care that he was losing in a game that he had grown up training against his brothers to be the best at. It was the giggles that radiated from her lips that sent flutters to his heart. It was the way she was perched cross-legged between him and his roommate, elbows jutting from side to side, tongue stuck between her lips in concentration, that truly pulled his gaze from the television, rendering his on-screen character dead more often than not.

She was constantly shifting between them, her knees hitting both men in the thighs as she turned her body from side to side.

"Hey, Bees, you do know that moving your own body has no effect whatsoever on what your character's doing, right?" he quipped, socking a killing blow from his Link to Mark's Bowser.

"Oh yeah? Well if it isn't working," she began, shoving her hips more insistently into his side, "then why are you on your ass?" She shifted her gaze long enough to shoot him a toothy grin, then returned her eyes to the screen as her Princess Peach continued the assault on Mark while Jim's character respawned from the sky. While she concentrated her efforts on finding power-ups and getting the most kills, Jim allowed himself a moment to simply bask in the glow that positively radiated from her. At least for these passing moments, she was carefree, without worry.

And his character was dead, yet again.

"What was that about my strategies not working?" She twisted her body at the waist to watch the expression on his face switch from eye rolling to satiric sadness at his loss before adding another tally mark underneath her name on the whiteboard.

"Suck on that, Halpert." Her tongue poking out between her teeth almost killed him, but he remembered where he was and who else they were sharing a couch with. As if by some telepathic communication, Mark yawned suddenly, stretching his arms above his head as little squeaks sounded from his lungs.

"I think I'm gonna call it a night, guys. Thanks for dinner, Pam. And for thoroughly kicking my ass at a game I thought I was good at."

She giggled and waved as Mark disappeared up the stairs, leaving her alone on the couch with Jim. Suddenly realizing how close they were on the couch without a second side to the sandwich of people, she lifted her stiff body to a standing position, collecting the garbage they had littered around the room.

"Hey now, you're a guest, cut that out." He watched as her body bent gracefully, her casual jeans and t-shirt combo hugging her curves as she did something as simple as cleaning up.

"Nonsense," she began, plucking the last napkin from the coffee table and adding it to her pile. "It's the least I could do after essentially inviting myself over."

Throwing his hands up in defeat, he helped her carry the pile to the kitchen, both wordless until they ended up back on the same couch that had almost killed him a week ago. He let his eyes settle on her features, trying to distinguish the worry lines from the peace that had settled upon her arrival, noting which of those had come from Roy and which had been his own doing. He wanted to know-needed to know what had caused her hardships tonight. If not for his own curiosity, but to find the root of her pain and take it away. As he opened his mouth, the question lingering on the tip of his tongue, she beat him to the punch.

"I don't want to talk about it."

His disappointment was not brought on by the wall she had put up, the lack of knowledge, but by the sheer dejection that had suddenly washed over her. There shouldn't ever have been a reason in the world for her face to be painted with such sadness, making her body so small. He wanted to reach out, wrap her in his arms, save her from the pain that she had been trying to hard all night to push away. He settled instead for wrapping his hand around hers, giving her a reassuring squeeze.

"Okay."

"I'm just...I'm so done with this, Jim."

Biting her lip in this instance was to stop the tears, and as her glassy eyes wavered up to him, he didn't care what sort of boundaries he had set for himself. He pulled her small body to his chest, cradling her head with his hands, muttering, "Hey, it's gonna be okay," as his fingers passed over her curls. In any other moment, his body would be radiating heat, filling with tension, pulsing at her contact. But right now, holding her in comfort filled him with an immense sadness, a desperation to absorb the pain she was feeling.

She pulled away, reluctantly so, and met his gaze with a shy smile.

"Hey," he began softly. "Let's talk about something else. Literally anything else. I hate seeing you so sad."

Though his voice had tapered into a whisper, it still sent a shock through her spine. His hands had trailed from where they held her moments ago to rest lightly atop hers, clenched in her lap. She nodded up through lidded eyes, still attempting to hold in the emotions she'd been fearing and avoiding since the previous night. It was only once she had allowed herself to relax in Jim's presence that she realized that, while her anger at Roy hadn't been misplaced, it certainly had been masking the absolute pain that she'd been harboring. Sitting here in Jim's arms, it was about to crash over her like a tidal wave, and the way he was looking at her with pure sorrow etched into the lines on his face surely wasn't helping.

She was lost for words, knowing that she should urge him along in his quest to change the subject, but also knowing that if she opened her mouth, she would more than likely lose it.

"When I was six years old I had to go to the emergency room to get a rock removed from my nose."

His blurted words interrupted her stream of thoughts, leaving her with no choice other than to burst out in surprised laughter.

"Wait, what?"

He chuckled, squeezing her hands once more before letting them drift away to his own lap. She was smiling again.

"So, um, my brothers and I were really into superheroes growing up and...god, this is so embarrassing." His eyes traveled to the ceiling as he smiled in embarrassment, a warm pink tickling his cheeks. "So, Tom and Pete, they convinced naive little me that if I wanted to be like a superhero, I'd have to pick a superpower. Seems logical, right?"

Pam, completely enthralled by his tale, was nodding enthusiastically, encouraging him to continue.

"Right, so somehow along this whole process of me deciding my power, they convinced me that super strength was the way to go. And the only way to get 'rock hard' muscles, was to literally send that message to my brain."

"Oh my god, Jim, you didn't."

"I did."

Her tears now stemmed from laughter, and she used the back of her hand to wipe them away.

"They helped me pick the 'perfect rock' to do the job, and then...I mean, you can guess where this is going."

"What did your parents say?" she managed between hearty laughter.

"Oh, they were pissed. I mean, I obviously got yelled at, but since I was their precious baby boy, they laid into Tom and Pete the most. Grounded them for two weeks And after I did such a good job being brave for the doctor, I got an extra large blizzard from Dairy Queen."

He looked so proud of himself as laughter continued to ebb from her lungs.

"Larisa was only two at the time, so of course, she was super freaked out because my mom tried to get it out with tweezers and all that did was shove it up further and make my nose start to bleed. So we had a screaming toddler, a bleeding six year old, and two bozos arguing with my dad about how it wasn't technically their fault because they didn't make me put the rock up my nose. It was like a circus, Pam. I swear."

She tried to imagine a much younger Jim, wanting to impress his older brothers so much so that that it possessed him to force a rock up his nose. The chaos of having four children reacting so differently to that situation made her wonder what her life might look like ten years down the road.

"Alright, Beesly. It's your turn."

"My turn for what?" she asked, caught off guard.

"Embarrassing childhood stories is obviously the theme here. I told you mine, so, I'm waiting."

She pondered for a moment, selecting a memory that could compare to Jim's, one that would return the joy he had brought to her at such a breaking point.

"Okay, now you have to realize, this isn't a story I tell very lightly," she began, already twiddling her thumbs in her lap. He grinned in anticipation.

"So, when I was four, I was going to be the flower girl in my aunt's wedding." Now, it was her turn to blush. "Oh my god, I can't believe I'm telling you this. So, we had gone in for the dress fitting, and I absolutely loved my dress. It made me feel like a Disney princess or something. Well, we got it home, and I wanted to show Penny, because obviously a toddler is going to understand my excitement. Anyway, so I put the dress on-that had fit perfectly at the shop, by the way-and I was swimming in it, Jim. It was like, six sizes too big."

He marveled at the animation she used to tell the stories. It was as if she had transformed into a completely different person in under ten minutes.

"How much did you freak out?"

"I was freaking out!" Their shared laughter filled the room with a new warmth. "I was so nervous! I was supposed to walk down the aisle at my aunt's wedding but the dress didn't fit, and I thought she was going to be super mad at me, so I did the only logical thing I could think of!"

"Which was?"

"Go into my kitchen and eat an entire box of Oreos."

He threw his head back, cackling at her admission as he slapped his thighs.

"Beesly! Oh my god!"

"I didn't know what else to do! I figured I'd have to gain, like, a lot of weight to fit into it the right way, so obviously gorging on Oreos was the best choice."

The image of a tiny Pam Beesly suddenly invaded his sense: a little girl with honey curls, drowning in a fancy dress, with a box of Oreos in her hand. Just like that, he was reminded of a future he would never have.

"So then my mom walks in, sees what I'm doing, and goes absolutely ballistic. She snatches the cookies and starts yelling at me, like, 'Oh my god, Pammy, what were you thinking?!' And of course, even back then, I hated when she called me Pammy, so then I started getting mad, and I was crying and throwing a fit about needing to fit into the dress, and then Penny starts crying, and my dad has no idea what's going on. Well it turns out, they gave me the wrong dress at the store."

"No."

"Yes! She called the store and they had given me the wrong one. Problem solved. But not before I had the worst stomach ache of my life. I haven't eaten Oreos since."

With his head bowed, laughter continuing to fill him, he stole her gaze, seeing eyes that were no longer troubled, but filled with joy and hope. Over the next hour of their night, he strove to keep that lightness, urging her to trade stories both to keep her focused on the good, as well as to steal glimpses into the Pam Beesly that he knew she tucked away. They learned all sorts of oddities about one another: Jim's pregame rituals before taking the basketball court in high school, Pam's first kiss at a summer camp back in seventh grade where little Pam Beesly broke the rules to sneak out after curfew ("He never wrote me back that summer. By far the worst heartbreak of my life," she had laughed).

As the hours of the night passed them by, neither of them wanting it to end, she suggested a movie, and he happily obliged, taking her up on the offer to choose, "As part of your 20 questions winnings, good sir." Finding the case that Kimmy had left at their places ages ago, he queued up Legally Blonde, her joy being his only purpose.

He wasn't so much surprised as he was contented when she immediately laid her head on his shoulder. They were friends. Friends could cuddle, right? His arm found its place around her shoulders, and as her knees bent with her feet tucked beside her, he gave himself just one moment to cement this feeling into his mind, the feeling that this should be his every waking moment with her. When her head grew heavy against his body, her soft curls rubbing slightly against his cheek, he smiled that lopsided smile with a hint of sadness, and pulled her to him just a little bit tighter.

The credits to the movie rolled too soon, and he gave himself three turns of the DVD menu reel until he started to shake her awake. Ever so gently, he squeezed her shoulders, whispering, "Pam. Pam. Hey, Beesly?" into her ear. While he truly didn't want her to go, he also didn't want to be that guy who left her there on the couch all night. But the thought of having her asleep in his living room while he slept was so taunting. He gave it a few more tries, for his own conscience.

Removing himself carefully, he watched as her head slowly found its place where his body had been warming it for the past hours of the night, her hands coming to cradle next to her sleeping face. Even in her sleep, she looked like an angel.

He knelt close to her, resisting the urge to brush the curl from her forehead, and whispered, "Hey, Pam. I've gotta be honest with you, this couch isn't the most comfortable thing to sleep on."

She didn't so much as stir.

He sighed, grabbing the blanket off the back of the couch.

To be fair, he had tried. He'd done everything aside from pulling her off the couch, which he refused to do, for personal reasons.

He covered her to the chin, making sure her feet were tucked in, and smoothed the blanket over her impossibly tiny body. Without thought, he gave in to his impulses, bent down, and placed a soft kiss atop the crown of her head. The pulse that shocked throughout his body from that simple contact sent him back on his haunches, and he found himself steadying his movements against her shoulder. Realizing what he'd done, he braced himself for her to awaken, sucking in a breath while intense eyes locked onto her face. But she never did, never wavered at the contact. She was out like a light. As he tentatively made his way towards the stairs, he gave himself one last look at her before he turned off the lights.

She'd known consciously that she was awake, could feel the stifled movements against her cheek, his warm breath at her ears. But at the same time, she didn't have the strength to pull her from her slumber. She'd had this problem as a child: she knew her parents were trying to wake her after falling asleep during a movie, but her body fought against her willingness to wake up, and her dad would eventually wind up carrying her to bed. As she grew older, she'd be left on the couch, waking in the early morning to the sound of the coffee maker. She'd sworn that he'd kissed her on the forehead, but then again, it could've been her subconscious playing tricks on her, and she let that moment turn into dreams as she faded back into true unconsciousness.

The next morning was like deja vu; she was awakened by the wafting scents of cinnamon and coffee, the faint sounds of scratching forks and sizzling in a pan causing her eyes to finally crinkle open. She took her time folding the blanket, fixing the pillows, and smoothing out the wrinkles in the couch. Doing so gave her the opportunity to calm the palpitations in her heart caused by the fact that Jim Halpert was making her breakfast. In socked feet and the clothes she'd been wearing the night before, she crossed the ten feet into his kitchen. He turned to face her before she could make a sound.

"Well good morning, Sleeping Beauty. How'd you sleep?"

"Not so bad," she replied. He offered her a smile before turning back to the stove, attending to the pan of French toast. She took her time admiring him, the way he looked in his plain grey t-shirt and green plaid pajama pants. She shivered as his broad shoulders stretched the cotton as he moved the finished slice of French toast to the already mounting plate. Suddenly, she became self-conscious of her own attire, wishing she wouldn't have left her duffel bag in the car. But, then again, how presumptuous would it have seemed if she had come to his door with an overnight bag? As she pondered this, she threw a hand up to her mouth, suddenly realizing that she'd eaten a fair amount of garlic the night before, and she hadn't brushed her teeth.

Jim rounded the table, placing the plate of French toast in the middle of a table already set with plates, glasses, and a half-used bottle of maple syrup. Upon seeing her startled expression, his body filled with worry. Was this too much? It was just breakfast. He braced himself to watching her dash out his front door again, but instead, she tensed in her chair, her fingers still locked in front of her mouth.

"Everything okay there?"

She hesitated, loosening the grip she had before responding through her fingers.

"I just, um, well...Ididn'tgettobrushmyteeth."

His grin made her blush, dipping her head as a smile curled up around her fingers.

As he took his place across from her at the table, words traveled by way of a voice still yet waking up itself, causing her to shiver despite his humor.

"Ya know, Beesly, I'm sure if you start eating, the cinnamon will mask that dragon breath of yours in no time."

She could only roll her eyes, lifting her plate for him to serve her. As they ate in contented silence, she marveled at the way the Sunday morning sunlight came in through the windows, making the chocolate color in his hair stand out. She noticed the five o'clock shadow that he hadn't bothered to trim before coming downstairs to cater to her, and found herself wondering what it would feel like beneath her fingers, her thoughts interrupted when Mark came barreling down the stairs to join them, not even flinching as he engaged Jim in conversation about a basketball game that would be taking place that afternoon. Pam was comfortable to lose herself in her thoughts, smiling as she noticed that this time, the French toast was cooked to perfection.

On Monday morning, she was welcomed into the office by a box of Chips Ahoy cookies. The Post-It note fastened to the top in his handwriting said Just in case you need to fit into another flower girl dress. Hope these don't give you a tummy ache.