The only issue she could find with seeing him on Friday was that Friday was still five days away. It was the first time in her life that she'd ever used and abused communicative technology to this degree.

And the duties of her day job were literally answering phones and entering data on a computer.

Monday evening, her cell was ringing before she had even made it through the front door.

"So what's on the menu tonight, Beesly?"

She hadn't even gotten her shoes off, but with one heel in her hand, she made her way to the fridge.

"At the moment? It looks like either leftovers from last week that I should actually probably just toss out, a Healthy Choice chicken meal, or…" He heard cabinet doors opening and closing as she rummaged around her kitchen. "...a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Ugh. I might just order in. What about you?"

She removed her other shoe, balancing them on her fingers as she headed toward her bedroom, but pausing before she made it down the hallway.

"Hey, I'm gonna put you down for a second. I'll be right back."

"Running away with the pizza guy, Beesly? And here I was holding you to a much higher respect!"

"Right, like running away with the paper salesman?"

He heard her smirk, envisioned those lips curling sideways as he rifled through his own cabinets that were now healthily stocked thanks to her careful choosing.

"Exactly," he chuckled.

"But, to answer your question, I have to pee, and I'm not about to take you with me to do that."

"Good call."

He chuckled, listening to the clank of the plastic against the countertop, heard muffled sounds that he assumed were her footsteps, and turned his own phone to speaker as he boiled a pot of water. Close to ten minutes later, he heard her voice again.

"Macaroni and cheese or frozen pizza?"

"How do you do that?"

"You realize that I'm the one who stocked your kitchen, right?"

"Touche. So, did you fall in? I was starting to get worried there."

He beamed at her nervous laughter, stirring the pot atop his stove. "No. I um, wanted to change out of my work clothes, too. Freshen up a bit before I got all ready for my hot date on the couch."

She lingered in the silence, not wanting I didn't think having you in the same room while I stripped naked would be a good idea to wiggle off her tongue just yet.

"So. Macaroni and cheese or frozen pizza?"

"You caught me. Mac and cheese tonight."

His pasta was ready around the same time she'd called it quits and placed an order for a pizza, and they'd made it through Jeopardy together before her doorbell was ringing.

"Hold that thought, food is here." She'd been on the verge of setting down the phone when he cut her off at the tongue.

"Wait, wait, wait. Bring me with you. I don't need some teenaged pizza freak trying to poach on my territory."

Her reaction split between a chuckle and a momentary lapse in breathing.

"Oh, your territory, huh?"

"Yep."

She noticed the change in his breathing, the husk to his voice, and the fact that his tone was suddenly twelve octaves lower. He waited patiently as she paid for the pizza, only barely registering that the delivery driver was actually a woman.

"And by 'your territory,' I'm assuming you're talking about the extra order of breadsticks, right?"

"Not in the slightest, Beesly. Talkin' about the woman carrying them."

It took everything in her power not to drop her dinner to the carpet.

Tuesday evening was her watercolors class, but her phone was glued to her ear on both the drive up and back.

"I promise you, Pam. I am being one-hundred percent serious!"

"So you guys actually play Call of Duty in the middle of the work day?!"

"Absolutely. Although I'm actually really terrible at it. Today, Andy-"

"That's the guy who calls you Big Tuna, right?"

"The very same. Anyway, he got so mad that I blew our cover in a match-up today that he turned around and flung his cup of paper clips at me."

"He did not!"

"He did. I probably still have some buried somewhere in my hair."

Though she was supposed to be experimenting with different shades tonight, her thoughts couldn't be pulled from threading her fingertips into his hair and untangling paperclips from long locks.

Wednesday, he kept her company as she worked on an assignment.

"I'm just saying, it would be easier to give you my opinion if I could actually see what you were painting."

She chuckled, shifting her cell to her other shoulder as she added strokes in differing shades of blue to her paper.

"What? My descriptions aren't good enough?"

"I never said that! Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt your abilities. But 'right now, it's just a lot of blues, and when I get the background right, it'll be the Pacific Ocean' would look so much better than it sounds."

"I guess you'll have to wait to see it until this weekend."

He paused, and the next time his voice broke through the phone waves, it was deeper, richer than before.

"Or, maybe we head to Best Buy and get a couple webcams this weekend."

Something in his tone, in the way that it had been new and gruff in these past few days, made her toes tingle and her fingers ache to tangle in his hair.

"Wow, Halpert. You've taken me on one date and already you're showing me your kinky side?"

For once in the past several months, he was grateful for the distance between them, feeling the flush and the heat in his cheeks at her words.

"N- Pam, no, I...to see you, like, your face, when..to talk-"

"Jim!" He knew her laughter was at his expense, but it was all worth it to let the sudden tension slip from his body, and he turned his bottom on the couch as he propped his feet on the armrest opposite his head.

"C'mon. That was too easy. There's no way I was about to pass up that opportunity."

She heard him shifting, heard his breathy laughter.

"But, seriously, webcams might not be a bad idea. This not being able to see your for a whole week crap kind of sucks."

"Yeah. Yeah, I, uh...can't disagree with you there, Pam."

The rest of the conversation hung in silence that was only broken by breathing, the background matter of his TV, and her occasional Humph's and Oh's! and all of the adorable sounds that she made when she got into the zone of creating.

They weren't talking, really, but it was the comfortableness of just being there that had him more than content.

Thursday evening, she muted the sound on her computer during her multimedia class and minimized the AOL chat window behind Photoshop so that she could talk to him while her professor was observing other students.

JHalp18: hey

JHalp18: hey pam

JHalp18: pam

JHalp18: paaaaaaammmmmm

ARTsly24: omg! yes jim?

JHalp18: watcha doin?

ARTsly24: lol. dork! im working on a logo design.

JHalp18: oo fun. for what?

ARTsly24: technically speaking, its a mock up for a new ice cream company. literally speaking, so that i can pass this class and not have to take it over.

JHalp18: that sounds moderately boring.

JHalp18: now i want ice cream

JHalp18: this is your fault

JHalp18: as punishment, you should have to bring me ice cream

JHalp18: i will accept rocky road or chocolate chip cookie dough

JHalp18: thank you in advance for your contribution to the james halpert hunger foundation

ARTsly24: omg jim. you are relentless! youre going to get me in trouble!

JHalp18: uhg. sorry.

JHalp18: ill stop

JHalp18: i just miss you

ARTsly24 is typing…

ARTsly24: i miss you too.

ARTsly24: but i get to see you tomorrow! :)

JHalp18: i know, and im very excited :)

JHalp18: i just wish i could see you sooner.

JHalp18: hey, what if i took a half day and met you right for the end of the day? that way i dont show up at like nine oclock when youre already ready for bed

ARTsly24: hey now! dont mock my tiredness. Its not my fault ive been up late every night this week ;)

ARTsly24: but seriously. i dont expect you to take a half day, as wonderful as that sounds.

ARTsly24: plus, with everyone at work bombarding you, id barely get to see you anyway.

ARTsly24: ill just see you when you get here :)

ARTsly24: but listen, class is about to wrap up, so ill talk to you later, okay?

JHalp18: ok. text me so i know youre home please?

ARTsly24: will do :)

ARTsly24: bye jim

JHalp18: bye pam

Tonight, it wasn't his voice through the phone that kept her up past midnight, but the way that she busied herself with tidying her apartment. She tried to remind herself that this was just Jim, but as she vacuumed her bedroom at ten PM and scrubbed with yellow gloves at the bathtub close to eleven, her nerves were still squelching the excitement that she'd been packing all week.

Her shaking hands changed sheets on the bed that she knew would see little to none of her tonight, and her toes tapped as she started dusting the knick knacks on the shelves. She was halfway through a pot of calming tea that was having quite the opposite effect when her cell phone buzzed on the end table.

Jim.

"Hello?" He heard the anxious nature in her tone and realized he'd been right to call her all along.

"Hi," he smiled, reaching his hand under the coolness of his pillow as he turned on his side.

"Not that I'm not totally ecstatic to hear your voice right now, but shouldn't you be sleeping?"

"I could say the same to you, Beesly," he chuckled, and, "I couldn't sleep," a little quieter in her silence.

"So you called little ole me?"

"I sure did. Something told me you needed a little pick me up. What exactly are you doing awake at...one thirty in the morning, anyway?"

"Uhm...cleaning." She almost sounded embarrassed, and the image of Pam in raggedy clothes, a pair of yellow gloves, and her hair in a messy bun sitting cross-legged on her kitchen floor had him had him grinning from ear to ear.

"Cleaning? At one-thirty in the morning? And what, dare I ask, has possessed you to do that?"

"Well, I don't know if you've heard, but I sort of have a house guest this weekend, and I'd like to make the impression that I don't live in a dump."

His laughter warmed her, wrapping around her frazzled emotions like a cozy blanket.

He could hear the sigh breathe out of her body, and pictured the bags under her eyes. It was cute, really, that she was up cleaning for him. But as his own reasons for being awake so late pecked the backs of his eyes, he settled into his pillow and tried to ease her similarly wandering mind.

They had left one another last weekend on terms that promised hope. Hope that would, he believed, continue to blossom as soon as he jumped out of the car and into her arms tomorrow evening. They hadn't been like this yet, just them, wholly ready to just be. And as excited as he was, he was also completely terrified. Knowing that she was awake and cleaning this early in the morning gave him the sneaking suspicion that she was feeling the same way.

"As the aforementioned guest, I am ordering you to put down the scrub brush and go to bed," he quipped. "Because the only details I'm going to be paying much attention to for the next seventy-two hours belong to you."

His voice trailed into a whisper only meant for her, and despite the heat in her bones that had built up from cleaning virtually every surface in her apartment, she was suddenly chilly.

"I wish you were here." She'd closed her eyes, wrapped her free arm around herself, and willed her words to touch him all those miles away.

"Me too. Get some sleep, okay?"

"Call me when you leave tomorrow?"

"Absolutely."

"Goodnight, Jim."

"Goodnight, Pam."

Although she thought that Friday would be a day of sitting on pins and needles in anticipation, Michael kept her moderately busy for a majority of the day. Something about branches closing and having to produce numbers from the past year had her diligently copying and binding and actually productive for the longest she could admit to in a while. She'd taken a quick break at lunch, only to tell Jim that she couldn't sit for their normal half hour and chat over sandwiches in the car; she was eating at her desk to, dare she say it, work through lunch. He'd heard the rumors, too. He understood.

She didn't even realize that it was nearing on five o'clock until her work line rang, jolting her from her concentration.

"Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam."

"Oh my god, Beesly. I don't know how to tell you this, but I think someone let the air out of your tires."

"What? God, this would be my luck-I'll be right there."

She hadn't bothered to grab her coat, hadn't bothered to tell Michael why she was running down the stairs, hadn't bothered to process the fact that it was Jim on the other end of the line until she found his tall, lanky body propped against the passenger side door of her little blue car. Her expression that had begun in anger knit into confusion, and finally spread into a smile that covered the miles from Stamford to Scranton as she ran across the parking lot, not at all hesitating before throwing her arms around his neck and meeting his lips halfway.

His strong hands cradled her cheeks, his thumbs brushing her bottom lip as he pulled away only long enough to breathe, "I couldn't wait," into her skin. The word, "Good," had barely escaped her lips before she pushed insistently on the back of his neck, kissing those five days of agony away. It was only when they began to hear the sounds of coworkers emptying into the parking lot that they split, only then realizing that, not only had they yet to define the relationship for themselves, but that explaining why they were making out in the Dunder Mifflin parking lot to the likes of Michael Scott and company was nowhere near close to the top of the plans that they had for their weekend.

Although they had inched a respectable distance from one another, his stature made him an easy target, and no sooner was Kevin crossing the parking lot in a mad dash to side swipe him with a hug than several others were approaching him with mixed greetings, some similarly friendly, while others (namely, Dwight) scolded him for his traitorous actions.

And somewhere in the mix, despite his every intention to sweep Pam off her feet and spend from now until Sunday evening wrapped in her embrace, he found himself headed for a night out at Poor Richard's with the old gang.