Work Text:
i.
I've been trying to do it right
I've been living a lonely life
I've been sleeping here instead
I've been sleeping in my bed,
sleeping in my bed
The last time Pam had insomnia was after she called off the wedding with Roy and then it was fine if she didn’t do anything but eat cereal out of the box and watch weird infomercials at night. She wasn’t responsible for rocking a baby and making peanut, dairy and gluten free desserts to bring to daycare and playing repetitive games with a toddler.
She didn’t have anyone, and it was scary, yes, to be alone at 28 for the first time in her whole life, but not scary like this. Not like the scary that comes with being past 30 and somehow being alone while wearing a wedding band and carrying two babies to the car while it snows and they’re both screaming. The kind of scary that makes her realize she can do a lot more than she thought she could, it’s just going to take a little bit of her each time to make it possible.
Pam was never the kind of girl to go out on Friday nights, out the way other women talk about going out. With the primping and the outfits and the dancing or the drinking or the debauchery. And yet as she sits on her couch, too tired to find the remote, Phillip breathing in a way over the baby monitor that suggests he’s going to have another cold before she knows it, Pam wants to be out. With a pink drink in one hand and maybe a cigarette in another, saying it’s fine, she only does this when she’s drunk. The tip of the cigarette wearing a color of lipstick so bright she’s never even owned something like that in reality.
She has regrets at night because she has the time to have regrets and nothing to distract herself from them.
The dryer’s going to buzz soon, full of the clothes Cece spilled yogurt on and bath towels and onesies, and Pam’s going to fold them all, mindless, while Jim is socializing or eating out or at the very least, not balling socks.
She resents him. No matter how tired he sounds or how short he comes across on the phone. She resents him because she doesn’t get to be those things. She sings “Old McDonald” for the 97th time and makes up what a rabbit says and reminds Cece again not to splash Mommy while she’s in the bathtub and she’ll do it again tomorrow night and again after that, and she’ll smile the whole time because her children deserve that.
But she can’t help but think that she deserves some stuff too.
When she reaches for her phone, she’s pretty sure she was going to text Jim, but she finds herself typing, So if we were young and cool what would be doing tonight? to Brian.
There’s a weird sense of anticipation in her, waiting to see if he’s going to respond, which she tries to distract herself from by getting up and unloading the dishwasher. After noticing she put too many nipples in the thing, she sighs, and gets ready to wash them by hand in the sink, but then her pocket vibrates.
She bites her lip in an attempt not to smile while she reads, I AM young and cool and I’ll have you know I’m watching a very hip show on pawn stores.
Young and cool people don’t use the word ‘hip’ she sends back and she can see the little dots at the bottom of her screen that show he’s already crafting a response.
please Pam, like we’d even tell you what kind of slang we use.
She leaves the dirty bottle parts in the sink and asks him to describe the treasures people are trying to sell. They wind up talking about the weird things her grandmother has in her house and his childhood obsession with Cracker Jack prizes and she doesn’t even mind that it takes her two trips with the laundry basket to get all her clean-for-the-moment clothes upstairs.
But, after awhile, he tells her she should probably get to bed and she writes, Is it that obvious at work how tired I am?
I think you always look great shows up on the screen and she touches the words in their little conversation bubble, turning them a darker blue. Before she can respond because thank you seems too small and it’s all she can think of to say, he shoots off, sleep well P.
You too, she sends, after a minute, but it comes up green instead of blue, so, it’s possible he already turned his phone off.
The weird thing is, she does sleep that night, peacefully even, despite the fact there’s a lot of stuff she should be trying to sort out.
Doesn’t even need to count sheep.
ii.
(Hey!) (Ho!)
“So, tell me, how guilty should I feel for being here, drunk, while my mom’s in my lice ridden house?” she asks him, popping a peanut into her mouth.
“I thought girls just want to have fun,” Brian says, reaching into the bowl as well. He’s allowed to sit with her, and talk, because Rob’s been taking a piss for so long he’s probably definitely getting someone’s number.
“Don’t mock my karaoke choices.”
He tells her, “Oh, I would never dream of it,” with a smirk he knows is too flirtatious and over the top especially since he’s sober.
“Fine, Brian. What would you serenade the masses with?”
He looks at her overly curly hair, like the girls he used to like in high school, and her mom cardigan, and he knows exactly why he had no problem calling Alyssa to say he had to stay late at work. “‘Hip Hop Hooray’.”
“What?”
“Naughty by Nature, come on!” She still looks puzzled, so he puts his arms up to do the chant, “You know it, ‘Hey, ho, hey ho,'" and then she laughs.
“I haven’t thought about that song since freshman year.”
“Pam, that’s a lie.”
“Okay, maybe I’ve heard it in my head since then, but that can’t count.”
“Actually that’s exactly what thinking is, hearing something in your head,” and she’s laughing again, and leaning into him, and she’s drunk and married, but it’s still the most fun he’s had at a bar since the last time his assignment was to follow her to one. "Okay, what about,” he starts singing, “wrote a little ditty 'bout Pam and Bri-an..."
She snorts she's cracking up that hard, and he pulls her hand away from her face when she tries to cover up her embarrassment.
"If I sang for you, you've got to let me see that smile." He half expects for it to fade but she keeps grinning.
"Two American middle aged people doing the best they can," she closes out the verse and if this is his best he has no idea what his worst would look like.
"Man, you're great," he informs her, just digging that hole a little deeper. Looking at the flush on her face that’s maybe a little bit him but probably just all the alcohol. Wanting to kiss her regardless.
But Rob’s going to come back from the bathroom and Alyssa’s going to tell him to be careful not to leave the kitchen light on in a text, and Mrs. Beesly’s going to need to go home and lot of other things that should all matter a little more than they do.
He offers to get her a glass of water and a cab, and she accepts both, which is probably for the best.
iii
So show me family
All the blood that I would bleed
I don't know where I belong
I don't know where I went wrong
But I can write a song
When she goes into the kitchen for her second cup of coffee of the morning, Brian follows her, since it seems Jeff is handling the boom work on an interview with Oscar in the conference room.
“You want some?” she asks, motioning the pot in his direction, but he shakes his head. And she doesn’t want to talk to him about Jim’s first day in Philly or her first night home alone with the kids, or what the plan is going ahead, but she figures it’s better to talk to him before having to do it on camera. “I didn’t sleep much.”
He sits down at the table and she joins him, even though there’s a stack of things to get to on her desk. “You stay up too late watching the Count on Monsterpiece Theater with Philip again?”
She informs him, “Cookie Monster hosts Monsterpiece Theater,” while stirring another pack of sugar into her mug.
“My apologies.”
“And, no, Philip went down beautifully last night. It was Cece who spent over an hour crying for her dad to read her a bedtime story.”
“That’s rough,” he says, looking at her like he actually cares that that’s how she spent her time from 7 to 8:19. “Did she eventually just tire herself out?”
“Not before she puked on her sheets.”
He grimaces. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” She sighs and sips the coffee and tries to tamp down the anxiety that’s been threatening to rise up since Jim’s new opportunity came into their lives.
“But, hey, maybe tonight will be better, you know? You’ve got one under your belt already and everything.” Pam stares into her mug, trying to breathe, thinking of all the things that can go wrong tonight instead. And then Brian’s hand is on her shoulder and she looks over at him and it’s nice that someone cares that she’s sad. That someone still doesn’t just want something else from her. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.
“I love my kids,” she says, shakily, as he nods. “But sometimes I just want to leave them there in the house and disappear.” She doesn’t say out loud, like Jim did, but she thinks it, and it makes the knots in her stomach get that much tighter, even as Brian squeezes her arm. “I don’t know, I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay, I mean, all of this is okay. It’s normal to feel this stuff.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
He turns his head away, breaking eye contact a little. Shy. “Alyssa made me watch Sex and the City 2 with her, and the redhead said it was fine.”
“You must really like her,” Pam says, aware of the way he’s still touching her.
“Yeah,” he says, sheepish, with a hint of a blush. “She’s not so bad.”
Pam thinks about the weird way it felt to reach across the whole length of the bed to turn off the alarm clock in the morning and how the kids both have to get shots at the pediatrician tomorrow after work as Brian’s thumb moves over the sleeve of her sweater.
She tells him, “I should get back,” while making no attempt to do so.
“Hey, before you do, draw me something.” He slides a napkin towards her with the hand that was comforting her and takes one of the Bic pens out of the Solo cup next to the empty salt shaker with the other.
“What?”
“I need another Pam Beesly original,” because he still calls her by her maiden name. “Something funny you can think about later, if you need to. Give you a laugh.”
She takes the pen and doodles out silly things they’ve talked about recently: a snake wearing a monocle, Dwight with an afro, that weird mascot from the Olympics, and as he smiles, she feels herself smiling too.
iv.
I don't think you're right for him
Look at what it might have been if you
Took a bus to China Town
I'd be standing on Canal
And Bowery
And she'd be standing next to me
There’s a meeting where it’s decided that he and Colin are going to New York with her. Mike sets up a sublet for them, buys them each a guidebook on Manhattan and tells them like any good mother hen of a boss that their per diem is not to be spent on booze alone.
So they obviously scope out the bars around their neighborhood in Brooklyn as soon as they finish taking the boxes out of Colin’s Toyota. They toast this next phase in their story even though it feels weird to do that without Pam there.
He lays in his-for-the-next-few-months bed that night, listening to the hum of a box fan he hasn’t used since college, wondering what she’s thinking about, what she’s feeling.
He wants to call her but she’s probably on the phone with Jim, her boyfriend, so he just thinks about it, feeling 19, on the verge of something.
And then he’s picking up Pam’s audio from outside of classroom doors and in dark bars and the scenery’s different in Brooklyn, obviously, but she’s different too. Lighter.
He rides the subway with her and they make up stories about the other passengers, which she’ll sometimes hand him sketches of the next morning. He starts hanging them up on the fridge, his own museum to weird New York, that he stares at while drinking his iced coffee.
Colin looks at him sometimes, like he should know better, but Colin’s always been the least annoying one of his co-workers, so that’s as far as it goes.
When she aces an assignment he knows she spent a lot of time on, Brian tells her he’s taking her out to celebrate even though that tool Alex almost beats him to it. Since Jim’s not coming in that weekend either. And she agrees. Meets him at their subway stop in little sandals and a sundress that he knows all night he’s going to want to touch the strap of.
He takes her to some little place in Chinatown that one of his college friends said was amazing, and they wind up sitting at a table with most of an Asian family. He watches her try to use her chopsticks and wave at the little girl sitting on her mother’s lap across the restaurant and cannot stop smiling.
His fortune tells him that our first and last love is self-love and he can’t get over the way she blushes and laughs out loud and makes at least three people turn to stare. When she delicately cracks open her own cookie, she reads, “A thrilling time is in your immediate future,” and he mentally adds the childish, “in bed” onto the end. Feels his own skin flush as he takes another sip of his beer.
Out on the street, it’s somehow cooler than the restaurant, even though it’s August in Manhattan.
“I don’t want to go home yet. You want to go home?” he asks her, and she shakes her head no with her whole body, hips swaying, purse batting playfully against her thighs.
They wind up picking up more beer, drinking it out of paper bags like true classy individuals, and heading towards the Bridge. He starts to hold her hand somewhere just before Manhattan turns into Brooklyn and she lets him. Their arms swinging between them, anyone else would think they were a couple. That there was no guy waiting back in Pennsylvania with a ring he bought a week after he broke up with his other long term girlfriend.
He leans in to kiss her, when they’re looking out over the East River, her hair blowing in the hot breeze, but she turns her head, and he gets her cheek instead.
“Brian,” she says, with a warning tone that lets him know she’ll indulge him a little, but not that much.
He responds with, “Yeah,” and a sigh. Thinking about how it doesn’t count, none of this counts. They’re both tourists in New York. Why not act a little like they’re never going home?
They walk all the way back to her dorm, it must be miles, and with only a block left, she finally says, “I think my shoes are literally threatening to cut off my pinkie toes.”
And since this whole thing was his idea, because he couldn’t stand the idea of getting in a cab and dropping her off before the sun had even set, he bends down and offers her a ride the rest of the way.
She hops on his back in front of the kids with dreadlocks and ironic t-shirts, and he carries her the rest of the way. At the front door, she slides off, straightening out her skirt. “Thanks. For the lift and dinner and everything. I had a great time.”
“It was my pleasure.”
This time she’s the one leaning to kiss him on the cheek. “Have a good night, Brian.”
“You too,” he says. He watches her go inside and show her ID to the night guard on duty and disappear around the hallway’s corner, but not before she waves.
He doesn’t tell Colin where he was. Just comes in and takes yet another beer out of the fridge before flopping down on the couch. Spends way too much time thinking about how he got a masturbation prediction from a cookie tonight.
A few days later, she texts him in the middle of the afternoon, “Hey, feel like driving to Jersey?” and Jersey sucks, but it’s Pam asking.
So he and Colin follow her down the Parkway in the rain and capture the long distance footage of Jim getting down on one knee and proposing, and he hears Michael saying, “BFD, engaged ain’t married,” in his head the whole ride back to Brooklyn.
v.
Love ‒ we need it now
Let's hope, hope for some
So, we're bleeding out
She didn’t get married but Jim’s in Connecticut anyway. And the only person who doesn’t look at her like she’s thrown her whole life away is Brian.
That’s where Pam’s at at the end of June.
She felt empowered about breaking off the engagement in the beginning, but then afterward, it felt like nothing had changed even though obviously her entire world has shifted.
She’s playing Bejeweled and trying to decide which brand of cereal to have for dinner when she gets home when she notices Brian watching her from behind Dwight’s desk. He raises his eyebrows, asking if she’s okay, and she nods, even though she realizes she’s going to have to pick up milk.
She writes it on a post-it, “buy milk” and attaches it to her car keys, because last Tuesday she just trusted herself to remember and had to eat dry Crispix out of the box in her new tiny kitchen. On her computer screen, she refreshes her game, and swaps a ruby for whatever the purple stone is, getting four gems in a row, and feeling accomplished even though that’s ridiculous.
And an hour later, when she has in fact forgotten about the milk again, but beaten her previous high score, Brian starts packing up his equipment by reception.
“You hanging in there?” he asks. “Because I couldn’t help but notice Meredith offering you her opinions on dating websites over lunch.”
“Yeah, I’m trying to block that event from my memory, so, if you could stop talking about it, that would really speed that process along.”
“Sorry,” he says, winding a wire around his bicep and through his palm. “But I’ve got to ask...”
“What? If I’m considering online dating yet? No.” She switches the phone over to voicemail, and puts some paper clips back into their box.
“No, not that.”
Pam checks the schedule for tomorrow, and sees that the copy guy is stopping by for scheduled maintenance. What a burst of excitement. “If I’d ever become so sad that I’d let Meredith’s advice influence my life?”
“No, let me finish.”
“Okay, finish.”
“What I was going to ask was is it really hard to have so many people so noticeably casting judgements about your life?”
“Ugh,” she says, her shoulders stooping. “Don’t make me feel like I should be sitting in a chair in the conference room.”
“You’re right, you’re right. I’m making things worse.”
She doesn’t mean to say, it, but “Yup!” sneaks out under her breath, and he laughs. “It’s funny now? You making me feel bad is funny?” she says like she’s actually mad about it, but she’s smiling. At least someone is acknowledging that they’re not actually helping.
“No. But it’s making me want to buy you dinner.”
Pam could think about how she hasn’t eaten dinner with a guy who isn’t Roy or her dad in a really long time. She could fantasize about the kind of place Jim would take her to. Or she can go out to eat with this single guy who’s actually offering. “Good. It should make you want to do that.”
“Now?” he asks, and she can tell how hopeful he is about her answer.
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
They spend fifteen minutes in the parking lot trying to decide who should drive, and if it’s out of the way for him to drop her off back here after, and finally they just decide that she’ll follow him to The Banshee.
It’s still light out and she rolls her windows all the way down, letting the warm air into the car. Kids are outside playing and she’s remembering those days right before summer vacation started, the summer stretching out ahead of her, just slightly out of reach but almost better for it. Summer was always perfect at this point in June because it hadn’t really happened yet.
At the pub, he asks if she wants to sit outside, and she does, although it makes her wish she wasn’t dressed for work. He orders a beer and she gets a glass of wine, and they talk in the way she wishes she could talk to him all the time at work. Like the way she used to talk to Jim, but not exactly.
Pam flicks her left shoe off and on while Brian tells her about how he and his friends used to make movies together when they were in high school, and she mentions how they probably would have been friends, hanging out in the art room or the computer lab during free periods.
“How did you ever end up dating a basketball player anyway, Pam, I’ve got to ask.”
“Roy liked me,” she says, simply, because that’s kind of all there was to it. She’d been crushing on this senior, Jonathan, who wore eyeliner and never let anyone call him Jon, when Roy had asked her to go and get fries sometime after school. Jonathan made a lot more sense to her as her boyfriend, but the most he had ever done was compliment one of her paintings during class.
“So you were going to marry a guy because he liked you?”
“There’s worse reasons to marry someone than that.” She pokes at her salad. “And anyway, it’s not like I went through with it.”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up. I took you out so you could have a good time and I was counting on myself not to screw that up.”
“I am having a good time. You’re better company than a repeat of Everybody Loves Raymond.”
He laughs and makes her clarify if he’s better company than Friends, which, she informs him he isn’t, since basically no one is.
They split a piece of pie while the sun sets, and he gives her his sweatshirt once the air starts to cool off. It’s warm and it doesn’t smell like Roy.
Eventually the way their waitress is hovering makes them both realize that they should go. “I’ll see you at work tomorrow,” he says and she thanks him for dinner.
She wants him to brush his hand against hers, or fix her hair, which she realizes are all smaller pieces of wanting him to kiss her.
But he just walks her to her car and she has to remind herself about that June sense of possibility, all the weeks they have ahead.
Pam’s never been the one to act first. Until that night outside a restaurant named for a wailing ghost.
That night, nine days and so many years after she was supposed to marry Roy, she pulls herself up to Brian’s mouth and can’t wait to see where this leads.
vi.
I belong with you, you belong with me, you're my sweetheart
I belong with you, you belong with me, you're my sweet
It’s while she’s laughing over Jim’s answer of mixed berries yogurt that Brian feels himself smiling the tiny smile that means he kind of likes a girl.
Through his headphones, he listens to her share so many parts of herself that no one else has ever bothered to ask about. And he sees the way Jim looks at her, and the way Roy doesn’t, as he sits in the editing bay some nights and he wonders what others could pick up on if he was on the other side of the camera.
So he stays where he’s supposed to. Behind the boom and the lens and the producer.
He does that for a year.
And then he does it for eight more.
Until it’s nearly 2013 and he’s grown up on this project, falling for a girl he listens to for a living, and he can’t take it any more. He tells them to turn off the camera and walks over to her and he knows exactly how it’s going to read on film.
He just don’t know how it’s going to read for her.
And nine years is suddenly way too long for him not to.