A/N: Yeah, I know, I'm starting another chapter fic while A Whole New World and Life In Slow Motion are still unfinished. And yes, it is another fic where my heroine is put in danger. I'm not sure why that keeps happening, but I was just watching Women's Appreciation a couple weeks ago and Michael's comment about the guy having seen Pam or Karen stuck with me a bit. And I thought, what would happen if it had been Pam? And here's what my twisted imagination came up with. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: If I owned this show, I'd have barbecued Karen much earlier in Season 3. So obviously, I own nothing.

Stuck Between Floors

by Angel Monroe

Even before the camera crews showed up, she was always the first to arrive in the morning. No, actually, that wasn't true. Sometimes she found Dwight there before her, sometimes sleeping on the couch by the reception desk. Those were weird mornings.

But usually, she came about thirty minutes before everyone else and got the office ready. She turned on all the lights, started the coffeemaker, and occasionally she left little presents (with very different intents) for Jim, Dwight, or anyone else she pleased. It was her private time away from her coworkers, when she could drink her tea and relax without Michael or Dwight or Angela breathing down her neck.

Today the parking lot was empty when she pulled in, and the vacant look of it was familiar and comforting. She parked under the lamp as she always did, grabbed her purse, and glanced briefly at her reflection out of sheer habit. The face never changed. The makeup never changed. The expression in her eyes very rarely changed. It was just another day at the Dunder-Mifflin Paper Company. Why hadn't she left this job already?

And then the reflection did change…just a little. Her eyes crinkled the tiniest bit at the corners, like they wanted to smile even if she didn't. That was the expression they always adopted when she was trying not to laugh at Jim.

Things were still a little weird between them—Angela's Pam-pong count was about half what it always had been before Stamford—but it was getting better. With each conversation, each prank, they were working their way back to best friends. As for everything else, well…

The clock on her dash read a full three minutes since she'd parked, so with a dramatic sigh and a rolling of her eyes that no one but her mirror could see, she opened the door and started the long, arduous (thirty foot) trek to the building, keys in hand.

"Miss!"

She looked up, stunned to see an intruder in her vacant space. A worn, dark blue intruder of a car parked sideways across the parking spots just fifteen feet to her right. The man sitting in the driver's seat seemed to be staring pretty hard at the map in his lap.

"Miss, could you help me out here. I think I got turned around somewhere."

He looked up at her, such hope on his face, and she knew she couldn't really leave the poor guy lost. She walked toward him, thinking that no one would mind if the coffee wasn't quite done. Five minutes didn't matter to the lights or the spring-loaded bobble head she had in her purse for Dwight.

"Alright, so where are you trying to go?" she asked, glancing down at the map.

And there it was. Something she really wasn't expecting strewn across Fulton Avenue and Gardener. Holy mother of…

"Oh, God!" she yelped, turning away. She didn't see that. She didn't see anything. Oh man, she was blind.

It occurred to her to start walking away, to get into the building and call the police. Or Jim. Oh man, she would never get that picture out of her head.

"Where are you going?" said a laughing voice behind her, and she was afraid to look. She just picked up her pace. Thirty feet was never so far.

She didn't expect him to come after her. For some reason she pegged him as a pervert, but a relatively harmless one. Maybe it was that hopeful look he'd given her before. But it was a startling jolt when she heard a footstep behind her. And another. A glance over her shoulder confirmed it, and she began to run.

Damn these shoes. Damn these shoes. Of course, this had to happen on the morning when she had tried to dress up a little, worn inch-and-a-half pumps instead of her white keds.

She stumbled into the door when her right heel snapped, but she somehow managed to not drop her key. She slammed it into the lock and turned. It clicked, the door pushed open, and a hand grabbed her jacket collar from behind.

He was stronger than he looked, too. Even as thin as he was, he could have lifted her clear off the ground if she hadn't slipped out of the coat. He took hold of her blouse collar, and for a full moment as she struggled to hang onto the door handles, Pam thought that this was it. This was how she was going to die.

And then her first button popped and the thin fabric of her blouse ripped all the way down her back. He stumbled as a strip came off in his hand, and she took his moment of disorientation to push herself through the door. Turn the lock behind her. Turn around and run.

She spared a moment to take the elevator, both because of her broken shoe and because her mom had always warned her against stairwells. Some random percentage of assaults every year took place in stairwells, so she chanced pressing the up button and was relieved when the doors opened right away.

Still, every second on the elevator, she imagined that he could have broken in already. He would take the stairs and beat her to the office. If those doors opened, there was a chance he'd be standing there waiting for her. God, why did she have to get to the office so early? No one would be around for another…

She checked her watch. Nineteen minutes.

Oh God.

She hit the stop button and the elevator jerked. A little buzzer-bell began to ring softly but sharply, and she slumped to the ground.

Okay, so she needed to call the police, but her purse (and consequently, her cell phone) had slipped off her shoulder with her coat. He had it, whoever he was. Or it was sitting on the pavement outside the doors she would not open right now for the president himself. Oh man, her driver's license was in there with her name and her address and everything. And her spare apartment key. And her address book. Oh man.

She had to get to the office phone to call the police. Which meant that she had to open the elevator doors. She checked her watch again. Sixteen minutes. That door wasn't opening for another sixteen minutes.

At eight minutes, she heard a thump, thump, thump on the wall in front of her. She scooted away from the sound and closed her eyes tightly. No one showed up this early except maybe the camera crew, and she wasn't opening the doors for them, either. Nope. Nuh-uh.

Another thump. "Pam? Are you in there? What's going on?"

Jim.

When the doors chimed open, she launched herself at him, surprising herself almost as much as him.

"Whoa, whoa! What's up Beesly? It's only been sixt…."

He trailed off, probably because she was shaking. And crying. And maybe he noticed her shirt.

Abruptly, she took a step back, pulling the top of her shirt together as much as she could without the thing falling apart. It was too intimate, having him hold her when she was so exposed. She saw the camera crew filming from over his shoulder and ducked her head.

"Hey, whoa, what happened to you?" he asked, taking off his suit jacket and wrapping it around her shoulders. She tasted his cologne every time she gasped. "Are you okay?"

She couldn't speak, not with those cameras on her and her body shaking so violently. Suddenly those men she'd seen five days a week for over two years seemed foreign and hostile. Their cameras, all pointed at her, seemed too demanding.

Jim noticed her aversion and seemed to remember the cameramen, too, turning to speak with them in hushed tones until they lowered their equipment and excused themselves to the break room.

"Okay," Jim said, very cautiously putting his hands on her shoulders. "So—"

"How…" hiccup "…how did you get in? The downstairs door…" hiccup "…was locked."

He didn't seem to care about her question as much as his, but he mumbled something about "second in command" as he led her to her chair behind the receptionist desk. She tried to pick up the phone and he took her hand in his, making her look at him.

"Pam, what happened?"

She looked around, suddenly paranoid in the silence. Where had that man gone? "There was a guy when I got out of my car. He asked for directions but then he had his…his…you know! And it was out on the map and he ran after me. And…" she just sort of deflated, staring at her hands which were in Jim's, and one of her nails had a thin line of dirt under it. But Jim's hands were warm. Her pulse began to even out.

"Did he catch you?" She looked up at him and wasn't sure what the answer was. What the question was. She needed to call the police. "Pam, did he get his hands on you?"

A hot blush crept up her neck, and she knew what he meant. It was startling, to think that she could have been raped. Her world could have been changed, turned upside down. She would be a completely different person. "Uh, no. No, I got the door locked and I hid out in the elevator. I'm okay."

Jim pulled her into a hug so tight she would have felt uncomfortable if it had been anyone else. He kissed her temple like she was his, and she didn't mind.

"Okay, uh, you call the police," he said, stepping away from her, "and I'll call Dwight—"

"Dwight?"

He smiled just a little bit. "If there's anyone in this office that will take this seriously, who do you think it'll be?" She nodded. Of course he was right. "And then I'm going to take you home."

"I can't go home," she interrupted, hating the helplessness that came with the statement. She couldn't go home. She couldn't feel safe in her own apartment. Safety felt so fluid just now. "I lost my purse out there, and there's a spare key. I don't think I can go home."

He nodded, sitting down at his desk. "Okay, well, I'll take you to my place, then. We'll call your landlord about the locks when we get there, and they'll have things set for you by tonight."

That made sense. Even if she was thinking irrationally and didn't want to go anywhere in her address book, Halpert was all the way in the H's. She'd be safe there. He'd look out for her. "Yeah, okay."

---

Not long after the police had asked their questions and Dwight had asked all of his own, Jim opened the door to his apartment and ushered Pam inside. He left her at the door and ran to clean a few things up, making sure Mark didn't have anything obscene out in the open. Up in his room he threw last night's sleepwear in the hamper and straightened his sheets. He grabbed a t-shirt and some sweats out of the closet.

She had wandered into the living room when he came down the stairs, and his too-big jacket was still wrapped around her. One broken shoe sat in her lap. He noticed that her mascara hadn't run.

"Here," he said, handing her the clothes and sitting down beside her. "The bathroom is upstairs on the left if you want to get cleaned up. My room is…well, you remember, if you want to lay down or anything. You know, whatever you want to do."

She looked up at him, smiled just a little bit. "Yeah, uh, thanks. And, um, thanks for finding me…in the elevator. I was just…" she started to tear up and let out a long, deep breath, "…I was scared, you know?"

"Yeah," he breathed, hating the world and feeling so very protective over her. It was strange, like some prehistoric male instinct had surfaced inside of him. He wanted to hunt down whoever the man was, rip him apart like a scene from some gladiator movie. He wanted to watch over her while she slept. "But you got away. You made it, and you're safe now. So it's okay."

She nodded again, looking down at her hands like she was ashamed. She had nothing to be ashamed of. He suddenly wanted to tell her that she was beautiful.

"So," he sighed, "do you want something to eat? Or we could watch a movie? Mark has a killer DVD collection."

She smiled that same grateful but half-hearted smile she'd been giving him since he'd found her, and if there was ever a smile of hers that he could dislike, that would have been it. It was too sad, too weak for the face of such a strong woman. When she stood up, it was on wobbly legs. "No, I think I'm just going to change and then lay down if that's alright. I'm starting to get a headache."

"Alright. Call me if you need anything. I'll be sitting right here." He bounced a little on the couch for emphasis and watched her walked away, wishing he knew how to make it better.

A/N: Angsty, I know. But it'll get better. Eventually. I'm evil that way. Sorry. I've already got the next chapter finished, but you've got to let me know if you want more, okay? Good, bad, or ugly, I want to know! Thanks. O:-)