Note – Sorry for continuity errors. I swear, I just suck at life this month. And again, this story is just fluff. Far more list-focused than anything else, just because I wanted to see if I could weave together 75 imperatives into a Ryan/Kelly story. :-P

3. Take a photo. Fill the frame.

[Showing one’s teeth is a submission signal in primates.]

Kelly was at reception, idly flipping through an old copy of Elle (he’d gotten lazy about switching out new copies after she’d agreed to get back with him again) as he answered the phones, and Ryan was afraid she’d get whiplash when she turned around all of a sudden when Jim entered the office.

He smiled at her instantly, seeing the expectant look in her eyes, and lifted his black satchel. “I’ve got it. It’s good as new.”

“Oh, my God!” Kelly clapped her hands and hopped up and down a little. “It is? You got it fixed?”

“I got it fixed,” Jim grinned back, motioning for her to follow him to his desk. “My buddy at Precision said there was just a little grit jamming the lens. If it happens again, just blow a couple times, real quick, on here, real close in there, and it should do the trick.”

“That’s what she said,” Michael called as he sailed into his office, laughing on his way in. “God, it never gets old.”

Jim shot the camera a look and then pointed to the battery dock. “And he saw that you were using alkalines, so he replaced them with these. He said alkaline batteries don’t give you that much power and they burn out real quick after, like, just a couple pictures.”

Kelly was paying rapt attention. “Cool, how do they work?”

“They’re rechargeable, so they’ll take about a hundred pictures with every charge…”

“I need this faxed to that address.” Ryan looked over as Dwight approached with a small packet of papers. “Immediately, please, I have a busy day and can’t baby sit you to make sure you do it.”

He grumbled something under his breath and took the papers from him, moving over to the fax machine. Even though his back was toward him, Ryan could still hear Dwight drumming his fingers impatiently on the counter.

“So. Are you really back with Kelly?”

He sighed and fed the first sheet through. “Yeah.”

Dwight was nodding, bobbing his head in that awkward, self-important way of his. “That’s probably a good move. The Indian race has quite a few medical traits that are superior to the Caucasion race; you’re smart to take advantage of that. Thicker and healthier hair, for one thing. At least you know that Kelly won’t be bald when she’s eighty.”

Ryan fed the second sheet through the fax machine. “Yeah, there’s that.”

“Low likelihood of skin cancers due to darker pigmentation, and extremely low rates of Alzheimer’s due to a diet containing turmeric,” Dwight continued thoughtfully. “Also, their culture values the birthing of many children per family unit. Good for the survival of the race, having all those offspring running around. Better chance of at least some of them making it through the monsoon season.”

He clenched the papers in his fists, hearing the paper crinkle loudly, and didn’t trust himself to respond. Dwight flipped through the magazine that sat open on the counter, scoffing at the half-naked and gawkishly tall models in the advertisements (he liked his women petite and modestly dressed, thank you) and waited for it to go through.

“I just hope she doesn’t end up crying under her desk when you guys break up again.” The salesman sounded bored, but Ryan was suddenly interested and actually turned around to listen to him. “That was horrendous. All the salesmen had to handle our own customer service calls because Kelly wouldn’t come out from under her desk. And she put absolutely no work into her appearance, and it was off-putting.”

“Kelly cried under her desk?” he asked, only stuffing another sheet into the machine when Dwight pointedly arched a brow at him. “…For how long?”

He shrugged, not looking terribly concerned. “A couple weeks. She was entirely useless. Wouldn’t come out. Wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t answer the phones. Wouldn’t socialize during the properly designated time slots. She just lay curled up under her desk and yelled that she didn’t want to talk about you whenever anyone came to drop something off at her desk. I tried to make it so that she wouldn’t get her paycheck for those weeks, and that she would pay the company rent for that time instead, since she just spent it taking up space, but Jim vetoed it and wouldn’t let me take it up with Michael. I calculated how much she cost the company for that little pity party, and I’m going to request that it’s subtracted from her year-end bonus. It’s only fair.”

“Of course,” Ryan murmured, barely hearing that last part. He couldn’t picture the normally gregarious and peppy Kelly curled up under her desk like Dwight was saying. And for weeks after he left?

“You said this went on for…?”

“I think a couple weeks,” he shrugged. “She was better after Darryl asked her out. That’s when she got rid of your pictures, when he made a move on her. Now that could have been a potentially dangerous match: African Americans and Indians have among the highest rates of heart disease out of all the races. Put them together and it’s like…whoo. Pulmonary Chernobyl.”

Ryan made a face, knowing that there was no reason that any normal person would ever use that phrase, and pushed on. “She had pictures of me? Still? Where, on her desk?”

“Yeah, two of them, I think. There’s one more page after that.” He waited as Ryan fed it into the machine, only continuing when he was satisfied that it had been done right. “Propped up against her keyboard so that she could see them. I tried to take them away from her during the whole under-the-desk phase, but she almost bit me. And then Darryl asked her out and I saw them in the trash a couple days later. Thanks, I’ll take those.”

Ryan absently handed him the report and watched Dwight walk away, his thoughts still on Kelly allegedly huddled under her desk and refusing to come out. He knew back then that the break up would be hard on her, but he always figured that she’d mope for a week and then be back to normal. After all, she liked her job, she liked the people she worked with, and she liked Scranton. She had family and friends here, and she was hardly alone when he left.

But Dwight had no reason to lie to him, much less about Kelly, so it had be true.

He watched her standing at Jim’s desk, happily inspecting her digital camera that he’d gotten one of his friends to fix for her. She must have felt his gaze on her because she turned and looked over at him, looking confused for a moment. Before, she would have darted over to him immediately and showed off her good-as-new camera before insisting that he took a half dozen glamour shots with her, some of them serious, some of them cute, and some of them just silly. Now, she seemed to be deliberating whether she wanted to come show him anything at all.

He saved her from that by tipping his head at her. “What’ve you got there?”

Kelly held up the camera and walked over, still fiddling with the lens. “My camera. I kept getting this weird lens error, and I was going to go get a new one but then Jim said that his friend was good at camera repair and stuff and that he’d take it to him. And it totally works again!”

“Yeah?” Ryan held out his hand. “Lemme see.”

She happily handed it over and grabbed the magazine that Dwight had left open, shutting it and putting it with the others. “He saved me, like, $200. I thought for sure the thing was just busted. That’s what my dad said – he offered to get me a new one because I was kind of bummed about it.”

Naturally, he would. Her parents were filthy rich and only too happy to spoil their oldest daughter.

“Looks good,” Ryan allowed, still working the gadget as he came around the counter and sidled up next to her. “You try it out?”

“What?” She was eyeing him warily, wondering why his arm was reaching out and slipping around her waist. “No, I-”

“You should always try your things out, make sure they work,” he told her, pulling her into his side as he held up the camera to get the shot. “Smile.”

Confused though she was, Kelly managed to flash a grin at the last second, and Ryan studied the picture they’d just taken. “Not bad.”

She was staring at him again. “Ryan, wh-”

“Kelly?” Michael poked his head out of his office. “There you are. I need the evaluations you pulled from the high school and the municipal center. Now, please.”

“Oh, sure.” She pushed herself away from the counter, leaving the camera with him. “I’ll go get them.”

Michael nodded and disappeared into his office, and Ryan slipped back around the counter and into his seat. It was a slow morning, so he took the USB cord from the little camera bag and plugged it into his computer. It only took twenty seconds for Windows to download the correct drivers for it and before long he had the picture pulled up on the screen. By the time Kelly returned with the forms for Michael, he’d already attached the JPEG file in an email and sent it to her.

And, not entirely knowing why and not anywhere close to ready to dealing with it, Ryan saved a copy in his My Pictures folder, telling himself it was just for backup in case she lost hers.