“She’s my best friend.”

He says it and he’s instantly horrified. This is the last place he wants to be sharing these little gems of information. On a boat, in front of their entire work place. In front of Katy. In front of Roy.

But he is looking at her and she is looking at him and he can’t seem to stop.

She looks so happy right now. She has a genuine smile on her face and there’s just that glow she has. He rarely ever sees that glow. He likes to think he sees it when he makes her laugh. That it extinguishes immediately when Roy comes in the room. That he is the only one who can make her smile in that beautiful way.

But he may be biased.

He wants to tell everyone on this stupid boat how great she really is. How much she really does deserve. How she deserves so much more than-

Dwight interrupts him being his usual obnoxious self and she looks away, to where he is speaking. And suddenly, the spell is broken. Jim feels his face go red and he lets out a deep breath, reclaiming his seat in the booth in the corner of the room.

He knows that if Dwight hadn’t been Dwight he wouldn’t have stopped. He would have said how beautiful it is when her hair falls in front of her face as she’s typing and she almost always tucks it away behind her ear with her left middle finger. He would have said how cute she looks when she is mad. Her eyes go one shade darker and redness creeps up her cheekbones.

He secretly wonders if that’s what she looks like when-

He would have said something about her art. How it made him feel like she could do anything. That she could do anything and she shouldn’t be a receptionist in this stupid company anymore. She should be in a program somewhere, anywhere but here, chasing her dream. She shouldn’t be settling for this.

And he secretly doesn’t want her to, because she would be chasing something away from him.

He would have said how her favorite yogurt is mixed berries because she brings it in every day to lunch and sits at her desk quietly, eating a spoonful at a time, closing her eyes slightly as the spoon slid in her mouth. He would have said how she can’t swim because when she was eight and her parents took her to the lake, she was swimming and her foot got caught in a net at the bottom. She almost drowned and had been terrified to swim every since.

Not like there was any place to swim in the middle of Pennsylvania anyway.

And he has no idea how her favorite yogurt or her face when she is angry has anything to do with her wedding to Roy. He should have said something like “Congratulations” or “I’m so happy for you both, you deserve this.”

But he wasn’t, and she didn’t.

He likes to think that the things he knows about her, Roy has no idea. That he is clueless as to why Pam doesn’t own a swimsuit and he could never read her face in two seconds flat.

But he knows he is biased.