Why, oh why, didn’t Dunder Mifflin have carpet cleaners on call? There had to be people who cleared the wastebaskets, reset the tables in the break room, cleaned up Dwight’s disgusting beet mess that he left in the fridge for two months, and so on, even if they only came in on weekends. So they could come in for a carpet cleaning emergency, right? They’d know what to do. They’d deal with Michael’s panic calmly and easily. They’d…

OK, mostly they’d mean that Roy of all people wasn’t upstairs today.

Sure, Jim realized, it probably wasn’t the most romantic of situations: to see one’s fiancé cleaning up literal human shit from the inside of your boss’s office, and then hauling out the stained carpet for cleaning, disposal, whatever. But there were certain angles it could be viewed as positive from, and these teased Jim with possibility. He’d always imagined Roy as a big buffalo of a man, less concerned with cleanliness or hygiene than with projecting a masculine affect: the sort of guy who’d be more likely to leave his fiancé with a stinky clogged toilet at 2:37 a.m. than to flush, much less fix the toilet himself. So this new situation put a nasty spin on his assumptions: what if this helped prove Roy was a practical, capable man who cleaned up messes instead of causing them? What if seeing him take control of a situation that had everyone freaking out was an aphrodisiac? What if…

The other problem, of course, was that this was all what if. Jim knew it was irrational to think that one carpet cleaning was actually going to change Pam’s opinion of Roy, much less that she even had the thoughts he did about her fiancé. After all, they’d been dating for ten years, engaged for three…her thoughts on that score had to be pretty fixed, didn’t they? And they obviously didn’t march with Jim’s, or else she wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place, right? So this was all beyond the land of hypothetical into dream, wish, and fantasy.

But he didn’t even know if his fantastical dream-nightmare-panic scenario was happening. Because he’d been kicked out of the main office into the annex so that Roy (and Darryl, he supposed) could do the work. So instead of catching Pam’s eyes and rolling his at Michael’s odd ejaculations (and at the use of the word ejaculations, which he could pretend to be shocked by, and so on and so on) until she giggled, he was stuck listening to a Kelly monologue. He was sure she thought of it as a conversation, of course, but here in the safety of his own mind he could at least call a spade a spade.

Worse, instead of waiting eagerly to hear Pam’s giggle, or the little intake of breath that meant she’d noticed something interesting that he’d get to hear about later, he was dreading it. Every sound that was vaguely like her made him jump. Alright, it usually did. But this was a bad jump, an “oh no, she’s like that with everybody” jump. Well, not everybody. An “oh no, she’s like that with Roy” jump.

Not that it ought to be bad for her to be like she was with him with Roy. After all, if you thought about things rationally, coolly, objectively (which he had to admit had ceased to be his strength recently…or ever when it came to Pam) you would think that someone who wanted to date…be engaged to…marry someone else could do worse than to relate to that person in the same way that that person related to their actual significant other.  It would be a sign of closeness; a sign that there was, as his sister Larissa had reminded him just last night on the phone, “something there.” There were at least three problems with this that he could see: one, he knew he was close with Pam, so it wasn’t comforting to hear that, because he wanted to be special; two, Roy was an ass and (5) he didn’t want to be like Roy, especially to Pam; three, the looming deadline of June 10 that meant that he couldn’t draw this out as slowly as everyone told him he had to.

Ugh. Sitting in the back wasn’t just crowded, it was bad for his mental health. He had started with a burst of energy, a determination that if he couldn’t look at Pam he’d work himself into not caring that he couldn’t, use the opportunity to get ahead on work so that when (he tried not to think if) he got to move back he could look to his heart’s content. But then thinking about Roy and listening (even with half an ear) to Kelly and trying to avoid Angela’s scolding eye had made muck of that intention, and now he was wallowing in that muck. He needed distraction.

He stuck his head out of the back and walked quickly to the break room. Nothing wrong with that, right? He wasn’t cursed out of the front, just moved for the day. Kelly came to the break room sometimes. So did Kevin. This was OK.

He dealt with the expected Dwight interrogation, which was almost sweet in its predictability, grabbed a grape soda, waiting for the satisfying plonk as it fell, popped the tab, and sat. That he happened to sit facing the windows to the main office was just coincidence, he told himself.

He watched Roy. Well, he also watched Pam, but he didn’t really notice that he was doing it, in the same way you don’t notice you’re breathing until someone mentions it and then it gets all weird. Consciously, he watched Roy. And he began to notice a tendency that he didn’t really trust himself to have gotten right, but which made him want to grab someone else (if only the other candidates weren’t Michael, Dwight, and Darryl) and demand whether they saw it too.

Roy didn’t talk to Pam.

Oh, he did on occasion, but she kept glancing up from the desk towards him (like she always did towards me, Jim thought with a pang—though she had been turned towards the copier when he’d come out of the back and he hadn’t been brave enough to say hi with Roy right there, so she didn’t look at him. Or at least he hoped that was the reason) and Roy almost never met her eyes. He grunted jokes to Darryl, tweaked Dwight’s sensibilities (Jim was really not enjoying feeling like they were similar), and mocked Michael (OK, that wasn’t Jim’s bag quite as much) but he didn’t really talk to Pam.

Jim sipped his grape soda, surprised to see it was still almost full, and wondered what it meant. When he finished the drink he walked back to the annex and got back to work. Whatever it meant, it was suddenly very important to make sure he had plenty of available time for Pam when he did get back to his regular desk.