The strangest thing about being in a relationship with Jim is that it doesn’t actually change anything, she realizes.

She knows that’s not quite true—certainly, they never spent their time in together in the supply closet in quite that way before—and she knows she hasn’t literally always felt the same way about him as she does now. When he first started, she only noticed him as a distraction, a break in the routine. Now he is her routine, but not in the way that sounds; not in the slow boring habitual way that marks the beaten path of the world, but in the way that lungs breathing and hearts beating and stomachs digesting are a habit—he’s become an integrated part of her body, with a Jim-noticing system buried deep in her medulla oblongata alongside the cardiovascular and the respiratory and all the other systems that keep her body going, and that won’t stop until she’s dead. He’s a part of her now, in a way Roy never was, in a way she didn’t ever think anyone would, and she’s happy it’s so. She’s most happy because she realizes that the last four years haven’t been a waste; the seven years before that weren’t either; nothing that she’s experienced has been valueless because if it hadn’t happened this way, if he hadn’t slipped into her life almost imperceptibly and she hadn’t had the chance to realize how important he was bit by tiny bit—and then feel the same pain he felt for so long over the last year—she doesn’t think it would have happened at all.

A little bit of pain, on both their parts, was a necessary ingredient, and while she wishes she could have minimized his pain (and while they’re at it, she wouldn’t mind having had a little less herself) there’s no way she’d risk undoing a single moment of it. Because they’re here now, and if someone appeared in a time machine and offered her a ride back to the day they met, or the day he first told her he loved her, or even the day of the merger, she wouldn’t take it, because she’s finally got her hands on him (literally and metaphorically) and she’ll be damned if she’s going to let go.

She still notices him every moment they’re together—that’s actually been true for far longer than she’d have admitted even a little while ago, much less when it was all going on—only now she gets to revel in the fact that she spends almost all of her day around the one person in her life who matters most. She’s amazed sometimes at how easy it is for them to slip into this role of lover and beloved—how natural it feels to slide back into their old dynamic, only with the added benefit of a freely and fully expressed affection between them. OK, maybe not entirely fully expressed—they’re trying to be technically discreet, since they would rather not have the entire office gossip about them all of the time—but expressed, and fully understood, and out in the open.

It’s like four years of pranking Dwight and coddling Michael and just generally surviving the madness of Dunder Mifflin was just practice relationship-building. She already knows what every one of his facial expressions means (and she’s rapidly cataloguing which ones of them also have a secondary, subsurface meaning of “I love you” or “I miss you” or “I want to fuck you”—so far, the rate of translation to at least one of those three meanings is 100%). They already have a secret language and it works just as well for love and affection as it ever did for laughs—and it still works for laughs, too, she realizes. And of course, as she does, she also realizes that it always worked for love; she just didn’t want to acknowledge it back then.

In fact, if there’s anyone or anything she’s learning about, it’s not Jim but herself: she’s noticing all the ways she’s always shown him affection, her own love language if you will, only now without the thick layer of denial that she used to slather over it to make it all OK even though she was with Roy. She’s also learning just how much attention he paid to her, and how carefully he filed that knowledge away. And she knows he’s learning the same thing, learning which things he used to do that were pure pining and which were intended to actually communicate with her, becoming aware that while she might not have been able to comfort him (and she still regrets that day hotly and vividly) she knows just as much about him as he does about her. And they’re both so happy that even when they learn something painful (like the day she realizes that when he swallows hard, he’s thinking about kissing her, and remembers all the times she turned away unthinkingly—and worse, all the times she kept staring at him and breaking his heart by not letting herself notice how he felt, or the time she figures out that he knows she doesn’t like being tickled because he’d watch her with Roy, and she remembers sitting on his desk while being tickled and just wants to sink into the floor) they can actually talk about it, and process it, without being dragged down into the doldrums of the past.

That’s what she most notices about them, actually: that they just work together, that it’s easy and fun and all the things that her relationship with Roy never really was. And no, it’s not all bluebirds and puppydogs (or maybe it is, because bluebirds bite your fingers sometimes and puppydogs piddle inside when you haven’t trained them right) because they do fight, and they do disagree, and they’re not perfect. But they’re clearly perfect for each other, and she’s so glad. Because if she’d been wrong about this, she’s not sure when she’d trust herself again. And she tells Jim this and he nods, and he kisses her, and after the kiss he just murmurs “same,” and holds her hand while they lie on her bed in silence for a little. And then he turns to her and asks “was that OK? Should I have said something more?” and she pretends to get upset and insist that yes, obviously, he should have said more, and he cocks his head at her (she thinks—she’s too happy and content to really turn around and look at him, but she’s got a pretty good idea of how he moves by now) and pretends to ponder it for a little while before doing a little “eureka!’ gesture and bending down to whisper “I love you” in her ear.

And she notices that for the first time she’s in a relationship where she doesn’t have to notice when she’s happy. Because she just is.