Jim didn’t really know what he’d expected when he and Michael had gotten out of the car—Pam and Roy kissing on the side of the building, maybe?—but he knew he hadn’t expected to peer into the pickup’s side door and see a visibly disheveled Roy eating Arby’s from the bag.

Nor had he expected Roy to look up, meet his eyes, and lunge out of the truck. Fortunately for him, hung over Roy was apparently less coordinated than drunk Roy, who had been surprisingly good at darts, and the lunge became more of a fall in short order.

“Halpert!” The bull roar was the same, though.

“Hi, Roy.” He wasn’t sure what was going down, but if Roy was a bull, he knew that running was a sure way to enrage him.

“Halpert!” He yelled again, as if Jim hadn’t spoken.

“What?” He’d always gone through life with an insouciant attitude; he found that for the people whom he could charm, it worked, and for the people he couldn’t, it didn’t matter, and it amused him, so he clung to it whenever possible. He put it to full use here, but as he’d guessed, Roy fell squarely in the category of those he couldn’t.

“What the fuck”—he said this with a peculiar relish, as if it were the key to the whole sentence—“are you doing with my girlfriend?”

Jim bit back the instinctive retort that he at least knew that Pam was Roy’s fiancée, not his girlfriend, because he sensed that even for him this was perhaps a bridge too far, and for Roy it was several major highways in the wrong direction. He also bit back his second instinct, which was to laugh in Roy’s face. What was he doing with Roy’s fiancée? Not what he wanted to be doing, which was being her fiancé instead of Roy. No, he was just pining for her and worrying about her and hoping for the best for her. You know, being the lovelorn, lovesick fool he was combined with the best friend to her he could be under the circumstances. But that, he could tell, wasn’t the answer Roy was looking for. He was looking for black and white, for “nothing” and a scared jump backwards or “wouldn’t you like to know” and the asshole swagger he himself specialized in (although Jim had the distinct feeling that if the situation were in fact reversed Roy would fall into the latter group, not the former). He wanted the excitement of the mano-a-mano macho encounter or the uncontested dominance display. Jim did not feel inclined to give it to him.

His hesitation, however, allowed someone else to enter the conversation. He had somehow forgotten Michael was there—a dangerous practice if there ever was one—and his boss reverted to form, balancing the earlier humanity and grace of his reaction to Jim’s interactions with Dwight by the sheer tactlessness of his reaction to Jim and Roy.

“Jimbo! You and Pam, huh?” Michael socked Jim in the shoulder, and at that moment Roy charged, and everything went haywire.

Reconstructing the scene later, Jim could tell that Michael had meant to go for the old one-two punch on the shoulder, a manly and/or comradely gesture to indicate that they were all men of the world. This was unexpected but only in the specifics, as Michael mishandling a situation was, he already knew, the most likely outcome of any given scenario. Less unexpected than that was Roy’s angry reaction to the implication of Michael’s ill-chosen comment, but more unexpected was the speed with which it developed: while Michael reared back for the second punch, Roy snapped out of his crouch with the speed of a former all-city linebacker, and the impact of his body into Jim’s moved Jim just that crucial inch or three down as Michael’s fist landed.

Smack.

Michael hit Jim square on the lip.

Crash.

Roy’s followthrough put them both into the door of Michael’s car.

And suddenly there were lots and lots of voices, as the warehouse guys had apparently come up for their break and, seeing Roy charge, come over to investigate. Jim was a little dazed, but he though he saw Darryl leading Roy away, muttering something about “liability” and “your job” while Michael tilted him onto his back and started yelling distracting things like “what year is it, Jim?” and “How many fingers am I holding up?” while shaking his fist in front of his face. His eyes gazed skyward and he thought he saw a figure turn away from the window, though he couldn’t tell in the moment who it might be.

It didn’t take long for the warehouse guys to figure out that nothing more was going to happen, not now that Roy was being crammed back into his truck by Darryl and led away, and soon Michael and Jim were left alone again outside the office. Michael gave a last effort at checking in on how Jim was doing—“you know you’re bleeding, right Jimbo? You haven’t given into toxic shock? NOD IF YOU CAN HEAR ME”—and at Jim’s annoyed insistence that it was just a bruise and a split lip, sat down next to him.

“You know she has a fiancé, right?”

Jim stared at Michael. “Yes. Yes, oddly enough, I did know that.”

Michael went on as if this were the most normal conversation in the world and not the dominant cause of Jim’s worry that he might have hit his head hard enough to cause serious damage. “Well, BFD anyway. Engaged ain’t married.” He shrugged. “It’s like Winston Churchill used to say…” he trailed off.

Jim decided to help him out. “Never, never, never, never, never give up?”

“Nah, that’s not it. Oh yeah. The difference is, ma’am, in the morning I’ll be sober.” He patted Jim on the shoulder. “You think about that.”

Jim wasn’t sure that under ordinary circumstances he’d have been able to think about anything else.

But these were hardly normal circumstances, and at that moment he spotted the actual subject of his thoughts striding across the parking lot to meet them.