The next couple weeks were tough for Jim. As he thought that, it felt incredibly self-centered: Pam and Roy were breaking up, Pam was getting her own place for the first time as an adult, Pam was renegotiating her entire life, but it was tough for him? But it was, nevertheless, tough for him, because whatever fantasy he might have had looking at her storm across the parking lot of having her show up at his doorstep the next day and confess that she had feelings for him the way that he did for her (that was how he thought of it to himself, when he let himself think about it, back before the Break Up: feelings. If he’d let himself think “I’m in love with you,” or even just “I love you,” he’d have had to say something, and saying something would…well, he thought it would have been bad, but how could anything really end up as bad as this had? Except if she’d actually shot him down, and that…that was unthinkable except that he thought about it every day), she hadn’t. She hadn’t come into work the next couple of days, and Michael had been very wink-wink-nudge-nudge about it all until Jim had made it crystal clear that he had actually literally zero information or knowledge about what was going on. Then she’d come back, but there had been bags under her eyes and a bare patch on her ring finger and there were too many eyes on them and too many elbows poking at them (thank you again Michael) for there to be any real conversation about it, and besides he could read the look in her eyes well enough: it said “can we not” and so they didn’t.

That was what was tough.

Well, that and watching Pam drag herself in day after day, clearly not as OK as she wanted everyone to think. He’d managed to worm out of her one day in an unguarded moment that she hadn’t actually found a place yet; she was staying with friends and family, rotating between Penny and Izzy and her parents—yes, they lived three hours away, but she was spending weekends there so that her friends could have a little time to themselves given how completely generous they were being of their couch and futon, respectively. But that meant she couldn’t really use the weekends to look for apartments, because she was three hours away and her mom was treating her like a kid again and…

Well, it was a long unguarded moment. Actually, a whole unguarded meal at Cugino’s, which he was pretty sure she’d only agreed to because they had somehow found themselves the only people in the office at lunchtime and so there was no one around to notice that they went to lunch together. And he’d enjoyed every minute of it, and there had been the same crackle in the air between them that he’d felt that first night on the phone, and he felt like an idiot for feeling that way because surely if she actually felt that way about him there’d have been some kind of sign now that she’d been broken up with Roy for…ten whole days.

OK, so he was getting a little unreasonably impatient. She’d been with the guy for years, she didn’t have a place to stay yet, she probably wasn’t in a place to date or anything. But still, you’d think there’d be a sign.

Or you could make a sign yourself, he decided. Or at least take steps to create the situation in which a sign might possibly be put up by someone else. In this case, it was the moment when Pam threw up her hands—they were alone at work again, this time at 5:30 when everyone else had gone home, even Dwight, who had left mumbling something about a beet harvest and how it was more important than making sure Jim didn’t mess with his desk. Jim had already decided the perfect prank for that: he was going to do absolutely nothing to Dwight’s desk, but subtly change his own desk, using a faux-wood set of extenders he’d found on eBay, so that it looked like he’d moved Dwight’s because the relative positioning was off. But he’d done that already, so now he was just killing time, trying to figure out something to say to the woman behind the reception desk, when she threw up her hands and sighed. He raised an eyebrow and she shrugged.

“Penny’s got a date tonight—something her friend set up that she forgot to tell me about—and while she promises that they won’t be staying at her place, and I have a key…”

“She was your ride?”

Pam nodded. “And so now I have to take three buses to her place, which will take me an extra hour…” she glanced up at the clock. “Shit, two hours, because I just missed the first one.” She let her head slump against the keyboard (or so he assumed, as it dropped out of sight behind her monitor) and let out a loud sigh. “And then I won’t have time to look for apartments, or a car to do it with, and it’ll be another week of suitcases and stretching her and Izzy’s generosity to the breaking point.” Her voice was slightly muffled by the monitor, so he got up and walked to her desk. To hear her better, he told himself, even though he knew he was lying.

He looked down at her from the other side of the desk. God she was cute, with her hair all out of sorts against the keyboard. She didn’t quite meet his eyes—was that a blush? Maybe that was the sign he needed. He decided to make it so, and knocked on the desk.

“Well, Beesly,” he drawled, knowing this would definitely draw her interest, since it was the way he introduced most of his pranks on Dwight—but this was definitely not a prank.

“Yes?” She sat up. “You have an idea?”

“Well, it occurs to me…” He grabbed a jellybean and pretended to consider it. “It occurs to me that if you’re already committed to spending the next two hours getting home.” He looked up at her. “You are committed to that, right?”

“I guess so.” She made a face, he made one back,  and she half-laughed, which he considered a whole victory.

“Then since you’ve already marked those two hours down as being spent getting home, we might as well take it as read that you will spend those two hours getting home, and arrive home,” he  glanced at the clock “around 7:37?”

“More like 8.” She grimaced, and he nodded.

“So we’re agreed you’ll get home to Penny’s at 8.”

“Yes?”

“Then why don’t you and I spend the next two hours and…twenty-two minutes now shopping for apartments for you?” He shrugged as nonchalantly as he could with the idea of helping Pam and also not coincidentally spending another two-plus hours one on one with her in his mind. “I have my car, we have the internet…it seems to me that the world is our oyster.” He popped the jellybean in his mouth. “Whaddya say?”