Jim drags himself into work on Monday—not that anything strenuous happened over the weekend, just that it’s a drag to go into work and sell paper all day. Dwight is his usual self, Michael is especially Michael, and even Kelly emerges from the annex to somehow be a more distilled, more distracting version of herself—something to do with Ryan and cheese puffs and a broken promise, apparently, but since the two of them aren’t dating, he’s not sure what Ryan is supposed to owe her. All of it is distracting and none of it is energizing, and he can see Pam is having the same kind of morning: her eyelids are drooping and he thinks she’s playing solitaire at the slowest rate he’s ever seen.

He heads up to her desk for a little bit of a sugar rush and a chance to talk to her, and idly points out a potential move:

“4 on the 5. No, the other 5.” She moves the card, clicks the back of the new one, moves the 3 onto the 4 she just moved, clicks again, and…

FWIPFWIPFWIPFWIPFWIP.

Apparently the rest of the cards were all lined up, ready to go.

“Hey.” She smiles, but it’s a tired smile. “Thanks, I don’t know why I didn’t see that.”

“Sometimes you just need a new perspective on things.” He grins. “For instance, I’ve found that being a foot up and at a forty-five degree angle is ideal for playing solitaire.”

“Oh, do you hover above your laptop at home?”

“No, I stand and make the laptop float with antigrav skids. That’s also how I keep my weight down.” He winks and she giggles.

“Thanks, I needed that.” He settles in, forearms on the desk, and gives her space if she wants to talk.

Apparently she doesn’t, because she just smiles tiredly at him and starts a new game. But if she doesn’t want to talk he’s perfectly happy standing up here, kibitzing her moves and eating her jellybeans, until someone makes him move.

That someone, as it turns out, is Roy. Not violently, like he had on the day Jim and Pam had been laughing about his alliance with Dwight, but just by coming through the doors with heavy tread. Jim slips back to his desk, well aware that he needs to keep his boundaries in Roy’s presence, but he can’t help but notice Roy is carrying a paper box. This in itself is not unusual—they work at a paper company—but the box lid is off, and there’s non-paper things inside. Roy sets it down on the desk in front of Pam and there’s less thump than there would normally be in a full box of paper too. It almost sounds like things inside are jangling against each other.

“I went through the kitchen cabinets, and this is all the stuff you use that I don’t.” Roy sounds as tired as Pam looks. “I figured, you might want it, and it’s just going to go to waste if I let it sit there.” He smiles at Pam, and it’s not the cocky smile Jim is used to seeing on Roy’s face, the one that says “let’s get me into a tub.” It’s almost the same as one he recognizes in the mirror: a tired smile that says “I’m doing my best to keep my emotions in check.” What the hell is going on?

Pam’s eyes flicker around the office, lingering for a moment on Jim’s face, and he quickly turns away and tries to pretend he was working on something. His ears perk up though as he hears the box make its way to what is clearly the ground behind Pam’s desk, and then something else is being deposited on the desk—it’s a little sad how attuned he is to the sounds of Pam, he thinks, but then again, he’s not going to change anything about that anytime soon—and there’s some whispering and then the doors are swinging closed on Roy’s heavy footsteps again. He glances up in time to see Roy walking down the stairs with a heavy saucepan in his hand.

He doesn’t get up, but he looks a question at Pam, who sighs and beckons him over, shoving the jellybeans at him as he approaches. She looks a little hesitant so he decides to break the ice for her.

“So are you telling me this is a multiple jellybean conversation?” He grabs three: green, yellow, red, and lines them up on the counter. “How about this: I’ll eat Mr. Green here, and you can tell me what’s going on; then I’ll eat Mr. Yellow and you can tell me how I can help; then I can give you Mr. Red while I tell you everything’s going to be OK.”

“Are you offering me my own jellybeans, Halpert?” But she’s smiling, and she already looks less tired, and he thinks everything might actually be OK if she just keeps smiling at him like that. He nods, and she rolls her eyes, and then she nods at him and he realizes she’s just waiting for him to pick up the green jellybean. He pops it in his mouth with a wink, and she rolls her eyes again but starts talking.

It takes him a moment to realize what she’s talking about, because she starts in what is, to him, the middle of the story. He wants to ask her to go back and explain why Roy was giving her her kitchen spices and she was giving him the pan his mother used to make her famous chili (not, like, Kevin-level famous, Pam specifies—just, county-fair-winning). But he figures he has to let her tell the story her own way, and when she clarifies that she’d taken the pots and pans when she moved out, but forgotten to leave Roy his heirloom, he’s pretty sure his brain stops working altogether. By the time he comes to she’s staring at the yellow jellybean and he realizes it’s time for the “what can Jim do” portion of the event. He chews on extremely fake lemon as she rattles on about carpooling and “just being there” and “advice on finding a roommate” and he just nods at each because of course. Of course if she needs to save gas money he’ll drive with her from her hotel (Pam is staying at a hotel, and not living with Roy). Of course he’s there for her, he’s her best friend (she’s single). Of course he’ll help her with apartment hunting (maybe she could live near me).

At the end she grimaces and says something about knowing it’s a terrible imposition and a bad time for her to be asking things of him (he’s not sure why that would be, but he lets it go). He hurries to hand her the red jellybean and her face visibly relaxes as he says what he already told her he was going to say: “everything will be OK.” He pops one last random jellybean as he walks away, and later in the day he emails her a dozen or so apartments.com listings that look like they might be in her price range (or what he imagines her price range is from knowing how much Dunder Mifflin pays its employees).

He tries to tell himself it’s a coincidence that despite her talk of a roommate, all of them are studios or one-bedrooms. Because he doesn’t want to get out over his skiis now: just because she’s single doesn’t mean she’s going to decide to date him. But if she did…he’d rather not have to deal with an annoying roommate. After all, he already has one of his own.

But that’s for the future. Right now, he’s just flying high on the idea that Pam Beesly is single, and is never, ever going to become Pam Anderson.

All in all, it was a pretty good day.