This day was a much better day, Pam decided. It wasn’t that the sun was shining or the birds chirping or Michael not being an asshole. None of that was true, though it would have been nice if it had been. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she knew it had something to do with Jim’s presence. He livened up the office somehow. Not just by continuing the prank on Dwight (seriously, how did he keep a straight face while reciting off the extremely boring catalog details Steve had apparently done the day before?). Not just by bringing everyone their favorite drinks (though the thought was nice—and there was something very soothing about having her giant cup of tea to clutch while listening to Michael screw up another conference call with Jan). Not just by coming up to her desk after Dwight finally subsided (sipping the coffee Jim had brought him of course) and making her laugh with some inane comment about cardstock. No, it was deeper than any of that. A kind of innate Jimness that lightened the mood and made everything feel better than it had in his absence.
She supposed that was why the brilliant prank, while it had been fun while it lasted, hadn’t made a deeper impression on her. Steve was great at what he did, beyond great, but he just wasn’t Jim, and if it was obvious to her it should have been obvious to Dwight. You couldn’t fake or teach Jimness. It just was.
She tried to find the words to tell Jim this, but they kept coming out wrong in her head, so she never let them past her lips. How did you tell someone you could recognize them blindfolded and muffled without making it sound like you meant something more intense than what she intended? He was her closest friend. She had missed him. But every time she tried to find a way to tell him that, it foundered on the reef of language. She and Jim weren’t a couple, just a couple of besties, but she couldn’t find the words.
So instead she retreated to what she could find the words for: her disappointment that he’d let Toby in on the prank instead of her.
“C’mon, Jim,” she teased in the breakroom that afternoon while Dwight was safely out on a sales call. “You could have told me. You can tell me anything.”
He was facing the soda machine, so she couldn’t see his face, but he just shrugged and she sat down with a flop. “I wouldn’t have let Dwight know. You can’t seriously think I would have let him know?” The thought that maybe he really didn’t think of her the way she thought of him bolted through her mind and left a sizzle of apprehension down her spine.
“No, Beesly.” He plopped his grape soda down on the table—whatever Starbucks drink he’d had this morning was long gone, tossed into the trash can from an impressive distance—and followed, folding his long limbs into the chair in front of it. “But…” he fiddled with the pop tab, “I felt like Toby had the authority to pull it off.” The tab finally popped and he waited for the fizzle to die down. “Like, if Toby says it’s me, Dwight’s gonna believe it, right? Whereas you…” he trailed off for a moment and then continued. “You’re always up for a prank. I mean, so is Toby.” He took a sip of soda. “But Dwight doesn’t know that. I’m pretty sure he’d just have scoffed at you and said ‘of course you’d say that, you’re in on it.’”
She felt a little better hearing that explanation, but that last sentence deflated her again. “But I wasn’t in on it.” She sipped her now-cold tea, which she held onto like a talisman against further conference calls. “I could have, I don’t know, given him a fax or something, something specific to you.”
“Yeah, but are you sure Dwight trusts the fax system?” He cocked an eyebrow.
“Implicitly.” She grinned. “He once told me that the fax machine was the superior invention to the telephone, since it predated it.”
“Huh.” Jim looked thoughtful, like he was checking a mental box, then grinned at her. “Well, I suppose I could have, then. But you were in on it, Beesly. How else would I have gotten that wonderful cinemascope view of the entire thing? You were amazing. I knew I could count on you to figure it out.”
“Yes you could. And don’t you forget it.” She definitely felt better having that out in the open, but she couldn’t deny—it still bothered her just a little that he didn’t think of her first when doing such an elaborate prank. She didn’t know exactly why, and the itch of that carried with her all the way home, resulting in burned garlic bread and overboiled spaghetti—but at least Roy wasn’t there to carp about it, because Wednesday night was darts night, and he and the boys rolled in at 11:30 to sleep in the living room.
At least it wasn’t past midnight because, as she had reminded him a dozen times if she’d reminded him once, Thursday was still a workday.
Whatever. Wednesday was also the day she got to actually paint, as long as she cleaned up the living room before Roy got home, and so it was still a pretty good day. She amused herself this time by painting Dwight’s face from yesterday morning when he’d first laid eyes on Steve.
It was a pretty good likeness if she did say so herself.
Of course, there was no one she could show it to, since Roy wouldn’t care, she didn’t think she could sneak a canvas past him into the car to show to Jim (or Dwight), and she had no idea how to contact Steve. But still—she was proud of herself. And that had to count for something, didn’t it?
