“Come on, Izzy.” Pam tries her best, but her best friend is indefatigable (always has been) and her puppy dog eyes aren’t helping.

“Come on Pamela.” Izzy pouts. “You never tell me anything interesting anymore! Come on, just one little tidbit!”

“His name is Jim.” She realizes in that moment that she has lost: her little bubble of The Comedy Roasters as an alternate reality where it can just be her and Jim and the weird people who make up the rest of the regulars without any interference from the outside world is going to collapse. She should have said something, anything else. Started with the story of how she got here, maybe—not that Izzy is going to be that interested in the fact that the Starbucks is closed, she obviously already knows that, but at least it wouldn’t have put that voracious, chop-licking look on her face. Or maybe started with why she’s drinking balsamic fig steamers—except that would lead back to Jim again, wouldn’t it? She’s only experimenting with the menu because it makes both of them laugh. Or maybe even…something else. Michael, maybe, or…

Shit.

She should have started with Dwight. Maybe there’s still a chance?

“And the other guy is Dwight Kurt Schrute.”

“The cute one?” Izzy looks over.

“No, the German one.” Dwight is currently demonstrating…actually Pam doesn’t know what Dwight is demonstrating, but it sure as hell looks like he’s doing a Nazi salute. Jim is egging him on without visibly egging him on, something she’s not sure when she began to recognize but which makes a little something in her soften. He’s just so hilarious, and it’s often so subtle. Like, she can’t hear what either of them is saying, and she’s not sure it would even make sense if she could, but she’d bet that if you read out a transcript of it in a flat voice like Dwight’s it would sound perfectly sincere, inquisitive, maybe even helpful.

Inflected in Jim’s voice the way she knows Jim talks, though, she has absolutely zero doubt whatsoever, even without hearing any of the actual words yet, that it is sarcastic. And funny. And just…Jim.

“What are you on about?” Izzy smirks at her and snaps her back into her head and the realization that, oh right, this is all about to change. “The German one is the cute one.” The smirk turns shit-eating in a moment. “Ooooooh, does someone have a crush on the barista?”

“Shut up.” Pam has known Isabel Poreba for…well, not actually for that long, even though she’s her best female friend. She’d kind of drifted away from a lot of her high school friends over the years, something she’d only realized in retrospect once she broke up with Roy and discovered that he’d basically isolated her from her entire social network along the way. Izzy had been a friend from after that, made through friends neither of them was close to anymore, and they’d just clicked perfectly, so well that even Roy’s eye-rolls at ‘going over to Izzy’s again’ hadn’t been able to slide her out of Pam’s life completely. But for all they might not have know each other all their lives, Pam still knows very well that literally the only way to get Izzy off of a topic is to refuse to engage. Shut it down. Tell her to shut up, and move the conversation along.

“Shut up,” she repeats. “It sounds to me like someone has a crush on Dwight.”

“Well, duh.” Izzy rolls her eyes. “I’d like him to get his Deutschland uber alles of me, if you know what I mean.”

“I really don’t and I would prefer not to, thank you very much,” Pam shoots back.

“Oh, have you really not…since Roy? Does that mean you’ve forgotten? Because I think my little sister has some kids books on the topic you could borrow.” Izzy smirks again and Pam kicks her under the table.

“So not the point. I know what you mean, I just don’t ever want to think about it.” She smiles, though, both so that Izzy knows that it’s just another tease (not that she really does want to hear about that with Dwight, but if Izzy needs to, they can talk about it) and in her own personal triumph that they’ve moved the conversation away from Jim. “He literally owns a beet farm, Izzy.”

“So he’s a small business owner?” Izzy grins. “Very entrepreneurial. Very attractive.”

Pam snorts. “You think so? Here, let me show you.” She flips open her laptop and goes to the bookmarked page with Schrute Farms’ Zillow listing. “You will not believe what he charges for one night.”

“One night, huh?” Izzy’s eyebrows waggle up and Pam groans.

“Not like that.”