“If I were you I would definitely totally one hundred percent take that as a rejection.”

Really? She had to run back into the room to tell him explicitly what he already heard loud and clear? He couldn’t pretend it didn’t hurt, but…yeah, he could see why she’d come in and say that. Running away was a pretty clear signal, but he’d seen the guys who refused to read that signal before. He’d even had to toss a couple of them out of events he’d organized in college—the debate club singles night had ended up attracting way too many of the kind of guys who thought that “no” was not only not a complete sentence but the first step in a debate that they were going to win by sheer volume—and so while he thought he wasn’t the kind of guy to pursue someone who said they weren’t interested, he could see why she’d think that she needed to be more specific, more clear, more detailed in that rejection.

After all, if there’s one thing he’s learning about Pam, it’s that she’s really careful with her words, and so of course she’d feel the need to use those words to make things as crystal clear to him as possible.

And hey—he knows himself even better than he’d like to, after all these years of living in the same body, and he can’t entirely deny that if there was ever a girl he’d met that he’d go after even after she’d left him rejected, it was probably Pam. He could see a world in which he’d do something stupid like go after her and kiss her, only to get rejected again, and have to face the reality that he was more of a jerk than he wanted to think.

So yeah. Maybe he ought to be grateful. She’s spared him that, at least. She’s told him unambiguously where he stands. One hundred percent rejection. Honestly, for all that he knows a lot of people read rejection as cruel, this is kind of her.

“And while you didn’t actually, you know, explicitly say that he would like to ask her out it was kind of strongly implied in that.”

Yeah, hence the rejection. Though again, he’s noticed Pam is careful with her words, and it’s nice that she’s giving him the respect of assuming that he’s careful too, and paying attention to what he’s said. But yeah, she knows. She’s got the right handle on the stick, she’s not missing anything, the words that came out of his mouth meant what she thinks they meant. He’d definitely grabbed onto the implication of her friend’s request for his “intentions” with both hands, and while he’d given them both an out by pointing out that it was super uncomfortable to have your friend ask that in front of you, everyone in the coffeeshop clearly knew what he meant.

Hell, even Dwight Kurt Schrute probably knows, and what that guy understands about human emotional signaling could fit on the back of all the teabags that this coffeeshop still somehow doesn’t have (seriously, Michael, what the hell is wrong with your ordering system?).

Though…Dwight may well have gotten twice the women’s phone numbers since this shop started that Jim did. He’s fairly sure that Angela is at least not entirely unresponsive to whatever questionable charms lie in the fabled “Schrute genes” of which Dwight will not stop boasting, and it looked a lot like Pam’s friend Izzy just gave him hers too.

This is a depressing world, if that is all true.

But it’s not like being (he really really hopes) a better person and a nicer person and honestly just a more emotionally sound person than Dwight actually means the universe owes him anything. Those same guys he’d had to kick out of the debating club date nights had always gone on and on about how they were nice guys, and so he has zero sympathy with anyone, not even himself, saying “but I’m a nice guy.”

It still sucks though.

At least he has proof that Pam understands his words, even if she’s not interested. She’s rejecting him, but at least she’s doing him the honest good truth of rejecting what he was truly offering, and letting him know outright.

God, she’s such a good person.

“And I would really like you to know that this is not a rejection, it’s a stress reaction.”

Wait.

What?

So Jim was a Marxist philosopher by undergraduate thesis, and generally interested in politics, and the good life, and the proper organization of a society—those kinds of general, fuzzy, humanities-based questions that (in his not-particularly-humble, full-of-four-years-of-learning, senior undergraduate wisdom) only philosophy truly grappled with properly.

But he’d taken a full undergraduate courseload in philosophy, which included a class on logic. And that class had been full not of philosophy majors like Jim who liked basketball, and debate, and parsing out the technical differences between a communist and a socialist worldview, but of comp-sci majors taking logic before they could do the coding and programming they were actually interested in.

And he’d made quite a few friends among them, and started hanging out with them, and he still used some of the slang borrowed from their particular line of work.

All of which was to say that upon hearing those words Jim.Halpert.exe encountered a fatal exception.

Abort/Retry/Fail?

Retry.

It’s not a rejection?

What Pam was saying—all that stuff about it being one hundred percent reasonable to feel rejected—was all about how she wasn’t rejecting him?

She was stressed?

Well of course she was stressed! He was stressed too! It was a stressful situation! He was—apparently they were—being put on the spot!

But if she wasn’t rejecting him…

Well, Jim had taken logic, but he was a humanities major at heart, and he knew that for all that logic insisted that all statements could be reduced to pure binaries, this was not one of those times.

She might not be rejecting him, but she definitely wasn’t accepting him either.

And Pam was careful with her words.

But if she wasn’t rejecting him, she was probably interested in hearing some more of his words.

To help her decide.

And then his mouth moved on its own.

“I’m sorry you’re stressed, Pam. Would some tea help?”