Pam was utterly flummoxed. She had definitely not expected Jim to actually go out and buy tea with his own personal funds for her. That had not even been on her radar screen.

Jim seemed to sense her overwhelmed response and quickly whipped out a series of paper cups from behind the counter.

“All right! We’re going to have a sampler party.” He pulled the tea back towards himself and started laying them one by one into the cups, leaving the torn papers with the names of each tea in front of each cup as he did so. “Lemon Lift.” A yellow package, with the words black tea across it. “Constant Comment.” Orange, also apparently black tea. “Earl Grey.” This, unsurprisingly, was grey—and again, black tea. “English Teatime.” This was the black tea in a blue varietal, apparently. “Plantation Mint.” He grimaced. “A little colonialist for me, but you do you Bigelow.” To Pam’s surprise this was also black tea, though the green packaging was appropriate for mint. “And finally, the most originally named of all, Green Tea.” This was an unsurprising green, with the words green tea and classic across the package.

He bowed slightly. “Your tea, milady.” As he rose from the bow, a grin sprang into life across his face and distracted Pam entirely from the tea. “Well, just add water.” He started filling the cups one by one with hot water from a spout on the drip coffeemaker.

Pam just watched him. Not because she couldn’t think of anything to say, or because she was overwhelmed—though she was, still, a little—but because she could. She had clear and fairly unambiguous evidence that Jim was not just being friendly and flirty because it was his job, but was actually genuinely interested in her—so interested that he had left his place of work and gone entirely out of his way to accommodate her wishes and needs—and so she could finally let herself just look at him in the way that she’d been avoiding doing before. She’d been stealing glances and letting her eyes slide towards and then off of him for what seemed like forever; now she didn’t feel like a thief in the night anymore. She could just look, and so she did.

She liked what she saw. This was not in itself a surprise. She’d known that Jim was aesthetically pleasing from the first time she’d seen him, and nothing in his personality or her experience with him had in any way changed that initial impression, except perhaps to deepen it. After all, when she’d first seen him she hadn’t realized that for all his lanky glory and his broad shoulders the real beauty of him was in the joy in his eyes and the rhythm of his movements; that his smile was so much more attractive than his merely physical body (though that was, uh, quite attractive on its own as well); that watching him do things was more interesting than just watching him be pretty.

Now she knew all of that, and she had the chance to take it all in.

But she also realized as she finally let herself indulge that she really, really wanted to paint him. Not just to sketch him, or to take a picture (it will last longer, she thought to herself, and considered just how much she’d like anything she got of Jim to last), but to dig out the oils that were somewhere in the closet in her childhood bedroom (abandoned there long before she’d moved back in after the disaster of her relationship with Roy, back when she’d been trying to accommodate his whims and his belief that paint and by extension paint supplies were “just disasters waiting to happen, Pammy, how would I get oil paint out of a work shirt huh?) and really go to town on a portrait.

She wasn’t sure that oils could really do justice to the motion of Jim, but they might be the only medium she knew of that had a hope in hell of capturing the glow of him, the way his soul seemed to pour out of the limiting confines of his body and make everyone around him better, happier, more alive. Even Dwight was more Dwight with Jim around.

Speaking of which, she was brought out of her reverie by Izzy nudging her and Dwight scoffing something that sounded like “inappropriate secondary market items.”

“Uh…thanks.” She cursed her slow tongue. “I really appreciate this. I…uh…” she grabbed the first cup she saw and took a sip.

“Ahh, HOTHOTHOT.” Just like Jim, she thought, and was very grateful that she was too busy trying to cool her mouth by making little ah-ah-ah noises to actually say the second part out loud. She breathed out over the tea to cool it and took another sip.

It was the green tea, of course. Pam had a complicated relationship to green tea. She had always wanted to like it—it was the kind of tea that you had when you wanted to meditate or to concentrate, a light refresher and not a heavy wake-me-up of a beverage, the most tea-like tea in some sense to her—but never really did except at Asian restaurants, where (not to be exoticizing or essentialist) they really did a better job with it than she could do on her own, probably because they actually bought good green tea and knew what to do with it.

This was not that tea, so it was not actually that good.

But it was special in a manner all its own because Jim had made it for her, so in that way, she thought, it tasted better than anything she’d ever had before.

Which was silly, because she’d been drinking drinks he’d made for weeks, but there you go.