The amazing thing about Jim, Pam thought as she watched him work, nicely ensconced at the nearest table to the cash register with her new friend Phyllis, was that he didn’t ruin anything when he showed up.

She knew that was a low bar. If anything, it was a limbo stick, and someone who could slither under it deserved to be not just not dated but ignored. And yet Roy Anderson had frogboiled her into accepting it, turning up his misbehavior by degrees as he checked out of their relationship in such a way as to make her start doubting her own instinctive understanding of how people worked. He had slowly disassociated her from the part of her that liked meeting new people for instance. She had forgotten how nice it could be to just sit and chat with someone you hadn’t met before but got along with—like Phyllis Vance, who reminded her of her great-aunt Bertha, who had been one number short of a cuckoo clock but an absolute darling, and who was currently describing her beloved Bobby’s refrigeration business to Pam for the third time in half an hour.

Not that Phyllis was as loopy as Aunt Bertha. Rather, she seemed genuinely so adoring of Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration (currently performing an impromptu check on the minifridge in Michael’s office—a space Pam hadn’t known existed until today—because Michael said it ‘kept making noise’) that she was simply incapable of carrying on a conversation for more than fifteen or so minutes without looping it back around to him.

Pam understood. Had she been in control of their direction she had no doubt that she would have looped back to Jim just as much.

He was just...well, he wasn’t perfect. “Nobody’s perfect,” they said at the end of her mom’s favorite movie, Some Like It Hot, and Pam believed it—even if she doubted that Jim was masquerading as a gender he didn’t identify as—so she was certain that there were flaws and warts in Jim just like in any other real human. But he was better than perfect; perfect was a circle, all untouchable surface, while Jim was a puzzle piece with weird, squiggly edges that nestled right up against her own weird squiggles in companionable union.

It was good that Phyllis was going on again about freon shipments, because Pam needed something cool to think about instead of the implications of that image.

She had been a little worried for a half-second or so after Jim had shown up that he would say or do something to make the Vances not like her or her not like the Vances anymore, but he’d apparently known Phyllis since before she was a Vance (the way he called her “Ms. Lapin” suggested maybe a schoolteacher, though she was currently waffling between that and the neighbor next door) and had cheerfully made her her favorite drink on the house—with Michael’s enthusiastic agreement—before doing the same for Pam and letting them wander over to the table to start drinking them.

Pam was still wondering where he’d gotten the liquor for the old-fashioned in front of Phyllis, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her she supposed, and she was very determinedly ignoring the lack of liquor license on the wall.

It was Michael’s problem anyway.

That was the thing about Jim—he seemed not just to have a life outside of her (Roy had had that in spades—no pun intended, though he had played a weekly game of spades for high stakes with his buddies once Lonny had decided poker was “too basic” because you could watch it on cable now) but also a space for her in that life, already waiting. Meet old friends of his? She’d find herself sitting down with them across a cafe table. Compare favorite musical artists? He’d find a remix of their two favorites playing together already on his phone (though a small part of her had thought that he’d picked Tony Bennett just to match with her preference for Lady Gaga, the way he’d then started a random shuffle of other Tony Bennett songs had convinced her otherwise).

Basically, whatever they did they seemed to do unconsciously in concert, and it was amazing.

She sipped her tea—see, he really was amazing, he’d gotten her tea after all this time—and pretended to listen to round four of “Bobby Vance realizes there’s a gap in the Scranton cold food market.”

As long as she could watch Jim working, she’d stay there all day.