Pam wasn’t sure exactly what she had expected to result from texting Jim her art. Well, she knew one thing: she had been hoping, in some small part of her that was still only hoping and not simply believing, that he would reveal yet another way in which he was not Roy Anderson. Not that she wanted to keep thinking of him and Roy in the same sentence, or even the same brain, but it was kind of inevitable when you had had a grand total of two (2, dos, deux, due, shtayim) relationships of more than one meal’s duration in your life that you would end up comparing them.

And honestly, it wasn’t about Jim, or Roy, that she didn’t want to keep comparing them. After all, Jim was inevitably going to win those comparisons, or if he didn’t she was going to run screaming into the Lackawanna River and let it pull her into the Susequehanna. But for herself, for fancy new Pamela Morgan Beesly, she needed to stop it. Because she wasn’t Pamela Anderson. She wasn’t Roy’s in any way, shape, or form anymore. But every time he popped into her head as a comparison, she was, in a little tiny fundamentally distressing way, pulled back into that mental state.

So no, she hadn’t really sent the text of the photo as a test. She’d had a brief moment of panic when he’d just said Sweet, but that hadn’t been the reason for the photo in the first place. No, she’d just...wanted to share something of herself with him. Because she felt like they were connected already, somehow, in most of the ways that mattered, and she wanted to make sure it was all the ways that mattered—at a sane healthy pace, of course. No breakneck rush to marriage like she’d heard Kelly nattering on about to Jim a few weeks ago (apparently there was this dreamy guy named...Riley? Ryker? Ryan? that was also a customer and that she was obsessed with). Just...a normal, healthy, connected relationship.

And he’d passed that test, if you could call it a test, with flying colors. She’d fallen asleep with a smile on her face and a pseudo-Rothko on her wall and life was good.

It was a few days until she could actually get back to the coffeeshop, which made her unhappy because she’d been there most days for a while now. But Mom needed something and then Dad needed something (rare and therefore urgent) and then even Penny needed something (even rarer, and therefore all the more urgent) and before she knew it it had been three days. Not that she was suffering actual caffeine withdrawal or anything—honestly, given Penny’s insistence on teaching Mom how to use the espresso machine she’d bought them last Christmas, she was probably over-caffeinated, if anything—but whatever the equivalent was of Jim, she was that.

She supposed she was missing him, though that didn’t seem like nearly strong enough language for it. Perhaps if she’d gone into writing as her fine art instead of painting, she would have found the words. Something poetic. Something witty. Something more than texting Jim “miss you” alternating with “I miss you” three times a day (she still wasn’t entirely sure what kind of texter she was—what kind of texters they were—so she couldn’t decide on the use of I). But since she hadn’t, she didn’t, and she had to confine herself to those plaintive texts.

Which, thankfully, he did.

Every time.

Still, she missed him a lot, and it was with grave disappointment that she once again realized that it was Michael, not Jim, at the counter of The Comedy Roasters when she finally made her way back again after three long days of family time.

She was so disappointed—or maybe just so used to Michael blathering on—that she didn’t actually register the words he was saying to her until he was about halfway through.

“...and hang it on the wall of our shop!” He gestured emphatically towards the place where Eddie Murphy stood facing George Carlin on the opposite wall. “You know, we’ve had complaints from customers that we need more ‘upscale art’,” he made finger quotes around the word, “and I’ve had to stop myself from giving them the old heave-ho, the Oklahoma Hayride, the riding out of town on a rail,” he acted these out in turn, inaccurately to Pam’s best knowledge “because the customer is always right, you know, except when they’re not. And they were not. Can you believe they wanted Mr. Izzard here to close his shirt?” He gestured to where “Eddie Izzard: Live at Madison Square Garden” showed an ample amount of chest and sighed.

Then he brightened as he seemed to remember what he was talking about—which was a relief to Pam, as she definitely didn’t.

“So anyway, I heard you and Jimbonicus talking about how you do, you know, the whole artsy thing,” he gestured wildly again and Pam’s heart sank “and I was all like ‘Jim, you gotta show me if you have any of her stuff, maybe the punters—you know, that’s what Mr. Izzard calls them, punters, because British and all—” he giggled inexplicably “maybe the punters will like that better. And then he showed me this piece you did, with the red and blue and the yellow, and I was like boom, gotta have it, gotta put it right up there.”

Here he interrupted himself by jabbing his finger a little too hard up next to the Eddie Murphy wall-hanging, causing it to teeter dangerously, and Pam realized for the first time that these weren’t actually painted or stuck onto the wall but just...sort of laid onto it, like Michael had forgotten the existence of tape. She wondered how they’d stayed up all this time—or whether Jim was just constantly putting them back up each night.

After putting “Mr. Murphy” back up on the wall, Michael turned around and beamed at her again.

“So what do you say? We’ll pay you, of course, for the use of the art. And it would be nice to have something a friend painted to brighten up the place.” He stuck a hand out. “Is it a deal?”

Pam didn’t know what she’d expected when she’d texted Jim her picture, but it definitely wasn’t this.

Still, she wasn’t stupid, either. She stuck her hand out and shook Michael’s enthusiastically. “It’s a deal.”