It easily becomes her tradition to slip into The Comedy Roasters every day—even on those days where she doesn’t really have any work to do, but she needs to just get out of her parents’ house for a little bit—and while she doesn’t settle on a single flavor, she drinks a lot of steamers.

The tea is always out: she has a sneaking suspicion that Michael forgot to order it, and the impression she gets of Jim is that he’s doing his best not to directly contradict his boss-stroke-family-friend if he can avoid it.

It’s fine. She likes hot milk. And besides, she likes it there enough anyway.

She’d probably camp there full-time if they actually had the tea she likes.

She comes to understand and appreciate Michael more once she’s no longer disappointed that he’s not Jim, and once he comes to recognize her well enough to stop with the terrible comments and jokes. She thinks he’s kind of like a hedgehog, which Izzy used to have as a pet (the imaginatively named “Hedgey” is off in hog heaven somewhere by now, but was a beloved companion to their mutual youths). If he doesn’t know you he curls into a ball with his spikes out—in Michael’s case, tasteless ‘jokes’ and nonsense—but once he warms up he’s a little ball of fluff with a cute nose.

Well, Michael’s nose isn’t that cute, but the point remains. She gets to know the man he actually is: the sort of guy who loves coffee shops and the “whole vibe where creative people get their creativity on!” but doesn’t know the first thing about roasting or brewing the stuff; the sort of person who heard the word ‘roast’ and immediately thought about Comedy Central late night TV and also the sort of person who, once that idea got into his head, was completely unable to let it go and so created an entire novelty shop persona around it; the sort of sad but ultimately lovable person who knows deep down that he will never actually be able to tell searing insightful observational jokes like his idols, but cannot stop himself from trying instinctively.

He’s a complex person and while he’s not really her friend she doesn’t mind sharing space with him anymore, which is good because about half the time she comes in he’s the one manning the counter. Jim is, after all, also a real human with real human needs, including break time and even days off, so she can’t count on having him there every day.

But when he is, The Comedy Roasters goes from being a nice little hangout where her mom won’t ask how she’s doing and her dad won’t be a bit weird about her having broken up with Roy (whom he had always looked on as a surrogate son) to being a beacon of light in a dark world.

Not that she thinks her world is actually especially dark, but the brightness of Jim’s presence and his smile makes her think of Plato’s Cave and people who mistook fire for sunlight. She had studied art when she was in school, though through one thing and another she hadn’t actually graduated, but there were general education requirements as well and she’d found herself in a philosophy class that had actually been really cool. For a brief period she’d imagined herself not as an artist but as a philosopher, hanging around a Greek agora all day debating the nature of reality. That was never really her goal, just a passing whim—but she wonders now if she could have that, if Jim would be the sort of person who would talk to her about the big things that seem like small things, about imponderable and unanswerable questions that are important because they are questions, not because they have answers.

She thinks he might.

But whenever she considers opening her mouth to have that conversation, she remembers that while he may be the sunlight in her cave, she is just another customer to him. Sure, she’s a regular customer (though no Pam-inspired drinks have appeared on the order board with their accompanying pun as of yet) but she’s a customer. He’s friendly and smiley and kind to everyone, not just to her. She remembers the other lesson she learned in college while she was waiting tables to make rent (since Roy hadn’t yet gotten his job in the shipping warehouse): customer service smiles aren’t real.

She doesn’t think she’s like the tired businessmen and angsty teens she’d waited on at the Applebees, trying to grab at scraps of human connection from someone simply paid to smile and nod as if they cared, but she’s wary. She doesn’t want to reach out to Jim for connection and find out that she’s been looking at a mirage this whole time.

So instead, she waits. She goes into The Comedy Roasters and types and draws and sends ever so many emails, and she looks over at Jim, but she doesn’t say anything more than the occasional joke while ordering, or when he comes by to wipe the table near her.

She lets his laugh roll over her and smiles in return, but she doesn’t presume.

She realizes that she’s probably being overdefensive, overcautious, but she can’t help it. If Jim’s grin is the brightest light she’s ever seen, it just makes her more afraid of having to go back into the shadows.

So she drinks, and she works, and she watches, and she tries very hard to tell herself it’s not creepy.

Sometimes it’s even convincing.