Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Anything at all. Just the plot, really. Characters, settings, etc all belong to their respective authorities, who are not me.

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Mark tried to repaint the entire house the other day. For some reason, Jim had let him sweet-talk the brush into his hands, and now he was left with a few half-hearted strokes on the far wall that he liked to call art. Karen liked to tease him for it, liked to poke at the wall and pretend to peel the paint off, and Mark liked to rag him for not finishing the job, but Jim likes the way Jim’s room is and if it’s only a few strokes, he can pretend it’s all still the same.  

It looks awful, he knows, or something close to it. Just a few strokes, each at odd angles because he was too lazy to do it all rank-and-file like Mark did. Still, he protects it when Karen comes over with paint remover and buckets of new primer, and he still doesn’t know why.  Besides, he likes the way the edges of his brush strokes scatter into a mindless spatter as they follow the curve all the way to the bottom left side, gaps and dots appearing where he’d changed his mind halfway through and let the brush lift off just a little bit. Mark likes to walk in and criticize the strokes sometimes, with the aura of a man who has painted his own room without a woman to help him. Too little paint, he says, not enough commitment to the project, dry brush and bad angle and then Jim pushes him out with a laugh and tells him to go watch SNL or something.  

Then one day, he had the entire office over for a party for some holiday that Michael invented that morning involving paper clips and plastic rulers, and he just knows that she’ll be in the room sometime with her artist’s eye, and he’ll hear the full of it. Just to be safe, though, when he sees her moving toward the door she knows, he pulls the drink out of Karen’s hands and beats her to it, sliding into the room first with Karen on his arm.  

“What is this, Halpert? You painted your room?” 

“Tried to paint his room. Never quite took off.” 

They’re both smiling now, and it’s like his old train sets with two magnetic cabooses competing for the end of the engine car, only he’s not so sure which should be red and special to him and which should just be another car on the train.

“Excuse me, I think this is art.” Smiles and does his best to pull off another joke, just another joke, just be Jim for them, and all cabooses fade into bleak normal eventually, don’t they? 

“I agree. This is art.” She would.  

Shrug, and Karen walks out of the room to find her drink. Pam sits on his bed and pretends to contemplate the three, four strokes on his wall, marring imperfection and all he can see is the bowl of shadow where her body meets his mattress.  

“I’m curious as to how you achieved this kind of artistic nirvana,” she jokes, pulling a half-empty margarita closer to her mouth.  

“I tried to smell teen spirit. A lot. Over many months. Actually, it was even harder when – “ 

“I could fix this for you, y’know.” Pam’s eyes are focused again, but sharper than he’s ever seen them at work or at a party or even in his arms after mysterious phone calls and disastrous confessions. Maybe if she was drunk more at work, she’d get more things done. “I could fix this for you. All I’d need is a bucket of this.” 

He finds himself moving, and realizes that the can has stayed resealed under his desk for weeks. The brush handle is smooth in his hands and he’s holding it out to her before he knows why, and soon she’s standing up at the wall with paint on the brush, spreading shades of mistakes over the rest of the untouched surface. He wants to look at the art, the magic he knows is worth attention, despite anything Roy or Oscar or Ryan might say, but all he can see is perfect curls glancing lightly off sweater shoulders and the shape of her arm as it stretches up.  

When she’s done, she turns and faces him with that look in her eye that he’ll remember for a long time, he’s sure. He moves to stand and takes the brush lightly from her loosening hands before it can drop to the floor and cause more damage, but he can’t look away from the strokes and shades and complex patterns stretched out like the diagram of a magic spell on his wall.  

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever painted,” she says, and he can tell without looking that she’s back to Pam who pushed sketches under piles of faxes and erased doodles from the edges of her notepads. But he looks at his wall now and can’t imagine why she would waste time on mugs and office buildings.  

It’s beautiful, he thinks, it’s beautiful and he wants her to hear – but “You’re beautiful” is what spills out of his mouth and it begins here, it begins here, because what was a thankful hug with curls against his chin and arms around his shoulders is turning fast into something greater, and he can feel her lips on his somewhere in the back of his mind, but all he wants right now is the feeling of her hands on his chest, tracing the pattern on his wall into a pattern on his heart.

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