Pam sat in the office munching chips. They were good chips. They were Jim-chips. So of course they were good chips. And she was thinking very hard.

Her conversations with Scranton had gotten her thinking about Jim. Dear Friend that he was, was her relationship with him all that different from Scranton’s with his Normal Chick? They both spent all their time at work together, they both seemed down when the other one was in the least put out, they both…they both cared more than the other one knew about their happiness.

Scranton had a crush on Normal Chick. He had for years. Did she have a crush on Jim? If she did, she had to have had one for years too. It’s not like anything had changed recently. Sure, Jim had been a little extra nice recently as if to apologize for his part in the whole Cumberland Mills thing, and she’d been real jumpy around him—witness today’s ridiculous situation at the dojo. But that was all minor stuff. The real stuff had been there from the beginning. So if Scranton had a crush on Normal Chick, she probably had one on Jim.

But if she had one on Jim, she definitely had one on Scranton too. Sure, she’d never seen what he looked like, but for every time Jim had helped her through a workday, Scranton had helped her through an evening. Actually, looking back on it, it was more like 3:1, since she’d known Scranton for so much longer.

Longer than Roy, even.

Roy was the real issue here, she realized. She’d always assumed that her relationship with Roy was how real life went: that Scranton was an online fantasy who’d ultimately turn out to be a 45-year-old woman from Calgary, Alberta, while Jim was only able to be Jim from 9-5 on weekdays. Roy was solid, Roy was secure, Roy was safe.

But was Roy all that safe if she needed both Jim and Scranton to keep her sane?

Why wasn’t she spending every workday hanging around the warehouse, or every evening chatting with her fiancé? Why was she finding excuses not to eat lunches with him, and secretly reveling in the nights when he went out with Darryl and the boys and she could stay online all evening without guilt? Why was she happy with Roy only taking up 11 hours a day of her life, 8 of which she spent sleeping?

Maybe she’d had it wrong all along. Maybe Roy was the fantasy—a fantasy of a boyfriend you met when you were 16 and never broke up with, a fantasy of first love being true love. Maybe she needed to take some time to think that through, with all its implications.

Maybe she needed another chip.

She realized the bag was empty, and it was already 7. She wasn’t going to be home in time to cook dinner for Roy tonight, and he was going to be mad. And why was that? They’d been living together forever, why was it that he was incapable of making dinner for himself? Why did he always assume she’d do it?

Because she always did. She was always in such a hurry to get dinner on the table so they could eat and she could get online that she never really thought to think that Roy wasn’t helping. At most he provided gusto when eating it and maybe some help setting the table, but most nights he was pretty indifferent to the food and sat on the couch until she told him it was ready. So of course he wasn’t up to making dinner for himself on the fly.

“Well, he’s going to have to do it tonight,” she said to herself out loud, as she hit the buttons on the vending machine for another bag of chips. These wouldn’t be Jim-chips, but they would be thinking-of-Jim chips, which made them almost as good.

So. She had a crush on Jim. She had a crush on Scranton. And she…didn’t have a crush on Roy. Well of course she didn’t, they’d been dating for ten years, engaged for three. What she felt for Roy was much more than a crush, wasn’t it?

The little Pam inside of her (maybe she should start thinking of it as “Morgan” in honor of her online personality) quirked an eyebrow at her. Was it really?

No. It was much less.

Well, that was going to be fun.

The first thing she felt upon realizing how she really felt about Roy was a crushing sense of guilt and unease. Her parents had raised her better than this. You don’t let a ten-year relationship go just like that. You work at it. You try, hard.

So she would. She would try to limit her conversations with Jim and Scranton a little and work on how she felt about Roy. If she decided she felt the way she had thought she felt until a few minutes ago, well, that was as things should be. If she decided otherwise, she would cross that bridge when she came to it.

But she definitely was going to cross that bridge if she came that far. She realized abruptly that she’d been shying away from that particular bridge for some years now, hiding behind the “reality” of Roy compared to her other…what should she call them. Options?

Now, were they really options?

She was pretty sure Scranton had had a crush on her at one point. He’d been so pissed off when she’d gotten together with Roy that she’d known it couldn’t entirely be just because of that one story she’d told him about one bad date. But they’d never met. Never, most likely, would meet, although she was getting more and more certain he had at least lived in Scranton in high school if not now. So he wasn’t an option, per se, but he was definitely someone else who’d been attracted to her—and not for her body, that’s for sure, since he’d never seen it. But he was definitely into this Normal Chick he worked with—although he’d said at least once that she reminded him of her, so that had to be a good sign, right? Still, put him in the maybe column.

Jim on the other hand she was convinced was not into her. If he had been, wouldn’t he have asked her out? Well, she was with Roy the whole time. But still, Jim had slid so quickly and efficiently into being her best friend that there hadn’t really been any time to think of him in that way, so what were the odds he’d ever thought of her that way? Pretty low, she imagined. She’d seen the kinds of girls he dated, when he dated. “Pam 6.0” kinds of girls, at least according to everyone else. Red-haired goddesses everyone else drooled over. Not Pams. So he’d picked her up today and she’d found herself liking it a little too much. That just meant she had a Jim problem, not the other way around. But still, he did hang around her a lot. There was that terrible game of Angela’s, Pam Pong, which strongly suggested he hung around her at least enough to make Angela grumpy. Though Angela was always grumpy about other people having fun, so perhaps that was not the best example. Still, he did like her, even if he didn’t like-like her. Oh god she was back in high school again. Best to move on.

So even if Jim and Scranton weren’t really options, they were still…indicators? Suggestions that maybe it wasn’t necessarily Roy or bust. Maybe neither of them would burst through the computer screen or fling themselves across her desk and declare their undying love, but at least they cared about her.

It was time to figure out if Roy really did. And if she did about Roy. Because it was unfair to be having these thoughts right now. But she might have to indulge herself in them again soon, if things with Roy went as she was beginning to suspect they might.

But first, she needed a real dinner. For reasons she wouldn’t figure out until later, she grabbed her keys and headed out to Cugino’s.