A/N: I didn't want to do this to them, I promise. I adore Pacey and Joey. It just sort of came out this way when I started writing, and like I said, it's loosely based on two people I know. I'm sorry to be such a downer, but please review and give me hell if you have to. Thanks in advance!

What's happening to us, this slow, painful dissolution, is my fault, and you're going to hate me when I finish telling you about it. Knowing my guilt, admitting it to myself and to him and being helpless to fix it, to put things right, is only making the impossible harder. I'm losing him. Slowly, surely, unalterably.

I keep having this nightmare, the same damn one, every other night or so. And the awful part is that I can never remember it clearly when I wake up. All I'm ever able to cling to in the thin threshold that exists between sleep and reality is darkness and fear and an overshadowing shame that makes me want to cry even after I open my eyes. I always have to reach over and touch him then, in the aftershock of this dream, to reassure myself that he is there, and that he is Pacey.

Sometimes he stirs in his sleep, shifting slightly against my touch. In the wretched loneliness of the early morning dark, nursing the remnants of the nightmare, I often wonder if he means to pull away from me.

"Do you want me to recap it for you? I think you know," he had said, and the bitter edge in his voice couldn't really cover up the hurt beneath it.

I'd rather him be angry. Yell. Punch walls. Hell, punch me. But of course he would never put his hands on me in anger, not my Pacey.

It's a testament to how far we've slipped in the last few months that something like Pacey hitting me is preferable to this. At least then we could share some of the burden. As it stands now, the guilt is all mine. Don't think I don't realize how selfish that sounds, to want him to feel some of it too. Believe me, I know.

When did I become this person? I look in the mirror and don't recognize the woman staring back at me. I think Little Joey Potter would hate her. I know I do.

How do you even begin to apologize for making someone's worst fears come true? To atone for something like that? I'm still trying to work that one out. Every time I close my eyes, I see his as they were that day; flat pools of some liquid colder than ice, blazing at us from the doorway of my office. Harsh fluorescent lights, a stapler pressing into the small of my back, a near-stranger's hand on my thigh. One thought engulfed me, engulfed everything: We had shattered him. That thought was the whole world.

I know now it wasn't even true. Not the "we" part, anyway.

You did this, Joey. No one else. You shattered him. And all because he loves you too much.

There's no excuse for what I did. I'd love to tell you there is. I'd love to gather the tatters of sanctimony and tell you that Pacey Witter was the farthest thing from my mind that night, that I didn't even know what I was doing. That Matt had put me under some kind of black-magic spell and made me helpless to control my actions. I wish I could say that when Pacey opened the door and saw me cradled in another man's embrace, leaning against a desk littered with manuscripts and papers as if it were just another workday, I jolted out of the spell and saved both of us from the agony of the minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months that followed.

But it didn't happen that way. There was no spell. It was just me, shattering him in the instant it took his brain to acknowledge what his eyes were seeing.

Behind my eyelids I can still see the roses (roses, God help me!) dropping out of his slack hand, his jaw clenching and unclenching as he tried simultaneously to understand and to deny the scene before him. It's all in slow motion in my memory, like some ridiculously melodramatic scene in a daytime drama. I never watch that crap. It's so unrealistic. Not like this, which is so realistic it makes me want to throw up.

I don't remember screaming, but I think I did. When he yanked Matt away from me and drew back and punched him in the mouth, when Matt's blood flew and spattered my wrinkled white blouse, I'm pretty sure I screamed.

I don't remember the tears starting to flow, either, but I know they did. I reached for his arm, begging him—for what, God only knows—and he threw my hand off with such force that I stumbled back against the desk. I had a bruise on my hip the next day from that, and I remember wishing it would stay there as a permanent reminder of how abysmal it feels to shatter someone you love.

"Pacey, please?!" Sobbing. I still don't know what I was asking him for.

I would have traded every happy moment of my entire life just to be spared the look he gave me. I can't even do it justice with words. In it, I saw the end of all the goodness life has to offer. It will never leave me, that look.

He was shattered. And when I gathered myself together enough to apply some screwed-up kind of logic to what had happened, the reasons obediently lined up in front of me, glaringly naked and oh, so trivial: Because I worked late that night with a man who seemed so eager to help me jumpstart my career. Because we got tipsy on the bourbon that he kept, for some reason I don't even care to know, in his desk drawer. Because he read my poems and told me I had the soul of a writer. Because it was dark and cold outside and I didn't want to go home just yet.

Because I had found the ring box in Pacey's coat pocket just that morning. In that little velvet box lay all the fears I'd ever harbored about commitment and the implications of forever. It ignited my self-destructive need to run.

You're probably wondering why he didn't leave me that night and never look back. Believe me, I've asked myself the same thing every day since. And I don't have an answer, except that sometimes love is stronger than it should be.

I've doubted many things in my life. I've never doubted his love for me.