A proud man might deny standing on the wrong side of that door with his heart in his throat, waiting for her to follow, and with something as simple as a look, a touch, or a smile, allow him a chance to forgive her—to make him whole again. A proud man might have been halfway down the street before the phone even stopped ringing, in a cab before she had time to figure out the bottom line and get her coat on. A proud man might have been able to turn away from that woman, all silky hair and big, dark, shining eyes and porcelain skin, and finish saying the goodbye she didn't seem to be able to get through on her own.

A proud man never loved Joey Potter.

I don't know how long I stood there with my head against the brick wall by the service elevator, blood thumping in my ears in time to the rapid drumbeat of my pulse. It could have been half an hour, but I'll save some of my depleted dignity and say it wasn't that long. I was grateful for one thing: the soundproof walls. The slamming of the door had cut off the ringing phone and her subsequent actions; I had no way of knowing if she was on the other side of it right now, on the road to completing the betrayal she'd begun so many months ago.

The bitter wind hit me with the force of a 50-pound sandbag in the gut, and I paused below our big, bare window to button my coat against the cold. She might have been watching me, hovering above the dark sidewalk like a troubled angel, silhouetted in a warm golden glow with tears streaming down her cheeks and the fear of losing me in her eyes. I didn't turn around to look. I was afraid she might not be there.

So I walked. It was dark and cold, and my head was throbbing from too much beer and too much thinking, and my feet resisted every step I took away from home, but I kept going. I entertained myself with visions of a chance encounter with the bastard who was driving this wedge between us. My knuckles actually tingled in anticipation of slamming into his jaw, wiping off his smug, condescending smile once and for all, and paying him back in small part for the pain his existence had caused both of us. It was a big city, and odds were highly stacked against such a meeting, but I enjoyed the daydream just the same.

But the mind, in its fundamentally logical and often infuriating persistence, always returns to the real problem, doesn't it? And the real problem wasn't something I could satisfy myself by inflicting physical pain upon. The real problem wasn't him, as much as I hated the guy, as much as I would love to absolve Joey by putting all the responsibility on him. He wasn't the one who had done this to us. We were to blame, Joey and me.

I've known that all along, I think, that my desire for her, my need for her, was the one thing that would eventually be our undoing. It clashed in an insurmountable way with her terror of stability, her natural instinct that refused to let her be happy or satisfied or—God forbid—complacent. So the harder I fought to hang on to her, the harder she struggled. This counterproductive fight was breaking us, not just us as a couple, but individually, too. Sometimes I was almost certain that when it was all over and she had won (as the deepest part of me knew she would), I'd look in the mirror and realize that all that was left of Pacey J. Witter, lovable loser that he'd been, was pieces. And without her, all I knew for sure was that I wouldn't be able to put the pieces back together again. Without her I could never be whole again.

I walked until the wind wasn't stinging my face anymore because my face was numb. Periodically I raised a red, raw hand to wipe at my nose, which was protesting the frigid air. I wished vaguely that I'd brought my gloves. "Hold that thought, Jo. Before you pick up the phone and drive that spear you're wielding through the pitiful muscle that is my heart, give me a second to grab my gloves so my fingers don't drop off from frostbite when I'm wandering the city trying to forget that I love you." I chuckled to myself and the woman walking a few paces in front of me turned around and gave me a strange look. I smiled at her, and she turned back around and picked up her speed a bit. Ah, New York. You gotta love it.

The first time we had walked this city together had been a magical experience. I remember having trouble tearing my gaze away from her face, her cheeks flushed with excitement, her eyes shining as she pointed out buildings and landmarks, filling me in on all the lovely minutiae she had soaked up in her brief residence here. And as she shared her city with me, I'd fallen in love with it because she was in love with it, and I was in love with her. It was just that simple.

"Jen gave me my first tour of New York," she had said, her smile fading and her tone losing its lilting quality as the rawness of the all-too-recent loss of our friend rolled in on us again like a merciless wave that wouldn't break on the shore. "She knew it so well, she knew it like the back of her hand." Her voice had broken, and tears welled up in those beautiful dark eyes. I had taken her face between my hands and made her look at me. I thought I was going to say something profound, soothing, at least moderately intelligent, something that would stop the tears before they started flowing. But instead I leaned in and kissed her, our lips parting in the warm, slow, delicate motion that was the wonder and rapture of the summer before senior year all over again. And when I pulled back and looked into her eyes again, the tears had frozen, and the glimmer of happiness had returned.

What I said didn't really qualify as enlightening or comforting or even especially relevant, but it made Joey smile, and at that moment that was the most important thing in the world to me. "We'll do Jen's city proud," I said.

My hands were stinging now, and there was a lead weight sitting on my chest cavity. It made it hard to breathe. It made it impossible to picture Joey's face without some degree of discomfort. So what could I do? Going home seemed the most appealing option, but my feet, which had been so reluctant to let me walk away from that building now seemed to have reconsidered and decided to refuse to let me go back, instead.

I didn't really think, just turned in to the first neon-blinding hole-in-the-wall I stumbled upon, went to the bar, and plopped myself down on a stool. Going home wasn't an option, at least not until I felt I could look at her and not see the end of us.

Maybe I would discover the cure for love or the remedy for heartache at the bottom of a shot glass.