Sleep is a sadist. That's the thought that finally drove me out of bed, still wearing his clothes and smelling his scent, still enveloped in darkness and slightly lightheaded. It wants to steal over you at the most inopportune moments, when you're on the road in the middle of a long car trip and there's nowhere to pull over, or when you're in a Monday morning staff meeting, taking notes on editorial lineups and fighting the weight of your eyelids. But when you seek it as a means of escape, when you reach for its suffocating unawareness for a moment's respite from the despair of your waking world, it refuses to be captured. Sleep is a sadist.

So I gave up on it and wandered back out to the living room. Too big, too empty.

"Where are you, Pace?" My voice in the silence startled me. It sounded weak, strange. Not really like my voice at all. And of course there was no answer. I would have known if he'd come in during the fifteen minutes or so that I'd been fruitlessly courting unconsciousness. Pacey was many things—quiet, as a rule, wasn't one of them.

I went over to the kitchen and started rummaging around in the cabinet for headache medicine, cursing myself for being so indulgent with the wine. God knew I'd never been able to hold my liquor. The overhead light glinted off the diamond on my left hand and I froze with the Advil bottle an inch away from my reaching fingers and stared at it, transfixed, as if I'd never seen it before.

I love you, Pacey, you know that! God, you must know that!

Well I'm sorry if that's a little hard for me to process right now, Jo, seeing as how there's an image of you about to screw another man on top of your desk burned into my brain. No, don't! You don't want to touch me right now. Not now ... not—with those hands.

What can I do? What can I say, Pace? Please, just tell me, and I'll do it, I'll say it!

Tell me why, Joey. Tell me why you would do something like this to me. To us.

I—I don't know! It wasn't—I didn't—

Bullshit.

I don't know, Pacey! I'm just so scared, I'm so ... I'm so afraid of ...

Of what, Jo? Of me? Of us? Are we back to that amateur psychological scarred-from-the-past fear of commitment garbage? Because I thought we'd left that behind us a long time ago. I thought we'd gotten past it, I thought you had grown up a little. What the hell are you so scared of?

Of forever! Okay? That's what keeps me up at night, that's what makes me do these incredibly self-destructive things, that's what makes me wish I didn't love you so much! I know how crazy that sounds, but it's the truth! I can't even fathom the implications of forever...

...You knew. You knew I was going to ask. You did this on purpose, then. You did this because you wanted to destroy us. Didn't you?

No! I snapped myself roughly out of the gripping clarity of this nightmarish memory and brought out the Advil bottle, slamming the cabinet door harder than was necessary. I swallowed four of the orange pills, gulping them down against the dry lump that had risen in my throat. One of the worst nights in a life peppered with bad nights, and I can recount it in achingly accurate detail, from the angry hurt in his bloodshot eyes to the feel of empty air as he snatched his arm out of my grasp when I went to touch him; the helpless panicky feeling that clutched at my chest and made me feel like a prisoner on a runaway train as I realized that if he was right about my motives, success might mean the ultimate loss.

But I hadn't lost him. Not that night. That night he had gone to bed alone and shattered, leaving me crying on the couch with my hands pressed to my makeup-streaked face. And when at last I crept into the bedroom and climbed in beside him, terrified of touching him and having him shrink away from me again, there were no words, even though I sensed that he was awake. At some point during the silent, wakeful early hours, I had found a strength desperate enough to make me seek out his hand underneath the covers. I twined my cold fingers through his warm, strong ones and held my breath. After what seemed like an eternity, I felt those slack fingers tighten almost imperceptibly around mine, and I could breathe again. A tear tracked slowly down my cheek and soaked into the pillow.

Now, leaning heavily against the kitchen counter and tasting the slightly sweet coating of the Advil at the back of my throat, I noticed that my stomach had tightened up into an uneasy knot—why was I rehashing things best left in the past? I had to think about the here and now, and in the here and now my biggest concern was Pacey. Why hadn't I gone after him? Why had I let him walk out that door already half-drunk and in no frame of mind to be wandering the streets at night?

Hateful thoughts tried to crowd into my mind, so chilling in their boldness that I actually shook my head to try to dismiss them. Because you want him to finish what you started. Because you know it's only a matter of time now that you've gotten the first thread worked out, and the unraveling is picking up speed every time you have one of these fights. Because you're tired of waiting for it to end and you'd rather have it over so you can once again be the tragic victim of your own neuroses.

If any of that is true, I deserve to lose him. Maybe I do anyway. Picking up the phone, I looked at the keypad and debated dialing his cell number. What harm could it do? If he answered, not much. But if he didn't...

I dialed, suddenly desperate to talk to him, hear his voice. All at once it seemed as if my entire world hinged on just that. The phone rang three times, and I was about to hang up, discouraged and beaten, when his voice came through, almost lost in a sea of background noise, music, voices, laughter. "Jo?" he said in a husky tone.

"Pacey, where are you?" I asked, unconsciously raising my voice to compete with the thunder of echoes coming through the phone. He didn't answer for a few moments. "Pacey?" I tried again.

"Listen, Jo, don't wait up for me, okay?" he said, almost shouting but still practically drowned out by noise.

"Wait, Pace," I said. "Tell me where you are."

"You don't need to come down here. I'm fine."

"Well I'm not."

"What? What's wrong?" His tone changed ever so slightly, and I detected traces of concern there. Pacey, forever my protector. If only he was able to protect me from myself. My greatest enemy.

"I want to talk to you, Pace. So either you come home or I'll come to you. I need to see you, okay?"

"Are you all right, Jo?" he asked, as if he hadn't heard me.

"Yes—no! Come home, sweetie, please."

There was a long pause. "Not yet," he said. "Go to bed; get some sleep. Don't worry about me."

"Pacey...?"

The line went dead.

"Dammit!" I threw the receiver at the couch, where it bounced and went skittering across the bare floor of the living room. The desperation was stronger now, the need to see Pacey's face and to touch him and beg him to—no, force him to—forgive me was all-encompassing, overwhelming. I stood there for a few moments in panicked indecision, racking my brain for a way to fix this, to dig myself out of the gaping hole my transgressions had unearthed. The hole was going to swallow me alive if I didn't do something to reverse the damage.

Next thing I knew, I'd retrieved the phone, dialed another number and was tapping my fingernails against the countertop impatiently as I waited for a response. When he answered I didn't even bother with the pleasantries.

"Jack, I need you to do something for me," I said.

"Joey. Are you okay? What's up?"

"I need you to call Pacey and find out where he is for me."

"Sure thing," he said without missing a beat. "But you're scaring me, Jo."

I laughed a little, but there was no humor in it. "I'm scaring myself," I told him.

"Tell me it's not life or death, and I won't ask anymore questions."

"It's not life or death," I said. But it felt like a lie.