Time has a funny and perpetually heartrending tendency to speed up when all you want is to savor each moment as it passes you by—when you want to reach out and snag those moments and stick them in your pocket for safekeeping, to store close at hand for the nights when you need to remember a time that you were simply, honestly, purely content. Time, more often than not, fades to a pleasant blur on the happy days, the calm days, the days when the most complex and wonderful people you've ever known come together, physically and otherwise, for the first time in months and the last time in the foreseeable future. Another afternoon had slipped away, another evening had crowded in, effectively (if temporarily) mending ancient hurts and slights and betrayals among them with life's best medicine, laughter.
Jen's thoughts chased one another as she sat silently at their table, the same Icehouse table they had shared the night before last, minus one of their number. Without Andie, the walls or chains or heartstrings or whatever it was that connected them had tightened, moved them as one unit toward the center of a circle that was precious and almost tangible now, under the starry night sky of their childhood home. Thinking of returning to New York herself, or even of letting Joey do it, was somehow alarming, terrible, in this setting.
She could almost resent time's fickle ways in this moment, as she sensed the pleasant blur trying to happen, trying to usher her, blind and protesting, through the warmth and security and satisfaction of this night and on to her inevitable return to New York. What awaited her there were only the cold realities of an empty apartment and fears of inadequacy that she would voice to no one but herself and her unborn child. Even as she fought time she knew it was a hopeless battle.
"Jen!"
Three voices at once, a chorus of shouts. She jumped a little, startled out of her reverie, and looked around the table at the curious, smiling faces, all of them focused on her.
"What is it with you lately?" Jack asked amiably. "Is there some link between pregnancy and catatonia that I'm not aware of?"
"Stop it, I'm just thinking." She stirred her water around with her straw, not looking at them, slightly embarrassed by the uncharacteristic sentimentality she was about to spew forth. "I just ... I like this. I like us, together like this. I don't want it to end, you know?"
Pacey gasped. "Do my ears deceive me? Is Jen Lindley going soft on us? Someone, quick, alert the media!"
"Bite me, Witter," Jen muttered, still absentmindedly stirring her water.
"She got that from me, you know," a rather inebriated Joey announced proudly to the table at large.
"Very true, Jo, thanks for letting me borrow that eloquent all-occasions comeback," Jen said indulgently, regaining her firm hold on the sardonic wit that had always been her effective shield.
"Ah, such a Potter classic. You should copyright that, you know." Pacey tipped a wink at Joey, who graced him with one of her special, glowing smiles—the absolutely sincere, emotionally uncluttered ones. Jen thought with a twinge of amusement and a sharper twinge of affection that their dark-eyed, somber, overanalytical Joey always came alive after one or two too many cocktails.
"Unfortunately, it's only relevant when you're around. It would be wasted on anyone else," Joey said. "But don't knock it, Jen; it shuts him up."
"Too bad we don't have any magic words for you, drunk girl," Jack said teasingly, and Joey stuck her tongue out at him. He grinned and turned to look at Jen, reaching for her hand that was obsessively twirling the straw in her glass and squeezing it in his own. "I know what you mean," he said seriously. "I don't want it to end either."
"Me neither," Dawson agreed.
"Nope," Pacey offered.
"Well, then it's unanimous, because I don't either," Joey declared defiantly. Then, her eyes lighting up, "So let's all move back here! Come on, Dawson, Jen, what do you say? We can do this forever. We can stay securely stuck here together for the rest of our natural adult lives."
Dawson smiled at her, a sweet and somehow sad smile. "That would be great," he said.
Jen nodded her agreement. "It would," she said. "You guys can help me raise my child. We'll all live in the same house and practice tag-team parenting. It will be like Full House for the twenty-first century."
"Oh, God, don't wish that on your child!" Dawson laughed.
"Come on, don't you think I'd make a great Uncle Jesse?" Pacey asked. "He was the cool one, right?"
"There wasn't a cool one. There was a doofus and a dork and a weirdo," Joey said wisely, tipping back her glass to drain the rest of the liquid from the bottom.
Wordlessly, Pacey got up and slipped away to the bar to get her a refill. Jen noted this with amusement tinged with pride. Not that she would condone one person's attempt to use liquor to take advantage of another, but in this case, with this particular hard-headed subject ... she was willing to overlook it.
"It'll never happen," Joey said, her exuberance turning on a dime into a sighing proclamation of despair.
Jen bit down on her smile and offered her friend a sympathetic look. "Why's that, Jo?"
"Because Dawson is a big producer in Hollywood, and because I have my stupid job, and you would never move back because you've got New York in your veins." She looked honestly disappointed, and Jen felt a stab of pity for her.
"So what?" she said, in an attempt to lift Joey's spirits again. "So maybe you're right, we won't actually move back here. But we can come back and visit more often, right? We can stop drifting apart and trying so damn hard to forget each other. Right?"
"Hey now," Jack said, shooting a stern look between the girls. "Who's trying to forget each other?"
Jen and Joey exchanged a knowing glance and looked away quickly. Jen offered Jack a sweetly innocent smile. "No one, dear. I'm just trying to help Joey feel better about the fact that we're not going to do the Full House thing."
Pacey returned and set the fresh drink down in front of Joey, who smiled her thanks and immediately began sipping at it. He sat next to her and, very casually, slipped an arm around the back of her chair. "What's this I hear, I don't get to be Uncle Jesse after all?" he asked sadly. "Well damn, just stomp all over my dreams."
"I don't know about you guys, but I relive our past life every day of mine," Dawson said. "I think moving back here would only succeed in hopelessly confusing me."
"D, man, you've got learn to untangle fantasy from reality, now, I've warned you about that," Pacey said, shaking his head in amusement. "And if you call me Petey again, it's on."
"He calls you Petey?" Joey asked.
"Yes, Sam. Sometimes he does."
Joey slapped at Pacey's chest in protest, and he effortlessly caught her hand and brought it to his lips, planting a quick kiss on her palm in a gesture that was painfully sweet and endearing.
Jen cleared her throat and looked around at her friends. "All right, I'm going to the restroom. Don't you dare say anything interesting until I return," she declared.
"I'm going with you!" Joey announced, getting up from her chair and swaying slightly as she tried to find her sea legs. Pacey reached out and held her arm to steady her.
"Jen, can you handle this one on your own, or do you need an escort?" he asked.
Jen smiled and reached out to link her arm through Joey's. "I've got it covered, thanks."
The bathroom was deserted, as the restaurant was set to close in twenty minutes and the dinner crowd had already thinned out considerably. Once inside the ladies' room, Joey flopped heavily down on the black leather bench in front of the bank of mirrors and sinks, and Jen laughed. "So I take it you just came along for the ride?" she said, heading for a stall.
"No, I have to go," Joey said. "I'm just resting."
"Oh. Okay then," Jen said agreeably. "You rest up, Jo."
"Jen?" Joey said when her friend was about to close the door of a stall.
"Yes, Joey?"
"I think I'm drunk."
"I think so too, sweetie."
"Do you think Pacey wants me to be drunk? He keeps bringing me drinks. And I keep drinking them!"
Jen stepped back out of the stall and smiled at the genuinely perplexed look on Joey's face. "I think Pacey wants you to be happy. Is it working? Are you happy?"
"Tonight, yes, very. In general?" She paused. "I don't know."
"Really? You don't know, huh?"
"I mean, I like my job. I like my apartment. It has the best view, Jen, you've got to come over sometime and see the view!"
"Sure, just name the day." Jen waited patiently, dismissing her need to pee in deference to Joey's need to vent.
"But happy ... I'm not sure. Sometimes I think I am. Doesn't that say something? I mean, no one's happy all the time, Jen—are they?"
"You're asking the wrong person that question. I would have to say no, though, if I were forced to guess."
"Well good. Because sometimes I think I am." She slumped lower against the cinderblock wall, her forehead wrinkling with the effort of sorting through her fuzzy thoughts. "Do you think Pacey's happy?"
"I don't know, Jo. But if he's not, I have an idea of what would change that."
"I don't want to hear it."
"You never want to hear it, so I'm going to stop trying to say it. I'll just be content in the knowledge that we both know. We all know."
Joey frowned. "Christopher calls him Percy," she said.
"What?"
"Christopher calls him Percy. And every time he does that, I just want to grab a handful of his hair and yank on it as hard as I can until he changes it to Pacey."
Jen smiled. "How often do you and Christopher discuss Pacey?"
"More than you might think," she admitted. "For some reason, Christopher's always been jealous of him. Something about how my eyes light up when I mention his name, and about how I'm so supportive of Sam and Petey's relationship on The Creek. Chris says it makes him nervous."
Jen nodded understandingly and went back into the stall to take care of business. When she came out, Joey was still sitting on the bench, staring down at the tile floor as if it were spelling out a secret message that only she could see. Jen reached out and tapped her on the shoulder.
"Don't you have to go?" she reminded gently.
"Oh," Joey said, nodding. "Oh yeah."
Jen studied her reflection in the mirror critically as her drunk friend made stumbling progress into a stall. There were still dark circles under her eyes that made her look at least five years older than she was. She swiped on some lipstick and smacked her lips together, noting a slight improvement in the result. At least with color in her lips she didn't look quite so sickly. That was good. Jack still persisted in shooting her concerned glances from time to time, and the two of them had been at each other's throats most of the day for the same reason. She was annoyed to no end by seeing her own worries mirrored in his eyes, and she wanted nothing more than to push them away and to enjoy this stretch of time that was fast reaching its end. That's all. She would see to herself, to her body, as soon as life resumed its normal pace. For now her fears and Jack's were irrelevant. They had to be.
"I'm fine," she insisted quietly to her reflection. The reflection stared back at her, a pale-faced, hollow-cheeked denial of those words. No, you're not, it seemed to protest. And you know it.
