THE BIG LEAP
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX - DENMARK (AT LAST!)
These were Joey´s first impressions of Denmark:
- Seemingly everyone either wears black or earth tones.
- The Danish language sounded REALLY, REALLY strange to her American ears!
- It seemed like a very mellow kind of place to her.
Their flight hadn´t been anything to cry about and had actually felt much shorter than when she´d flown to Paris, something that she figured, she could chuck down to not having to fly alone this time. Herself, Jen and Jack had a section of three seats to themselves for the entire trip, which had mostly been spent playing cards (they´d gone through every card game they knew between them, to the point where Joey and Jen spent the last of the flight playing "Go Fish", while Jack tried without any luck to catch some Z´s) and talking about all of the things they wanted to do on their little vacation.
Joey only had two things one her list, having a picture of herself taken in front of the statue of the little Mermaid (to give as an extra present to a (much beloved to her) little cutie-pie back home in Boston) and taking a trip to Tivoli, the amusement park that Pacey had e-mailed her pictures of himself having gone to, just for the fact that she hadn´t been to one, since she was a kid and it looked like it could be fun. Jack, who thanks to his Mensa member boyfriend had developed a new found interest in science, wanted to see the Copenhagen Planetarium and apart from that, was more or less happy to follow the flock. This was in stark contrast to Jen, who had a list so long of things, she needed to do while she was there (which according to Jack was both a direct consequence of Jen´s long-running status as perpetually single and them getting their first unlimited high-speed internet connection, back in their apartment in NYC). So long, in fact, that there was little chance of them getting through even half of it, before they had to go home a week later
More than anything, Joey looked forward to spending more than a few days with Pacey and she´d made a choice with herself to be as nice and inviting to his girlfriend, as she could be. Making new friends had always been her annoying social Achilles heel and while she was fine with it when she was younger, it wouldn´t be long until she would be out on her own in a job market, where she knew that she would probably be forced to learn to get better at it. Not that she was entirely denying to herself, that there would likely be a tiny hint of jealousy on her own part, when she saw this girl kissing the guy of her own dreams. But, the rationalist in her also gathered that if she could get past something like that and still make friends with the girl, then she should be able to get past a lot of other things easier in the future.
Then again, she also knew all too well what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men and the truth was that she had no idea how she would react in reality, until she came face to face with this "Pacey Stealer", as she had unflatteringly named her in her head.
It was for that reason a relief, when Pacey (who looked far too good to her, considering that she was now a "Kept Woman") told them, that they wouldn´t be seeing her until the day after along with his other Danish female friend, the one with the name that was slightly similar to her own, that she kept forgetting what was for some reason.
The funny thing to her was though, that while he looked like the same Pacey, he´d always been, there was something different about him, that she couldn´t put her finger on. One thing was how he seemed so at peace with himself, especially if you compared it to their last years in Capeside, but there was also a confidence to him that if it had been there before, wasn´t something she´d noticed. Having heard him answer someone in what sounded to her like perfect Danish on their ride to his place on the bus, had been a true "Mind-Blower" moment too, when she thought back to how he would struggle to just pronounce the simplest of sentences correctly in French class back in high school.
The old Pacey from back then would have given up at learning a hard language, even before he´d begun, but this Pacey was like a new and improved version of him, stripped of the negative thoughts that she´d known for a long time, would always hold him back from realizing his true potential. A guy, who when he saw a hard challenge in front of him, didn´t throw in the towel and instead went to it with an ideology of "I Can". It looked great on him as well; she would gladly be the first to admit.
Copenhagen itself reminded her a lot of Paris, at least as far as the architecture went, and the bus ride back to Pacey´s "Loaner apartment" (as Jen called it) had been a pleasurable one with Pacey doing his best to fill them in on what they were seeing, whenever they passed by some landmark or other place, that he felt the need to point out to them. When they got to his apartment, that she would consider to be nice and functional without being flashy (in other words, your classic "Single Guy´s Apartment"), they began by figuring out the sleeping arrangements. Jack (after winning a game of rock, paper, scissors) would get the sofa, while Joey and Jen had to make due with a pair of air mattresses that Pacey had bought for the occasion. After herself and Jen making a game out of who could fill up theirs with air the fastest, which Jen took the pointless honor or winning, it was time for the alcohol to be brought out, while Pacey concentrated on his cooking.
"You can´t come to Denmark and not taste what a real Carlsberg tastes like. Cheers" Pacey said, during a break in his cooking, where the food could more or less mind itself. She had a taste of the beer; she was holding and it just tasted like any other beer did to her. Not all that great, to be honest and two of them was usually her limit, before she switched to something else.
"Did you guys know that the name comes from the original founder´s son, who was named Carl? The name means "Carl´s Mountain" and was chosen because their first brewery was at the top of one of the biggest hills in the city" Jen explained.
"I´m starting to think that the combo of you not having a social life and unlimited internet isn´t the best one, I´ve ever seen" Joey joked and Jen gave her a playful punch on the shoulder.
"To be fair, she does go out sometimes. To school, the grocery store with Grams, last week they even went to a Bingo game together. I´m not entirely sure, but I thinks she´s turning into an octogenarian" Jack told Joey and got a small scowl from Jen as thanks for it.
"Would you rather that I turn back into the old version of New York Jen again? Trust me, you wouldn´t like her" Jen told him off and while they were just kidding around now, Joey also knew that Jen meant it, when she said that she didn´t want to revert to her old self.
"The food will be ready in fifteen" Pacey told them, as he came back in from the kitchen and sat down next to Joey on his couch. Just sitting this close to him had ever since their late teens, filled her with a calm, like few other things could and there was a familiarity to it, that she´d found to be almost impossible to replace with anything else.
"Fifteen!" Jen exclaimed, before taking a sip of her beer. "Wanna hear about the last time, I started feeling old? When I found out that my great nephew, who I hadn´t seen in years and still thought of as a little kid, is now as old as I was, when I moved to Capeside!"
"Alexander is growing so fast too, it´s like I can´t keep up with how big he´s getting!" Joey mused along with her. "I hate to tell you guys, but I think this what it feels like to become ..."
"Don´t say the word!" Jen interjected, but it was too late.
"An adult" Jack and Pacey ended Joey´s sentence and the three of them nodded along with one another in agreement, that this was something, they couldn´t run away from anymore.
"I actually don´t mind being an adult and getting to bed at a decent hour, so I´m not wrecked the day after" Jack shared with them.
"If I don´t get my seven hours, I feel like I´m forty, when I wake up in the morning. And that´s seven, if we don´t count the two times at least, I have to get up to pee" Joey felt like she may as well share too, now that they´d gotten into this slightly wallowing in their own misery mood anyway.
"Two times! I wish, that was me! The times I feel like I´m forty the most, is after I´ve been out partying the night before" Pacey told them.
"Remember when you could just continue on partying the day after, like it was nothing?" Jack rhetorically asked them. "Nowadays ..."
"Would you guys stop this? We´re still only twenty, we aren´t forty yet! Okay, so a few of have turned twenty-one, but we´re not old yet!" Jen clearly felt the need to intervene with, seeing as their feeling sorry for themselves was taking overhand, in her estimation. "You know what we need to do tonight? Try acting like we´re fifteen again".
"We weren´t allowed to drink, when we were fifteen" Pacey had to throw into the mix, before taking a large sip of beer.
"Okay, so it doesn´t have to be entirely realistic, but we can always try it?" Jen asked them and since no one else had any real ideas, it looked like it would be the one, they went with.
After dinner, which was some duck dish they served at the restaurant, Pacey worked at and was pretty much infinitely better than anything she would have been eating for dinner, if she´d been having it by herself, back in her dorm room in Boston, they had to ask themselves one big question first? What do fifteen-year-old´s actually do? Seeing as it had been so long since they were that age, all of them had slowly begun to forget it and the best anyone could come up with was playing a game of truth or dare.
"When was the last time, we did this?" Joey asked without expecting an answer, before taking a shot of liquid courage, just to get herself into the spirit of it.
"You were probably too drunk to remember it. You were on the other hand, very entertaining to watch that evening, I can tell you that much" Pacey told her with that small smile of his, that he would always have on, when he´d told her something a little embarrassing about herself, but still didn´t want her to feel bad about it. As usual, it worked pretty well, although she had pretty much no idea when it could have been.
"Okay, since I proposed we play this game, I guess it´s only fair that I get the first one" Jen started them off with and while the first truths were rather tame, as they got further into the evening, both the dares and truths started getting racier, as all of them got more alcohol inboard. Among the highlights for Joey were Jen admitting to still having a crush on her teenage boyfriend Henry and seeing him as her one, that got away (something Joey had a little expected, when she considered how filled with sweet nostalgia that Jen would look, whenever his name was brought up), Jack admitting that he´d once been a part of stealing a car, even if he in his own defense claimed to have been so drunk, that he didn´t know what was going on and Pacey admitting to once having to flee out of a window practically naked, when the boyfriend of the girl he was getting it on with came home earlier than expected and he had to make the quickest exit, he could.
"One last round and then, I need to hit the hay" Jack said after a large yawn, that then spread like a wildfire to the other three.
"Jetlag sure is a bitch, isn´t it? It´ll be a day or two, until you´ll feel like you´re back to normal" Pacey told them and it made Joey think back to her trip to Paris, that as great as it had been, had also been slightly plagued by how long it had taken her to adapt to being in her new time zone.
"My turn first, then. Jack, truth or dare?" Joey asked.
"I´m too tired to do a dare, so it´ll have to be truth" Jack answered.
"Was there ever a time, where you flirted with the idea of becoming more with Jen?"
Jen and Jack looked at one another and seemed to be in agreement on something.
"It´s time, we told them" Jen started, before letting Jack finish with their "revelation".
"We sort of had a drunk hook-up, senior year of high school" he told herself and Pacey, who had to look at one another in utter shock.
"How have I never heard about this before?" Pacey asked, practically taking the words out of Joey´s own mouth in doing so.
"It was a one-time thing that will never happen again!" Jen stated unequivocally, although if Joey wasn´t all wrong, she could still detect a hint of "I wish it would have happened again and again after that" in her voice.
"Jen, truth or dare?" Jack asked his friend, who finished what had to be at least her eighth beer of the evening, before answering him.
"I´m game for a dare" Jen answered him back.
"I dare you to tell us that we can stop playing this game and that we can all go to sleep now" Jack dared her and as little as Jen looked like she wanted to admit it, she was clearly getting ready for some shut-eye as well.
"Okay, I guess we can call it a night! Tomorrow, I want to see some of the city life, though! I didn´t come here just to hang out in your loaner apartment, Pacey".
And with that, they decided to call and end to their long, and in spite of being rather uneventful for the most part, rather tiring day.
Joey woke up only a few hours later with a bladder, that needed to be emptied, before she could go back to sleep. After taking care of her business, she was just going to head back to her not all that comfortable, but not disastrously uncomfortable mattress either. When she saw that the door out to Pacey´s small balcony was open and that he was standing out there, she made a quick decision however, to go and talk to him.
"Can´t fall asleep?" she asked him, as she came out onto the balcony, where the night wind and them being on the fourth floor made for a somewhat chilling combo at that time of the year in Scandinavia. The view from up there was something though, and from where she stood, she could see out over most of the neighborhood they were in.
"There was one question, I was expecting to be asked tonight, but you never did" he told her as she joined him, in leaning up against the railing.
"What´s that?"
"Whether I almost got on a plane back to the states, because I missed you too much. The answer to that, is that I came close to a few times, when I first came here" he confided in her and in spite of the chill in the air, the warmth it hit her with inside to hear so, was enough to make her not feel that chill at all.
"All I kept thinking about was that moment, when I would see you again and what would happen, when we did. You really have a way of messing with my head, like no one else has ever been able to, Jo" he said softly, as they looker one another deep in the eyes.
"It isn´t like I´m alone in it. If you want the truth, I think I was border lining on a depression for those first weeks, after you´d left. I didn´t know what to do with myself, so I just concentrated on school and when that was over, I´d stay in my dorm room all evening".
"It sure sounds depressing. What changed?"
"I got out there and somewhere along the way of making new friends and having new adventures to tell you about, I think I began to find out who I really am now. I´m not the Joey Potter, who left Capeside close to three years ago anymore. That girl still had so much anger inside of her and now, I can say that the anger is gone from me. I´m fine with who I´ve turned into and while the future is still a little scary to me in some ways, it´s slowly starting not to be. I´d even go so far as saying that I can´t wait for it to come for me, because do you know what I´m going to do? I´m going to kick it´s ass!" she told him with a wide smile, that made him smile along with her.
"I have a feeling, that you will too, Potter! Before we get that far, there´s still the matter of tomorrow and what will happen when you and Marie meet for the first time. She doesn´t need to know about what happened between us in LA, are we agreed on that?"
"I won´t tell her, if you won´t tell my boyfriend. We can just be friends again, Pacey. I know we can, because we´ve done it before".
"Until we became more than that again. I´m seeing if I can´t get some sleep, you should do the same. We have some busy days ahead of us, if we´re planning on getting through everything on Jen´s list in a week!" he half-joked, before heading back to bed. After taking one last look of anticipation out on the city below her, Joey did the same.
END OF CHAPTER FORTY-SIX