THE FIRST TIME

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE - THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR

"It's the most wonderful time of the year

There'll be much mistletoeing

And hearts will be glowing

When loved ones are near

It's the most wonderful time of the year"

ANDY WILLIAMS (From the album "The Andy Williams Christmas Album" (1963))

Joey loved Christmas and always had, ever since she was a little kid. One thing was that it gave her a handful welcome of extra days off from school, after the stress of mid-terms was over, but it felt to her like everyone was just a little bit nicer to one another on those days around the 25th of December. Even her father and Bodie had agreed to keep the peace for the holidays and looking at it objectively, they had plenty of things to celebrate this year compared to some of the past years, where it had felt harder than usual to get into the spirit of the season, both thanks to her dad being in jail and the economic troubles that never seemed to entirely go away, no matter how hard they'd tried to scrimp and save during the rest of year. With the Ice House now being on other hands (something that she still was getting used to, all of these months later) and their new B&B bringing in enough income to sustain their entire family and allow them to occasionally put a little extra into her college fund, they literally had nothing to worry about, save for whether their family members would like the presents that had been bought for them.

This was only one part of what made it special though, and what had happened between herself and Pacey on the evening of the Winter Formal still had her smiling to herself time and time again, even though almost a week had passed since that in many ways magical evening. It had felt to her like a big step in the ways of growing up and while she'd expected him to be as sweet and caring for her needs all of the way through, like he had, she now felt closer to him than she ever had, and had become sure that they would last the test of time, even after their high school years one day would come to an end. For a natural born cynic like her, this was a big step towards becoming the girl that she wanted to become; a girl who looked on the bright side of life more often than she'd done in the past and maybe even, someone who could learn to open up to new people a lot easier than she did now. A trait that would surely become quite useful to her when she left the small and comfortable confines of Capeside for a new life in college, where she'd have to step outside of her familiar comfort zone, if she wasn't going to wind up being lonely there.

All of that laid far into the future however, and on the 23rd of December, she'd be spending her afternoon doing some last-minute gift shopping with Jen, who still didn't know what she would getting for Grams, a woman that constantly claimed to have everything that she needed already. While this was nice for her, it also made gift shopping for her quite a test for her granddaughter, who wanted to show her how much she appreciated all of the ways that living with her had improved her life since she'd first moved in with her around a year and a half earlier.

"Any ideas at all?" she asked Jen, while they were browsing through the clothing section of the town's one and only department store that was nearly filled to the brink with other shoppers, who'd "pulled a Jen" and had also chosen to wait to the last days before doing their gift shopping for their loved ones.

"Not a single one!" Jen exclaimed, while she shook her head in despair at the situation, she found herself in. Not that it was anything to stress over, but it still annoyed her to no end, that much was easy to tell.

"Is Chris getting you anything?" Joey thought to ask, if nothing else just to change the subject for a moment.

"We both agreed that it would be too much, too soon. I mean, I still don't know if I want to date him on a regular basis" Jen mused and it wasn't hard for Joey to see where she was coming from. Even if they (according to Jen) had a very pleasant time together at the formal, she clearly still had plenty of reasons to doubt if the most recent object of her affections had it in him to be boyfriend material, especially considering the dubious past that he had when it came to others of their fair gender.

"Does he?" Joey asked back and got an eye-roll in return.

"Whether he does or doesn't, I've decided to keep off making any decisions on him until we return to school at the earliest" Jen answered, and with Chris spending the holidays on Rhode Island with his family there, it wasn't as if it was a pressing matter in any case.

They'd almost gone through all of the clothing racks, when Jen saw something that made her freeze in place, at least for a moment or two.

"Is something wrong?" Joey asked her and could tell from the stone-like look on her friends' face that something had to be.

"The devil has come to Capeside!" Jen exclaimed, as a rather good-looking guy (objectively speaking) came over to them with a slick smile on his face, a stark contrast to Jen's reaction to seeing him.

"Jen Lindley. I never thought that I'd see you again" the boy, whom Joey immediately began to feel uneasy about, greeted her friend.

"Drue Valentine. I hoped that you'd be in jail by now!" Jen snarled back at him, although it didn't seem to deter him too much.

"It came closer than I'd like it to" the boy (whom Joey could now easily guess was the same Drue that she'd heard Jen tell more than a few horror stories about) informed them. "Who's your friend here?"

"Joey Potter and I wish that I could say it was nice to meet you, but I already know enough about you from Jen to know that you're the scum of the earth personified!" Joey smart-assed replied to Drue, who took her insult with a sleazy smile that almost made the hairs stand up on her arms.

"You're spunky! I like it!" Drue exclaimed, which didn't exactly endear him to her in any way.

"And you're a Bona-fide creep, so if you don't mind ..." Jen began to say before Drue cut her off.

"I just thought that I'd introduce myself, seeing as we'll be classmates after the holidays" Drue told them and from what Joey could tell, if there were words that Jen hadn't wanted to hear, it was those dreaded ones.

The rest of their shopping trip had, on top of being a fruitless one in the gift buying department, also been a rather quiet one, with Jen clearly not looking forward to what was to come in the new year.

A few days before this day, Jen had made a list in her head of things that she hoped would and wouldn't happen in the first year of the new millennium. On the positive side, she was hoping to find a boyfriend that it was worth holding onto and while she knew that it could be a fool's hope, she still felt like she had to hold onto it just based on how well her friends were doing in their romantic lives. The way that she saw it, if Dawson with all of his insecurities and movie nerdiness could manage to not just find one, but actually two girls that he was all kinds of compatible with, then it had to be possible for a borderline headcase like herself too. Chris certainly had some potential hidden deep underneath his usual macho bravado and even if it didn't work out with him, it wasn't like he was the only boy in her town around her own age that she could see herself making a go at it with. Other hopes of hers were that she would find a new after school job that she liked, along with her not having as many troubles in school, as she'd had in the past.

When it came to things that she hoped and in most cases, thought wouldn't happen, seeing her old drug buddy Drue again was at the top of her list, like it likely would have been for years to come, if she hadn't run into him earlier that day. It had filled her mind so much that she hadn't been able to fully enjoy the version of family fun that she'd planned to have with Grams and Abby that evening. Even if Abby didn't live with them anymore, it still felt like they'd become a small, albeit unusual family, in the months that Abby had called their house her home and whenever there was an occasion to, they tried to make time for one another, if nothing else just to keep up with what everyone of them were up to. That her half-sister Eve had come up from Boston for the holidays only served to make it even more cozy for the lot of them, with Grams' homemade Christmas cookies serving as the dot above the I.

"So, have you been driving the boys down in Boston crazy on an everyday basis, like you used to up here?" Abby teasingly asked Eve, after Grams had gone to bed and the three girls were lounging out on the couch and watching some old Christmas movie that they were only halfway paying any attention to.

"I do alright for myself" Eve answered with a cheeky smile.

"I bet, you do!" Abby replied and probably wasn't wrong there.

"What about you, Jen?" Eve asked and although, Jen wasn't in the mood for a heart to heart at that moment, she still figured that asking her full-out half-sister and her "almost half-sister" for a bit of advice on her latest problem wouldn't be the worst way to go about things.

"Ehm ..." she tentatively began, not really knowing how to tell them about Drue, without also divulging too much of her past with him to them. "I guess that I sort of have a boyfriend, although he isn't really my boyfriend. It's complicated!"

"The worst guy that she could have chosen, if you ask me" Abby chimed in with.

"Tell me about him" Eve asked for and within a few minutes, Jen had more or less filled her in on where she stood with Chris.

"Are you thinking about giving him a chance, just for the hell of it?" Eve asked her, now that she'd been brought up to date on her younger half-sister's love-life.

"I guess so. Do you guys think that a guy is worthy of being given a second chance, even if you aren't sure that he deserves it?"

"As someone, who's enjoying the heck out of her own second chance, I can't really say no to it" Abby remarked.

"What if what they did was really bad, like practically unforgivable?"

"As far as I see it, if they haven't murdered anyone, then everyone deserves a second chance" Eve said, throwing in her two cents on the subject.

Would Jen be ready to forgive Drue? Only time would tell.

Andie usually looked forward to the holidays for weeks up to it, still this year had been one where she found it hard to get into the spirit of the season. In years past, her mother had always been the one that brought it to the rest of them, with the one exception being the one after Tim had tragically died far too soon, and Andie herself had spent those days in a mental institution, doped up on pills that kept her from going off the deep end, yet also made it impossible for her to feel anything emotionally related. With their mom now being in her final resting place, there wasn't anyone to fill her spot and it made for a Christmas that she'd honestly rather just get over with, so that life could get back to some kind of normal. To top the misery of it all off, she'd been feeling the effects of a stomach bug and had started that day and the past three of them by barfing everything left in her belly up. Jack, being the duty fulfilling brother that he'd always been, had been worrying about her like there was no tomorrow and while part of her appreciated that he cared so much for her, she didn't want him to worry about her more than he already did on a daily basis.

"It isn't a stomach bug, Andie" the ghost of her older brother Tim told her, after she'd just gotten done making another sacrifice to the toilet gods. "You already know what it is, so why are you kidding yourself?"

"Andy and I have only had unprotected sex one time. I'm not pregnant!" she tried telling off the unwelcome guest in her life, even if she knew that there was a good chance that he could be right.

"One time is enough, Andie" Tim reminded her and although, she tried to ignore what he was telling her, the logical side of her knew that biologically, she was at the age where it's easiest to become with child and she'd cursed herself time and time again, since that evening where it had happened.

That day in question had been only a handful of weeks earlier, when the combination of teenage lust, it being so late that the pharmacy was closed, some pretty decent Ganja and a handful of brews had led them to say to hell with the consequences. While her boyfriend had pulled out before the big ejaculation came, she still knew that whatever little had come out before then could have been enough to "get the job done", in the one way that she didn't want it to.

Already, she'd begun to have paranoid thoughts of how everyone else would react and in truth, she couldn't imagine that it would be a pretty picture. Some of them would be understanding of course, with Jen and her brother being at the top of that list, but most of them had no clue that she'd been living a double life where she was the duty fulfilling daughter and student by day, while she'd spent most of her evenings and nights doing things that she didn't want anyone (except for the ones that she was doing it with) to know about. With how much her father had gone through already over the past years, a teenage pregnancy in the family wouldn't be a welcome addition, to say the least. On top of that, there was the thought of how everyone at school would react, and the idea of being known as "The Pregnant Girl" and hearing the sound of snickering voices every time that she walked down the hallways of Capeside High, didn't in any sort of way sound appealing to her either.

She had to take a pregnancy test, that much was obvious, if nothing else to give her some much-needed peace of mind and to know where she exactly stood. Even if she feared what the result would be, it still beat living with not knowing and if she had to get an abortion, then it would have to be before it became too late to.

After a (mostly) fun afternoon of hanging out with Jen, Joey's evening only consisted of one thing that she'd planned on doing: Lying naked with Pacey in his bed and divulging in some more of those pleasures of the most carnal kind that now where she'd gotten a taste of them, she found herself craving nearly every second of the day, whenever they weren't together, dressed in as little as Adam and Eve had been in the Garden of Eden. Already, it had begun to seem funny to her how much that she'd been afraid of taking that final step towards adulthood, especially considering that the boy, she'd chosen for herself was one that she knew for sure would always put her needs first, be they sexual or in any other way that she could possibly imagine. The only part of it that was a bit testing to both of the pair of young lovers was trying to keep quiet enough that neither his mom or Gretchen could overhear it, still it in some way only served to make it feel a little more naughty to her to know that what they were getting up to when they were alone together, was something that was just between the two of them and no one else's business than theirs.

"Can you even remember anymore, what we were so afraid of?" Pacey asked her, while her sweaty self was snuggling up in his arms and both of them were trying to catch their breath again, after yet another round of love-making that still had her feeling hyper-sensitive and shivering and she could sense on him, was doing the same to him as well.

"Only barely" she replied to him, before they shared yet another small kiss. "It almost seems silly now, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, I guess so" he answered her and as she pressed her ear down to his chest, she could hear how fast his heart was beating in this (most enjoyable) of moments between them.

Already, they'd begun to move on from the old-fashioned missionary position that was the only one, they'd tried on their first attempt, to experimenting a little more, even if they were still only up to two different positions: Either with him on top or her "doing the brunt of the work", whenever she got on top of him and rode his throbbing member like he was a race horse and she was the most erotic version of a jockey, whose job it was to lead him to the finish line. Whenever they switched to that "other position" and he just laid there with her being the one in charge, it made her feel a little more powerful too, and as if this was something that fed some kind of primal needs in her that couldn't otherwise be fed in nearly the same sort of way.

"The only question is, where do we go from here?" he thought out loud, and it wasn't as if she hadn't had those same thoughts too over the past days. In many ways, ever since the beginning of their relationship, having a sexual relationship had been the end all, be all of what it meant to be a couple to both of them and now that they'd gotten this far, what else was left for them to achieve that they hadn't done already? Hopefully someday, they would start a family and this would serve as the next challenge for the pair of them to overcome together, but those days still laid far off into the future and for now, they'd have to find some other way of keeping the sparks between them going, if the fire wasn't going to eventually burn itself out.

"I really can't say, Pacey. All I know is that as long as we'll still be together, it's all that matters to me" she told him from the heart and meant every word of it too.

"That makes two of us, who want the same exact thing. Right now, I could never imagine myself being as much in love with a girl, as I am with you" he sweetly told her, and it wouldn't be much more than half an hour later, before their next bit of "Exercise of the most pleasurable kind" commenced, as it would a further couple of times before the evening came to an end and she had to return to her bed at home, that while it was in many ways more comfortable to lie on than Paceys old and slightly lumpy mattress, also didn't have the one thing that it in her mind needed the most: The boy that she'd fallen so crazy head over heels in love with that she couldn't in her wildest dreams ever imagine doing those slightly dirty things with anyone else, that she loved ever so dearly to do with him.

Even if she would never in a million years tell her sister about any of it!

Jen still found herself reeling a bit, even after Abby had headed home to the Potters and Eve had taken the bus back to her dad's house, where she would be spending most of the holidays being spoiled rotten by him in the ways that she never got to, when she was growing up. She'd tried going to bed and falling asleep right after they'd left, but it had turned out to be an impossible endeavor and she'd in stead gone back down to the living room and turned the TV on, planning on hopefully being able to fall asleep in front of it while she watched some movie or TV show that didn't require her to do too much thinking.

Luckily for her, an old episode of "My So-Called Life" had just come on that while she'd seen it a few times before, would hopefully also serve as a nice distraction from the troubles that had filled her mind, ever since her run-in with Drue earlier that day. She'd only watched a few minutes of it however, when there was a knock on the door and as she went to check who it could be that had stopped by at such a late time of the evening, she groaned in annoyance that they'd forced her to get up from the couch, now that she'd just started to drift away into the simplicity of Angela's world from the series, where her biggest issue was whether or not she had it in her to tell the dreamy Jordan Catalano that she had a crush on him that was almost as big, as the one that Joey had on Pacey and vice versa.

Honestly, she'd had no clue who it could possibly be (seeing as they never had any visitors at this time of the day and that Capeside, outside of the tourist season, was pretty much a ghost town after ten o'clock in the evening on most days), so when she saw the least likely suspect standing on her grandmother's porch and holding a small present, it filled her with a suspicion as to whether this was a prank or not.

"What are you doing here, Drue?" she asked her former drug buddy from a far-away feeling past that she wasn't in any hurry to revisit. "Didn't I already make it clear today that I don't want to have more to do with you than I absolutely have to?"

"I only came here with a peace offering, nothing more" Drue tried to innocently tell her, still with his dubious past that she was more well aware of than she would have wanted to, she also found it hard to believe him word for word. "We used to be close with each other before I messed it all up, remember?"

"What I remember is you leaving me lying alone and helpless, when I needed you the most to be there for me. I'm sure that you understand why it's hard for me to believe that you have entirely honest intentions" she toughly answered her former friend and lover, who looked like it wasn't too hard for him to understand where she was coming from.

"Jen, no one knows better than I do, what a rotten and selfish piece of dirt that I'd turned into by the end and I don't expect you to all of a sudden forgive me for all of it. Just know that I've been doing a lot of soul searching over these past months and I don't want to be that kind of guy anymore" he told her, before handing her present over to her.

"You can't buy yourself out of this, Drue" she answered him, although she still had to admit to being a little curious, when it came to what he could have bought for her.

"I know that it'll take plenty of time to win your trust back and I'm fine with that, but I hope that this at least can be a way to get started on it. Merry Christmas, Jen" he bade her goodbye, before heading down to his car that she guessed, he'd either stolen or borrowed from his parents, and drove off again.

Sitting back down in front of the TV again, she considered for a moment just throwing his gift in the trash and trying to forget all about it, still it wasn't many seconds until her curiosity got the better of her and she opened it, to see what was inside of the packaging. When she saw what it was, a small smile crept across her face and even if she still wasn't sure what to think of Drue's claims that he'd changed, she still couldn't help be a little flooded with memories when she put on the cap that he'd bought for her and had a picture of the statue of liberty and had "I Love New York" written in large letters underneath it.

"No, this can't be true!" Andie tried telling herself, while she stared at the result of the pregnancy test that she'd just taken, but there was no denying that it was as blue as anything could be, meaning that somewhere inside of her uterus, a small life had already been created and was growing so fast that within nine months or so, a fully grown baby would be coming out of her.

She knew as well as anyone, how much this could screw up her carefully planned-out plans for the future and although, she knew that a seven-dollar, ninety-nine cent pregnancy test bought at their nearest pharmacy wasn't a hundred percent fool-proof or accurate, her innards were still screaming to her that it was, even without a visit to her doctor's office being needed to assure her that what it told her was spot-on in it's accuracy.

How was she going to tell her family and friends about this, or Andy for that matter? They'd only been a couple for a handful of months and not even a real couple at that, when it came to acting like it around everyone else, so who was to say that he would even want to stand by her in the tough times that were sure to come in the next months for her? Whatever it was that they had was meant to just be a fun and uncomplicated distraction from their everyday lives and not the least, something for herself to look forward to when the dark thoughts hit her again, like they had so many times since her mom decided to leave them all behind, by taking her own life with the help of a handful of pills. This was as far from those ideas as anything could be, and it made her wish for a moment that she'd never met him in the first place. Not that she could say for sure if her life had been better now than it was, but she at the least wouldn't have been with child, something that she hadn't pictured herself doing until she was well up into her twenties at the earliest.

In any case, there was sure to be some tough conversations ahead that she would be forced to have and even if having an abortion seemed like the only way to deal with it, the question of whether or not that she would be able to go through with it was too much for her mind to deal with, at a time when she was still trying to process that just about the worst thing that could have happened to her, had now officially become a reality.

END OF CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

A/N: Sorry for the wait with this one, but I've had some busy months working my butt off to save my personal economy and haven't been able to find the inspiration as easily as I usually do, since I've been so tired after work that I could barely piece two thoughts together, let alone come up with compelling storylines for you guys and girls (probably mostly girls) to enjoy and sink your teeth into. I hope to be able to keep up a more or less regular release schedule in the new year, but as it is in this crazy thing called life, it's hard to predict how much time that I'll have to spend on my writings.

In any case, thanks a lot for reading and if you have any comments, then I'd love to read them.