SOS by Glory, Girl Writer.pdf - Dawson's Creek Fandom Wiki

"I feel bad," he said simply. "I feel like I did something I shouldn't have. I feel like I
should apologize to you, but I'm not sure what for."
"You have nothing to apologize for," she said, smoothing her dress across her hip. "I'm
telling you it's okay. In case you haven't noticed, I'm having a highly impractical
weekend fling with a rich computer design mogul, so I'm not exactly sitting in my lonely
bedroom, licking my wounds."
He walked slowly around behind her and wrapped his arms around her in a way that
struck her as brotherly, more than anything else. "I'm just going to stop talking, then."
She put her hands over his. "Okay."
***
Joey was surprised to find herself thinking about the night sophomore year when she
and Dawson had gone to some ridiculous school dance in the early stages of his crush
on Jen, with Dawson desperate to track her down on her date with that oafish football
star Dawson had hated so much. He had grabbed Joey and ordered her to dance, more
in the manner of a forced march than anything, and then they had found themselves
face to face, hands actually touching, and he had suddenly looked at her like he'd never
seen her before. It had lasted only a minute, but it had made her stomach fluttery and
her face hot and her knees oddly reluctant to support her. And here they were again,
five years later, and it was like coming full circle. She seemed to be seeing him, not as
an obstacle or a threat or a savior, but as himself, for the first time in so long she could
hardly remember. His hand on her back felt friendly and relaxed, and his hand felt
familiar in hers.
Dawson reached over and hooked a finger under the strap of her dress, which had
slipped from her shoulder. Briskly, he slid it back up into place. "It was falling down."
"Thanks." She smiled. She heard the music, was aware of the people swirling around
them, and could see out of the corner of her eye that Pacey was talking to Jen outside,
but Joey felt utterly cocooned. Images of Dawson, images of herself -- younger,
dumber, more sure of everything -- flashed in her mind. She remembered, with an
almost unbearable rush of something bittersweet, the first time Dawson ever kissed her.
She had been so surprised and so relieved -- he feels something, I'm not crazy, I'm not
doomed -- and the next morning, when she woke up, she had looked at herself and been
convinced that she seemed ten years older. She'd felt like she had seen and felt and
done things that nobody had ever seen or felt or done before, ever. All the songs were
true, all the poetry was about something after all, and she had crossed some
momentous threshold. She'd been picked, chosen, delivered, rescued from the swamp
she'd been swimming in for a year. That was the way it had seemed then.
Dawson realized that he'd never really noticed how beautiful she was. He'd thought he
had, but now he could see that in his mind, she'd always been fifteen, a little gawky, a
little unsure of herself. Somewhere along the line, she'd become this woman. He had
the sad feeling that he'd missed it for some reason, maybe because he was too busy
adoring her for being frozen in time, his one constant reassurance that not everything
changed. He remembered their first date, when she'd come down from the porch as an