Chapter Twelve


Jaymie

“Come! Come here.”

I groaned and rolled over in bed. Outside, it was dark, the moonlight pale bluish-white, cast through the window. I kicked my blankets off as I blinked, trying to adjust to reality from the dreamstate I’d been in. Rolling off the bed, I went to the window and peered out at the beach, a light breeze coming in through the screen, ruffling the curtains. Below, the sea grasses rolled in the movement of the air, bending and dancing as it steered through. Lost in the pale moonlight, my eyes struggled for a moment to catch sight of either of them - that’s how much they blended with the sand at this hour - but finally my eyes caught sight of Nick and Nacho. Nacho was running, unruly and unchecked, barking as he went at gulls. Nick was frustrated, hands on his hips, by the base of the steps that led from the deck down to the sand.

“Come back! Please, just….just.. come… come back!” his voice broke midway. Like he was… crying?

Panic went through me like electricity.

I grabbed my bathrobe from the hook on the backside of the door, pulling it around me and tying the waist belt and hurried down the stairs, through the house and out onto the deck. They were quite a ways down the beach from the house now. I didn’t have time to put shoes on, I just hurried down the steps and onto the sand, running barefoot and naked under the robe. Sand kicked up under my feet, leaving the trail of footprints behind me.

Nacho was running circles, coming back around, and Nick turned and I was close enough that he nearly ran into me. We collided and he caught me by my shoulders before I could go down and steadied me, “Sorry,” he muttered, “I’m sorry, I’m trying to - to get my dog…” he ran around me and rushed on after Nacho. “Come here,” he called as Nacho rushed toward the edge of the beach grass, his tongue lolling out, panting. He clearly thought this was a super-fun game.

“Just go inside, he’ll follow you,” I said.

He didn’t answer me, he just kept going on after Nacho.

“Ugh,” I groaned and I ran up behind him, frustrated and grabbed his arm. “Why don’t you ever accept help, god damn you?” I demanded as he spun to face me.

He ripped his arm away, his eyes wide and a strange, wounded-animal sort of expression on his face. “Nick?” I asked, my voice gentler than it had been when I initially grabbed at him. He took two steps back. “Nick, what’s wrong?” I glanced behind me because the look on his face was similar to that in horror films when the guy sees the ghost behind the girl’s shoulder seconds before it kills her. But obviously there was nothing behind me. “Nick?”

He tripped. Stumbled over the bottom step of the deck and landed, sitting and sprawled just a little, on the fourth step, catching the railing for balance. He squeezed his eyes shut a moment, gripping onto the rail tightly.

“Nick? Jesus are you okay?” My voice was pitched with concern. Even Nacho realized this wasn’t fun and games anymore and he rushed over and trotted up the steps quickly, licking Nick’s ear as he sat up. I hurried to offer him a hand, to pull him up, but he batted it away.

“Fuck,” he choked out the word. He hugged Nacho to his chest, “Fucking damnit shit,” he muttered, squeezing the dog. Nacho’s legs flailed, but he couldn’t get away from the bear-hug Nick had him captured in. “Don’t do that, don’t do that to me,” he said, pressing his face into the dog’s neck. “Don’t go away from me like that, don’t go.”

I reached out tentatively. Nacho looked panicked by the show of emotion. He wanted out of there. “Nick…” I said, “Nick, it’s okay.”

Nick loosed the grip on Nacho, who leaped away and ran up the stairs to the deck. Nick looked at me in surprise. “J - Jaymie,” he said. He swallowed.

“I heard you chasing Nacho,” I said. “I came out to help.”

He stared at me for a long moment.

“Are you okay?” I asked slowly.

“Yeah. Yes, I’m fine,” he replied. He pulled himself to his feet, again not accepting my help, and rubbed his backside. He’d taken the step pretty hard, it had to have hurt. “Sorry,” he said, “About… about panicking. I was upset about -- Nacho.” He was talking funny, with pauses in places and doubling words after them. Like he was trying to remember the words.

“It’s okay,” I said, concerned. “C’mon. Let’s go inside.”

“Okay.” He turned and climbed the stairs to the deck. Nacho was waiting at the top, watching and waiting for Nick to come, and as soon as we reached the last couple steps, he bounded through the doors. Nick followed and he walked to the table and sank in the closest chair, his hands covering his face, and he let out a heavy sigh.

I went to the kitchen and pulled out the stuff to make hot chocolate because it was kind of cold out there on the waterfront, for LA at least, and neither one of us were really dressed for it. Even Nacho was kind of shaking a little as he came over to investigate the opened fridge door. I gave him a couple pieces of deli meat and he ran off, delighted, hitting his pet bed in a rollling leap that ended in him on his belly, legs stretched out behind him, eating his midnight snack.

Nick put his head down on the table, resting his forehead against his forearm.

A couple minutes, and a lot of stirring later, I poured the hot chocolate into two steaming mugs and counted out eight marshmallows (the number Nick demanded be placed into hot chooclate) and went over to the table, putting his eight-marshmallow mug in front of him. He turned his head to look at the mug, and then again to look at me.

I sat down, sipped my cup, and stared at him, resolute that I wouldn’t leave the table without knowing the whole story.




Nick

I forgot his name.

Nacho woke me up during the night, begging to go outside, and he’d pressed his nose into my neck and I’d rolled over and looked at him and… I didn’t know his name. I’d stared at him. I knew he was my dog, I knew I loved him, I knew what he wanted and why he was asking it from me, but I forgot his mother-fucking name.

I’d brought him outside and let him off the deck, stood on the sand, watching him run, the panic rising in my throat because I still couldn’t remember it. I tried to think of something - anything that would’ve reminded me, but nothing came to me and I finally knew I had to go inside and look at my journal to find the name and I’d called him - generically - and he hadn’t come and the frustration built until there was full-fledged panic and I was blinded by it. And I don’t really know if it was that blinding panic that made me not recognize Jaymie or if that, too, was a side effect of the tumor’s limbs spreading around my brain.

Now she was staring at me, a mug of cocoa steaming in front of me, waiting for an explanation I wasn’t ready to tell her yet.

“Can you believe how dark out it is?” I asked, sitting up, trying to pass it off as a simple low-lighting error.

Jaymie raised an eyebrow. “The moon’s out,” she said simply. And then, “We were under a lamp post.” She sipped her cocoa.

I turned the mug in front of me, staring down at the eight marshmallows floating and melting in the chocolate. I wrapped my palms around the ceramic, feeling the heat permeating through. I took a deep breath. “I don’t really wanna talk about what happened,” I said.

“Why?”

“I just don’t.” I said. Then, old reliable, “It’s too personal.”

She stared at me, challenging me with her eyes in a way that only Jaymie can do. “Don’t you think,” she said slowly, “That you’ll have to get way more personal than this with any woman you plan to fall in love with?”

I closed my eyes.

“You can’t be in love with someone without telling them things. You think you can handle getting married to some girl then you’re gonna have to tell her everything. You can’t get away with half-truths to your wife. You might be able to with me, but I’m nothing, I’m ---”

I stood up so fast the chair behind me knocked over, cutting Jaymie off mid-sentence. I grabbed the chair and uprighted it, annoyed. Nacho looked up from his doggie bed and scooted out of the room quickly at the loud sound the chair made as I slammed it back in against the table.

Jaymie stood up, too. “Why the hell are you mad at me?” she asked.

I didn’t really know how to put words on it. I guess because she thought she was nothing to me. She wasn’t nothing. Maybe she was once, but now -- now if things were any different I would sweep her off her feet and prove to her what she was; she was everything. Somewhere between booze in a Canadian nightclub and sex and the talking we’d done over the last few days, I’d fallen in love with Jaymie. Yes. That’s right. I love Jaymie. But I couldn’t tell her that. I couldn’t tell her what she meant to me because if I told her she’d wanna get closer to me, she’d want me to be more personal, obviously because she thought that’s what made marriage work, and maybe it is, but I couldn’t get personal with her or closer to her. I had to get further away from her before I dropped dead. The more I was forgetting shit, simple things like Nacho’s fucking name for example, the worse the tumor was getting. The less time I had to push everyone away.

Everyone, I thought, thinking of the four other Backstreet Boys and how utterly and completely alone I was going to be.

But I wasn’t important. After all, I was going to be dead. Like a rich man that gives away money before his death because he can’t take it with him, I had to shed my friends and give them their lives, spare them of the guilt and pain of watching me die.

It was gonna hurt.

But it had to happen.

And it hard to start here.

Now.

“Because,” I said, my voice low, laced with a venomous kind of anger, “You are breaking our rules.” I didn’t want to say what was coming out next, but I couldn’t stop it, either, it exploded out of me, from the part of me that knew I had no choice but to save her from the shrapnel my death would create if she stayed, “I want you out. Out. We’re done.”

Jaymie looked at me, appalled.

I turned and got my wallet out of the kitchen, pulled money out of it, and tossed it onto the table. “Get yourself a fucking hotel room until you can get a new apartment. I don’t want you here anymore. You want too much from me. Get the fuck out of my life.”

I heard her choke a sob back as I walked to the stairs, my hands shaking, tears streaming down my face.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

I’m a bomb.