When I was a child, my parents managed a retirement home. It wasn’t a luxurious lifestyle, but the job came with a place to live (just down the street) and I don’t think my mother fed us a single meal that wasn’t prepared by the kitchen staff. Every employee, much like the residents, loved my siblings and me so we could always count on there being sweets and candy available whenever we dropped by.

School was within walking distance and there were quite a few kids to play with around the neighbourhood, but I rarely had the opportunity to do so because I was always babysitting my (stupid) sisters. In the summer though, adults would come to visit their parents or grandparents at the home and drag their unwilling children along with them. I always loved those times because it meant I got to play with someone my own age without leaving the building.

That was how Marki and I met. My mother was caring for seven-month-old twins and completely out of commission when it came to child supervision, which meant I was stuck with two girls following me around all day long. We often played hide-and-seek through the hallways, having residents assist us in finding the best hiding spots. When it was my turn to hide, I raced down the hall, skidding along the linoleum floor before dashing into the room of an elderly woman named Herta. She always helped me hide from my (stupid) sisters and would deny ever having seen me if they ventured this way.

My quest to beat the countdown happening at the end of the hall was cut short when my lanky body (skinny arms and legs moving faster than I could control) went barreling face first into the back of a tall man who was blocking the entrance into the room.

“Whoa there, careful son!”

I can vividly recall the rush of heat into my cheeks as my tan skin turned cherry red in a flash. It wasn’t out of embarrassment for crashing into a stranger, that happened somewhat regularly. The blush was the result of a pair of brown eyes peering back at me around her father’s legs.

“What are you doing?” she smiled mischievously and cocked her head so far to the side that her high ponytail arched like a waterfall of thick, dark hair.

“I’m hiding,” I explained, looking back toward the door in panic upon hearing my (stupid) sister’s giggles echo down the hall. “She’s coming!”

“Quick,” she grabbed my arm and yanked me in the direction of the wardrobe, not thinking twice before shoving me inside. It smelled like old people in there, a familiar scent of mothballs and disinfectant but I stayed silent until the door opened once again. I was only eight-years-old, I wasn’t suppose to care about girls but I already knew that this girl with the round, doe-like eyes, porcelain skin and perfect, heart-shaped lips was the girl I was going to play tag with as long as she’d let me.

“She’s gone,” she said while freeing me from the smelly wardrobe. “I’m Marcia but everyone calls me Marki.”

“My name’s Nick,” I replied, confidently sticking out my hand as my father had taught me to do when I met someone new. She laughed and I felt that heat in my cheeks again as I awkwardly stuck the hand back in my pocket. There was a single moment of silence as the adults in the room watched us with amused smiles but it passed just as quickly as I looked up and said, “Wanna play?”

That part of the story was one that my friends were more than familiar with. Marki and I became best friends that summer and when she returned to her home in Tennessee we wrote letters and sent postcards almost weekly. Every time she came to Florida to visit her Great-grandmother it was a sure thing that we would be inseparable for the full length of the visit. Soon our mothers became friends and after Herta passed away they would still make the annual trip to Tampa, this time to visit the Carters.

She was the first person I called when I was offered a spot in the Backstreet Boys, putting me in a position of having to choose between the Mickey Mouse Club and an opportunity that might flop. Even at only 10 and 11 years old we talked through the pros and cons like professionals, with her finally pushing me to take the chance. In the end, MMC got cancelled and BSB took off so as a thank-you, I bought her a necklace, a cheap (but expensive to me, at the time) sterling silver chain with a pear-shaped, cubic zirconia drop pendant. The chain broke years ago but I knew I would find the pendant still hanging from the charm bracelet Marki wore every day on her slender wrist.

My parents had brought her out to visit me a couple of times on our smaller, van tours of the southern states when all we did was hit up high schools and amusement parks. My bandmates had met her and took an instant liking to her, feeling the same need to protect her that I did. She was never allowed to stay long because it was close quarters and there wasn’t money for guests.

Years later, when schools and parks became stadiums and amphitheatres, that changed and she got to come out to Europe a couple of times, but we never let on that somewhere just past puberty our relationship had made a smooth transition into a romantic one. There was never a Hollywood movie moment when we had awkward sexual tension and finally broke it with an uncomfortable kiss which forever changed our friendship. Quite the contrary, in fact. It was as if we’d been together our whole lives but were now just at the point where we could make the decision to show our love for each other physically. We kept it secret because we were afraid that if adults knew what we were doing behind closed doors, they’d never let us be alone again.

My first everything could trace back to Marki. She was the first girl I kissed, first girl I french kissed, first breasts I’d ever put my mouth on (I was bottle fed), the source of my first erection and subsequent first wet dream, first hand-job, blowjob and of course the first notch on my bedpost. More importantly though, Marki was my first, and some might say only, true love. She was the first girl to make my heart flutter just by walking into a room, the first girl I slow danced with on the beach under the stars and the first girl I cried over.

Two hours flew by after I’d collapsed against a random workout bench to cry. Eventually, I was out of tears but no further ahead in coming to any sort of conclusion about what to do with my predicament.

There was a clatter of noise behind me as the magnetic locks released with the swipe of a keycard and the gym door swung open. Not wanting to be caught, I quickly tried to rub away the evidence of tears with my shirt sleeve and grabbed the nearest weight. The fifty pound dumbbell I’d hastily chosen was more than twice what I could reasonably lift with one arm at that age so it just hung awkwardly off the side of the bench, but I was sure the stranger coming around the corner would write me off as an inexperienced idiot not an inexperienced idiot father-to-be.

“Nick?”

“Shit.”

Kevin was the last person I wanted to see. There was no way my cover would work because he would never believe I’d come down to the gym without a gun to my balls.

“Are you okay?” he asked with genuine concern in his voice. He was obviously coming down for a workout, dressed in grey shorts and a red tank top with a white hotel towel pulled around his neck. Not wanting to disturb him, I shook my head and tossed the weight to the floor with an obnoxiously loud thud. Before I could make my way to the door, he stopped me with a firm hand on my shoulder.

“You’ve been crying. What’s wrong?”

There were a million and one available excuses I could have told him. It would have been believable for me to say I was homesick or that I had something in my eye. In most situations, when I find myself feeling a bit lost, Kevin has always been there to offer some inspiring words of wisdom, a fishing story, or something his Dad taught him to help guide my way. That’s what I needed, someone older and wiser to tell me what to do, to tell me what the responsible and ‘adult’ thing to do would be. So, in spite of the fact that only me, Marki and the cashier knew what was happening, I found my lips suddenly loose.

“Kev, there’s...something I have to tell you.”

I sat back down on the edge of the weight bench and he followed suit, grabbing a spot just across from me. He said nothing but I knew he was waiting for me to continue.

“You know my girlfriend, Marki?”

Of course he knew her, I never shut up about her and my bandmates were the only people who knew that our relationship status was more than it seemed. Management thought we were just childhood friends and I wanted to keep it that way because I knew they’d keep her as far away from me as they could if they knew the truth.

“She okay?” he asked, his super-sized eyebrows nearly turning into one as a look of concern cropped up on his face. I could tell he was waiting for a breakup story.

I shook my head negatively and the tears I thought were gone found their way back, now spilling down my cheeks, dripping silently off the edge of my jaw.

“She’s pregnant.”

“Please tell me it’s not yours.”

This was not the all-knowing, wise owl response I had been expecting.

“Of course it’s mine! We’ve only ever been with each other.”

“Jesus Christ, Nick,” he muttered, running his hands through his hair quite anxiously. “Did no one ever teach you about safe sex?”

“Yes, but AJ--”

“Tell her to get rid of it. Yesterday.”

“I can’t!” I gasped, nearly choking on the air as it passed through my throat. “She won’t do that. She doesn’t believe in that and I don’t think I do either.”

“Of course she doesn’t,” he said and I swear you if you could have squeezed the words as they escaped his mouth they would have dripped sarcasm. “She knows you’re on your way to the top, why not see what she can get for it, right?”

“She’d never do that. We love each other!”

Kevin rolled his eyes, “You don’t know what love is, you’re a kid. I’ll tell you this right now, if you go through with this and it ends up in the public…it’ll ruin us, Nick. All of this will be over, we will never make it through this. No mother is going to want their teenage daughter lusting after a 16-year-old boy with a baby.”

“How can you be so sure?” I wondered, having been more concerned about the actual fatherhood portion of the issue and not what it would mean to the rest of the world.

“Nick,” Kevin’s voice was steady and serious and he locked eyes with me as if to further emphasize the importance of the words he was about to speak. “You can either do what society thinks you should do in this situation and go home and be a teenage Dad or you can forget about it, stay here and follow your dreams.

“In one reality you will likely grow up to work some minimum wage job, living paycheque to paycheque to support your kid and your woman. In the other you’ll be an amazing fucking singer and maybe even end up in music history, who knows. Either way, you can’t have both realities. You have to choose which one you want.”

Deep down I knew he was right. Europe was one thing, but we had our sights set on making our break into the US market. I wanted to be a star but I wouldn’t find the kind of stardom I wanted by being a teen father. I could practically feel every mother in the Bible Belt judging me already. More than that, I would be single-handedly responsible for bringing down the other guys. Call it a tad egotistical, but I didn’t think they’d be as successful without me.

I couldn’t handle the guilt that would come with taking this opportunity away from my friends, but I also knew that my problem at home wasn’t going to go away as easily as Kevin made it sound. My parents would never let me turn my back on Marki quite so simply, I knew. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to, I loved her, I just needed to make all of them understand that this was a matter of life or death for my blossoming career.

As chance would have it, no sooner had Kevin and I left the hotel gym and returned to our rooms when we were summoned by management to a meeting. We’d been booked for the end of May, as expected. Our record label was putting on a huge Memorial Day party and we had been requested to perform, to give us some exposure to American music industry big wigs. The party was in Orlando and we would get to spend the rest of the weekend at home before returning to Europe. Like the clouds had parted, I saw my opportunity to sit down with Marki and explain to her that being a father just wasn’t part of my destiny.

“No.”

I sighed heavily at the negative assertion. The battle was being fought entirely uphill as soon as my troops had landed on American soil. Marki was shocked and, I dare say, disappointed by my request that she put an end to our oops-baby problem but I kept working on trying to convince her that it was really for the best, for both of us. We were sitting in the bedroom I shared with my brother, cross legged on my bed facing each other. I’d managed to ditch my mini-me long enough to get some private time, having told our parents we were playing video games.

“What if the press finds out? We’re working our asses off to make it big here and this could ruin us. No mother wants their teenage daughter lusting after a teen dad,” I quoted Kevin, hoping that his logic would speak to her.

Marki shook her head in confusion, “Don’t you think those mothers would judge you equally as much for pressuring your girlfriend into having an abortion?”

“How would they even find out?”

“My point exactly. Things might be happening for you in Europe, you might be in a couple magazines but you’re still no one here. There’s no guys with cameras following you around. No one would find out about this because I wouldn’t do that to you. There’s no reason you can’t be a father in private and be a regular teenage heartthrob in public.”

“There is so many reasons, though! Think of how people would judge me if this got out!”

“How they’d judge you?” she laughed sarcastically. “This is the definition of a no-win situation, Nick. You’re worried about how some women you don’t know MIGHT judge you, IF this got out? How about how everyone I know will judge me? My entire community is going to judge me, not you.”

“That’s why we shouldn’t go through with this!”

“How would we even do that without telling our parents?” she questioned and I realized she had made a valid point. I didn’t know the first thing about getting an abortion, I didn’t even know if they were legal. I just knew that’s what chicks did when they got knocked up and didn’t want to be. Like in Dirty Dancing, only without the rusty knives.

“I don’t have any money,” she pointed to herself then turned the finger on me. “You don’t have any money-”

“Well, not on me, right now, this instant, but I can get some.”

“How? You’d have to ask your parents. You don’t have any right now and I looked it up, it costs around $500 at home. Plus, I can’t have a medical procedure without consent from my parents. I’d need to go through counselling and a bunch of other stuff first, too. I actually did my research before I came to my decision.”

She had won, I knew it, but I was having difficulty coming to terms with it. Marki was right in that either decision we made there would be someone who didn’t approve of it. I wasn’t sure that eighteen years of disapproval was worth the small amount of time people might not be okay with the alternative though.

“We’d only need $250 each,” I attempted to rationalise. “Once we explain the situation to our parents I’m sure they’ll be on board. They won’t want you to throw your life away.”

Marki’s eyes went wide and I thought for a moment she was having an epiphany, finally seeing things my way. I cocked my head to the side and her eyes darted to the door and I realized she was not in shock by my logic, but rather by the fact that we were no longer alone. I remember chanting in my head how much I wished that it would be my brother that I saw when I turned my head. Much to my chagrin, it was my mother instead.

“Explain what situation?” she asked. With my usual amount of dramatic flair, I leaned my entire body forward on the bed, legs still crossed, until my face rested against Marki’s knee.

“It’s really complicated,” I muttered.

“Why don’t you come downstairs and tell me all about it then?”

We took a break from touring in early August but that didn’t mean we had any real time off. Our first album was already at the top of the charts throughout most of Europe and management knew the train couldn’t stop. Before the first record even released in the UK and Canada we were already in Sweden working on the second. Then the award show circuit really got going for us and people started inviting us to festivals, all of which had to happen before we were back on tour in early November.

Six days at Christmas was all we were guaranteed in terms of days off between November of ‘96 and October ‘97. Sometimes I look back and wonder how we ever made it this far without completely burning out. It was usually five days on and one day off, if we were lucky, and that one day was always filled with travel or press.

It wasn’t exactly ideal conditions for trying to execute a secret marriage when there was a time limit on when it could happen. By Christmas Marki would be ready to pop, there was no way I would be able to put off making an honest woman (teenage girl) out of her in order to satisfy our parents and society, who weren’t even going to know about it in the first place. My dad had been on tour with me through the rest of the summer, maybe to make sure I didn’t get any other girls pregnant or maybe because my mother couldn’t stand him, but it became his mission to find a time to get me back to the states even for a few hours so I could sign some paperwork and sign my freedom away.

Somehow he managed to pull it off and I was back in Tampa with less than 24-hours before I had to be on a plane to Tokyo. He luckily hadn’t needed to make any excuses to justify the stopover since management thought my Dad’s idea of a brief trip home to swap clothes as we moved from Europe to Asia and from summer to fall, was brilliant. I wanted to tell the other guys what was really going on every day, to beg them for sympathy or advice, but Kevin’s words about what my secret could do to the group’s future hung over my head, like a bright neon sign swinging dangerously from a broken wire.

There were no white dresses, tuxedos, flowers or tiered cakes at our wedding. Marki and I arrived separately at the office of a notary public not far from my house, someone my parents knew through the nursing home. At that point she was visibly pregnant and I couldn’t stop myself from staring at the bulge in her dress, blaming it for all of my problems from the situation we were currently in right down to the fact that I hadn’t had decent sleep in months. The ceremony, if you could even call it that, lasted all of ten minutes. We signed some things, our parents signed some other things saying we could sign the first things and before we blink it was over.

A short while later, back at the house, Marki and I were alone for the first time in what felt like forever. We were both sitting on opposite sides of the couch, she had her feet up on the coffee table and hands comfortably settled on top of her bump, which I hadn’t stopped looking at out of the corner of my eye. I thought in that moment it would be impossible to feel any more uncomfortable in a room with her, to feel any further away from her even though I was sitting next to her. I was wrong, but at the time I didn’t have anything to judge against.

“Are you going to talk to me?” she asked.

“Is it weird?”

“Is what weird?”

I motioned to her stomach, “That. Does it feel weird?”

She followed my gaze down then rubbed her hand over the fabric covering her stomach. “I dunno, I guess,” she said with a shrug. My expression must have hit the point of terrified that borders on comical because she laughed. “This isn’t Aliens, Nick. Nothing is going to come busting out of my stomach at any moment and try to kill you.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” I teased and for a split second the tension in the room decreased.

“It feels better now than it did at first. I felt lousy for a while there but now it feels pretty much normal. Except for the snakes.”

“Snakes?!” I screeched, my voice cracking embarrassingly as I jumped back away from her.

Marki laughed (at me, not with me) and reached over to grab my arm, pulling until she could press my hand against her belly. “That’s the only way I know how to describe it. Sometimes it’s like my stomach is full of snakes all wiggling and jumping around.”

I wasn’t sure what a bag of snakes felt like but I suddenly knew what a belly full of baby felt like and it scared the shit out of me. It was like whatever was in there was tapping out a medley against my palm and I had to use every ounce of willpower I had not to pull away lest Marki think it was her that I found disgusting.

“Do you know what kind of baby it is yet?”

“A human baby, I hope, but judging by how freaked out you are I’m starting to think you’ve been hiding something. Are you really an alien and this is all just an experiment?”

I rolled my eyes, “I know it’s a human baby. I meant like a boy one or a girl one.”

“Don’t you think I would tell you if I knew that?”

She had me there, though that wasn’t anything surprising since Marki was infinitely more intelligent than I was. Still is, I’m sure. The silence was about as comfortable as having a tooth pulled but we both continued to sit in it awkwardly until I felt like I had to escape.

“I’m going to get a soda. Do you want anything?”

“No,” she said, giving me a strange look. “I can’t have soda, all that caffeine and sugar isn’t good for the baby.”

I had perfected the overdramatic eye roll at that point and put it to good use in that moment. “I could get you water or something else.”

“My mother suggested you might be acting so distant because you’re worried that you’ll be a bad father,” she said, seemingly out of left field.

“That’s bullshit.”

“Is it?” she asked. “You don’t have a positive male role model in your life, your Dad is kind of mean. Every time we’ve talked on the phone lately, you’ve been really cold and I don’t understand why. So if it has anything to do with you worrying about what kind of father you’ll be, I just want you to know that you’re going to be a good one, you’re your own man.”

“Your Mommy tell you that, too?”

“Why are you being such a jerk?”

“Why are you trying to ruin my life?”

I hadn’t really meant for those words to come out. They were supposed to stay internalized along with all the other emotions I felt on a regular basis before I realized that bottling it up only led to moments like the one I was stuck in. Almost instantly I regretted opening my big, stupid mouth, as Marki’s eyes filled with tears and one by one they started slipping down her cheeks. She didn’t make any move to wipe them away and I wanted to do it for her, to apologize, but I knew it wouldn’t seem genuine, and it wasn’t.

“You don’t think this has affected me as much as you? I’m missing an entire year of high school, all the hobbies I had I now can’t do, my friends have forgotten all about me except for a few, you blame me for everything inconvenient in your life and worst of all I have to carry it all around on the front of my body like I’m wearing a big fucking sign that says hey everyone, look at this girl who couldn’t keep her legs closed, what a slut.”

Adult Nick would have apologized and felt like an absolute fool for even thinking for a moment that Marki wasn’t suffering as much, if not more, than me but Teenager Nick hadn’t figured out how to think past himself yet. I didn’t have a lot of compassion because in my mind that was a sign of weakness and my father had done a pretty good job of snapping my compassionate bone pretty early in my life.

“Maybe you should have thought about all these things back when I suggested you get an abortion.”

She had every right to be pissed but it wasn’t in her nature. I had always been the passionate one of the two of us. When I was hot-headed and quick to react irrationally she was the perfect balance of calm and reasonable and could usually diffuse my attitude with no issue. I chalked her apathetic reaction to pregnancy hormones because she just shrugged. It was unlike her to be so dismissive.

“It’s too late for that now, we can’t go back. I think maybe I should go. You clearly need to go back on tour. When you come back could you please bring Nick with you? Because this guy, whoever you are pretending to be, is kind of an asshole.”

“I am the same Nick!” I argued, pounding my fist against my chest for extra effect but she shook her head.

“I am the same Nick and you are the same Marcia,” I said, using her full name only because I knew she hated it. “Unfortunately, you and I, together, we aren’t going to ever be the same.”

What we had when we were kids, even what we had six months earlier, was gone, but I never imagined it would get as bad as it did.

“Remember that thing you and I talked about a while back?”

I finished scrawling my name across the top of an 8x10 photo, just above my image, before I sent it down the line. It took a second to register the fact that Kevin was speaking to me but when the next photo didn’t make it to my hand I finally glanced up to see him waiting expectantly for an answer.

“What thing?”

“That problem you were having, that we talked about in the gym.”

“What about it?”

“What ever happened with that? You never followed up.”

There’s a reason for that, I thought to myself before reaching to take the photo out of his hand. I continued silently signing my name and sending it down the line while considering my options for a safe escape from the conversation. There didn’t seem to be a way out without trapping myself in an impossible lie so I went in head first.

“It didn’t really get resolved the way we had discussed.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Brian asked from the seat next to me. “You’re speaking in strangely formal code.”

“Nothing,” Kevin dismissed him. “Nick had me write him up a strength training program but I never see him in the gym so I figured he hadn’t bothered to follow through.”

It was just like Kevin to come up with a lie on the spot that made him look like the good guy and me look like the lazy piece of shit. Some things never change. I continued doing my job, like I wished Kevin would also do, but I could still feel him staring at me, waiting for the conversation to continue.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“What’s complicated about having a plan and executing it?”

“Because...there were other people in the gym. They were using the equipment so I wasn’t able to follow the plan the way you had it written out. Plus, you’re not considering that in some gyms I’m not old enough to workout by myself and I need adult supervision. My Dad is here because he didn’t want me to go to the gym, okay?”

Brian laughed loudly, still listening in on our conversation. “Your Dad doesn’t want you to go to the gym? That’s the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard, man.”

“Yeah Nick,” Howie agreed. “Put down the Gameboy and go to the damn gym already. They don’t card you, it’s just a sign on the wall that says you need an adult. Just don’t break anything.”

“Fuck you guys!” I said in frustration. “Kevin gave me a plan that was way too fucking hard, okay?”

Brian’s eyes went wide at my outburst, “Sheesh, okay you big baby. Calm down.”

I snatched the next photo out of Kevin’s hand with a snap, leaving a permanent dent where his thumb had been. “Thanks a lot,” I muttered.

“We’ll talk later,” he told me in a tone I recognized as his attempt at being a figure of authority in my life.

“It has nothing to do with you, just let it go,” I said pleadingly, utilizing my own skills in the eye of puppy dog eyes.

“We’ll talk later.”

To hear Kevin describe it later that night, I single-handedly held the pistol that would kill any chance we had of making it big in the states. He gave me a laundry list of reasons that we were ruined, everything from the fact that there was a marriage licence with my name on it, to the potential that Marki, her parents or even staff at the hospital who would eventually deliver our child might say something and it would get out. He was so certain that this spelled certain doom for us yet he still wanted to fill management in so they could do damage control if it got to that point.

I staunchly resisted that recommendation if only because the fewer people were aware that the situation even existed, the better. I had no plans to tell anyone else unless it was absolutely necessary and I was going to do my best to ensure that no one else said anything. No one was scouring the Hillsborough County marriage records looking for my name because it was a little far-fetched.

“This is the last time we ever have this conversation,” I told Kevin confidently. “If there’s something you need to know then I’ll tell you. Otherwise, we can’t have anymore random discussions about the gym in front of the other guys or you will end up being the one that let’s the cat out of the bag. This isn’t going away for me, but I think it needs to for you.”

“I can’t be here for this.”

The door slammed shut and I rubbed my hands over my face, trying to control my emotions. My bandmates were torn between looking at me and looking at the door Marki had just hastily exited in the middle of my storytelling. I was grinding my teeth but the quiver of my chin gave away how hard I was fighting the urge to cry.

“Go on,” Brian encouraged me.

I rubbed my hand across the stubble on my jaw, thinking that was the same way I’d felt that night when we’d gotten to the hospital and found out the baby was in trouble - rough and raw. Marki was inconsolable, but I couldn’t be. I somehow had to stay positive and encourage her to pull it together so that she could deliver a baby. The doctors wanted to induce her immediately and I just had to sit back and hold her hand while it all went down.

Hours went by where we just waited for something to happen and every time the doctor came back in the room the situation looked a little more grim. At one point, he’d pulled Marki’s parents off to the side and I reluctantly left her, not wanting to be left out of the loop on what was happening. The doctor stopped speaking as soon as I approached and I looked between the faces of the adults, trying to gauge how bad things were.

“What’s going on?” I demanded. “I’m the father, you have to tell me.”

“Nick,” her mother said while wiping a tear from her eye. “It’s complicated.”

“I’m not a little kid, I can take it.”

Somehow, whether it was from the position Marki had slept in when she took a nap that afternoon or something else, just a freak accident, the umbilical cord that connected the fragile life inside her with everything it needed to live, had gotten twisted up. The doctor gave me the analogy of a garden hose getting a kink. The water going through the hose hadn’t stopped entirely but had gone down to a trickle. The baby was still alive but the chances of it living without serious brain damage, or living at all, was almost impossible.

It was all my fault. I had spent the every moment since May wishing that this curse had never been brought down upon me then, like a gruesome punishment for being selfish and ignorant, my next shitty Christmas present was for that wish to come to fruition. It wasn’t the personal loss that hurt the most, it was the hurt I felt for Marki, who still looked like a dream to me when to everyone else she certainly looked like a sweaty, emotional, terrified little girl - helpless on a hospital bed.

I first tried to think of what Kevin would tell me to do in this particular situation but given the way his advice had been steering me over recent months I went in a different direction and instead tried to imagine what Brian would tell me to do. I imagined myself as him, strong and resilient, caring and protective, but most of all compassionate for others before himself. With that in mind I simply moved back to the bed, returned to my seat, picked up Marki’s hand and held it tight, letting her know through one of our time-tested silent conversations that I wasn’t going anywhere.

With a heavy sigh, I went back to the couch and the same seat I’d been in before. Admittedly, our relationship was fucked up and it was mostly my fault. By my late teens I was already drinking heavily, doing drugs and putting way too much work into all the wrong projects in a desperate effort to stay away from home.

When I’d relocated from Florida to California, Marki had come with me. One thing she could never say about me is that I hadn’t fulfilled that very first promise to provide for her. For as long as I had been making money she had never been for want of anything. She became a professional student, taking as many varied and interesting university courses as she could find to keep her busy, but she never really had to work. She volunteered and sat on a bunch of committees but didn’t need an income because she had me.

It wasn’t that she was a leech, not by any means. I encouraged her to spend money on herself and buy the things she wanted because we were in a position where she could and I felt like I owed it to her. After all, what’s mine was hers, she was legally entitled to half of it.

Many times she had wanted to get a job, always sure that we were going to break up and she was going to be left without any real work experience. I always assured her that even if we got divorced, she would end up with enough of a settlement or alimony to leave her very comfortable. Besides, it wasn’t convenient for me that she be tied to a job. When we were on-again I expected her to be on tour with me or wherever I was at the time and she never really had much warning when on-again would be.

I suppose it would have been impossible for the guys to guess that we were married. Even Kevin, who knew about the marriage initially, had assumed we’d gotten divorced after the baby because I had so many girlfriends. What they did know was that that Marki and I had a complicated relationship and that we somehow kept ending up back in each other’s arms, and each other’s beds, even though they felt we probably should have left it alone.

After a while, when my drug use got really bad and I was completely out of control, Marki had given me an ultimatum - shape up, or ship out. I chose to go on a bender and fuck Paris Hilton. A few days later when I finally sobered up enough to leave Paris’ house, I found out Marki had moved out of our house and back to Nashville.

There weren’t many people who didn’t know how the Paris fiasco ended. After that I let myself fall deeper and deeper into a spiral of destruction until I finally hit the bottom. I soon found myself in Tennessee, kneeling in front of the door of a house I had paid for but didn’t even have a key to, in tears, begging for Marki’s help. She could have shut the door in my face that night but instead she brought me in and tried to help me get clean.

I owed my life to her in so many ways and I repaid her with one relapse, then another and so much more infidelity. One day, after a TMZ camera man had caught me drinking rum straight out of the bottle and doing body shots off a porn star in a Hollywood nightclub, I showed up at the house I’d paid for but didn’t even have a key to and a lawyer was there to greet me.

That was the first time I’d been given divorce papers. I ripped them up on the spot and threw them back in the guy’s face. Another set followed those and eventually it became a game for me to see how many times I could destroy a legal document before she would be forced to speak to me. We drifted apart over time, still together but living lives more separate than they’d ever been before.

I bought another house in Tennessee in the hopes that I would see her from time to time (once I was sure I saw her outside of a Starbucks) but I ultimately spent most of my time in L.A. with whatever girl I was dating. I was haunted by Marki though, seeing her and hearing her everywhere I went, at every soundcheck party, at every nightclub and even when I closed my eyes at night, until today when she was really there.

“That stunt you pulled today was not cool,” I said as she took the seat next to me on the couch.

“It’s not that different from the stunts you’ve been pulling for years, you know.”

“Why do you hate me so much? There is nothing I haven’t given you!”

She laughed deep from her belly, throwing her head back as if I’d just told the world’s funniest joke. “Are you kidding me? All I’ve asked you for in the last four years has been your signature and my freedom and you refuse to give me either of those things.”

“Don’t laugh at me like I’m some kind of idiot. You’ve got everything you could ever want, you are provided for just like I told your parents I would.”

“I appreciate that, I really do, but like you’ve told me many times before, I’ll be living off your money whether we’re married or not so you providing for me isn’t a reason to draw out this dead end marriage.”

This time it was my turn to scoff, “Dead end? I have been trying to make this work. I’ve offered to bring you to therapy with me!”

“You can’t save everything, Nick. What we had is over and we’ve beaten that dead horse over and over again for so many years. I spent the last part of my teens and all of my twenties pining for you, waiting for you to see what was right in front of you but you were more interested in sleeping around and snorting your money away.”

“I’m not that guy anymore, you know that!”

“I know you’ve changed. You’ve done so well at turning your life around but that’s not the problem. The problem is that I’m not that girl anymore. I wanted to have kids and and a family but now I’m in my thirties and my husband lives with another woman on the other side of the country.”

I leaned back on the couch and ran my hands through my hair in frustration. Losing was by far my least favourite feeling and I could feel it creeping up on me. “She and I broke up. It’s not too late for us to have those things.”

“I know you broke up, she told me.”

I froze, slowly rolling my head to the side so I could see from her expression whether she was bullshitting me. I couldn’t believe the words.

“She emailed me after you broke up with her and said you called it off because you couldn’t give her a future, she wanted to know if I was serious about the divorce and suggested now might be a good time to talk to you about it. She was the one who got me the VIP hook up.”

“That fucking bitch,” I said and Marki’s eyes went wide with shock. I hadn’t broken up with my latest flame because there was anything I couldn’t give her, it was because there was nothing I wanted to give her. I told her point blank that I was still in love with my wife and had made a decision that I couldn’t keep ignoring the divorce papers and needed to find a way to win her back again which meant I couldn’t be in any more extramarital relationships - ever.

“You sure know how to pick ‘em.”

“Look, I mean it when I say it’s not too late for us. Please come to L.A. and go to therapy with me. Just try it for a little while and if a professional says there’s nothing left and we should go our separate ways then I’ll sign the papers.”

Marki sighed heavily and shook her head, “I’m sorry, Nick. I’m done. I need to move on with my life and so do you. All of our memories of being together are depressing. They’re full of death and destruction and anger, I don’t want that anymore.”

“Not all of them,” I argued. “Don’t you remember when we used to lay in the treehouse and just talk about everything that popped into our heads? Or the times we never had to talk at all because we could read each other like books?”

Her expression was soft as she reached out and put her hand against my cheek, “We also started a neighbourhood campaign to have marshmallows put on the food pyramid then, Nick. We were kids. We didn’t know anything but sunshine and rainbows, we hadn’t weathered storms together. Did we have good times after that? Yes, we absolutely did, but we had more bad times. I will always love you, but I feel like I’m wasting my life being in love with you.”

“So you admit you’re still in love with me?”

“Please stop,” she groaned. Reaching into the large black and white striped purse between us on the couch she pulled out a familiar manila envelope and pushed it in my direction.

“I’d do anything for you to reconsider,” I said while moving the envelope from her hand to the coffee table.

Immediately, she picked it back up and pressed it firmly against my chest. “I don’t want you to do anything but sign these.”

The envelope felt thin considering it contained the end of an era. I gripped it tightly in my hand as I stood and started pacing the room. I took five minutes to mentally relive every moment since I’d seen her standing out in the audience during soundcheck. I thought about things I could have said instead of the things I did say and considered if there was anything else I hadn’t said that might make a difference before I made a decision.

“Hand me a pen.”