- Text Size +
Author's Chapter Notes:
Well folks...this is it! The end of the road. Thanks for reading along. Be sure to vote for It's Complicated to be next month's featured story if you haven't already - here

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.”

~~


The boys and I hit the stage like nothing had even happened between soundcheck and the show. Avoidance was a skill that we all had the exceptional ability to harness at both the best of times and the worst. Whether we had shit happening in our personal lives or our business lives, we left it all backstage once the show started.

“Hey Brian,” I called out and my friend turned away from his wife and son with a curious glance. We were just about to head to the vans and head back to the hotel and typically at that point in the night we weren’t up for much more than quietly ignoring each other until morning.

“What’s up?” he asked as he jogged over to me.

My weight shifted from side to side as I briefly considered whether or not I even wanted to divulge this information but I figured since so much of my secret alter ego had been bared already that day, I might as well keep going.

“His name was Thomas.”

“What?” he asked, a confused look passing across his face fleetingly.

“The baby, his name was Thomas. After you.”

He gasped and grabbed my shoulder, “What? Why would you have done that?”

“They needed a name on the paperwork and at first we were going to wait. Marki wanted to name him Nickolas but I wasn’t cool with that at all, especially given the circumstances. So she told me if I could think of a better name, that I could name him so I named him Thomas.

“If you’re waiting for a cheesy, sentimental reason why there isn’t one,” I shrugged. “It just popped into my head. You were my best friend then, you were on my mind at the time and I certainly wasn’t going to name him after Kevin.”

“Are we not best friends now?” he teased, giving me a cheesy grin.

I played coy, “Eh...I’m kind of into Howie now.”

“Well for that, you can ride in his van and listen to him snore the whole way back to the hotel!”

It felt good to laugh. With my bag hiked up on my shoulder, I moved for the door but Brian stopped me.

“Thank you for telling me that, for telling us everything. I’m not saying I’m not pissed at you for keeping that from us all these years, but it’s really put some things into perspective, you know?”

“Do I ever.”

There were just a few leftover fans at the back door of the venue, waiting patiently for a signature or a selfie before we left. I signed a few autographs as my bodyguard directed me toward the second van in line.

“Do you think I could get an autograph?”

I smiled, not surprised to find Marki leaning against the passenger side door of the white minivan where Howie and his family were waiting for me.

“Maybe you’d like a selfie?” I asked, still grinning widely. “I’ll even kiss your cheek.”

“You can kiss my ass is what you can kiss,” she said and I couldn’t keep myself from laughing.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to keep a straight face but failing.

She angrily shook a set of white papers in her hand, the envelope discarded. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you and should have checked these before I left.”

“You watched me sign it!”

Though she was trying to look pissed off, I knew deep down she was a bit amused. “I watched you write on it,” she said, flipping the pages to where my handwriting appeared. “On the signature line you signed the name Nick Watson.”

“Did I?” I asked ignorantly. “That’s an easy mistake, I mean your name was right next to mine and it says Watson, not Carter and stupid me, I thought we had the same last name. Blonde moment, my bad.”

Rolling her eyes, she flipped to another page, this one covered in various coloured tabs, “I might have been willing to believe you were that dumb if I hadn’t already seen the initial page. You closed all the c’s so it just says NO in every box. I know you think you’re being cute, but this isn’t funny. We just talked about this.”

“I’m pretty cute,” I said with a smirk but when it was clear she wasn’t playing along, I sighed and took the papers from her hands. “Come to therapy with me.”

“Not this again,” she groaned, throwing her hands up out of frustration.

“Look…” I said, pausing for a moment to collect my thoughts.

I wasn’t really great at putting together what I wanted to say in exactly the right way without going over it a few times to make sure it was right. She didn’t understand where I was coming from, why I had been avoiding our inevitable breakup even though we had both moved on from each other on different occasions.

“You’re one of….no. You’re the only woman left in my life that has loved me since before I was a commodity. Everyone else knows me as Nick Carter - millionaire pop star. Sure, I’ve had lots of great lady friends but you fell in love with me before I had money, before I had fame, when my clothes were from the Salvation Army, my dad beat up on me all the time and my mom still sorta gave a shit about me. You’re my north star, the one constant thing in my life.

“You are the only person who knows the things I went through to get where I am right now. I just can’t bring myself to walk away from that. Any woman I’ve been with, I never know whether she’s just with me for my money, or whether she wants my connections for her own career. You’re the only one who I know with absolute certainty genuinely loves me.”

Marki sighed and anxiously tugged on the end of her long ponytail. I knew I was winning her over so I continued before she could contest what I was telling her.

“This is my exchange. Come to therapy with me for one month, that’s all I’m asking for, one more month. That should feel like nothing given all the time you’ve already been waiting for me to sign these. I swear, I will show you that I am a different person and we can hash out anything you want to. Just give this one more chance, for Thomas. If at the end of the month you still feel as strongly as you do today that this is over, then I’ll sign the papers.”

“As if you’d use him against me,” she muttered. I tapped the papers against my hand anxiously waiting for her answer.

“Oh for the love of god, give him the month so that I can go back to the hotel and go to sleep!” Howie called out from the back of the van and I couldn’t stop myself from grinning.

Marki’s face also reluctantly broke into a smile and she quickly waved through the van window. “Sorry Howie,” she said before turning back to me. She held up one finger, “One month.”

“Great,” I smiled and stuffed the papers into my backpack so I could dispose of them back at the hotel. “I don’t actually have a month off any time soon, though.”

“Damnit, Nick! That is so typical,” she said, shaking her head in frustration. Grabbing the van door, she swung it open, motioning for me to get in.

“I guess it’ll be therapy on the road then?”

“Not on my bus!”

Laughing at Howie’s protest I tossed myself into the seat in front of my bandmate and his wife and looked back to the door, holding out my hand for Marki to join us. For a split second I knew she was reconsidering it but before she could let go of the side of the van, I stretched as long as my arm would take me and grabbed her hand.

“We better be going somewhere interesting,” she told me, climbing inside.

“Oh yeah,” I assured her, winding my fingers through hers in spite of the fact that she kept trying to pull away. “Tomorrow morning we’re getting on a plane and heading somewhere very exotic for two days. The locals call it the City of Angels and it’s in the land of Cali-for-ni-a. You’re gonna love it, they’ve got stuff.”

“Please take this month seriously, Nick.”

“It’s you and me all the way, baby.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

Chapter End Notes:

Special thanks to Steph (sakabelle) for being the greatest beta reader ever and supporting me in getting this one out of my head and onto the page.