Chapter Thirteen
Nick
There were girls speaking German in low tones, whispering. My head was throbbing. Light was threatening to invade my squeezed-tight eyelids. I didn’t want the light getting into my eyeballs, I felt like they would burn alive at the contact. I groaned and covered my face with my hands and several squeals and German words fluttered around me at the movement.
Where the fuck am I? I wondered.
“Nick?” a tentative voice asked. “Nick - I am sorry, my poor English - you are feeling better today?”
The voice was really close to my face.
I opened my eyes, knowing as I did I was gonna regret it. There was a girl staring at me, her eyes wide with worry. I stared back at her.
Oh. My. Fuck. What have I done?
Panic set in and despite the smouldering headache that was making my brain feel thick as oatmeal, I sat up and looked around. I was in an apartment, on a couch with a floral print to it, under a blanket. On the wall there were pictures, like black and white photography style pictures, and there were posters from various eras of BSB-dom in frames integrated with the classy photography. There was the girl that had spoken to me and three others sitting on the edge of another couch across the room. Two of them had on BSB t-shirts, the third one had on pajamas. I looked down at myself, I was still dressed in yesterday’s clothes and I could see my coat tossed over the back of a chair by the door.
I looked at the girl who had spoken to me, “Where am I? Who are you?”
“My name is Marnie,” she said, her voice thick with an accent. She was wearing just a plain white t-shirt over jeans. She smiled at me. “We are fans of Backstreet Boys. We met you at the bar last night? You needed a ride, so we offered, but you could not know your hotel name and you did not know the phone number to call Brian because of the speed dial.”
I ran my hands over my face. I remembered none of this.
“You were very drunk,” she added.
“We save you!” squealed one of the ones in the BSB t-shirts on the couch. Her accent was completely different.
“This is Stephanja, she is from Italy; and Maria; and that is my roommate, Polly,” Marnie said, pointing at each of them in turn. “We went to see you yesterday at the television studios and then out to drink together and was very surprise to find you there, so when you need the help, we help you.” She smiled.
It could be worse, I told myself, I could’ve got picked up by some serial killer psychopath who would’ve used me for scrap parts in his latest Frankenstein-esque masterpiece. I could’ve ended up mugged or some other crazy shit. I could’ve ended up sleeping on the street on that bench - which was the last fully clear thing in my mind, by the way. At least I’d apparently been well taken care of.
“Nothing, uh... like, happened, right?” I asked nervously.
They looked at each other and spoke in quick German. Finally Stephanja asked, “Do you mean the sex?”
I nodded, “Yeah -- no sex, right?”
Three of the girls giggled manically. The one in pajamas, who I assumed was Polly, was the exception. She looked only mildly interested in what was going on. I guessed she was probably invested in this more as a side effect of being Marnie’s roommate than as an actual fan. “None of the sex happened,” Stephanja said once she’d gotten her giggles under control.
Maria’s cheeks turned red, “Nur in unseren Träumen.”
The girls all started giggling again. This time even Polly laughed. “What?” I asked, “What’d you just say?”
“She said only in our dreams,” translated Marnie with a laugh. “You are very handsome and we like you so much, but this you know already.”
Backstreet Boy Nick Carter Me would have known how to respond to that, but as it was I was hung over and not in the Backstreet Boy Nick Carter Me frame of mind so I had no clue what to say. “Uh… thanks, I guess,” I answered awkwardly.
They giggled.
“I need to get back to the hotel,” I informed them. I reached for my wallet and dug around for the room key to the hotel. If I’d been thinking straight the night before, I would’ve thought to look at the key to tell me what hotel I was at then, but clearly, I hadn’t been thinking straight at all or I would never have ended up where I was. “Do you know where the Jumeirah is?” I asked, holding up the key so they could see the logo incase I was hacking the pronunciation.
“Yes, yes,” Marnie smiled, “We will take you there, if you would like.”
“Yeah, I’d like that,” I replied.
“Could we have the picture first?” Stephanja asked hopefully.
I had to look like shit. I mean I’d been drinking to the point of oblivion after having walked God knows how far across a foreign city while fuming mad after a fight with Brian after like ten hours of interviews. All that without a shower or a glance at a mirror or anything. My hair probably was limp. But whatever. “Sure, yeah, if y’all want a picture, that’s cool.”
The three girls squealed excitedly and talked in rapid German. Polly got up and left the room a moment while the other three came over and squeezed in around me on the couch, two of them grabbing my arms to snuggle in close against my sides and the third leaning over her friend to get closer. Polly came back with a big fancy camera and I had a suspicion that the framed photographs on the walls were probably her creations. She aimed the camera at me, “Say the cheese,” she said.
“Cheese!” the three girls yelled and I mumbled and the flash went off three times and Polly looked at her LCD screen and the other three scrambled off the couch to inspect the picture she’d taken, all squealing in delight at it.
“Now we take you to the Jumeirah,” said Marnie, a big grin on her flushed face, “And we say forever more that we save Nick Carter.”
Brian
There was a knock on my door.
“Please God, let it be Nick,” I begged as I rushed for it, “Please let it be Nick.” I pulled the door open to find Drew.
“We found Nick,” Drew said.
I let out a breath I’d been holding. “Is he okay? Where is he? I need to talk to him --”
Drew held up his palm to stop me. “He’s okay. He was out all night, some fans picked him up and took him home with them because he was drunk, and he just got back to the hotel a few minutes ago. He’s in with Mike and he doesn’t want to talk to you. We already tried to tell him to come talk to you.” Drew looked apologetic.
I frowned and walked back into the room, sinking onto the bed with a frustrated sigh. Drew followed me, standing a couple feet back. He rocked on his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Not as sorry as I am.” I looked up at him, “I can’t believe how bad I’ve messed things up. I didn’t mean to hurt him like this.”
Drew sighed. “It’s a shame, y’all were getting along better than I’ve seen in a long time,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
Drew hesitated. “Look… Brian… I, uh, I came down here ‘cos the flight to Amsterdam is in a couple hours… Nick says he’s not going. It’s a one day press run, he says he’ll catch up with us in London. He’s not feeling good, he said.” Drew looked so uncomfortable.
“Nick’s not coming?”
Drew shook his head. “He’s going to fly straight to London, I guess.”
I felt like I was crumbling. “But the interviews…”
“He says you can do a day of interviews alone, since he did one and he’s not feeling good.” Drew looked apologetic.
I sighed. Nick was right, I did owe him a day of solo interviews, but I couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to go to Amsterdam at all. I needed to talk to him and I’d been hoping that I could talk to him on the plane.
“So uh… let’s pack your stuff, and I’ll pack Nick’s stuff and we can get ready to head to the airport…” Drew suggested.
I nodded, “Yeah. Okay.”
Nick
Mike wouldn’t let me go home. I wanted to go home. I texted Lauren but it was the middle of the night in the US, so she didn’t answer. I just wanted to go home and see her. I wished so hard that she’d just come with us, then maybe none of this would’ve happened because I wouldn’t have spent as much time alone with Brian and he wouldn’t have had time to lie to me so much. It wouldn’t have bothered me a week ago if he’d quit the band because I wouldn’t have had the illusion that we had a chance to be best friends again. A week ago, I would’ve been like good riddance if Brian tried to quit the band. All I wanted in the world was to feel that way again, instead of feeling betrayed.
I imagined I had a machete sticking out of my back with Brian’s fingerprints all over the handle.
Drew brought my luggage back from Brian’s room and put it in a pile by the door of his and Mike’s room. They had two beds. I couldn’t believe I’d let the hotel railroad me and Brian into sharing one all week when obviously they did have rooms with two beds - right on the same floor, even. “Are you sure you don’t want to come to Amsterdam?” he asked as he put the last of my bags down.
I nodded. “I’m positive.”
“Okay.” Drew hung around the door. He shared a look with Mike, then he said, “Nick, Brian’s really sorry.”
“Fuck him,” I answered. “And you, too, if you’re gonna be his little minion. If he was sorry then this wouldn’t have happened at all. He wouldda told me before I got on that show and looked like a total dumbass for not knowing.”
Drew sighed and shook his head, but he didn’t fight with me. “Okay, well, we’re going to Amsterdam,” he informed us.
“Leave Brian there while you’re at it,” I said.
Drew frowned.
“Safe flight, man,” Mike called from behind me, where he was putting his stuff into his suitcase.
“Thanks,” Drew replied, and he turned and left the room.
Mike sighed as the door closed and he zipped his suitcase. “Maybe by London you’ll be ready to talk this out with him,” he suggested.
I shook my head, “It’s over. I’m so done trying with him.”
Mike shrugged, “If we all gave up the moment things got hard, none of us would have any friends at all.”
“With friends like that who needs enemies?” I said, shrugging. “Besides, it’s not like I’m the one that hasn’t poured heart and soul into this. I told him shit I’ve never even breathed in the presence of another human being before, ever, not even Lauren.” I sighed, “And he didn’t tell me anything. Not even this. I just… I feel…” I shrugged. No words were coming. No words described what I felt. So I didn’t finish the sentence.
Mike frowned. “Well… we got a while before the flight to London,” he said.
I nodded. “I’m gonna take some aspirin and take a nap,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said. He grabbed the bottle of pills from the desk by him and tossed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said. I shook a couple pills out of the bottle and palmed them into the back of my mouth, took a gulp from the water bottle I’d been nursing all morning, and crawled onto the bed, turning to face the wall, staring at the blankness of it and thinking that’s how I felt now… blank.
Brian
At the airport I kept waiting for Nick to run up and say he’d changed his mind, that he’d thought about it and decided to come to Amsterdam, that he understood that I’d been screwed by management just like we had a hundred times in the past. I kept checking the world clock on my phone too, waiting for it to be time that I could call home and talk to my wife. She’d have advice on what to say to Nick to make things better. I would probably have to wait until after we’d landed in Amsterdam to keep from waking her up, though. I had already sent a strongly worded note to Jen about how upset I was that she’d sent out the contract without warning me or waiting for me to tell her I was ready for the fellas to know what I’d been thinking about doing. I knew it would be awhile before I got a reply to that, too.
We boarded the plane and I pulled my seatbelt tight across my lap, staring out the window, my forehead resting against the wall of the plane while Drew buckled in next to me. I worried what Nick was thinking about me, and whether I’d ever be able to make all this shit up to him. I couldn’t ease my mind even a little bit. It was like a constant drum beat bump-bump-bumping away in the back of my brain.
Drew nudged me. “Hey. Man. It’s gonna be okay,” he said. “It’ll work out, it always does.”
I nodded because I knew that’s what he wanted me to do but in my mind I wondered if this time wasn’t the time when it wouldn’t work out.
The very last passenger on the plane rushed in and had blonde hair and for a wild moment, I thought it was Nick, but it wasn’t. We took off and I felt my stomach go queasy because we really had left Nick and Mike behind and the higher the plane flew over the city the more I realized it wasn’t miles that was distancing Nick and I at this point. I sighed and pushed the window shade down, leaning my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. I wanted to sleep just to get the thinking to stop.
I did sleep in the end, but it was punctuated by a nightmare. I dreamed Nick was drowning and when I tried to offer him my hand he pushed it away and gurgled that he didn’t trust me to pull him out. I woke with a start to find the flight attendant moving through the aisle asking if anyone wanted a drink. I snatched the menu quickly from the pouch on the back of the seat ahead of me and when she got to me I ordered a scotch. Drew looked at me like I had seven heads. “You’re gonna drink?” he asked, incredulous.
“I need something to calm my nerves,” I explained.
“You okay?”
I shook my head.
“Brian, it really is going to be okay,” Drew said. “I think Nick just needs some time to cool off. It’s a pretty big bombshell he’s been hit with. But you know Nick. He’s resilient.”
“He holds grudges,” I countered.
“Not against you,” Drew said.
It occurred to me just then that the complexities of the Frick & Frack relationship were so deep that maybe even the people who observed it everyday had no idea how messed up we really were underneath all of the facade of what we allowed the world - the media - to witness of us. We’d done so well faking it for all these years that even someone as close as Drew - a protector who stood by day and night - would have no clue when we were faking and when we were real. It broke my heart that Nick and I had perfected the act of friendship so well.
It shouldn’t have ever been an act, I thought. If we’d just stayed honest from the start then maybe he’d know now that the last few days hadn’t been an act, that, for me, they’d been real.
The flight attendant came back with my drink and she handed it to me with a napkin underneath it. I dropped the tray and put the napkin down before swallowing half the glass in one mouthful. It burned as it went down, but I felt my nerves loosen almost immediately. I took a deep breath.
I had to find a way to tell Nick how I felt, how much things had changed in the last few days, how much his friendship meant to me, and how sorry I was for hurting him. I would do anything to take it all back to the start and tell him the truth from the beginning. I would’ve told him that night at the restaurant, before he spilled the chili cheese fries all over Kevin.
When I’d finished my scotch, I sent the glass back with the flight attendant and I forced myself back to sleep. Thankfully, the alcohol had numbed me just enough that this time when I fell asleep it was dreamless.
There's Us by Pengi
