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** NICK **

My anxiety had transformed itself into heartburn; a persistent, nagging, burning sensation that simmered in my stomach and blazed all the way up my oesophagus. The painful feeling had appeared at the exact moment that Howie had been released from the hospital and it hadn’t waned since. Even though Howie was feeling noticeably better, and the five of us had performed the previous night without incident, I still couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that had become a regular part of my waking hours.

We were hounded by security twenty-four seven; being escorted to and from the venue, supervised while eating every meal, and guarded while we slept at night. The constant protection was a flashback to the height of our career. Only now, the threat of being groped by fourteen year old girls had been replaced by the threat of being shot dead by a psychopath.

Agent Adams had brought in a team of specialists from the FBI to handle our case, and the four of them were now following us around like a pack of rabid dogs. I couldn’t help feeling like our actions were being scrutinized beyond what was necessary, and I had a sickening suspicion that the FBI now knew more about my background than I did. Despite the depth of the supposed investigation, Agent Adams and his team still had no solid leads. The best that they had been able to drum up so far was an employee at our original Pittsburgh hotel with a less than stellar criminal record.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” I forced a smile onto my face as Brian flipped back the covers on his bed. “I’m good.”

“You’re a shitty liar.” Brian fluffed the already overstuffed pillows and crammed two of them behind his back so that he was propped up enough to look at me. “You want to talk about it?”

“There’s nothing to say.” I shrugged. “I’m worried … just like you are.”

Brian smirked. “This whole being roommates thing brings back memories, huh?”

“I’m surprised that you agreed.” I returned the smirk. “Considering all of the shit that I put you through when we were younger.”

“We had a good time.” Brian’s face adopted a kind of faraway expression. “We were inseparable back then.”

My mind was running at full speed, playing back all of the moments that Brian and I had spent together. He was right; the two of us had been inseparable for the longest time. We had gone everywhere and done everything together. He had looked out for me even when I had tried my hardest to distance myself from him. Eventually, he had simply stopped trying and walked away. It was like he had given up, as if he had decided that our friendship just didn’t matter to him anymore. In the end, he had broken my heart.

I had never told him, but the years that we had spent barely speaking to one another had been some of the hardest years of my life. Sure, my addictions and my personal demons had probably played a big part in sending my life down the toilet, but the absence of Brian’s presence had also contributed to those difficult times. He had been a constant force in my life for so many years and I had been lost without him.

I pulled my mind out of the past and focused on the modern-day Brian, the one who was looking at me now. He was older and a bit hardened, but he still had that same impish grin and the same crinkly eyes that had gotten the two of us into trouble countless times over the years. Brian would be forty next year; a milestone that still seemed too far away for me to fathom, even though I was only six years away from reaching it myself. As far as I was concerned, Brian would never be an ‘old man’. He would always be my partner in crime.

“Kevin offered … to room with me.” I admitted. “Agent Adams let Kevin know in advance that we would no longer be able to have single rooms, but I overheard the conversation.”

Brian snorted in amusement. “I was wondering why Kevin didn’t look too surprised when the announcement was made. I should have known that he had already spoken with Dave; so typical.”

“I went up to Dave afterwards and told him that the room assignments should be the way that they used to be; AJ and Howie, you and me, and Kevin living the life of luxury on his own.”

“That explains why Kevin didn’t look so smug at the end of the discussion. Of course, he’s not exactly living the high life rooming with Eddie.” Brian laughed. “So, why did you want to room with me?”

“Cause you’re my best friend.” I said the words as carefully as possible, watching Brian’s face the entire time. “If anyone were to murder us in the middle of the night, I would rather die beside you than anyone else.”

Brian’s body began to shake with silent laughter. “That’s so morbid that I don’t even know what to say!”

“Which part?” I forced a laugh, but inside my heartburn had increased by about tenfold. What if Brian was laughing at the first part of my comment? What if the two of us hadn’t really turned the corner?

After our now infamous fight; the one in which I had called him a dick and blasted him for his vocal problems, the two of us had finally forced ourselves to have a real conversation. When I had told him that I ‘missed his voice’ what I had really meant was that I missed him; I missed my best friend. It had been hard for me to say the words; nearly impossible for me to swallow my pride and my anger and to admit that I was having difficulty accepting the fact that we had both let all of our issues create a wall between us.

I could remember that initial fight as if it had happened yesterday. I could still see the hurt in Brian’s eyes and hear the crack in his voice as he told me that I had to ‘take the good with the bad’. At the time, I had felt that Brian was being a hypocrite. Had he really taken all of my good with all of my bad? No; he had abandoned me and turned to AJ for support.

It wasn’t until we had aired all of our dirty laundry in the form of a shouting match, which had almost turned physical, that Brian had finally found the strength to come clean. He had broken down; the tears streaming down his face as he told me that it had simply been too much for him to watch me self-destruct. He knew that he had been selfish and, to use my words; ‘a dick’. He had abandoned our friendship because he didn’t know how to fix it, because he was afraid of being influenced by my bad behaviour. At the same time that I was dealing with my ‘daemons’, Brian was dealing with his own struggles. He was losing his voice and questioning his faith in God as a result. He admitted that he had considered joining me on my path to self-destruction. He had seen me numbing my pain with alcohol and drugs and he had thought about doing the same. The thoughts had scared him and, as a result, he had decided to turn his back on me and my behaviour.

I wished that he had told me sooner. If I had known the reasoning behind his actions, it would have helped me to turn myself around that much faster. All he had ever had to do was tell me that he didn’t hate me, to let me know that he still loved me like the little brother that he never had. Even though it had taken way too long, I was happy that we had finally managed to work things out. The process had been slow, but we were ‘brothers’ again. At least I hoped that we were.

“The second part.” Brian’s face turned serious. “Did you really have to ask?”

I lowered my head so that Brian couldn’t see the massive grin that had overtaken my face. “Are you going to sleep now?”

“Yeah.” Brian pressed his head down into the pillows and adjusted the blankets. He raised his voice into the highest pitch that it would reach and made a huge production out of emitting a contented sounding sigh. “G’night bestie.”

“Shut up!” I grabbed one of the extra pillows off of my bed and whipped it at Brian’s body, missing by a long shot. “This is why I don’t ever say serious stuff.”

Brian stifled a laugh into his pillow. “G’night, Nick.”

“G’night, Bri.”

I flipped off the bedside lamp, rearranged my own pillows, and slipped under the covers. Within minutes, I heard Brian’s breathing becoming regular, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he had taken another one of those sleeping pills. Even though he and Kevin had all but come to blows over the prescription medication, I had a suspicion that Brian no longer put a lot of clout into what his cousin had to say. I didn’t see the bottle on the nightstand, but he could have easily taken one while he was in the bathroom. Although Kevin hadn’t said that it was me who had told him about the pills, I knew that Brian had been able to connect the dots. It wasn’t hard to fathom that Brian was now keeping his habit a secret from me as well.

It only took a few more minutes of staring into the darkness for me to give up. I pushed myself back up into a sitting position and pulled my iPad off of the nightstand. I flipped on the tablet and was immediately comforted by the soft glow of the screen that partially illuminated the room. I wasn’t scared of the dark, but I wasn’t exactly a fan of it at the moment either. Bad things happened in the dark.

Knowing that an hour or so of reading would likely make me more than ready for bed, I quickly punched in the address for streetfics.com. I navigated to the site and logged in with my username: ‘nacho_the_pug’. I was immediately greeted with the news that I had new replies to my most recent reviews. I skimmed through the comments quickly before clicking on the ‘most recent’ page. My heart actually picked up speed when I saw that one of my favourite authors had updated her most recent submission. It was a suspense story that had all the makings of an instant classic, and I hurriedly jabbed my finger at screen to get the page to load. I would never admit it to anyone, but my dirty little secret was fan fiction; Backstreet Boys fan fiction.

I knew that my desire to read about myself and the rest of the guys fighting our way through life-threatening situations was a bit weird. It was actually downright strange, but I didn’t care. I only ever read the stories that were labelled as ‘action’ or ‘suspense’. I never read any of the romance stories because they were practically all centred around me, and I found it a bit awkward to read about myself having mind-blowing fantasy sex with multitudes of different women. I also figured that if Lauren ever found out about my strange habit that I would have a pretty hard time explaining why I enjoyed reading online erotica about myself. So, to make things easier, I stuck with action and suspense.

‘Dancing_Blueberry’ had uploaded not one, but two, new chapters. I had been so worried about Howie that I hadn’t even thought to check the site for the past couple of days. One chapter had been online since the evening of Howie’s accident and the second chapter had just been posted a few hours ago. This girl, whoever she was, had talent. Her stories had a way of pulling me in, of making me question whether or not the events that she was describing had actually happened in real life. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I was reading a work of fiction. She portrayed the five of us so accurately that it was often hard for me to tell where reality ended and where the story began.

I stifled a laugh as I began devouring the most recent chapter. In the story, the five of us had just embarked on the second leg of the ‘In a World like This’ tour, and Brian had just finished telling Leighanne that she needed to return home because the presence of the Wylee trailer was driving him insane. Fictional Brian had actually stood up to his fictional wife, and the notion was so un-Brian-like that my body was shaking with silent laughter. Real-life Brian would never tell real-life Leighanne to take a hike, unless he was in the mood to be castrated.

It wasn’t until I moved on to the next paragraph that I realized that real-life Leighanne had yet to materialize. I wasn’t entirely sure, but I could vaguely remember Brian mentioning that Leighanne and Baylee were supposed to have joined us by now. I would have to remind myself to ask him about their whereabouts in the morning.

Pushing my thoughts of Leighanne aside, I refocused my attention on the text. Half a page later, I was gripping the tablet so hard that my knuckles were turning white. I could feel the sweat saturating my fingers and the base of my neck. This wasn’t happening. There was no way that she could have known that Howie had been poisoned. We had played off his collapse as a bad case of food poisoning. We had been more than careful not to divulge any sensitive information.

In the story, fictional Howie had just collapsed on stage during the middle of a show. Fictional Howie had been poisoned as a result of consuming too much of the green tea on our fictional catering roster. Fictional Howie was fighting for his life in the hospital while the rest of us pushed through the next fictional concert without him. The chapter was littered with heavy description and internal monologues, but I skimmed through all of it as I hastily clicked ‘next’. I had to see what happened. I had to see if the next chapter continued to parallel our lives in such an eerily similar way.

The next chapter appeared on the screen and it was all I could do not to vomit all over the tablet. In the scene, the four of us were running through the motions of performing for a sold-out crowd in Maryland, but all of our minds were on Howie. The four of us were getting ready to start a new set with ‘We’ve Got It Goin’ On’. We were on top of the risers at the rear of the stage. The crowd was screaming its approval, but we were still focused on Howie. We were so consumed with wondering about whether or not Howie was going to be okay that none of us noticed that one of the stage risers was no longer secure. The four of us were completely oblivious until AJ went crashing through the scaffolding; until his cries of pain echoed through the arena.