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Chapter 9: Hearing What You Don't Want To Hear

Sleep was the only thing that successfully took away the pain from AJ's hideous hangover, sending him floating peacefully into a world of nothingness that left his body tingling with a warm sensation. It was all he could ask for at the moment and he almost felt like he were in a place like Heaven. So when he was rudely jolted from his slumber when the tour bus roughly hit a large bump in the road, he moaned out in dissatisfaction, rolling out of the fetal position he had been curled up in, and onto his back.

He had been sleeping in his bunk and the curtain was drawn, so there was only a very faint trace of light peaking through the semi-thin fabric. AJ didn't mind the darkness that engulfed him at that very moment. It more then anything brought relief to his aching head. Light seemed to only make his migraine headache worse.

'Damn the alcohol' he thought stubbornly as he brought his left hand up to his forehead. His right hand currently felt like it was on fire again, but AJ chose to ignore the pain. There was enough pain and things on his mind at the moment. 'When will I ever learn my lesson...'

"Well, how exactly did he hurt his hand?"

AJ froze and ceased to breath for a minute as the voice entered his ears. He strained to listen better in order to decipher who the voice belonged to. His mind was so fuzzy and clogged with sleep that he was beginning to think he had gone deaf when he didn't hear anything for nearly a minute.

Then there was a reply to the question that had been prompted.

"I was sleeping when I heard Aje screaming in his hotel room-"

"Oh man, being woken up by one of AJ's wild sex occurances! Poor you, D!"

"Grow up, Nick! That's not what it was."

"Fine, what was it?"

'So they're talking about me behind my back' he thought, his eyes narrowing. He knew it wasn't the first time they had ever done such a thing, but this was really getting to him. If Nick wanted to know how he had hurt his hand, then he should have gotten off his butt and came and confronted him about it, 'But', AJ thought again, 'No truth would have been told'.

"That's when I heard pounding on the wall."

"Are you sure it wasn't-"

"Are you just going to keep interrupting me?"

"Sorry..."

"So I heard Aje screaming my name and pounding on the wall-"

Nick snickered and AJ could picture Howie rolling his eyes. 'That did come out the wrong way, D...' AJ thought.

AJ listened as Howie continued on to tell Nick how he had rushed into his bathroom to find him curled up on the floor in total hysterics, with his hand all cut up and all the blood. Now AJ was about to hurl, thinking about that all over again.

"I didn't know what was wrong with him," Howie spoke, his tone of voice different from it's usual normalcy. "His hand was cut up pretty bad and I couldn't even get an understandable answer out of him. So the first thing that came to my mind was to get him to the hospital. But he passed out for nearly a minute as we were making our way out the door."

"Oh shit, he passed out?" came Nick's enthusiastic reply.

"Yes."

"What did you do? Call an ambulance?"

"No," Howie answered, shaking his head. "Thankfully, he woke up and I was able to get him downstairs without much trouble and I hailed a cab to take us to the hospital. Calling an ambulance would have only caused more trouble then what any of us needed and the press would have had a field day if that was the case."

"Yeah, you got a point there. So what happened at the hospital?"

"You won't tell Aje?"

"Why? Was it bad?"

"Well..."

Howie was hesitating and AJ didn't like it one bit. He then realized that Howie had 'forgotten' to tell him about the events that had taken place at the hospital. Why was that? He wondered. What, had he made a fool out of himself or something? If so, then he really wanted to know.

"What happened?"

"I've seen Aje freak out before at a hospital because of injuries, but I've never seen it as bad as it was last night. He totally flipped once we were in a private examining room and a nurse tried to inject him with some pain killers. The poor lady had barely come near him with the needle and he went bizerk. The doctor came in shortly afterwards and had to assist the nurse in getting an IV into Aje's arm so they could actually get the pain killers into his system."

"Damn..."

"That's only the beginning of it, though. It took them nearly twenty minutes to do that, all the while Aje was thrashing about and "attempting" to fight the doctor and nurse off. Because of him, the sentence "Go to Hell!" is now over-used."

There was no reply from Nick this time, so Howie continued.

"The doctor ended up having to sedate Aje in order to successfully work on his hand. He ended up with ten stitches."

AJ looked at his bandaged hand. Had he really acted that bad?

No wonder Howie had 'forgotten' to tell him. His friend had enough respect to save him from-

"I have to say, I've never been so embarrassed because of Aje since I've known him."

AJ took that thought back.

"Damn." Nick's vocabulary had lowered itself down to one word for a moment's being.

"Hey, did you talk to Brian or Kevin this morning?" Howie suddenly asked several minutes later when niether of them had spoken up.

"I ran into Brian in the hall this morning on the way down to the lobby and I tried to say hi, but he wouldn't talk, he just kept on walking. He really wasn't in a good mood at all. And I didn't even attempt to talk to Kev. I knew better not to," Nick explained, trying to sound sophisticated with his answer.

It wasn't working.

"AJ really screwed up, huh?" Nick asked.

"Majorly," came Howie's answer and he fell silent for a moment. "The thing that angers me the most is that AJ is starting to go back to his old ways. He went out drinking last night, Nick. He was at that club down the street from the hotel and that's the only place we didn't look. So he was completely drunk when he got back to the hotel. He's going back to his old ways and I don't like it one bit."

AJ felt the anger and hurt continue to well in him as Howie and Nick moved on to talk about other things, away from the subject of "how much AJ had screwed up this time". That's when he realized that his face was wet and when he reached up, his realized it was the tears that were falling from his eyes. He had never felt so betrayed before as he did right at that moment. He didn't care as much about Nick being part of that conversation, but the fact that Howie had said what he had, and hadn't had the decency and respect to tell AJ to his face, was what hurt AJ the most.

And the fact that Kevin had been right when he told AJ the day before, it was like another punch in the stomach.

Quickly wiping his eyes and cheeks dry, he pulled the curtains open and climbed from his bunk. He couldn't handle being in that enclosed space any longer and he began making his way towards the front of the bus to have a word with their driver. Much to his dissatisfaction, on the way towards the front, he passed by the kitchen area where Howie and Nick were sitting and playing cards. Nick was the first one to see him and was completely oblivious to the expression on his face.

"Hey J!"

Upon hearing Nick say this, Howie looked over his shoulder to see his friend appear. "Hey Aje-"

"Fuck off Howie," AJ growled and continued straight past the two Backstreet Boys without another word.