Every inch of me hurt. My legs were stiff from all the walking I’d done late the night before. My back was sore from sleeping in the back of a pick-up truck. My head pounded from being outside all night, and my eyes stung from all the pollen and ragweed and shit in the air. But even as I dragged my tired ass up the flight of stairs that led to Cary’s apartment, I didn’t regret coming. I’d had a good time at the Relay for Life… and I was looking forward to more good times with her before I flew home the next day.
“What do you need?” Cary asked, ushering me into her apartment. “Food? Shower? Bed?”
“Two outta three ain’t bad,” I replied, thinking of how nice a hot shower followed by a soft bed would feel. We’d already eaten a big pancake breakfast at the Relay that morning, so my stomach was full. “I’ll take you up on the shower/bed part.”
She smiled. “Sure. Just lemme grab you some fresh towels.” She opened a linen closet in the short hallway, while I walked past her to the bathroom.
Her apartment was small, but spotlessly clean. I figured she had tidied the place up for me, but I was also willing to bet it stayed pretty neat normally. It was done in neutral tones – beige carpet, white walls and trim – but Cary had added her own accents of color everywhere to brighten it up. I noticed she tended to favor primary colors, especially red. Most of her kitchen appliances were red – the toaster, the blender, the coffee maker, the big mixer that sat in the corner of her counter. The bathroom had touches of robin’s egg blue, from the pattern on the shower curtain to the matching set of towels she handed me. I swear I’m not gay, but I’d thought about taking up painting since I’d gotten home from tour, as a way to pass the time and sort of channel some of the things I was feeling, so lately, I had been paying more attention to colors and the way they worked together.
I stripped out of my smelly, sweaty clothes and took a long, steamy shower, trying to loosen up my sore muscles under the hot water. When it started to run lukewarm, even with the faucet cranked as far to the hot side as it would go, I shut it off and got out. I dried off and wrapped the towel around my waist. “Sorry, I think I used all your hot water,” I called to Cary, sticking my head out the bathroom door.
She appeared in the hallway, hands on her hips. “Are you serious?” she demanded.
“Yeah… sorry,” I apologized again, sheepishly.
“Ugh… all I wanted to do was take a hot shower,” she sighed, pouting. Just when I was starting to feel like a terrible guest, she winked, a grin sprouting across her face. “Just kidding. It’s okay – it never lasts long, but there’ll be more soon. I’ll just wait awhile.”
I laughed, feeling relieved. “Okay.”
“You can change in my bedroom, if you want,” she said. I noticed the way her eyes dropped from my face, panning down the rest of my body. Just to tease her, I shifted my weight and sucked in a deep breath, puffing out my bare chest and tightening my abs, so that the towel slid lower down my hips. The way her cheeks suddenly turned pink told me she had noticed.
Releasing the breath, I replied, “Yeah, alright… I’ll be in your bedroom, then. Naked.” I left her with that thought, as I turned and went into her room, shutting the door behind me. Flirting with her was more fun than ever after last night, with the weirdness past us.
I really hadn’t planned on kissing her before it happened, but I didn’t regret it either. Her kisses were sweet and sensual. I’d enjoyed the night we had spent together, and it made me wonder what she’d be like in bed. My eyes drifted to her bed. It was perfectly made, of course, the comforter pulled tight, without a wrinkle, the pillows arranged neatly on top. A smirk spread across my face, as I imagined the covers on the floor, the pillows thrown every which way, lumpy from being squeezed in clenched fists in the heat of the moment.
I had shared a bed with her, but only in the most literal sense. I couldn’t imagine she was easy to get into bed in the other way. She definitely liked me, but Cary was no groupie; she wasn’t the type to throw herself at my feet. She was more reserved than that – classier, too – and I had a feeling it would take some time and trust to get her to open up to me in that way.
Normally, I’m up for a challenge, but I wondered if it was even worth it. Cary might be worth the effort, but what could come of it? I was flying home to LA the next day, and her home was here. Depending on which kind of treatment I chose, there might be another leg of the tour to spend together, but there might not. And if there wasn’t, when would I even see her again?
Before I could think of an answer to that question, she knocked on the bedroom door, and I jumped. Oh, hell yeah! She can’t wait for a piece of this, I thought, rushing to the door in my towel. I thought about dropping it just before I opened the door, but I’m glad I didn’t. Because when I opened the door, she was standing there with my suitcase.
“Thought you might need some clean clothes out of here,” she said, smiling, as she pushed it toward me.
“Oh. Yeah. Well… you know… I thought I’d just borrow something from your closet. Didn’t think you’d mind,” I joked, covering quickly.
She grinned. “You’d look just lovely in some of my dresses. Need help picking something out?”
I threw up my hands and put on a ridiculous, high-pitched and, for some reason, Southern voice. “Do I ever! I just can’t find a thing in my size,” I lisped, flapping my hands in distress. Then I sashayed back into the room, wagging my hips from side to side. It’s a miracle the towel didn’t fall off then.
Cary didn’t follow me, though. She just smiled at me again, her eyes sparkling, and said, “Make yourself pretty. I’ll be out here when you’re done.” Then she turned and walked away, closing the door again behind her.
Well, so much for that. I put on a clean t-shirt and my most comfortable basketball shorts and then went to find her. She was in the living room, putting sheets on the newly re-inflated air mattress. Her dad had let us borrow it, so that I wouldn’t have to spend the night on her couch, and we’d brought it back, deflated, in the trunk of her car, along with the pump to blow it back up. I took that as my sign that I’d been right to consider her a challenge.
She said, “I thought I’d get this ready, in case you wanted to go back to bed. I could use a nap, myself.”
I felt better than I had before the shower, but it would still be nice to lie down. Nodding, I replied, “Yeah, I think I’ll join you.”
“Alright.” She turned down the sheets, gave the pillow one last fluff, and got up. We crossed paths in the middle of the room, as I went over to my bed, and she headed for hers. But in the doorway, she stopped and turned, looking back at me. “Aren’t you coming?” she asked.
I had already sat down on the air mattress, so I looked up at her in confusion. “Huh?”
A flirtatious smile spread across her face. “I thought you said you’d join me,” she replied, before she slipped around the corner and out of sight.
I stared after her for a few seconds, my eyebrows raised. Then I followed her back to the bedroom.
***
We didn’t have sex.
I think both of us were too tired and too sore to even consider it, no matter what thoughts had been floating through my head earlier. We literally just lay down together in her bed and watched TV, until we fell asleep. Still, her full-size bed was a lot smaller than the queens and kings we’d gotten used to sharing in hotel rooms on the tour, so we got pretty cozy under the sheets.
When I woke up from my nap, her side of the bed was empty, the covers pulled straight and folded over neatly again. The TV had been turned off, and it was quiet in the bedroom, until her voice startled me. “Feel better?”
I rolled over and saw her standing by her dresser, towel-drying her wet hair. She had changed into a tank top and a pair of yoga pants, and I could see beads of water still sparkling on her shoulders from her shower. It made me wonder, had she gotten dressed right there in the room while I was still asleep?
“Hello? You awake?” she laughed, and I realized I’d never responded to her first question.
“Sorry,” I said, blinking. “Yeah, I’m good… just a little out of it still.”
She smiled. “Yeah, you were zonked out pretty good when I woke up.” She turned to the mirror over her dresser, wrapping the towel around her head like a giant turban. “Hope it was a good nap.”
I sat up slowly, surveying my body as I stretched. I could still feel the soreness in my legs and back, but it was a good kind of pain, the kind you feel after an intense workout. I needed that; I hadn’t done shit as far as exercising went since getting home from tour. It’s kind of hard to find the motivation to work out in between cycles of chemo kicking your ass. My body was tired, but at least now my head was clear.
“Yeah, it was,” I replied. “I feel better.”
“Good. You hungry or anything?”
I considered that for a moment, then nodded. “I could eat.”
She made sandwiches, and we took them into the living room to eat. We were both pretty quiet; I guess we’d run out of small talk. I knew it was time to get to the deep stuff, the real reason I had agreed to come. I couldn’t avoid the decision I had to make forever, and before I flew home, I wanted to talk, really talk, and get her opinion.
“So,” I said, setting down the remnants of my sandwich, “what do you think I should tell my doctor next week? You know, about the whole treatment thing?”
She chewed thoughtfully for a minute before putting her plate down on the coffee table in front of her. Then she said, “I went to school with this kid named Jonathan. He was, like, the dirty kid in class. I’m not trying to be mean, but it was true. His family didn’t have much money, and he would wear the same, dirty clothes to school, week after week. I remember he had long hair that he wore in a mullet, back when mullets were sort of in style.” She paused to laugh, shaking her head. I chuckled, too, but I was wondering what the hell this had to do with anything. I was asking her about cancer treatment options, and she was talking about mullets.
“Anyway…” she continued, “he was always getting sent home from school with head lice. He’d be gone for a day or two, while his mom tried to shampoo his hair and comb out the lice and clean the house, and then he’d come back, and a few weeks later, it would happen again. Finally, one day, he showed up at school with his mullet completely buzzed off, all except for a thin little rattail in the back. He tried to pretend he’d just done it to be cool, but everyone knew his mom shaved his head to get rid of the lice, once and for all.”
Just listening to her talk about head lice made me itchy, but by the end of this random story, I was starting to see where she was going with it. I stayed quiet, though, waiting for the moral of the story.
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I guess your decision really depends on how aggressive you want to be,” she said. “Maintenance chemo lasts a long time, up to two years, but it’s nothing you couldn’t handle, nothing compared to the chemo you’ve been through already. You could still tour and do all the things you want to do while you were on it. The only downside to it is that you’re counting on the chemicals in a few pills to hunt down and kill every last cancer cell in your body. If they don’t get every one, the cancer could start spreading again. Once it relapses, it’s a lot harder to treat.”
She paused, letting me absorb that information, before she went on, “A stem cell transplant is more extreme, but the high-dose chemo you would get if you went that route would be more likely to wipe out the cancer quickly and keep you in remission. Then it would just be a matter of rebuilding your immune system, which is where the stem cells come in. The downside is that there are a lot more side effects, and some of them are severe.” She looked at me closely and added, “You’d probably end up losing your hair after all. You’d feel sick… sicker than you did on tour. And there are some long-term effects, too.” Blushing, she looked away as she said, “Infertility is one of them.”
She made it sound like that would be the deal-breaker, and maybe it would have been, for her, but I just shrugged. “Yeah, they warned me about that before I first started chemo, too. I went to a sperm bank…” I trailed off, leaving it there. The whole sperm bank experience was weird. I wasn’t sure I even wanted kids, but I’d gone ahead and had some of my sperm frozen anyway, just in case. Who knew what the future would bring? I didn’t want to have any regrets in my life; it was good to leave every door open, every option still available.
“Oh! Well, that’s… good,” said Cary, shifting her weight on the couch.
“Yeah… I figure if I never need to thaw out my little swimmers, maybe I could auction them off for charity. You know… For Sale to the highest bidder: Nick Carter’s sperm! Make your own Backstreet baby!” I grinned at the headline, imagining the reaction it would get.
Giggling, Cary shook her head. “Oh my gosh, don’t even go there. Can you imagine the crazy girls who would spend their life savings to have your babies?”
I smirked, thinking of some of our more “passionate” fans. “Oh, I can imagine.”
She laughed again, but quickly got back to business. “So what you really need to decide,” she said seriously, “is if the transplant is worth it. Do the benefits outweigh the risks? It’s a lot more intense, and the side effects are worse. You’d have to be in the hospital for at least a few weeks, so it would interrupt your life and change the tour plans. There’s a higher chance of complications, but also, probably a better chance of curing the disease or at least keeping it in remission longer.”
I thought about her lice analogy, the slow process of picking out the lice one by one, compared to the quick, yet extreme choice to just shave the head and get rid of the lice and the hair they lived in, all at once. Nothing about the transplant sounded fun, except the fact that it might be able to cure me. But that one word, cure, was powerful enough to make it tempting. “Do you think it’s worth it?” I asked Cary. When she hesitated, I added, “You’re the expert – at least, more of an expert than me. I really wanna know what you think. Would you do it, if you were me?”
She sighed, but finally, she answered, “You have so much more life left to live, Nick… so much to live for… and so much to lose. If I were you, I would think about the big picture. Not about the tour or anything else in the immediate future, but about down the road… the far-off future. I would ask myself if it would be worth a couple months of pain and misery to buy myself years of time to do the things I still want to do with my life… and for me, I think the answer would be yes.”
“So you’d choose the transplant?”
At first, she shrugged, but then, she slowly nodded. “I think so. It’s the more aggressive route, but I’d want to fight as hard as I could. It’s all just hypothetical with me, though. You’re the one who would actually have to go through it. I’ve seen people go through it before, but I have no idea what it really feels like. And there are no guarantees that it will work, that it will buy you any more time than the other option would. It just seems to me like your best shot in the long run.”
I thought about that. There was no way to know what the future would bring; neither of us were psychic. But she had a point. My cancer had been in its last stage when I was diagnosed, and I knew there couldn’t be many options that offered a chance of curing it. I had to take the one that gave me the best chance. Go hard, or go home. Even though it sounded like torture, the transplant did seem like the best option for fighting the disease. It was the choice between throwing a hand-grenade and dropping a nuke. If it was cancer I was out to kill, then hell, I wanted the damn nuke.
Slowly, I said, “Yeah, it does seem like it. And now that the guys know, I guess the tour’s not such a big deal. We could always postpone and finish it afterwards, when I’m better…”
“You could,” Cary replied, “but don’t make that choice just because I said it’s what I would do. You’re not me. You have to make up your own mind. It’s your body, and like I said, you’re the one who would have to suffer through the side effects to get better.”
I nodded, wondering how much worse it could be than what I’d already experienced. I knew I was lucky to still have my hair, but I’d had other side effects. They had been bad, but not unbearable. Of course, it had helped having Cary around for the worst of it; I knew I never would have survived the tour without her.
That gave me a thought. “If I do go through with it,” I said, sucking in a deep breath, “would you come stay with me, like you did before? I mean, visit me in the hospital and stuff? I know I’ve got the guys now,” I added quickly, before she could say anything, “but you know more about this than they do. You get it. Like, on tour, you always knew the right thing to do to make me feel better.”
She smiled, her cheeks flushing pink. “They have good nurses out there who would know what to do, too, you know,” she pointed out, “but yeah, of course I would come, if you wanted me to.”
I smiled back and nodded, suddenly more sure of that than I was of anything else. “I do.”
“Then I’ll be there,” was her reply, simple and sweet and said without the slightest hesitation.
And I felt better.
***
