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a/n thanks to dancinpacer03 who gave me "please, baby, pieces, surrender, shadow"

Nick always woke up slowly. This time was no exception. He blinked a couple of times trying to clear his head to figure out what had woken him up.

He winced as the shrill ring of the telephone pierced through the mist drifting in his brain, leaving nothing to doubt.

Nick groped blindly around his bedside table, trying to find his phone since his eyelids didn’t seem to be cooperating. When he finally found the phone, he squinted open an eye just enough for him to see the screen name. Brian.

“You better have a *really* good reason for waking me up before noon. We’re supposed to be having off time, dammit. Someone better has been set on fire.”

On account of him not functioning properly until he was truly awake – and sometimes, not even then – it mostly came out as, “You bet haf grease fcallen fo’ nn. Wispse thaf offem, amt. Sum beht eton fah.”

But Brian, being Brian and also from the South, could interpret Nick well enough. At least, he thought that being from the South was part of it.

“I’m going to have a baby! And no one’s on fire!”

All his life, Nick had never heard Brian like this before. His sentences all seemed to end with an exclamation mark. He sounded like a cheerleader on crack.

Nick's still foggy brain couldn’t decipher Brian’s feelings that accurately but he settled on detecting the few emotions he could from Brian’s voice. There was a lot of excitement, a lot of nervousness, and definitely a ton of happiness.

Brian was babbling happily now and only bits and pieces of information like “Leigh”, “this morning”, “choked”, and “news” filtered through. And although right now Nick didn’t know what the word “choked” was doing in this kind of conversation he didn’t think about it much since he knew the whole conversation would come back to him when he was truly awake.

For the time being, he let Brian babble on.

“Huh?” He started when he heard Brian’s voice in his ear again. He winced when he realized that he had dozed off.

“Nick? Can you hear me? Goddammit, Nick. Did you fall asleep again?”

“Uh, no… Of course not.”

“Nick, if you’re tired, I’ll let you go.”

“No!” he knew Brian didn’t really want to hang up but would do it anyway if he thought Nick was tired and he definitely knew he had hurt Brian’s feelings, even if just a little. “I mean, uh, I didn’t fall asleep. I was just, uh, resting my eyes.”

“Uh-huh.” Brian didn’t sound like he believed a word of it. Heck, *Nick* wouldn’t have believed a line like that. Resting his eyes? Can you say lame?

He opted for a change of subject.

“So, when are you going to tell the other fellas?”

“You can’t tell the others.”

“Huh?”

Man, he was just an encyclopedia of lameness this morning. Although it was mostly Brian’s fault.

“We just want to keep this to ourselves for a while, you know? Just the two of us. Please don’t tell anyone else.”

By “just the two of us”, Nick had gotten that Brian wasn’t exactly referring to Nick and himself.

“Uh, Brian? You do realize that you were babbling to me about your baby five minutes ago, right?”

“Yeah, but that was because I just *had* to tell someone, you know? And I just hit any random number on speed dial and there you were.”

Nick rolled his eyes. He stopped mid-roll when he realized that his eyes were actually doing what his brain asked them to do.

“I feel the love, man. I really do.”

Hey, just tellin’ the truth here.” He sounded one-third apologetic, one-third amused, and one-third lingering excitement. Whoa. His brain was back to normal. And all this had happened before – he paused the train of thought to check the clock – 11 a.m.

When he finished talking with Brian, he knew there was no way he was going back to sleep. He had another one of his self-debates before jumping into a cold shower and jumping out again in the matter of minutes.

He got dressed and padded downstairs to feed himself. His dogs were staying with his Mom. After lunch, he was feeling almost human again. He checked his voicemail and called back his Mom, Aaron and AJ.

Brett came around the next night and dragged him out of the house, telling him the you-have-to-get-out-and-meet-other-humans-for-a-change speech in that mother hen tone he always used on Nick when he thought Nick was going to end up staying at home alone on a Friday night.

“Dude, you gotta go out on Friday nights, man. We have to surrender our sexy bodies once in a while to those hot Orlando chicks lusting after us,” he said above the music on the car’s radio.

Although that wouldn’t sound like a lecture to anyone else, Nick knew that it certainly *was* a lecture. First of all, he knew Brett. He knew Brett thought he was doing this for Nick’s own goodafter the deal with Paris and all. Second of all, he had heard enough lectures from Kevin in his lifetime to detect one in a five-mile radius.

The bouncer of the club knew Brett and let them through. It seemed like Brett knew all the bouncers to all the clubs in Orlando by their first names.

The only lights emitted from the dim, colorful, pulsing lights up ahead and the ones at the bar. The nooks and crannies were full of moving shadows. Nick thought that he had a pretty good idea of what was happening in those shadows. Plus, the DJ sucked. The only good thing about this club was that Nick figured no one would notice him.

They climbed up to the VIP section and checked the scenery for a while before stepping onto the dancefloor. After three hours of dancing and grinding against strangers, he was sweating and downing his third beer. Brett appeared and slid into the seat beside him.

“Man, could you take the cab tonight? I’ll make it up to you later.”

Nick let his eyes stray towards the girl Brett was gesturing at and made and appreciative sound. Brett grinned at him and slapped him on the shoulder before swaggering out of the club with his arm around the girl’s thin waist.

Nick finished his beer, got hit on a few more times and danced to a few more songs before taking a cab back to his house – alone.