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Author's Chapter Notes:

I know, I suck. I apologize and hope some of you are still around and willing to read! :)

 

In every situation, no matter how bad it is, there is always the potential for it to get worse, Nick realized. Waiting for Gina to get back with the kids so that Alaina and Brian could leave was one of the longest waits of his adult life. Holly had gone from being intoxicated to completely belligerent by the end of dessert and he was mortified.

He was half tempted to ask if he could crash at their place because he really didn’t want to be in his own house right then.

“Thanks for inviting us over,” Brian said once the kids and Gina were back and they were getting their things together.

Nick could hear how fake the sentiment was, as if it were part of his corporate nicety training, “Thanks for coming. I hope you enjoyed dinner.”

Brian gave him a cheesy grin and nodded, “It was great. Thanks again. And thank Holly when she’s uh... feeling better.”

“I’ll do that,” Nick reached out the shook the other man’s hand quickly. He tried as hard as he could to avoid Alaina’s gaze as the three made their way to the door. He was more embarrassed for her to have seen the situation than her husband. Now he looked like a great big fool. He’d told Alaina that Holly was a boring, stuffy, science type and she’d turned out to be a lush. He wasn’t so much worried about her opinion as he was her judgement of the situation. Why would he have left their weekend away for this drunk woman who was currently passed out on the couch?

At least, that's what he imagined she was thinking given the smirk on her face as she gave him a once over. 

"I guess I'll be seeing you at the park?" she asked, hiking a sleepy Benji onto her hip as they stood near the door. Brian had already gone out to start the car, no doubt anxious to leave the crazy poor people's house. 

Nick nodded and forced a smile, "We'll be there."

"With or without your tail?" Alaina asked and Nick sent her a curious look before realizing she meant Gina.

"Hopefully without," he replied despite his reservations about what would be expected if he were once again alone with Alaina. Would she expect him to come over to her house, would she expect them to pick their relationship back from where it left off, or would she tear him apart for the way he'd acted in New York?

"Hopefully," Alaina concurred. She sent some pity my way with a sad smile then was out the door.

~*~

With a heavy sigh he shut and locked the front door then turned to look towards the living room. Gina had gone upstairs to put Olivia to bed once they'd come home, so he wasn't even sure she knew about Holly's condition.

Cautiously he walked towards the figure slumped over on the couch and gave her a once over. She was laying on her stomach, dress hiked up to the top of her thighs from how she'd fallen onto the couch, with one arm was bent behind her awkwardly. He'd be worried it was broken if he didn't know she just wasn't feeling the discomfort because of all the wine. 

"Holly?" he called out carefully, putting his hand on the center of her back, just to make sure she was still breathing. She groaned in response. "Do you think you can walk upstairs?" he asked and again she groaned, which he took as a no. "Do you think you can roll over?"

"Nick," Holly whined, the frustration evident in her voice.

Nick knew that she wouldn't want to sleep on the couch and have Olivia discover her hung over and disheveled the next morning, but it didn't look like she was going to move. With a sigh Nick grabbed an arm and a leg and pulled gently, trying to get Holly onto her back. She looked worse once he got her rolled over, her hair splayed out in every direction, the dress hiked even higher up her legs.

"Okay... let's try to get you upstairs..." 

He crouched down next to the couch, his long legs creating a seemingly endless distance between him and the furniture. One leg hooked under her knees, the other slid under her shoulders and he braced himself against the floor before heaving Holly up and into his arms. She wasn't heavy by any means given that she was quite a slender woman and he was in decent shape but being half passed out had turned her usually light frame into dead weight.

Nick's arms shook slightly as Holly struggled against him. As he made his way up the stairs her arms went up and around his neck, fingers spreading into his hair.

"I can't see," he complained as he arm cut into his line of vision, wishing he had a free hand to shoo hers away from his head. 

Holly was mumbling something and Nick tried to move his ear closer to her mouth to make out what she was saying, "You're a liar," she finally said clearly and Nick stopped short just inside their bedroom door.

"What?" he asked, not sure if she was really talking to him or about him.

Holly struggled to get out of Nick's arms so he took her the rest of the way over to the bed, practically dropping her once she was close enough to the mattress, "I said you're a liar," she repeated, her voice slurring.

"And what did I lie about?" he wondered, watching as she reached below her arm to unzip the dress, struggling out of it.

She pulled the garment over her head and fired it at him, watching as it hit him square in the chest, "About Alaina," the way that she spat out the other woman's name made Nick shiver, it was so full of disgust and contempt.

Nick felt the bottom of his stomach drop out and he held back the nervous butterflies. He carried her dress over to the hamper, giving himself a moment to think about what he was going to say, "I don't understand what I lied about," he confessed, shutting their bedroom door before he made his way back to the bed, not wanting Gina to get an earful of their personal life. He was sure she knew everything but he didn't need her interrupting with her rhetoric.

Wearing only her panties Holly pulled herself into a sitting position in the bed, oblivious to her nakedness, lolling over to one side from her lack of balance, "First," she held up a finger to accentuate her point, "You never told me about her, or Benji. You waited until Olivia mentioned him. Then you acted as if you hadn't really spent much time with her, as if you could barely remember her name. But in reality you've been to her house. Her house, Nick. You were there with our daughter, and her son, in the middle of the day... sneaking off to play house with your girlfriend."

"She's not my girlfriend," Nick snapped, sitting down on the edge of the mattress so he wouldn't have to meet his wife's intense gaze, "And I wasn't hiding anything. I just didn't think it was important to mention."

"It wasn't important?" now Holly was yelling, "You're 'hanging out' with some woman who I don't know in the middle of the day at her empty house and it's not even important enough to mention that you MET her? It's not important enough to mention that my daughter got heat stroke at the park? That's not IMPORTANT enough to mention?"

"Our daughter... who you are probably going to wake up with all the yelling," Nick corrected, keeping his voice calm, "You're drunk and I can't talk to you like this. You're hysterical."

"Why do you think I'm drunk, Nick?" Holly asked. Her voice was quieter but full of sadness.

Nick sighed heavily and shrugged, finally turning to look at her, "Because you can't handle your liquor?"

She rolled her eyes, "It has nothing to do with that. It's because I've been full of this annoying paranoia and anger over this damn woman ever since I found out about her. I just wanted to stop thinking about it. I've never felt as insecure as I have in the past couple of weeks."

"Why would you feel insecure?" Nick threw his arms out as he asked, seeming less than understanding of the situation, "That's ridiculous."

Holly laughed, running her hands through her messy hair, "You know... I thought the same thing at first too, that I was being ridiculous, that I was overreacting. But then... you left your manuscript."

"What?" Nick asked, the heavy feeling returning to his stomach.

"You claim that you went to the city to write your book. I know I wasn't all that thrilled about it at first but I eventually came around and I was happy that you were going to get ahead on writing. But never, in all the years I've known you, have you taken your computer but not the manuscript with all your notes. Why would you have left it in the basement?" Holly asked and Nick nearly threw up realizing that she was right. He hadn't even realized he'd forgotten it, "I was already concerned about that come to find out after my sister and Olivia take a trip to the park that Alaina was away for the weekend too. How convenient for you."

"This is absurd," Nick said defensively with a roll of his eyes, "I don't appreciate being interrogated like this. Nor do I appreciate you having your sister follow me around in the hopes of tripping me up or something. Don't think I didn't figure that one out! Besides your logic being all wrong, you may want to take a look at your calendar because I came back before she did."

"How do you know when she came back?" Holly fired back and Nick shook his head, getting up off the bed. She watched him move around to his side of the bed, grabbing his pillow and the small blanket off the end of the bed, "How do you know?"

"I'm not having this conversation anymore," Nick said sternly, heading towards the door, "Sleep off all the booze and then maybe when you're sane and rational in the morning, and willing to have an intelligent conversation that doesn't involve accusations... we can talk."

"Nick..." Holly's voice was a whisper and he turned away from the door reluctantly.

"What?" he questioned monotonously, gripping the pillow tightly in his hand. 

Holly was taking deep, even breaths, leaning forward slightly as she braced herself against the mattress, "I think I'm gonna be sick."

"Fuck," Nick muttered, abandoning the pillow and blanket on the floor before dashing to grab the wastebasket off the floor. He barely got it in front of Holly in time before she was heaving. Her hands gripped his forearms as he held the bin for her, and he cringed each time he heard her gag, "Come on..." he encouraged her once the initial round had subsided, "Let's go sit in the bathroom for a while."

~*~

He had vomit down the arm of his shirt from a near miss in the bathroom. With a grimace Nick carefully undid the buttons and pulled the offensive material away from his skin. He threw the soiled shirt in the hamper, not caring that everything else, and probably the room, would smell because of it.

He didn’t have time to put it in the laundry, he’d left Holly leaned up against the tub just long enough to grab her robe and change into something more suitable for being barfed on.

He exchanged his dress pants for a pair of basketball shorts, tossed off his socks and threw on a t-shirt before grabbing Holly’s robe off the back of the door. Quickly but quietly he made his way down the hallway but was interrupted by the creaking sound of a door.

“Daddy?” a tiny voice called out and Nick reluctantly bypassed the bathroom door, going further down to where Olivia’s room was.

She was standing in the doorway, peeking out, her blonde hair mussed. She was wearing a pair of pink Tinkerbelle pyjamas, likely from the second hand store, and was clutching Mittens tightly against the side of her face.

“Why are you up, baby?”

“A monster tried to steal Mittens,” she said softly and Nick sighed, not prepared to deal with a crisis in the lives of both his women.

He heard coughing from down the hall and knew that Holly was getting sick again.

“Okay,” he said quickly, scooping her up and into his arms, “Where was the monster?”

“Be careful Daddy, the monster is still here,” Olivia explained as Nick carried her back into her bedroom.

“Where is the monst...”

Nick couldn’t get the rest of the word out because he was interrupted by a loud squeal directly into his ear. He didn’t think given the volume and pitch that a human could have produced the noise, let alone his daughter. She was cowering against his shoulder and holding her hand out, finger pointed accusingly towards the window where a spider was diligently building herself a home.

“Olivia,” Nick groaned, “That’s not a monster, it’s a spider. It doesn’t want your cat.”

“Daddy,” she was crying now, big alligator tears that were falling against his neck, “Make the monster go away.”

“It’s a spider,” he repeated, setting her down long enough to grab a tissue off the dresser. He would have rather done a catch and release to show Olivia how not-scary the spider was but he didn’t have that kind of time, unfortunately for the insect. He used the tissue to snatch up the spider and crushed it before sticking it in his pocket. He knew there was no way Olivia would go back to sleep if it was still in the same room as her.

Olivia was sniffling so with yet another tissue he wiped her eyes and her nose.

“Can you go back to bed now? It’s really late.”

The girl nodded and climbed back into her bed, “Thank you Daddy.”

“You’re welcome,” Nick tucked her in and after a quick kiss to her forehead dashed back down the hallway to the bathroom, Holly’s robe in hand.

As soon as he opened the door he was greeted by the smell of rancid wine, and the sound of his wife heaving into the toilet.

“I’m back,” he greeted, picking up the wet washcloth he’d discarded on his way out. He rinsed it with cold water and rung out the excess, “I brought your robe.”

Holly just groaned in response, her head pressed to her arms over the bowl of the toilet. Nick sat down against the tub, rubbing her back lightly as he handed her the cloth. Holly sighed and wiped her mouth with the cloth before moving to curl up against Nick’s side.

“Do you want to put your robe on?” he asked, still holding the terrycloth tightly in his hand.

“I want this,” Holly replied, rubbing her hand over the front of his shirt, “It’s really soft.”

“I got your robe,” he reminded her but she shook her head.

“Too heavy, I want this.”

With a roll of his eyes he yanked his shirt over his head and helped her into it. Immediately she curled back up against him and he rubbed her back soothingly.

“I’m sorry Nick,” Holly spoke suddenly into the quiet of the room, the only sound having been the two of them breathing, “I’m sorry I’ve been... jealous, I guess.”

I’m sorry too, for lying, he wanted to say to her and let her know that her worries weren’t fabricated, they were legitimate.

“It’s okay,” were the words that actually spilled from his mouth and he closed his eyes tightly, feeling a wave of guilt rush over his body.