Nick
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.
***