Chapter One: Late Phone Calls.

So this is my first fanfic for about 6 years and my first one for BSB so I’m a bit of a novice. Be nice?
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The soft hum was enough to stir me from my sleep. I groaned and blearily looked at my alarm clock. Three A.M? Who the hell is calling me at three A.M?

I reached for my cell and against my better judgement, answered it.

“Hello?”

“Kevin?”

Oh, of course that’s who would be calling me at three A.M.

“Nick,” I groaned, shifting to the far end of the bed so as not to wake my sleeping wife. “It’s three A.M. What the hell?” My sleep addled brain was starting to pound and I found my eyes closing.

“Can you come get me?”

Great, he sounded completely wasted. Why was I surprised? His drunken face had been plastered all over the tabloids recently, reporters goading the youngest Backstreet Boy for his “party animal” ways and his lack of self control. Kristin and I would casually avoid any magazine or newspaper – it’s just not something we wanted to know about.

“Nick, get a cab.”

I hadn’t spoken to the kid in month and suddenly here he was, ringing me up, asking for a favour? Forget it! I was just about to hang up when I heard something that made me freeze. A sniffle.

“Please Kevin?” Was that a sob? I sat up in bed, suddenly nervous.

“Where are you Nick?”

“Kevin, I need you to come and pick me up!”

My heart began to pound. He sounded distressed.

“Kevin, please.” Ok that was definitely a sob, and another, and another.

“Nick,” I was suddenly wide awake. I jumped out of bed feeling agitated. “Where are you, buddy?”

The sobs got louder and the phone started to shake in my hand. “Kevin!”

“Nick! Where are you! Tell me where you are!” I was shouting barely aware that I had woken Kristen. She put on the light and looked on with concern.

“Billboards.”

Fuck! I wanted to scream! I was in New York and he was at a club in Florida. How the hell was I going to get him? My mind raced for a solution. Any solution that would have me down in Florida within the hour. Had they invented teleportation yet?

“Kevin, she hung up on me.”

I wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying; all I could hear was the sadness and pain in his voice. And then I had a light bulb moment. Howie was visiting Florida and was staying at AJ’s. I needed to call AJ and Howie.

The sobs from the phone were getting louder and faster and it was now becoming hard to discern what Nick was trying to say. I looked over at Kristen. Her eyes were wide and she looked frightened. I knew she could hear Nick – he was so loud.

“Nick, hey Nick, listen up ok buddy?” I tried to sound soothing but instead I was yelling. Nick’s breaths were coming out short and sharp and this worried me more than the crying. “I’m going to ring Howie to come get you ok? Nick, did you hear me?”

I got no confirmation that he had indeed heard me and instead what I received was more sobs. Have you ever heard someone cry, that heart breaking cry, where you can almost feel the pain that person must be going through? And as you hear them dissolve into a mess of sobs and moans, you can feel your own heart break, because all you want to do is take the pain away, but you can’t? And then you have that moment, when it becomes too much for you to handle and you can do nothing but add your tears to the mix? This was my moment.

“Nick, did you hear me?”

And then I heard the phone clatter and his sobs suddenly felt like they were coming from a distance. That’s when I lost it. I screamed his name over and over and Kristen, poor Kristen, could do nothing but add her own sniffles to the mix.

A moment of clarity suddenly hit me. Yelling on the phone to a distressed and delirious Nick would get me nowhere and before I knew what I had done, I pressed the end call button.

“Fuck! What did I do?” I turned to Kristen, not taking in her dishevelled appearance. “I hung up on him! Fuck!”

“Kevin,” her voice was soothing to me; it reached into my despair and brought me back. God I love her. “You need to ring Howie. Kevin! Ring Howie!”

I banged in Howie’s number and pressed the phone to my ear, my breath hitched.