Nick was seething on the inside. He knew it wasn’t right to be mad at Peggy because she didn’t intend to smash him with her head but he was really curious as to how her parents got into their house and that’s what was eating at him.

The fact that her parents were able to unlock the door and disable their security system and he had no idea really pissed him off. Luckily he was distracted from his anger by the fact that Peggy’s enormous father, who he didn’t particularly care for, was pressing around his face trying to stop the bleeding from his nose.

“It’s not broken,” Steven assured him, pressing on either side of his nose and giving it a slight wiggle. “It seems like most of the blood is coming from your mouth. Did you bite your tongue?”

“No,” Nick tried to say but the voice that came out of his mouth did not seem like his own. Things didn’t feel right in his mouth, something just felt abnormal but he couldn’t place it.

“Can I look inside your mouth?” Steven asked and Nick couldn’t stop himself from glaring at the suggestion. “Do you want me to stop the bleeding or not?”

“I am so sorry,” Peggy apologized for the millionth time, holding tightly onto Nick’s hand as if he needed the moral support to help with the pain.

Ignoring her pleas for forgiveness the two men focused on the task at hand. Despite how painful it was to do so, Nick opened his mouth. He grimaced as Steven’s fingers started prodding at his lip and wondered if it wouldn’t be more sanitary for them to go to the hospital.

“Oh boy,” Steven said delicately, closing the blonde’s mouth again. “I need you to run your tongue around in your mouth, get as much blood and whatever else to the front and spit it out into the towel.”

Nick followed the instructions, running his tongue along the sides of his teeth and anywhere else he could reach it before collecting the split in his mouth like he was going to spit out fluoride at the dentist. Steven held out the towel that had been pressed against his face and he spit as best as he could around his fat upper lip. The older man continued to hold the towel out as if to present something and Nick took it into his hands, looking down curiously at what might be there.

In the centre of the towel, surrounded by saliva, blood and whatever else, was half of a tooth. Nick’s hand immediately flew to his mouth while his tongue searched for a hole and he realized quickly that it wasn’t just half of any tooth it was his front tooth.

“Someone grab me a phone book,” Steven requested while Nick continued to stare down at the tooth in a trance. “We need to find an emergency dentist.”

~*~

“I am SO sorry.”

“Would you just stop? The boy is in an incredible amount of pain and you’ve already apologized forty times.”

Nick was positive it was more like forty-five just in the last hour. Luckily for him it wasn’t hard to find a dentist that worked seven-days-a-week in New York City so long as you had money to spend. Steven had taken them straight there after speaking to the dentist on-call, knowing that Nick likely wouldn’t be able to drive himself and Peggy had a huge headache from knocking one of her boyfriend’s teeth out of his head with her own.

They were all crammed into an exam room, Nick laying back on the dentist’s chair with a pair of orange sunglasses covering the upper half of his face and a lead vest over his waist, waiting for X-Rays to come back. The dentist had given him percocet for the pain and shot a numbing agent into his upper gums so he would be comfortable during the exam. Nick was starting to feel the effects of the pill and realized that he was going to be more than comfortable.

“Alright,” the dentist announced his presence as he walked back into the room. It was unusual to see a dentist wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt but they had obviously caught the good doctor during some down time on an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon. He was a young man, not much older than Nick and made his way through the room holding a set of X-Rays up to the light.

He popped down into a chair next to Nick, moving both the lead cover and the glasses himself since there was no assistant to help him. He held the X-Rays up high enough that Nick would be able to see and started pointing out some key areas.

Despite always looking nice in pictures Nick had struggled with his teeth and was a regular visitor to the dentist. As a youngster his parents didn’t have the money to always take them for cleanings then when he did have the money he was just too busy to find the time to make his annual visit. He had a space between his front teeth that photographers often complained about so as soon as the boys had money flowing in their managers had made him get it fixed, albeit cheaply. The results of that had left him with teeth that were weak and full of cavities, not a good combination with getting hit in the mouth.

His front tooth was a loss and would have to be pulled the rest of the way out. The problem was that one of the roots broke off when the tooth split lengthwise so he would need a root canal in order to fix it. Although his front tooth had broken relatively cleanly from the impact, the X-Rays showed damage to the his left incisor also and the dentist was recommending it also be pulled.

“We’ll set you up with some implants and no one will ever know that you lost a couple teeth. You didn’t do this playing hockey or something did you? Because we you can get implants that come out for when you want to play sports.”

“I don’t play hockey,” Nick slurred his answer through the pain medication, though he was glad to finally be able to put words together now that his gums were loaded full of lidocaine to numb the pain. He pointed to Peggy, “she head butted me.”

“Oh,” the dentist chuckled uncomfortably, not knowing how else to respond.

“How long will that take?” Steven broke the awkward silence, still standing against the wall with his arms firmly crossed. “How long is he going to have a hole in his face?”

It was a very parental line of questioning and Nick wondered if his own father would care enough to ask the dentist questions about the length of the inconvenience. The dentist considered the amount of work that needed to be done and took another look in Nick’s mouth before giving an answer.

“I’d say that once we get area cleaned up and get the root canal done it’ll probably be two to three weeks.”

Steven shook his head firmly, still in control of the situation since Nick was a bit out of it. “That’s too long. He has a very public job and I don’t think two weeks without two front teeth is reasonable.”

“Sir, your son isn’t the only person in the city with a job that involves being out in public-”

Peggy’s father stopped the dentist mid-sentence and Nick was positive he was about to correct him on the son comment but he didn’t even acknowledge it, leaving the younger man confused as to what had changed since the last time he had been brutally interrogated by the same man.

“Look, he’s a celebrity. Surely it’s in your best interest for your business to fix this fast and do it well and when he tells the story to People Magazine someday he can say what a great dentist you were to get his teeth fixed up so good.”

“Oh,” the dentist replied dumbly, “I didn’t recognize him.”

“You like boybands?” Nick asked loudly, the drugs clearly having more of an effect on him as they settled into his system.

“Um, not really. I’m more of a classic-”

“You probably lived under a rock in the late 90’s right?” Nick cut in, still speaking at a volume that could be easily described as an outside voice. “That’s where they say people who don’t know who the Backstreet Boys are live. I used to fuck Paris Hilton. For months. Not anymore though.”

Peggy put her hands over her face, silently willing Nick to go back to being in pain and quiet since he was making an ass out of himself. She expected that her Dad would be annoyed by the childish behaviour but quite the opposite he was laughing to himself and seemed to be smiling.

“Can you do it? Yes or no.”

The dentist nodded, “I’ll get as much as I get done today and if we rush things I can probably have the implants back and put in by the end of the week. Does that work?”

“Perfect.”

~*~

“You still haven’t explained why you were in our house in the first place,” Peggy noted over the sound of Nick snoring from the back seat of the truck. She glanced back at him then reached back to touch his hand which was hanging off the edge of the seat. She ran her thumb down his long index finger, noting how callused each knuckle was. His hair was going in a dozen directions from earlier when he’d been wearing a hat at the gym and he was still wearing the same shorts and tank top he’d worked out in.

The dentist had enough time to pull both the teeth, do some impressions to send to their denture lab and fix up the area. Nick was scheduled for a root canal in a couple of days then would be back at the dentist for a third time to get his new teeth. Judging from what the dentist had told them, Nick’s teeth weren’t in the best of shape so he was going to go ahead and order a set of veneers so that the rest of his top teeth would at least match.

By the time they got to that point in the discussion Nick was passed out in the dentist’s chair so they hadn’t gotten his approval. Peggy felt like that moment when she needed to step in and make a decision for his health, albeit cosmetic in nature, was a reason why being married was an important part of a relationship. If that had been a true emergency she wouldn’t have been able to help him.

“It was my idea to surprise you,” her father spoke, breaking her from her reverie. “When we got to your place you weren’t there but we figured you hadn’t gone far. Your mom had the emergency key with her and knew the security code so we decided to wait for you inside.”

Peggy sighed, “You really shouldn’t have done that. I thought one of Nick’s crazy fans had figured out where we live and broken into the house. You should have sent me a text or something. The emergency key is for just that - emergencies. If we lock ourselves out or can’t get home to feed the dogs.”

“I know, I know,” Steven said apologetically. “It was a mistake, I admit. I didn’t think you’d head butt the poor bastard!”

The two of them chuckled at the hilarity of the situation before Steven spoke again.

“I wanted to try and make amends. Your sister called me,” he explained. “She told me that I hadn’t been fair to Nick, that I hadn’t given him a chance to show me how much he cares about you.”

“She’s right,” Peggy agreed, making a mental note to give her sister a call to thank her.

“She also told me some things about Dustin that changed the way I look at him, too.”

Peggy gasped, surprised that her sister had divulged that sort of information. She knew that he meant the rumours and all of the abuse she had endured which were things she had never really told her parents about before. They knew things had gone sour but she didn’t think it was fair to try and sway their opinion of someone who had never done anything to them. Her issues with Dustin were between them and not between Dustin and her parents.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t think you’d believe me to be honest...”

Steven shook his head and let out a disappointed sigh, “Of course I would have believed you. You’re my daughter, it’s my job to believe you. I’m just sorry I didn’t see what an asshole he was before. The more I thought about it the more I realized that Nick seems like an okay guy. Yeah, he’s had some issues in his past but if you’re helping him get past those things and be a better person I have to support that.”

“Marilyn told you it was her dying wish, didn’t she?” Peggy chuckled, watching a blush rise in her father’s cheeks.

“Those words have an effect on a Dad,” he admitted sadly. “I want you to be happy as much as I want her to be happy.”

“Thank you, I really appreciate it,” she told her father honestly. “Nick’s a good man and he’s trying really hard to make everyone see that but he’s at a disadvantage because this isn’t his home turf. What was the surprise anyway? Layer dip?”

Steven chuckled, “Funny that you mention home turf. The Buccaneers are playing the Giants tonight and I thought he mentioned that he was from Tampa and liked football and you guys have that great big tv...I figured he would want to watch the game but we missed it.”

“You’re in luck,” Peggy grinned. “He tapes all of them and he still has the other side of his mouth that he can eat out of so I’m sure he’d love to try your layer dip.”

“That’s if he ever wakes up,” Steven chuckled, catching a glimpse of Nick rolling over in the back seat, narrowly missing falling onto the floor of the truck.