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Chapter 47

To Claire’s relief, the Tampa General Emergency Room was surprisingly un-crowded for a Friday night. She had expected it to be busier, with people going out and doing stupid things (at this thought, her mind turned to Nick, picturing him hanging all over “Diana,” who, in her mind's eye, was gorgeous), but she was called from the waiting room and ushered into a curtained examining area in a relatively short amount of time.

Once there, however, things slowed down. A nurse asked her questions and took her medical history, then left, promising that a doctor would come by to examine her soon. But the minutes ticked by slowly, and no doctor came. Neither did Jamie.

“Where the hell is Jamie?” Claire muttered irritably, more to herself than to anyone else.

She didn’t really expect an answer, but Dianna, who was sitting in a chair a few feet away from the examining table, piped up, “Don’t worry, hon, he’ll be here. Maybe he just needed some extra time… You know he’s not a fan of hospitals.”

“Who is?” Claire asked through gritted teeth, thinking she had far more reason to hate hospitals than Jamie did.

Dianna cast her a wary sidelong glance, and Claire shut her mouth. She didn’t mean to be snippy, but she was distressed and upset by everything that had happened that night. A range of emotions were running through her, and none of them were good. She was scared… terrified, in fact, that she might be facing a serious illness once again. If this rash turned out to be what she feared it was, it would be a huge setback. She could get sick… very sick, sick enough to die even, depending on how bad it got. Minor episodes of rejection weren’t uncommon shortly after a bone marrow transplant, but after two years, she had thought she was out of the woods. Every check-up she’d had showed that her bone marrow was working fine, and by now her immune system, which had been weakened by the transplant, was almost back to normal. Overall, she’d had a fairly easy time with the transplant, compared to some of the horror stories she’d heard anyway. She had been lucky, until now. Stupidly, perhaps, she’d assumed that her luck would last, that there would be no unexpected complications this long after the transplant. But now it seemed her luck had run out.

That was not the only thing on her mind now though. Nick, damn him, had made the whole night a thousand times worse, and at the moment, that was somehow even more upsetting to her. If Nick had been there with her at the hospital, talking to her and holding her hand, she felt she could have handled this a lot better. It was frightening no matter who was with her, but in the two and a half years she had known Nick, she had always been especially comforted by his presence. He was like a kindred spirit… he knew what it was like to have cancer and to go through everything that went hand-in-hand with it - painful tests and treatments with miserable side effects, low self-esteem, rejection from friends, the fear of relapsing or dying even… It was the thing that had connected them, and they had seen each other through hell. She’d been by his side after he lost his leg, and he’d been there for her during her transplant. When she’d run downstairs screaming his name that evening, terrified by the rash she’d found, she’d never doubted that he would be there for her again. She’d come to him for comfort and support… and he’d abandoned her.

In some ways, that realization terrified her more than the rash on her body. Where was the Nick who had loyally sat by her side and held her hand while she was fighting an infection in isolation after her transplant, the one who had flown all the way from New York when she’d gotten worse and who’d sung to her when she wanted to hear his voice? There was no sign of him in the Nick she’d talked to last… the crude, drunken Nick who had gone out to get wasted while she sat at home worrying and waiting for him. And for all she knew, he was cheating on her too. He’d definitely had another woman with him; she didn’t even want to imagine what they were doing at that bar. But of course, she had her suspicions, each of which made her increasingly more nauseous.

She tried not to think of Nick, but at soon as she stopped picturing his face in her mind, envisioning him flirting with a beautiful seductress at the bar, she saw the rash all over her chest and arms instead, and that made her even more nauseous.

With a rattle, the curtain surrounding her examining area was pulled aside just a tad. Claire looked up, grateful for the distraction and expecting to see Jamie, but instead it was the face of the nurse who had brought her back that peeked around it. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Miss Ryan,” the nurse said apologetically. “We just had a large trauma come in, so all of our doctors are very busy at the moment.”

Claire nodded her understanding, vaguely wondering what had happened. Car accident, was her first thought. Probably drinking involved… again, stupid people out on a Friday night, doing stupid things. And again, this made her thoughts turn back to Nick.

It was a vicious cycle she could not escape, for what else was there to think of other than the rash and Nick? There were certainly no happy thoughts she could muster up, for right now it seemed her life was on the verge of falling apart. The bone marrow transplant, which was the only reason she was even still alive, might be failing, and the man she was planning to marry was at a bar with another woman when he should be at the hospital with her. It was unbelievable to realize that this had all happened in the last few hours.

But it had. Earlier in the day, while out boating with Dianna and Jamie, she’d been perfectly happy. And now this. Life was cruel.

Wistfully, she remembered the boat, the loud, rumbling roar of its motor and the way it had bounced rapidly across the waves, sending up sea spray that hit her face like a cool mist and left a taste of salt on her tongue. The water had been cold, the sun hot, the day beautiful and perfect. She had enjoyed it immensely, but even thinking of that did not comfort her or distract her in any way. For again, she thought of Nick and his slurred words over the phone.

“Claire doesn’t like to hang out with me. She won’t invite me out with her friends. Instead she stands me up at the hospital, and she goes out boating, my favorite activity. Right Claire?”

She closed her eyes, pained by the sound of those words echoing in her memory. Nick had clearly been drunk when he’d said them; she could hear it in his voice. But that didn’t mean they weren’t true. On the contrary, they probably were true. He probably did feel that way, for as she’d thought before, Nick didn’t lie when he was drunk. He’d spilled something he’d probably been keeping to himself earlier, when she’d come home and found him in his studio. No wonder he’d been so short with her.

Angry as she was with him, a wave of guilt rushed through her. Boating was one of Nick’s favorite pastimes; he loved being out on the ocean. Maybe she should have made her friends wait so he could come with them. But as she chewed over that thought for a moment, her guilt was quickly drowned with a flood of annoyance. Her friends… Dianna and Jamie were her friends. Sure she wanted Nick to get to know them and like them the way she had grown to like his bandmates, but that didn’t mean she had to bring him along to everything they did together. She certainly didn’t expect him to bring her to every Backstreet function; surely, some things were meant to be just for the five of them. Couldn’t he see that?

Dianna was right, she decided. Nick and I are not attached at the hip, we don’t have to go everywhere together, and he shouldn’t be so bent out of shape that I did something with my own set of friends and didn’t invite him. As far as she was concerned, she hadn’t done anything wrong. And if she had, it certainly hadn’t been as wrong as what he was doing to her now. Maybe this was his form of payback. Maybe he was trying to get back at her for making him feel left out. If that was the case… She shook her head as a wide range of names to call him flashed in her mind, everything from ‘big baby’ to ‘huge asshole.’

Dianna’s voice interrupted her tormented thoughts. “Are you okay?”

Claire clenched her jaw and fought hard to keep from snapping again, reminding herself that Dianna was the one acting like a true friend tonight, dropping everything to be there for her. She was only trying to help. But ‘are you okay?’ Oh, how she hated that question, especially in times like these. Dianna didn’t understand though. “I’m fine,” she mumbled, thinking of how not fine she was. She wasn’t okay, in any context. Emotionally, she was a wreck, and physically, she might be headed that way too.

The curtain rattled as it was drawn back again, and her nurse appeared once more. But this time, she was accompanied by the familiar face of a tall, dark-haired man. “Claire,” he said when he saw her, and she saw his adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard.

“Hey, Jamie,” replied Claire dully, motioning him in. “Come on in; sit down.”

The nurse left as Jamie pulled the remaining empty chair up to Dianna’s and sat down next to her. “Did I miss anything?” he asked, looking between the two women.

Dianna spoke up, and Claire was grateful; she didn’t feel like talking much. “Nothing yet. We’re just waiting for a doctor to take a look at Claire. The nurse said it might be awhile cause the doctors are busy with a trauma.”

Jamie nodded briefly and didn’t say anything. He looked pale and uneasy. Now that he was here, Claire realized she was actually kind of surprised. She’d expected him to show up because he’d said he would, but she knew Dianna had had a point when she said Jamie was no fan of hospitals. He didn’t handle sickness well. Not that many people did… but most people found ways to cope when they had to. Jamie’s only way of coping was to avoid it altogether as long as he could. He was that way with every uncomfortable situation he had to deal with. He didn’t like to have serious conversations and talk about things that were bothering him; instead, he kept them inside and let the tension mount until he exploded into a torrent of emotion.

When she’d first been diagnosed with leukemia during her second year of college, Jamie had distanced himself from her. It had hurt her a lot. He’d been off at a different school for the last year and a half, making new friends, living a totally different life, but they’d always kept in touch and stayed friends, even after their relationship ended. His rejection stung, and she’d been angry at him for a long time because of that, thinking he was abandoning her for his new set of friends and party-boy college life, that he was too concerned about having fun to be there for a sick friend. Later she’d realized he was only scared and didn’t know how to deal with it.

Through a flood of tears and a huge hug, he’d apologized to her months later, and since then, he’d been a lot better. When she relapsed, he was living in Iowa, but he’d come back to Florida to see her as soon as he could. It was during that visit that he’d gotten wind of her need for a sperm donor and begged her to let him be it as reconciliation for hurting her before. Perhaps stupidly, she’d let him, and he had loyally gone through with it. They had been there for each other ever since, in spirit if not actually in person because of the miles that separated them. And she was grateful to see that this trend was holding up. For, as visibly uncomfortable as he was, sitting with her in a hospital room, Jamie was still there. And that was all that mattered.

“Sorry I took so long getting here,” Jamie spoke up, clearing his throat. “I would have been here sooner, but, uh… I ran into your boyfriend.”

His eyes were on Claire, who immediately felt nauseous again. “You saw Nick?” she asked in a low voice.

“Uh-huh. He got home just as I was about to leave. Had to call a cab to get him there apparently – the guy was plastered, Claire.”

Claire nodded briefly; no surprise there. “So did he see you? Did you talk to him?” Forget about Nick; you don’t want to know, instinct told her, but she was dying for information.

“Yeah. He was really pissed off. First he cursed at me… and then he attacked me.”

Claire’s eyes widened. “He attacked you? What does that mean? What did he do??”

“He tried to knock me down. Lucky for me, he was totally wasted and ended up falling over himself.”

Claire rolled her eyes. “Okay, so he didn’t ‘attack’ you, Jamie.”

“Well, he tried to!” Jamie insisted. “I’m serious, you should have seen the look on his face. He was ready to beat the shit out of me.”

Somehow Claire didn’t doubt that. Nick had never liked Jamie, and if he was drunk and had come home to find him there... She swallowed hard. “So what did you do?”

“I left,” Jamie replied matter-of-factly, as if it were the obvious answer. “I drove away and came here. What, did you think I would stick around to beat up on your drunken, one-legged fiancée just because I could? You know me better than that.”

Claire leaned over, wearily resting her forehead against the heel of her hand. She hated the way Jamie and Nick talked about each other. It was like they were jealous of each other for some reason, though it made no sense why. So she’d dated Jamie once… seven years ago. Big deal. She was marrying Nick; he had no reason to see Jamie as some kind of competition because it simply wasn’t like that. And Jamie… he didn’t love her anymore, not as anything more than a friend anyway, so why did he seem to resent Nick so much?

“Thanks for being the bigger man, Jamie,” she mumbled flatly, without looking up. “I’m sorry Nick tried to beat you up.” She wondered if he could hear the sarcasm in her voice.

“Hey, you don’t need to apologize,” Jamie said in a gentler voice, and she felt a hand on her back, rubbing it in small circles. “It’s not your fault. He ditched you to go out and drink, remember? He’s the one who came home shit-faced and tried to pick a fight with me. You had nothing to do with that.”

Claire didn’t reply. Instead, she just sat there, head in her hand, letting Jamie rub her back as she wondered what Nick was doing now.

***

At precisely the moment Claire wondered what he was doing, Nick was still passed out on the couch. Wasted, he slept for hours, and by the time he awoke, the sun had already risen. “Shit,” he cursed and tried to scramble up. He managed only to roll right off the couch and hit the coffee table in front of it with a dull thud. As he sat in a heap on the floor, rubbing the throbbing shoulder that had broken his fall, the past night’s events began to return to him in bits and pieces, triggered by the effects of the hangover he was starting to feel.

Slowly and painfully, he pulled himself up and returned to the couch, where he sat, his aching head in his hands, trying to think. He had screwed up royally the night before; that much was clear. He didn’t remember everything, but a few events stood out as he tried to backtrack in his mind: Jamie knocking him down (he was sure he had some bruises as a souvenir of that)… the kiss with the girl at the bar (Diana?)… and hadn’t he talked to Claire on the phone at one point?

Claire… where was she?

As he realized he didn’t have a clue, Nick tried again to stand up. This time he succeeded, and after getting his balance, he made his way through his house as quickly as he could, calling her name, searching for her. He was not particularly surprised to discover that she was not there. But where had she gone? Was she okay?

Digging his cell phone out of his pocket, Nick speed-dialed her cell. It didn’t ring, but went straight to her voicemail. Her phone must be turned off, he thought as he listened to the voicemail message. He debated over leaving a message, and when it came time, he realized he didn’t have a clue what to say. He ended the call without saying a word, knowing he had to talk to her in person. That is, if he could find her.

He remembered Jamie and wondered if Claire was him. Even if she wasn’t, Jamie would surely know where she was. He’d been over here last night anyway, and if Nick remembered correctly, he’d driven away in Claire’s car. The problem was, he had no idea how to get in touch with Jamie.

He stood in the doorway of the living room, scratching his head and trying to think. All of a sudden, he remembered Claire leafing through the pages of her address book in search of her doctor’s phone number. She’d have Jamie’s cell phone number in there too, wouldn’t she?

Nick hurried to his office and found the address book still lying on his desk, open to the R section. Turner, he thought. His last name’s Turner, isn’t it? He flipped to the Ts and quickly scanned the first page. Sure enough, there was Jamie’s name at the bottom, complete with an Iowa address, home phone, and cell phone number too. He dreaded the thought of actually calling that number, but he had to know where Claire was.

He had just picked up the phone when something else caught his eye. Dianna Treborn. Her name was written in Claire’s neat, rounded handwriting right above Jamie’s. Her cell phone number was jotted there too, and with a sigh of relief, Nick quickly dialed that instead, wondering why he hadn’t thought of Dianna first. She was Claire’s closest girlfriend, and if Jamie knew where she was, Dianna probably would too. And he would rather talk to Dianna any day.

Dianna answered her phone with a rather suspicious-sounding “Hello?”

“Hey, Dianna? Um, this is Nick… Carter. I was just wondering if Claire was with you?”

There was a long pause, and finally Dianna answered in a cold, abrupt voice. “No. She’s not.”

“Well, do you know where she is?” Please, please don’t say she’s with Jamie, he pleaded mentally, his blood pressure rising as he imagined Claire spending the night in Jamie’s hotel room.

“Where do you think she is? She’s in the hospital, you dumbass!” Dianna cried scathingly. Nick had hardly had a chance to process this information when she continued, “How many brain cells did you kill off last night?! Are you too hungover to remember that your fiancée might be really sick?? What were you thinking last night?! How could you do that to her?! She needed your support, and you left her! You left her to go get drunk with another woman!!”

Nick closed his eyes and held the phone slightly away from his ear, wishing he could block out her loud, almost hysterical shouting. If he had felt bad before, it was nothing compared to how horrible he felt now. As much as he hated to admit it, Dianna was right. He wished he could yell right back at her, but what was he going to say? He had nothing with which to defend himself, no good excuses to explain his actions. He’d freaked out, plain and simple. Pulled an AJ and turned to alcohol to escape from all his worries and fears. Drank more than he had intended, and… well, it had all gone downhill from there. That was the truth, but it didn’t excuse what he had done to Claire, and he knew it. He was sorry… but somehow he also knew an “I’m sorry” wasn’t going to cut it for Dianna.

Still, he had to try, because he had to find out what was going on with Claire. He took a few deep breaths, trying to keep himself calm. “Look, Dianna,” he started slowly, choosing his words carefully. “You’re right. I know what I did last night was… was horrible, and I’m sorry… I-I’m really sorry. I need to talk to Claire though. I need to tell her that.”

“You’re gonna have to do more than say ‘I’m sorry,’ Nick,” Dianna snapped – but at least she had stopped shouting. “You completely shattered her trust in you. It’s gonna take a lot to fix that.”

“I-I know…” he whispered thickly, his throat closing up.

“You asked her to marry you! Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Wedding vows – haven’t you heard of those? ‘For better, for worse… in sickness or in health…’ Do you think she wants a husband who’s going to walk out on her if she gets sick again??”

Nick swallowed with difficulty, trying to keep his composure. He got the feeling Dianna was trying her hardest to make him feel like shit. It was working.

“Claire’s been hurt like this before by people she thought were her friends. But I never expected you to be one of those people. And neither did she. You’re the one person – well, besides me – she thinks she can count on to be there for her when she needs a friend, especially because she’s always been there for you. And this is how you repay her? By bailing the minute you think she might be sick again?”

Finally, Nick found his voice. “I-I didn’t bail on her!” he cried hoarsely. “I would never bail on her. I love her, no matter what. I was just… scared. And I needed a drink to calm my nerves. I planned on coming right back, but… things just got out of hand, and I…” He trailed off, not wanting to admit that he’d totally lost control of the situation. He figured Dianna already had a good idea of what had happened anyway.

“Whatever, Nick. Bad decision. Really bad decision.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Nick muttered irritably. “You don’t have to keep lecturing me; I already know. I just want to find out where Claire is.”

“I already told you, she’s at the hospital. I took her there last night so she could get that rash checked out.”

Nick felt sick to his stomach, imaging her laid up in a hospital room identical to Casey’s. “H-how is she? I mean… do they know if-?” If she was rejecting her transplant? If she was really sick? If she was going to die? That was what he wanted to know, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

“Not yet,” Dianna said shortly. “They ran some tests late last night and then admitted her for the night while they waited on results.”

Nick let out a shaky breath. “What room is she in?” he asked.

“I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to go see her now,” replied Dianna in an icy tone. “She’s under a lot of stress already – I don’t want her to get even more upset.”

“Well, it’s not really up to you, is it?” Nick retorted, thoroughly annoyed now. “You’re not her mom. Either tell me what room she’s in, or I’ll go and find it myself. I have connections at that place, you know.”

“Oh right - you’re Mr. Hot Shit Backstreet Boy. You do what you want, Nick. I’m warning you though, don’t you dare go upsetting Claire again. She is my best friend, and I can’t stand seeing her hurt.”

Nick felt a flash of anger. “She’s my best friend too, damn it. I love her. I don’t want to hurt her anymore than you do.”

“Then why did you, Nick? Why did you?”

Nick clenched his jaw. Fuck you, Dianna, he thought, but he knew it wouldn’t be a good move to say that. Instead, as calmly as he could, he said, “I don’t want to get into this with you again. It’s Claire I need to apologize to. Thanks for the info, Dianna.” And he hung up.

He went upstairs long enough to change his clothes, which reeked of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes, brush his teeth, splash a little water on his face, and rake his fingers through his hair. Then he walked back downstairs, grabbed his car keys, and left for the hospital.

***