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Chapter 60

Nick was just finishing off the crumbs in the bottom of his bag of chips and waiting for Kevin, Howie, and AJ to get back from lunch when his cell phone rang. He smiled when he looked at the screen and saw Claire’s name. “Hey, baby,” he answered the phone. “I was just thinking about you.”

He heard Claire laugh on the other end of the line. “You were? Does that mean you’re not doing anything important right now?”

“Nope, we’re still on a lunch break,” replied Nick. “What’s up? Did you just get off work?”

“Yes, thank God.”

“Bad day?” Nick asked sympathetically. She sounded a little frazzled.

“Eh, it could’ve been worse. It just seemed long cause I’m so tired.”

“Tired?” Nick repeated, and immediately, he was concerned. “Why ya so tired, babe?”

“Oh-ho, that’s quite a story,” began Claire, and he listened as she told him all about how the alarm on his home security system had gone off in the middle of the night, waking her up and scaring her half to death. Hearing the story sent cold chills down his spine, for it reminded him of the horrible dream he’d had over the summer, the nightmare in which Claire had been stabbed by a masked intruder. In the dream, he’d been helpless, unable to protect her. And now, in real life, he was no better off. At least in the dream, he’d been there, though he’d been powerless to fight off the attackers. Now he was two thousand miles away. And if something had happened to her at his home while he was gone, he’d have never forgiven himself.

“God, I’m sorry, Claire,” he said when she was done telling him about how she’d spent the night at Laureen’s apartment after the police had come. “It’s never given me any trouble, so I’m betting the police were right – someone set it off.” He tried to keep his words and his tone of voice nonchalant, not wanting her to know how shaken he was by this news. She’d laughed off her bloody fate in his nightmare four months ago, but he certainly didn’t want to remind her of it now – maybe she wouldn’t think it was so preposterous. She’d had enough of a scare the night before.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” she sighed. “They said it was probably just some kids, being that it was Halloween and all, but I dunno, now I really don’t like the idea of being there alone at night and not knowing who could be prowling around on the property. I think I’m going to spend the night at Laureen’s tonight, for my own sanity.”

Nick nodded vigorously, although she could not see him. “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea,” he agreed. “Listen, you stay with Laureen as long as you need to, and I’ll fly home this weekend and talk to the security company and the police and make sure things get taken care of.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. Her voice rose in pitch, but he could hear the happy note in it. She secretly wanted him to come home just as much as he was secretly glad for an excuse to fly back and see her again so soon.

“Positive. I just want to make sure you’re safe – and I want you to feel safe in our house. I don’t need to be here for anything over the weekend anyway, so it’s no problem flying back. Unless…” He paused. “Unless you’d rather just fly back out here.”

Claire sighed again. “I’d love to, but you know I can’t, Nick. You fly home if you can… but if you can’t, I’ll be okay. I don’t want to go all ‘damsel in distress’ on you – I just wanted you to know what happened.”

“Nah, I know; I’m glad you called. I don’t want people messing around on my property either, so I’m gonna come back and make sure everything’s been taken care of. Sound good?”

“Sounds great. Let me know when you book your flight so I can be at the airport to pick you up.”

“Alright,” replied Nick, just as Kevin, Howie, and AJ paraded into the room. Glancing up, he said, “Listen, I gotta get back to work, so I’m gonna let you go now. You gonna be okay?”

“I’m fine, Nick,” Claire laughed.

“Alright, just checking. Call me back if you need anything.”

“I’ll be fine. Laureen and I are at the house now, and I’m just gonna pack some stuff and then follow her back to her place.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to ya later then. Bye, baby.”

“Bye, Nick.”

***

Claire sighed as she ended the call on her cell phone, turning around to face Laureen. “He’s too sweet – he sounded all worried about me,” she said, touched that he was. She’d almost expected him to tell her she was being silly, that the burglar alarm went off for no reason all the time, and that the house was perfectly safe. But no, he’d seemed concerned enough. Enough not to mind that she’d slept in Jamie’s hotel room? Well, maybe not that concerned. She supposed she’d never know – she had told him she’d stayed with Laureen, and he had believed her, no questions asked.

Lying to him like that made her feel guilty, as if she really had done something wrong that she was trying to cover up. But she hadn’t, had she? She’d had no other choice that night. He wouldn’t have seen it that way though – he was already suspicious of Jamie. But if he ever found out she’d lied to him about staying with Jamie that night, she knew she’d have hell to pay. As Laureen had said, the suspicion would never end then.

“So was he okay with you staying with me?” Laureen asked, interrupting her thoughts.

“Oh, sure,” Claire answered. “He agreed that maybe I should stay someplace else until he can make sure everything’s safe. He’s planning on coming back this weekend to make sure this gets taken care of.”

Laureen smiled. “What a sweetheart. You’re so lucky to have a guy like that in your life, you know what I mean? A guy who loves you and watches out for you like that.”

“I know,” Claire replied softly, returning Laureen’s smile. But beneath her smile was a sense of shame, which Laureen was unconsciously intensifying. She’d only told a “white lie,” as Laureen had called it, but a lie was a lie, and this was her fiancée – if she couldn’t be honest with him for fear of what he would think of the truth, then…

She wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence.

All she knew was that she felt bad about lying to him, but it was too late now. Sighing, she said to Laureen, “Okay, I’m just gonna pack a few things real quick, and then we can go.”

She led Laureen upstairs to the master bedroom, where she emptied the overnight bag she’d brought to Jamie’s hotel the night before and repacked it with enough clothes and toiletries to last her a few days. Laureen perched on Nick’s side of the bed, chatting with Claire as she bustled around the room and delighting in the fact that she was sitting on Nick Carter’s bed.

When she was ready, Claire got into her beat-up Toyota and followed Laureen’s burgundy Saturn back to her apartment complex. Like Claire’s former home, it was an older building, but the apartments were decent-sized and well-maintained. “This is it,” Laureen said, as she ushered Claire through the door of her second-story flat. “Doesn’t quite compare to what you’re used to,” she added with a slightly nervous-sounding giggle, “but I like it.”

Claire smiled; she could practically hear herself telling Nick the same thing the first time she’d invited him back to her old apartment. “Oh, don’t worry, living with Nick for five months hasn’t turned me into some high-class snob,” she told Laureen quickly. “The apartment I lived in before I moved in with him was just like this one. I think it’s really cute.”

“Thanks!” Laureen replied brightly.

In fact, as Claire looked around, she realized that the interior of Laureen’s apartment reminded her very much of her own. Lots of color, especially green, and knick-knacks and decorations everywhere. She admired a beautiful watercolor of the ocean on an overcast day, painted in soft shades of green and gray, which hung over the couch in the living room. “Did you paint this?” she asked, pointing to it.

Laureen laughed. “No. I saw it at a flea market and just thought it was so pretty. I really like the ocean – and I grew up near Chicago, so it’s awesome to be living down here.”

“Wow, I bet! Chicago, huh? Why’d you move all the way to Tampa?”

“Duh, there’s no ocean near Chicago,” Laureen replied, then laughed and added quickly, “Nah, really I just felt like getting away from home, you know what I mean? I lived my whole life in Illinois, and I wanted to move someplace new and different.”

Claire nodded. “You’re brave,” she said. “I don’t know if I could move that far away from Florida. I’ve grown up here, and my family’s still in the area… I’m such a homebody, I know, but I can’t imagine just up and moving to a place where I didn’t know anybody.”

“It was definitely scary,” Laureen conceded with a smile, “but I’m glad I did it. I love being on my own, and my family is just kind of overwhelming at times. I love them, you know, but I have two brothers and two half-siblings and a couple of step-brothers too, so it was easy to get lost in the crowd. It’s weird though, being this far away from them, cause I’m not used to being alone, you know what I mean?”

Claire nodded. “I see what you mean. Lots of brothers, huh? I only have one, but my family’s pretty close, even stifling sometimes, so I know how it can be.”

Laureen smiled knowingly. “Yep,” she said and reached for a picture frame that was sitting on one of her end tables. “These are my two brothers,” she said, handing Claire the frame. It held a photograph of a younger Laureen flanked by two boys who appeared close to her in age. They both had Laureen’s auburn hair and green eyes. “We’re triplets,” Laureen added, and Claire felt her eyes widen as she glanced up from the photo.

“Triplets, wow! That must have been interesting.”

Laureen smirked. “Yeah, and imagine being the only girl of the three of us. It was ‘interesting’ alright. But I love my brothers.”

They kept talking about their families and childhoods as Laureen showed Claire the rest of the two-bedroom apartment. “I just use this one as my music room,” she said as she opened the door to the spare bedroom, “but it should be fine once I move my stuff out of the way.” Peering into the bedroom, Claire could see a large keyboard set up in front of the window, and different sized instrument cases were spread across the twin bed, which had been pushed into the corner of the room.

“Wow, what all do you play?” she asked, her eyes traveling from the instruments to a small set of bookcases which was full of what appeared to be sheet music and other music books.

“Piano, guitar, flute, and clarinet,” Laureen answered, pointing out each in turn.

“Wow… you rock!” Claire exclaimed with a laugh. “I played the trombone for like two years in middle school, until I quit. I kinda sucked.”

“Trombone?” Laureen repeated, joining in her laughter. “There weren’t too many girl trombone players in my junior high band.”

“I was the only one in mine,” Claire admitted. “And my arms weren’t quite long enough to move the slide far enough to hit some notes. I probably should have learned to play the clarinet or something like my mom wanted me to, but I thought trombones were cool.”

“Hey, they are cool! If you rounded up your trombone and your fiancée, we could almost have a full-on band!” Laureen exclaimed jokingly.

“Hey, yeah!” Claire chimed in, playing along. “I’m sure Nick could get us some gigs too – maybe we could open for the Backstreet Boys!”

They both laughed, as Laureen started moving the cases off the bed, clearing a spot for Claire to set her stuff down.

It wasn’t long until Claire was sound asleep in that bed. Exhausted from her restless sleep the night before, she’d gone to bed early and found that she had no trouble drifting off in the coziness of the tiny bedroom. She slept the whole night through and didn’t wake up until Laureen knocked on her door the next morning to get her up in time for her shift at the dentist’s office.

***

Claire’s and Laureen’s work schedules were identical that week. They drove to work separately though, for every afternoon when she got off, Claire dropped by the hospital to visit Casey. She gave him the pilot wings Nick had gotten for him and told him about her and Nick’s Halloween, leaving out the fact that the party they’d gone to had been at the Playboy Mansion.

Casey seemed no better than he had the last time she’d seen him, but no worse either. She supposed that was a good thing, but she couldn’t help but worry. No one knew if the new chemo he was on was helping, and that was the worst part – waiting to see if the treatments were going to work, unsure of what the future held. It had been the same for Nick’s lung surgery and her own bone marrow transplant. Things had looked pretty grim for both of them, yet they’d survived and recovered and were now on their way to being cured of cancer forever. Casey was young, and he was a fighter; he could do the same. At least that’s what she kept telling herself at night, when she prayed.

One evening, she came back to Laureen’s apartment after a visit with Casey and found Laureen at her computer, looking at the Backstreet Boys message board she’d shown Claire the night she’d come over for drinks. “Anything interesting on there today?” asked Claire, coming up beside her.

“There’s some pictures of Nick, AJ, and Howie clubbing that someone posted,” said Laureen, turning her monitor towards Claire so that she could see the images on the screen. Claire leaned closer, studying the pictures. There was a blurry picture of the three of them outside the club; Claire could see AJ’s girlfriend Mary in the background. Posted below it were a few pictures of the guys inside. There was one of Howie and a pretty Asian woman and, below it, one of Nick smiling in between a curvy young woman in revealing, too-tight clothes and an older woman who appeared to be trying to look twenty years younger (it wasn’t working).

“Who are these women?” she asked, pointing to the latter picture.

Laureen shrugged. “Probably just fans. There’s pictures like that posted here all the time.” She clicked through a few other threads and showed Claire a number of pictures of Nick with his arm around various women. In some of the pictures, he was smiling; in others, he looked tired, drunk, or simply annoyed. She was astonished that in the short time he’d been in Los Angeles, so many of his fans had already met up with him and gotten pictures. He must have been going out a lot more than he had in Tampa, probably with some pushing from AJ and Howie. She hoped he was enjoying himself. The attention from the fans had to make him feel good – surely it helped his self-confidence to know that so many young women obviously still admired him.

Still, the pictures were reminders of how different his real life was from hers. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be idolized that way, to constantly have people come up to her in public and ask her for pictures or autographs. She’d had her share of celebrity crushes when she was younger, but the movie stars and rock stars she’d drooled over had always seemed untouchable and out of reach to her. Nick was the first big celebrity she’d actually gotten to know, but it had been all too easy for her to forget how famous he was, after she’d realized he was just a regular guy who was in a situation not unlike her own, dealing with cancer.

She’d seen glimpses of his Backstreet Boy life in the spotlight since then – she’d watched him on TV, she’d accompanied him to last year’s MTV Video Music Awards, and of course, she’d been his date to the Playboy Mansion Halloween bash. Yet, as her relationship with him had grown over the past year, she’d lost touch of what his career really entailed. Being a Backstreet Boy meant spending months out of the year recording, touring, and promoting all over the world. It meant countless weeks away from home and loved ones, endless days on the road, sleepless nights in concert halls and clubs, in the midst of thousands of adoring females.

Nick’s celebrity lifestyle was no longer such an enigma to her, now that he was finally back to living his life much the way he had before cancer had gotten in the way. But one question still remained: Where was her place in that life?

***