I moved into my first apartment when I was twenty-two. It was a one-bedroom on the second floor of a small, three-story building. It wasn’t part of a swanky complex with a pool and a rec center; it didn’t overlook Tampa Bay. Its parking lot was full of potholes, and weeds grew up through the cracks in the pavement. The building itself was okay, although I heard complaints from the third-floor residents that the tile roof leaked. When you walked inside, you were greeted with this smell that will never quite leave my nostrils. It wasn’t a bad smell, per se, just a distinct one. It was an old smell, the same sort of musty, mildewy odor of an old woman’s attic. Treading across the threadbare carpet in the halls for the first time, looking around at the grubby walls, inhaling that stale air, my father looked at me like I was crazy for leasing such a place and told me his daughter could do better.
And had my father, the retired dentist, been paying my rent, I could have done better. Much better. I’d have lived in one of those swanky complexes near the bay, with a pool and a rec center and an ocean view. But I was just a kid with an associate’s degree and a hygienist’s job and never-ending medical bills. I didn’t have the luxury of choosing a place for its amenities or location. And I was too proud, too stubborn, to accept charity from my dad. This place was affordable… and besides, I happened to love it.
It was a far cry from the house in which I’d lived with my parents, but if you looked past the weeds and potholes in the parking lot, the worn spots on the carpet, and the smudges on the walls… if you just bypassed all of that and looked straight into my windows (which, okay, was kind of impossible without a ladder - second floor, remember?), you would see that the apartment itself was me.
It was so me. Within two weeks of moving in, I’d converted that six hundred square feet into my own personal sanctuary. I’d painted the walls with my favorite colors - dark purple for the living room, light green for the kitchen, pale blue in the bedroom - and complimented my parents’ old furniture with my own accents. It was more cluttered and eclectic than feng shui, but I adored every nook and cranny of it for what it was: my own place.
I think people are like buildings in a way. When you first encounter them, you judge them by what you see on the outside. You have no idea what they’re really like until you get past the walls and see what’s on the inside. And, of course, it’s the inside that really matters.
I’ll admit, it was the outside that first attracted me to Nick. I don’t consider myself a particularly shallow person, but I am a woman, and Nick… Nick is a chick magnet. Or at least he was then. He had the looks, the presence, the charisma that just naturally attracts women. I didn’t usually go for blondes, but I do have a weakness for blue eyes. It was his eyes that got me… and his sexy eyebrows (why can’t my eyebrows look like that??)… and that sort of smirky, half-smile thing he does.
The first time I met him, I thought he was an asshole, but by the second or third time, I had sort of a crush forming. Not a serious crush, just… I dunno, the sort of crush you get on the hot guy who works at the gas station you fill up at on the way home from work. You don’t talk to him, beyond “Fine, and you?” and “Thanks,” and you can’t remember his name without checking his name badge, but you know his face, and a silly little part of you looks forward to seeing it when you go in to pay for your gas (and you always go in, even though you could just pay outside with your card). That was the kind of girly infatuation I had with Nick in the beginning. He was easy on the eyes, and after it had happened a couple of times, I looked forward to seeing him in the waiting room when I went in to the cancer clinic for my appointments.
Of course, I knew his name; every girl my age knew who Nick Carter was. I’d seen him on MTV with his boyband, baring his soul to the world as he revealed his cancer diagnosis. That was the first glimpse I got at his inside, at the Nick Carter who lived beneath the sculpted blonde hair and perfectly pruned brows. He was braver than I’d thought; the guy who’d sought total privacy for his chemo, who’d hidden behind pregnancy magazines in the waiting room to avoid being recognized, telling the whole world he had a deadly disease in person on live television. It gave me a new respect for him, and that made the crush feel a little stronger and a little less silly.
I’m not sure when exactly it turned serious. It was a gradual thing. At first, it was just a frivolous, secret crush, if you could even call it that. That was one-sided, I know. But then there was a friendship, a camaraderie between us, and that was mutual. There wasn’t, like, this one magical moment where the two merged and blossomed and I all of a sudden sat up and thought, “I’m in love with him.” It wasn’t like that. I don’t remember the instant I first realized it; it just sort of… happened.
I think the turning point was when we started seeing each other outside of the hospital. Up until then, all of our interactions had taken place on the fifth floor of Tampa General, and they’d all been initiated by me. I was the one who spoke first to him in the chemo room on the day we met. I was the one who came up to say hi to him in the waiting room of the outpatient clinic as we both sat waiting for our appointments. I was the one who offered to stay and hold his hand through one of his bone marrows. I was the one who visited him when he was admitted to ICU with pneumonia. I was attracted to him, on an emotional level as well as a physical one, but although he’d started to warm up to me, he hadn’t shown any signs of reciprocating my feelings… until the night he called and asked me out.
It was a Thursday night, and I had no plans. My life was pretty boring back then; I worked part-time, in between chemo cycles, and I used my time off to relax and rest up for the next round of work/chemo, both of which kicked my ass. I was just lying around my apartment in pajamas when the phone rang. The caller ID came up as “private caller,” and normally, I wouldn’t have answered, but something made me pick up that night. Maybe it was boredom. Maybe it was fate.
In either case, when I answered the phone, I heard this guy’s voice go, “Hey… is this Claire?” I recognized it right away. Nick has a distinct voice, and it was pretty familiar to me by that point, although I’d never heard it over the phone before. It was hard to believe he was actually calling me, but I knew it was him.
I decided to play it cool. “Hey, yeah, this is Claire,” I answered and waited for him to identify himself.
“Hey, Claire… It’s Nick. Nick Carter.”
I smiled, pressing the phone closer to my ear as my heart did a cartwheel inside my chest. “Hi, Nick! What’s up?”
“Not much… you know… just hangin’ out at home… bored… you know.”
I was surprised by both the honesty and the normalcy in his answer. It was nice to know that even celebrities spent boring nights at home, that he didn’t live this total rockstar lifestyle, that I could relate to him outside of the hospital. “I do know. I’m doing that very same thing at this very moment,” I replied.
He laughed. “Yeah? Well, I dunno about you, but I gotta get out of this house. You wanna go out? Not, like, ‘out’ out - just out to dinner or something.”
I knew he wasn’t asking me “out” out, like on a date, but I was still thrilled that he had called to ask me to do anything at all. “Yeah, sure! What did you have in mind?”
“Someplace small… sorta secluded, you know? I don’t feel like being surrounded by a bunch of people.”
I immediately pictured my old high-school hangout, Leonardi’s. It was sort of a dive, only known by the locals, but it had the best pizza and milkshakes in the city. “How do you feel about pizza?” I asked.
“I was thinking pizza,” he said, and I smiled.
“Then I know the perfect place. Leonardi’s - ever been there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’ll love it! It’s my favorite restaurant in Tampa; I always end up going there when I don’t feel like cooking.” Like tonight, I thought, deciding his timing was impeccable. “It’s not too classy or anything, but the food is great, and it’s cheap. Not to mention, it’s never too crowded. It’ll be perfect.”
Nick agreed to try it out. I told him where to find the place, and we agreed on a time to meet there. Normally, I would have had to scramble to get ready, but being bald has its perks - without hair to style, I was dressed and out my door in a matter of minutes.
He still beat me there, which surprised me - I’d expected him to be the kind of guy who keeps a girl waiting. Instead, he was waiting for me in the parking lot, behind the wheel of his silver Jaguar. I noticed the car before I noticed him, and it was love at first sight. That’s right - I fell in love with Nick’s Jag before I fell in love with Nick. But that part’s coming up.
He got out of the car when he saw me pull in and walked over to meet me. I had to suppress the urge to laugh when I got a good look at him. He was wearing a polo shirt with the collar popped like some frat boy and a baseball cap with the brim pulled down low, and even though it was getting dark, he had sunglasses on under that.
I got that he was trying to fly under the radar, but I couldn’t resist teasing him. “I think you’re attracting even more attention to yourself in that get-up,” I said, reaching up to pull the ridiculous sunglasses off his face.
Nick smirked, but even under the light of the parking lot, I could tell he was blushing. “Don’t hate,” he said.
“Not hating,” I replied, as we walked into the restaurant. “Just offering some friendly advice.”
But I really did understand why he didn’t want to be recognized, so when we got inside, I requested the wraparound booth in the far back corner, usually reserved for big groups or couples wanting to cuddle. Luckily, it wasn’t crowded that night, so no one was sitting there.
“Hey, thanks for meeting me here tonight,” Nick said, as we slid into opposite sides of the booth. The smirk was gone from his face now, and he sounded genuine, like he thought I was doing him a favor.
“No problem.” I smiled at him. “I’m always in the mood for pizza - well, almost always - and I could never pass up coming to Leonardi’s.”
He nodded, looking around. “Yeah, this place is perfect.” But as he said it, I saw him run his hand over the top of his baseball cap, like he was checking to make sure it was still covering his head. I knew he was bald underneath it, but I’d already seen his bald head and couldn’t understand why he was acting so self-conscious about it now.
“Quit it, would ya?” I said teasingly.
He smiled sheepishly and lowered his hands to his lap. “Sorry.”
“You should just leave it off. People would think you shaved your head on purpose. I know guys who’ve done that.” Guys with cancer had it easier than us girls, I thought. It wasn’t unusual for a guy to be bald. But for a girl - especially a pale, Irish girl - it just looked weird. (Okay, so maybe Sinead O’Conner was an exception, but then again, she was pretty weird anyway.) Maybe I was being hypocritical in judging Nick, because it wasn’t like I ever went out in public with my own head uncovered, but I didn’t try so hard to hide it, either. I had a wig, but it was itchy and I hated it, so I wore scarves instead - the brighter, the better. The tiger-striped scarf I’d tied on that night probably attracted just as much attention as my bald head would have.
“You’re forgetting one thing - I’m famous,” Nick pointed out. “The whole world knows what’s wrong with me; no one will think I did it on purpose.”
“True, but if everyone knows what’s wrong with you anyway, why do you care if they see your head? I mean, they would probably expect you to be bald, right?” I countered.
He shrugged. “I dunno. I just don’t feel comfortable with it yet, I guess.”
It was strange to see someone who was used to being the center of attention get so self-conscious, but I reminded myself that he was a newcomer to the cancer community, still a newbie, whereas I’d been a part of this world for three years. Realizing I was probably making him feel even more uncomfortable by giving him the third degree, I decided to let the issue drop. I smiled and said, “That’s okay. Neither do I, really. I was just giving you a hard time.”
I did that a lot, gave him a hard time, and he gave it back to me just as bad. That night, we bantered back and forth about a little of everything. I called him out on checking out the chick who waited on us, while he teased me about having a huge appetite. For once, cancer wasn’t the center of our conversation, until I started babbling about how the steroids I was taking had turned me into a bloated bottomless pit. “I used to be able to eat whatever I wanted though without it showing, but the chemotherapy I’m on now has totally been screwing with my system. The appetite thing plus the water weight just makes me-”
“Hey, you think we can change the subject?” Nick interrupted, and I realized I was over-sharing. Remind me never to write a book about first date etiquette, unless it’s one of those “what NOT to do” kinds. Not that this was a date, but a part of me - the part that was crushing on Nick Carter - wanted to pretend it was.
I laughed to cover up my embarrassment and quickly apologized. “Sure! Sorry. Yeah, let’s talk about happy things now.”
“Okay… happy things like what?”
“I dunno… like flowers and kittens and shit?” I joked. I may not have realized it at the time, but this was the first true test of our relationship: could we come out from under the shadow of cancer and sustain a conversation about something else, something light and fun?
“Kittens?” Nick wrinkled his nose. “Nah, I’m more of a puppy person.”
I laughed. “Me too. Cats are too damn temperamental.”
“Yeah,” agreed Nick.
I struggled to think of something to add to that. I wanted to talk about happy things, I really did, but I had no idea what those things might be. I realized I still knew almost nothing about him, other than that he was a famous singer from Florida who had cancer, which we’d already covered. Did we have anything else in common?
“So… what else makes you happy, Nick Carter? What are you into besides the music thing?”
A faraway look came into his eyes as he thought about the question. He seemed to be taking it far more seriously than I’d intended. So much for light and fun. “The ocean,” he said finally. “I’ve always loved the ocean. It’s like my… my sanctuary… the one place I can go to take my mind off of all the crap I have to think about and just chill, you know. It’s my escape.”
It was nice to hear him open up for once. He was usually so closed-off. I suppose he had been carefully groomed to say just the right things in interviews and such. For the first time since I’d met him, I finally felt like I was getting to know the real Nick Carter.
But just as quickly, he shut down again. “Sorry,” he said, blushing. “Didn’t mean to go all fruity on you.”
For the third time that night, I wondered how someone who acted so cocky sometimes could be so self-conscious. His sudden shyness was sort of endearing, though, and he was even cuter when he blushed. The red in his cheeks brought out the blue of his eyes, the windows to his soul. I looked inside them and saw someone who was struggling to hold on to himself in the midst of everything that had happened to him - or, maybe, to find himself in the first place.
“Why are you sorry?” I asked, frowning. “And I don’t think you’re fruity. That’s cool. So I bet you’ve probably spent a lot of time by the ocean recently then.”
“Actually, no, I haven’t. My poor boat hasn’t been taken out in months.”
“Oh. Well, you should take it out. Clear your mind and all that.” Clearly, he needed some kind of release. He was wound up way too tight.
“Yeah…” Nick said slowly. “Yeah, I should…”
And he did, the very next day. I saw him at the grocery store that evening, looking extremely sunburnt. Under the knit cap he wore, his eyes looked extra blue. He gave me a guilty look when I caught him holding four cartons of ice cream, but I wasn’t about to judge him for that. I knew from the previous night that it was all he could eat. Besides, he’d caught me with a frozen pizza, one night after our pizza “date,” which meant that I’d already plowed through the leftover pizza I’d taken him from Leonardi’s and wanted more, so I had no room to judge.
Instead, I decided it was my turn to make a move, so I did something I didn’t usually do: I invited him (and his ice cream) to come home with me.
And even more surprising? He came.
I felt sort of silly showing him around my one-bedroom apartment, knowing his house was probably huge, but he didn’t seem put off by its smallness. After he’d opened up to me the previous night, it was nice to let him into my world, the world outside of the hospital. It was a world of mundane things, of televised movies and mint chocolate chip ice cream, frozen pizza and Bisquik pancakes, but those were exactly the kinds of things we wanted. When cancer takes over your life, you miss the mundane. You crave normalcy.
I think that was why he stayed that night. Even if he wasn’t comfortable in his own skin, he was comfortable being in my place, just hanging out and watching TV and pigging out on ice cream. I represented both the normal he needed and the sickie he’d started to see himself as, or maybe more of a bridge between the two. I understood what he was going through because I’d been there myself, and because of it, I didn’t let him feel too sorry for himself. I kept him balanced. Whether he realized it or not, I think that was why he liked hanging out with me back then.
That night was definitely a pivotal point in our friendship. Not only was it the first of many nights we spent curled up on the couch, watching TV together, but it was the first time he really opened up to me. I had seen him vulnerable before, but until that night, he’d never willingly let his guard down in front of me. Oddly enough, all it took was a little aloe. He started by taking off his hat to let me put the stuff on his sunburnt scalp, and ended up removing his shirt so I could rub his back. But, looking back, this physical exposure represented so much more. Little by little, I’d started to peel back Nick’s layers and see the person he was underneath the walls he’d built up around himself. He had bared his body, but it wasn’t until he bared his soul that I fell in love with him.
Until then, I just liked looking into his blue eyes, sneaking a peek at the enigmatic soul inside.
***
