Nick Carter was a man.
He was a man who spent much of his time questioning his own masculinity. After raking over all of his daily activities he picked them apart, piece by piece. Would a man do that, did other men think this was “manly”... and so on, until he’d run out of every possible question one could ask about the validity of manhood.
He’d covered the basics of course. He liked women, he liked porn, he like sports, beer, and flatulence but he could not tell you the last time he’d really been in a room with a man his own age, a peer. He didn’t count doctors or salespeople; he was only really interested in counting friends.
Nick did not have a friend to his name. He could remember a time, back when things were different when he’d had many friends. His decisions though, his interest in the wrong woman had been what had undone the tight knit friendships and forged a barrier between them so uncomfortably wide he never really thought the gap could be closed.
He’d been in his third year of college when he met her. She wasn’t his type, not at all his type. He had been a bit of a popular kid in high school, and didn’t usually have any troubles getting girls. Now he was in college, and the girls were smarter, more beautiful, and on a rampant hunt for the best looking grad student they could find. They weren’t interested in him; with his baby faced 18 year old appearance (though his drivers licence proved he was 20), his scrawny arms, and lack of apparent fashion sense. Sure in senior year at Kennedy High School he’d been top dog, but now he was sitting at the bottom of the totem pole, had been for the past two years and he didn’t see anywhere to go but down.
He had been having the same problems ever since the day he set foot on campus for freshman year. He was on his own for the first time; a university man! He quickly found that being on his own was a huge adjustment (who will cook my food? Who will do my laundry? Who will tell me they love me when I’ve had a bad day?), and he quickly found he was homesick and depressed but that was all part of a far deeper story. He forced himself with the help of his roommates to get out, and have “fun”. He rarely actually made it out the door, and often found himself sleeping on Friday and Saturday nights.
He wasted those first two years though and he had to start making up for lost time. This time; this time he not only made it out the door but he made it to the party, and to the keg, through the crowd to the dance floor and by the end of the evening he was drunk as a skunk… and that was putting it lightly. She had been sitting quietly on one of the couches, waiting for her friends so she could drive them home. She was geeky, and awkward, but in her own way she was beautiful and Nick could have sworn she smelled of books the same way the library smelled when you first walked in.
“Do you work at the library?” his first words to her had been, at least that’s what he thought they were. For all he knew he could have been asking her the time, he was not currently commanding the brain-to-mouth ship.
He could never forget the look of surprise on her face. Not because he’d really asked her if she knew someone named Murphy but because to date he was the first boy who had ever spoken to her about something other than school work. She was a grad student, this was the first time that she had ever been let in the front door of a party, and now was the time someone decided to speak to her. In her mind he wasn’t hammered, he was perfectly sober and perfectly willing to spend the evening having intellectual conversation over a bottle of wine on a dark, snowy evening.
Everyone has dreams before they end up broken.
As strange as it had seemed to everyone, they dated. For longer than either of them had anticipated, or really wanted. He quickly discovered that she wasn’t what he wanted, and she quickly discovered he wasn’t what she needed but they were comfortable and by the time they realized they could in fact go separate ways forces beyond their control had sealed their lives together with some kind of celestial super glue.
A real man would have realized the volatility of their relationship long before it got to the point it was at now. He wondered if he was less intelligent than most men, but found it hard to believe that was possible because he’d witnessed many stupid things in his day. He wondered if other men sat just like he was now reminiscing about times past, and whether things in their lives could have gone differently. They probably did, he rationalized.
Now he wondered if men could appreciate the value of a silent moment as much as he could right now, despite the fact that someone had been calling his name.
“Is someone calling my name?” he yelled upstairs from the dimly lit basement, harshly broken from his personal narration.
“Dinner!” the voice called again and Nick shrugged.
“Who?” he asked more to himself then popped to his feet when he realized the real reason of the call, “I’ll be right up!”
~*~
“How was work?” he asked, practically following a set list of questions that got asked on a daily basis. He didn’t really care about the answer, but he sometimes liked to hear other people’s voices.
She sighed heavily as if to show how utterly stressful the day had been for her, “It was absolutely crazy! Sometimes I have to wonder how people get their jobs because they are definitely not skilled at what they do. I’m working on that new exhibit about…”
Suddenly her voice was gone and he could only see her lips moving. He knew there was an audio track to this portion of his life but he tuned it out. She worked at a museum; collecting, grading, and cataloguing before coming up with new displays and exhibits. It was her dream job, the one she had always wanted when she went into numismatics…
nu•mis•mat•ics [noo-miz-mat-iks]
–noun (used with a singular verb )
the study or collecting of coins, medals, paper money, etc
She collected coins. She was a coin collector. She did this for a living. It bored him to tears.
“So basically I’ll be out of town for that week, then I’ll probably end up there most nights when I’m back… are you even listening to me?” she asked, watching as his eyes suddenly flicked back over to her.
“Of course I’m listening!” he said, stuffing a piece of broccoli into his mouth.
“You didn’t look like it,” she accused.
Nick took a deep breath and looked her straight in the eye as he lied, “Holly, I’m listening to you.”
The conversation was gone. Forks on plates, cups to mouths, the gentle scrape of a knife was all that could be heard across the table.
We have nothing in common, he found himself thinking for the hundredth time. I should leave, was the follow up statement. He knew why he stayed though, he knew why when they had absolutely nothing in common he had married a woman who was dull, and way beyond him in smarts, and was so detailed in the way she ran her life that she scheduled everything he did down to the times allotted for them to have sex. Not that they ever kept that meeting.
“Daddy?” a small voice asked and he turned his head, a smile immediately spreading from cheek to cheek.
“Yes baby?” he ran a hand over her delicate blonde hair, grateful that if there was any one thing that Holly had given him it was the perfect little girl in front of him.
“I’m all done,” she said, pointing to her empty plate, a flower pattern now visible beneath where the cut up cubes of chicken had once lain.
“Okay,” he couldn’t keep himself from smiling at her, it was infectious. He cleaned up the plate and got her off of her little stack of phone books (she was small for her age, and didn’t quite reach the table); expecting her to then crawl into his lap like she did after lunch.
She didn’t though. Things had changed since lunch time. At lunch time Daddy was the only warm lap around, and she knew she would get in good with him if she loved on him a little, but things had changed. Mommy was home now, and she only had eyes for the woman at the other end of the table.
So while Holly and Olivia discussed crayons and dolls he once again found he wasn’t needed. He looked at the woman across from him, the one wearing the pants in the family and he wondered if either of them would miss him if he were gone.
~*~
With a yawn and a stretch he turned the television off, heading upstairs for the night. Holly had gone up long before him (as was usual procedure) to read a book, her way of unwinding from a day of hard work.
Once he hit the top of the stairs he began to disrobe, tossing his t-shirt into the laundry hamper just inside the bedroom door.
Have to do the laundry, he told himself, wishing there was a way to get out of menial household tasks.
He pulled off his pants, leaving him in just his boxer-briefs and he put the jeans and socks in the same pile with the shirt before glancing at his wife of four years. She looked very pretty just then, with the bedside lamp reflecting off the spectrum of colours throughout her light brown hair. Her hair was one thing he loved about her. It was thick, luscious and a million different colours of brown all wrapped into one, and she had always kept it long just how he liked it. If it weren’t for her glasses, lack of makeup, and conservative clothing Nick was absolutely positive she could be a knock out.
She glanced up at him and smiled sweetly, and he thought for sure that something was going to happen that night. He didn’t care if it was an evening of high school style kissing and heavy petting he needed this, he needed to be touched, and groped, and loved.
He smiled back and quickly made his way toward the bed, about to ask if the schedule allowed for a little foreplay before noticing a familiar blonde head peeking from under the covers.
“I thought she was in bed,” he commented dryly.
Holly grinned again and put her book down and he realized then that the smile she had sent him had really been for Olivia but she was just too asleep to have seen it, “She asked if she could sleep in here with us.”
He sighed, “She slept in here with us last night, and the night before, and nearly every night for the past month. She needs to get used to sleeping in her own bed!”
“This is a new house; her room was closer to our room in the old house. She needs to get used to it,” Holly justified and Nick let out another heavy sigh. Sure the house was new but they began renting it over a month ago, and Olivia had never gotten used to her room because she was never given the chance to with the way Holly always hauled her out of bed to sleep with them. The big girl room further away from the master bedroom was as difficult for the little girl as it was for his wife.
“How can she get used to it?” Nick asked pulling back the covers to reveal his little girl decked out in Tinkerbelle pyjamas, clutching a stuffed cat, “She’s never in there!”
“Leave her!” Holly demanded, grabbing Nick’s arm as he bent to pick the little girl up.
“She needs to sleep in her own room!”
“Why is it so important to you?”
“She takes up all the room and I don’t like waking up with her feet in my face first thing in the morning!” he said in an angry stage whisper, not wanting to wake up the sleeping babe.
“Leave her,” Holly said again this time in a softer voice, “I’m not ready for her to be down the hall yet.”
The truth was revealed and Nick’s eyes were drawn to her hand on his forearm, “But… I thought maybe we could…” he trailed off, bringing his eyes back up to hers.
Her hand left his arm quickly and she settled Olivia back into the middle of the bed, “I have to get up early Nick, sorry. Good night.”
“Good night,” he repeated back to her, trying to get himself into the bed without crushing the little one who was immediately glued to his side, the whiskers of her toy cat tickling the back of his arm before he reached up to turn out the light, flooding the room with darkness and silence.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Hi everyone who might be reading this! This is something new I've got on the go, and I hope to get it finished up as soon as I can! Please read and review, I'd love to know what you all think of chapter 1!
