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Eleven Twenty Four PM
by Janie
Summary: Thirty-six minutes til midnight. Twenty-four minutes after eleven. The moment his world started to fall apart.

I laughed.

“I don’t think this is funny.”

I laughed again.

“Fine, be an asshole about this. If this is your way of showing me that you don’t care, then fine. Don’t care.”

“It wasn’t what you thought, was it?”

She didn’t have to answer. The sudden guilty concentration on the floor answered for her. Her hair slipped from the security of her shoulder and cast a shadow over her sad expression. There were suddenly shadows everywhere.

I sat down on the edge of my bed, kicking my new tennis shoe against my open suitcase. “I was wondering when you were gonna break.”

“I didn’t break,” she practically whispered.

I looked up at her, but she was still staring at the floor. That must have been one hell of a floor.

“So, you call dumping me not breaking?”

Her eyes found mine. Guess that floor wasn’t too interesting anymore.

“People break up all the time.”

“Yeah, they do, but there are reasons for it. Someone’s cheating, no chemistry, pressure gets to them and they break....” I shrugged.

“I didn’t fucking break.”

I stood up, and I wanted to hit something when she took a jump back at my action. “Do you think I’m gonna hurt you? I’ve never laid a damn hand on you. No, you’re the one doing all the damn hurting. I was always honest with you. Told you about the fans, about the press, about how little time I had, and you....you acted like you could handle it all. Like it was no big deal.”

God, I’m wishing I’d just shut the fuck up already. It wasn’t me to go into a rampage of a diatribe. It wasn’t me to let them know how much they’d hurt me. It just wasn’t me.

Me was the sweet smiling Backstreet Boy who everyone adored.

Me was the guy who was just, like oh my gawd, so freaking hot.

Me was the man who was still trying to figure out that he wasn’t a kid anymore.

I was fucking tired of being me.

And I was suddenly really fucking tired of her.

“Just go already,” I waved her off.

She blinked.

“Don’t tell me you expected me to drop down on my hands and knees and sing one of our tired, old love songs to you? If you want me to, I guess I could. I’m sure I have our CD here somewhere, so you can even pretend the rest of the fellas are here, too.”

I could have sworn she stopped blinking.

“You party too much,” she said simply.

She caught me so off guard, that I think I stopped blinking with her.

“What?”

“I’m not breaking.” Her voice was a lot stronger now, and I noticed she was even standing straighter. “I don’t care about the fans, or the hate sites, or even that we hardly get to spend time together.” She was shoving things into her bag again. “I like that we’re not joined at the damn hip. I need to slowly get to know you before we’re in each other’s faces so much that we go and get sick of each other. My problem with you is that you party too much. You seem like such a fucking fake.”

I think my mouth was hanging open a little.

“I’m not a fake.”

She scoffed. “So you like to hang out with all of those people that you don’t even know? Who spend all of their time taking pictures with you instead of talking with you? You’re such a damn fraud. Every time we hit some damn club, you act completely different. You drink more, smoke more, act a hell of a lot more indifferent than I’ve ever seen you.”

“What makes you think that the way I act when I’m with you isn’t fake, and that ‘club’ me isn’t who I am?”

“Nothing makes me think that. I don’t know who you are, and that’s the problem, and the more I hang around you, the more I don’t want to know.” She zipped up her bag and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “Get a grip on yourself. You won’t be happy ‘till you do.”

“Thank you, Dear Abby. Besides, what the hell do you know about me being happy?”

“Obviously nothing.”

I hated how sad she suddenly looked. That damn sad look was directed at me.

“Good luck on your new album.”

“Yeah, I’ll be sure to send you an autographed copy,” I smiled sarcastically.

She smiled back at me, and damn her, it was genuine. “I’ll keep a lookout for it.”

Before she could leave, and against the part of me yelling for me to just let her go, I called out to her.

“Yeah?” she asked.

I was really hating the idea of waking up tomorrow without her there. “Will you at least give me a chance to try?”

I really, really wanted to bitchslap myself right then, but I had to know.

She licked her lips and looked down at the floor again. “I can’t,” she finally answered. She looked at me with glassy eyes. “I can’t let myself fall in love with someone who doesn’t even know who they are, because then the chances are that I’ll be left to get over a ghost of a person I thought I knew, but who never really existed.”

“What time is it?”

She looked startled. I guess she was expecting me to beg or cry or something.

“What?” she asked.

“What time is it?”

She glanced at her watch. “Eleven twenty-four.”

I nodded.

“Why?”

“Just trying to pinpoint about what time it was that I realized I was so damn hard to love,” I said, kicking my suitcase again.

“You’re not hard to love,” she said, sliding her backpack over the strap of her bag. “And that’s an even bigger part of the problem,” she sadly smiled.

Sometime after she left, I realized I was staring at the floor. Turned out there really wasn’t anything terribly special about it. It was just a really good thing to do when you wanted to avoid everything else around you.

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