The Luckiest (4 page)

Twenty minutes later they’ve reverted to high school form, having fired up the karaoke machine that the Baxters always keep up to date, and are deep into a round of musical silliness that’s rapidly becoming sillier as Mia dances behind the bar and keeps both blenders humming and the margaritas coming. Alex never could sing three notes on pitch, but somehow she and David have
killed
“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” leav­ing Aaron and Jasmine nudging each other and pulling faces at how adorable a pair they make. David and Jasmine have mugged their way through the love theme from the last Disney movie—leaving the rest of the room groaning—and then, somehow, Aaron has a full cup in his hand and is scrolling through the most recent additions to the machine. He smiles to himself and, against his own best intentions, chooses the poppy, sarcastic, strangely biting “Blank Space.”

Aaron can feel Nik watch him while he slides one hand down his own torso, mugging for his friends and pretending to be drunker than he is, and, high on tequila and the best song to come off a record he still hears everywhere almost a year later, he takes a risk and makes and holds eye contact while he dives into singing about a doomed relationship and wonders along with Taylor Swift if the high was worth the pain. Nik leans back, lets his eyes drift up and down Aaron’s body and gives him a smirk just this side of filthy; maybe Nik has already made up his mind.

They’ve done this before, flirted and teased around every­thing they don’t say. They did it every time they saw each other for almost a year once long ago, and then the last night of the summer after their freshman year in college ended in Alex’s bedroom, both of them gasping and pressing their frus­tration into each other’s skin. Aaron lightly dragged his teeth down Nik’s dick without breaking eye contact, and Nik tugged Aaron’s hair a little harder than necessary to bite a bruise into his throat, and the next morning Aaron woke up sore and sticky and got the hell out of there as quickly as possible. They’d never talked about it, had escaped back into their lives at school; then, by Christmas, Nik was clutching the hand of a boy named Oliver as if it was a lifeline and refusing to make eye contact with Aaron. Aaron didn’t forget, but he threw himself into life in New York and kept his head down, putting one foot in front of the other.

Aaron finishes the song and Stephanie snatches the mic out of his hand, crooks her finger at Nik and launches them into a reprise of their performance of “Dancing on My Own” from the homecoming weekend they all spent here at the house back in senior year. Stephanie still has questionable rhythm and tragic pitch—she loves to sing, which is why they have a karaoke machine in this house, but it’s one thing she will admit she doesn’t have much of a gift for—but there’s a reason Nik majored in music at The University of Texas, and his voice has come a long way.

Somehow, this deliberate throwback to a memory that was never anything but happy seems different than what Aaron has just done. He sits on the sofa, flanked by Alex and Jasmine, hating them both a little for participating in it even while he smiles. Nik dances—how can you
not,
with this song—but he still watches Aaron, gives him a little head-tilt during the chorus, and it’s charming and devastating and infuriating.

Jasmine leans to murmur, “Oh, I see how it is.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“
You
might not be desperate, but I’m not sure about him. He’s coming hard, baby.”

Aaron catches the reference to his blog post from last week and elbows her in response, but he doesn’t stop watch­ing Nik. Aaron watches him bounce and grin and flirt—those eyes continue to be utterly ridiculous—and though he knows he is being drawn in, he leans toward Jasmine and mutters, “And he’ll be coming alone, because I’m not doing this with him again.”

“That would be easier to believe if you weren’t still staring at him. And if I didn’t know how long it’s been since you had a boyfriend.”

Aaron pinches her leg. The song ends; Nik sits. Aaron spends the rest of the night in a dance that should be heartbreakingly familiar—long glances, eyes skimming over each other—but Nik is doing it all wrong. The last time they did this, and every time Aaron has done it since with somebody strange and mys­terious, the dance has been about confidence, about tests and teases, about reeling him in with stops and starts and hot- and cold-running interest. Nik’s eyes are anything but cold—Jasmine was right, he’s coming right at Aaron, muted but constant.

Aaron drifts off against Jasmine’s shoulder, a sweaty cup of melting margarita in his hand and the look in Nik’s eyes burned into his brain.

When he startles awake to a shout of laughter from Jasmine just a few minutes later, Nik is gone.

In Their Own Words

A
post from
the blog
A Lone Star in Manhattan
, Sunday, September 18, 2011:

(I had to write this for a class and thought it might be worth putting up here. Those of you who know me: Keep your com­ments kind, please. It’s not like I can ask the same of my TA.)

I grew up in Texas, one more displaced son of the Great State. I’ve been in New York for three months now, and I’m starting to notice distinct families of response to that piece of information, and all the ways it disappoints people.

The politically-minded extend their condolences. It’s a fair response, and one that I guess I appreciate; I’ve been out since I was sixteen and there’s not much to hide, and I was born just before George Bush’s stupidest son decided politics might be fun. I haven’t lived a day of my life without knowing who he is, and that deserves some sympathy, I think. What those people can’t ever know, though, is how much every one of those condolences comes across as pity for the unknowing rube, and I don’t think I deserve to be pitied, at least not for that. There are certainly things about me that might be pathetic (I’m learning more of them every day, but here’s one: express trains still confuse me), but however tragic my general circumstances might be, being a bumpkin doesn’t seem like one of them. I got out of Texas as soon as I could, but those people can’t know how much my family loved me, how much my friends took care of me and how many very happy memories I have from there. I disappoint them with my smile, with the way I brush off their concerns, but who can care about a stupid governor with a mother like mine?

The science and tech people ask about computers in Austin, or oil exploration in Dallas, or space or medicine in Houston. I am hopeless: All I know about Austin is what I learned when I went there to compete for the state championship in feature writing, I’ve never even been to Dallas, and all I know about NASA is that my first boyfriend’s father worked for them as a contractor and was often stressed out. I grew up just a few miles from the Johnson Space Center and we visited every year because it was a cheap and easy field trip for a broke school district. I have memories of watching the news in a fifth grade classroom after a space shuttle fell apart as it crossed our state, and I remember some of the girls crying because we’d been on one of those field trips just a few months earlier. I was good at math as a kid, and people were already telling me that I could be an engineer if I wanted, but that day all I could think about was those poor people who had died, probably just because somebody messed up a fraction. It was the beginning of the end for me, and I disappoint those new friends with my now terminal lack of interest.

The more geographically ignorant, particularly those who grew up in the city and have never traveled outside of it, ask me about horses. Every time, they ask about the horses, half convinced I rode one to school. I never have an answer except to tell them that, no, there were buses and cars, thanks. There are lots of cars, especially in a city like Houston, which seems to collectively think that a longer commute time is a good solution to overscheduling and overcrowding—if everybody has their own car, the logic seems to go, there’s plenty of down­time during the day, all by yourself. I got my first car the day I turned sixteen, and I’ll admit that I still miss it, here in the city—turns out that quiet time is pretty valuable.

Here’s a secret, though: I’ve never been on a horse, but I’ve spent plenty of time on the water. As you get closer to the coastline, horse trails and pastures give way to bayous and salt marshes, little bays of brackish water that reach their fingers into land and wind through towns and neighborhoods. They bring snakes and frogs and truly terrifying mosquitoes, but they also bring an ease of transport that we took full advantage of—you can get a boating license when you’re only thirteen and a used aluminum flatboat for two hundred bucks. There’s a boat slip at the end of even our poor little neighborhood, and when I was a kid I played there, throwing pieces of gravel into the gray water and poking sticks at swarms of tadpoles.

When I was an older kid, the boat slip made space for other adventures; one impossibly steamy summer day my boyfriend sent me a text that asked me to meet him there in fifteen minutes, and remembering him riding up in a dilapidated boat with a grin splitting his face still makes me smile. We lost a lot of hours on that boat, and a few other things besides. I think I’m always disappointing new acquaintances when I tell them that I don’t know anything about horses, but that I do know several different types of knots and how to replace a pull starter cord on an outboard motor.

Texas did its share of disappointing me, too; for a place so big, it seemed there was never the right kind of room for a person like me, and maybe I can blame its politics for that. It’s a greedy state, so needy for glory that it doesn’t share well, which makes it hard for its more promising young people to leave it behind. I never did develop much of a mind for science, but I do remember that gravitational pull increases with mass, and I blame that phenomenon; I also harbor a grudge toward the state for everybody I had to leave behind to escape its orbit. But I learned a lot from that time on the water: How to push into a solid mass of humanity like this city and make space for myself; how to jump right over small waves to get where I’m going; how to tether myself to one solid thing to stay safe in a storm; and how to drift, aimless and happy and content, when the company and the circumstances are just right.

Monday

Monday starts with
a walk with Alex, Jasmine and Stephanie. Aaron is already sweaty by nine a.m. New York can get warm in the summer, but it’s nothing like the swampy heat here, although at least at the beach the breeze keeps things a little more comfortable. The girls chatter about the wedding and the house—what needs to be cleaned up, what they need to add or move, if the rental order for chairs is enough. Alex and Jasmine brought Alex’s mother here in the spring to meet with Stephanie’s mom Vanessa and show her the house in the last push to calm her down, and much of the big planning was done then. But now that they actually have to
do
it rather than talk about it, the wedding prep seems more overwhelming. Aaron’s glad he grabbed one of the clipboards the Baxters keep in the kitchen when he walked out the back door, and the girls grin at him and then each other every time he takes down a note. He has no idea why, and he’s not sure he wants to ask.

The house is beautiful, and, since none of the guests will make it past the bathroom in the front foyer on the ground floor, they don’t have to worry about keeping the whole place ready for the wedding itself.

The lawn is broad rather than deep, sweeping down to the beach in the St. Augustine grass that means home to him; he hadn’t even known there
were
different kinds of grass until he sat on a blanket in Central Park and noticed how fine the grass there was.

The grass ends in a low picket fence with the pickets spaced wide to let in the breeze, and then the Gulf spreads out; the water is gray but gleaming in the morning sun­light. The home­owners’ association raked the beach this morning, as they do twice a week, and so far there are no footprints; runners prefer to be closer to the water, where the sand is packed better, and the tide has come up enough to wash away their tracks. On Saturday the wedding party will set up a bower just over the dunes, and that’s where Alex and David will get married. Then they’ll have the reception on the lawn. The noise permits have been filed, the parking and use of the beach have been cleared with the homeowners’ association, all of the furniture and tents have been rented, and Alex’s mother is spending what she would have spent on the hall and church rental to re-sod the Baxters’ lawn after it’s all over.

The day passes with lists and consultations and end­less dis­cussions; Aaron is convinced that Alex, Stephanie and Jasmine have forgotten something he’ll be called upon to fix, and he doesn’t want to scramble at the last minute. Alex’s initial con­ver­sations with the florist have left things pretty much in order, and her vision is not complicated: She wants a stolen moment of summer, full of wildflowers and greenery, and Aaron will wrap her bouquet of daisies and brown-eyed Susans and delphinium—because bluebonnets are out of season and unavailable; she asked, because of course she did—in a swath of handspun ribbon he’s brought from New York, a remnant of silver-shot raw silk captured from the end of a one-of-a-kind bolt that a new friend had put aside for him. Her eyes widen when he pulls it from the canvas bag he’s tucked into his sewing box, and he has to quickly whisk it away and rewrap it before the tears in her eyes fall onto it and ruin the silk.

Over lunch he fiddles on his laptop with designs for the wed­ding program, runs fonts by Alex and Jasmine and measures the borders and margins of the paper Alex has chosen in order to make sure, make
double
sure that it’s right before he emails the file to Kinko’s with a request for completion by Friday.

And then, when lunch is over, David comes in from outside, sweaty and a little bit sandy. He wraps his arms around Alex and drops a kiss on the top of her head, and instead of fuss­ing about the sand she turns in his arms and leans into him with her whole body and whispers, “Holy shit, we’re getting married!” Within minutes they’ve taken off upstairs to get David cleaned up; apparently Alex needs to help. Aaron shakes his head as he shuts his laptop, but he can’t blame them for wanting to enjoy what they have.

Back at college, when they first met in their a cappella group, David intimidated the hell out of Jasmine with his easy con­fidence, which left her feeling defensive and unsure when he was around. She denied it; in long phone calls Aaron stood up for him and told Jasmine what a nice guy he was, and she told Aaron he was crazy and then dragged Alex along to their end-of-semester party for backup. Alex argued with a group of the guys for fifteen minutes about the treatment of women in popular music, and continued the debate with David long after the rest of them wandered away; by the end of the night they ended up making out on the back porch while Jasmine’s friends gave her endless rounds of holy hell for bringing the cute girl who snagged a perfectly acceptable guy out from under them while they were still planning their moves.

Jasmine called Aaron the next morning, pissed at Alex, pissed at her girlfriends and
really
pissed at David, whom, she had decided, was the real problem. Dragged out of bed by her phone call while trying to sleep off his own disastrous Last Night before he had to pack for home, Aaron assured her that it was just one of those things that happened in college. He reminded her that Alex and David really didn’t run in the same circles, they shared
no
mutual friends and years from now Alex would still be with her high school boyfriend Andy; everything would be out in the open and they would all share a laugh about that one crazy night in college. He believed it, too, and kept telling her the same thing over the long, awkward Christmas break when Jasmine and Alex hadn’t been talking, and Alex and Andy had done everything
but
talk, and Aaron did his best to stay out of it.

Only that never happened, that happily-ever-after for Alex and Andy, because Alex and David ran into each other during their first week back at school in January. They sat together at a talk that both of their psych professors had offered as an extra credit opportunity, and then they went to lunch at the Student Center food court, and then they ditched their afternoon classes and went to David’s dorm room. A week later, Jasmine came back to the dorm room she shared with Alex to find her sobbing on her bed, clutching her phone to her chest—she’d just called Andy and broken off with him, because she was
gone
over David. Jasmine had looked at her, gone downstairs to the dorm store to get ice cream and then come back upstairs to clean Alex up and call Aaron on Skype. That night, after the call ended, he’d felt shaken—if not Nik and him, he’d been
sure
Andres and Alex were the real thing. But maybe none of it had been real; maybe they’d all simply been using each other until they could get out of the crappy little suburb that had always felt a little like prison. This thought never seemed true, not even then, but sometimes he wondered.

The real horror of the situation didn’t hit him until that sum­mer, when he’d made it back to Texas, walked into a cook­out in Alex’s backyard, and seen Nik standing near the grill. David saw him freeze and came over to greet him as if Alex’s home was his own; that was the first real sign that this awk­wardness was Aaron’s brand new normal. Going to separate high schools had always been hard, at least right up until the moment he and Nik broke up; then he’d been grateful that he had a separate group of friends to carry him through the last few weeks of school. A year later, with David in the picture, all of that had changed.

And now they’re getting married, and it will be this way for as long as he and Alex are friends—and he’s never planned on an expiration date for that. And now Alex and David are upstairs sharing a shower, and, as Aaron packs up his lap­top, he tries hard not to think about where Nik is in the house.

In the late afternoon, Aaron chops vegetables for a salad while Mia and Nicole bump hips and prepare pasta and a sim­ple sauce. He listens to their ever-larger plans for food before he stops them and reminds them that he’s taking the kitchen on Wednesday night and on Thursday and Friday mornings for work on the cake. They share a look, and he’s not convinced they believe him, but they continue their planning and he makes a mental note to press the point later.

Jasmine strikes up a conversation with Mia and Nicole about people they all knew at college and what they’re up to on Face­book, and so Aaron ends up between Stephanie and Nik at the dinner table. He and Nik pause as they recognize the seat­ing configuration, and then sit down, and Aaron tries to laugh off the awkwardness as he shakes his head and pours wine for all three of them. Before December he hadn’t really
talked
much to Nik for years, and God knows Stephanie can talk enough for all three of them. Most of what he knows about Nik’s life now comes second- or third-hand, and if Aaron only keeps his Facebook open in the hope that one day Nik will change his mind and reactivate his own account, well, long and lingering pain is just a part of having a serious ex. After last night, though, he’s a little thrown, and Nik doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to decode any of his own behavior for Aaron.

Aaron smiles at Nik and is opening his mouth to ask him something,
anything,
when Stephanie turns to him with a chirpy, “How’s Josh?” Aaron frowns down at his dinner before he looks up at Stephanie. “He’s fine. He met a girl and it looks like it’s getting serious—he was talking about rings at lunch yesterday.”

Stephanie’s head snaps back. “Rings. Oh, holy… wow. That’s… I mean, is she new?”

He looks back at his plate; he had
really
hoped this wouldn’t come up. “Not too new—I met her at Christmas. She’s all right—she’s pretty—but at least when I met her, she seemed to think that he was some great catch, so that should tell you something about her judgment and taste level.” He knows this is an asshole move, and that Josh deserves better, but whatever happened between Stephanie and Josh was too weird, and he doesn’t want to encourage anybody to pick it up again. He doesn’t know the whole story; all he knows is that he stopped answering Josh’s questions about Stephanie a long time ago, and Stephanie seems to ration out her own questions. Both of them know how to use the Internet.

Stephanie laughs a little too loudly and bumps his shoulder. “Don’t be like that about your cousin! He’s a good guy! Are they coming to the wedding?”

“I think Josh is; he’s on weekdays at the refinery. I’m not sure about Meg—the girl.” He knows Josh is coming; he saved the address to Josh’s phone before he left the house yesterday. But he doesn’t want Stephanie to feel crushed at the thought of seeing her sort-of-ex, who’s all but engaged to somebody else, and he might as well give her time to get used to the idea.

But it isn’t a problem, apparently, as Stephanie grins and claps her hands together, “Oh my God, I can tell her the best stories! Soooo, what about you? Are you dating anybody?” She gives him a look and oh, God, she’s trying to be sly. God save them all.

“Stephanie, I saw you
three weeks ago.
You’re the most fre­quent commenter on my blog and you are a compulsive Face­book stalker. Have you heard me mention anybody?”

“Noooo, but I
do
see tagged pictures of you; you just always delete the tags so they’re harder to find later. But you do look like you’re having a good time!” Now it’s Stephanie who refuses to make eye contact; she smirks down at her salad, even when he gives her his best “shut-it-now” expression, the one he
knows
she can still read. He has no idea if Nik realizes that Stephanie has just called him a slut; he can see Nik out of the corner of his eye, but he’s focused on dinner. His body is turned toward Aaron and obviously following their conversation, but he doesn’t react to any of it.

“I see people, I go out, but there’s nobody serious, nobody… yeah. What about you?”

She lifts her eyes from her plate, finally, and fixes him with a look of triumph that makes it clear that was
absolutely
pay­back for not telling her about Josh and Meg earlier. “Oh, you know—work is an obsession, especially now that I’m headed to New York. And you, Nik? Anybody new after Oliver?”

Aaron can’t believe it—
Stephanie Baxter just breezed through an opportunity to talk about herself
. Suddenly, this whole bizarre conversation makes sense; he would bet his entire collection of journals that she has her eye on getting them back together. Aaron shivers.

“Oh.” Nik drops his fork and rubs his hands up and down his thighs—how interesting is that tell? Aaron thrills a little, that he can still read Nik’s body language: Nik is nervous. “Ah, no, that wasn’t a great breakup—I’m on my own for a little bit.”

That
part of the story is new, so Aaron offers silent thanks for Stephanie in interrogation mode and takes another bite of pasta while he waits for her to do her job and drag the rest of the story out of Nik. Is it just him, or is Nik really bad at breaking up? Because that would explain so much.

“Oh, I’m so sorry! You always looked very happy together. What happened?” He barely keeps from scoffing into his glass of wine; if by “very happy” you mean “attached to each other at the face,” then sure, they had seemed delighted to be together. For most of their sophomore and junior years of college, so many of Alex’s parties and dinners had included the dubious thrill of seeing his ex hanging all over somebody else. It had sucked. It
still
sucked when he thought about it, even though the worst was last summer, when Nik had been in Dallas with Ollie most of the time. It was hard to see Nik, sure, but that didn’t mean Aaron didn’t miss him when he wasn’t around.