The Luckiest (5 page)

Aaron turns to Nik; he wants to watch him while he answers this question. Nik is looking into his wine, swirling the liquid so that it almost reaches the lip of the glass. His face is passive, expressionless, even as he sighs. When he finally answers it is slow, deliberate. “I don’t—it was never quite right. I think we both really tried—we were good for each other. Ollie is the kindest person I know. But when one of you is hung up on somebody else it’s never going to work, and eventually you get tired of trying to force it.”

Stephanie coos behind him, “Oh, Nik, I’m so sorry! That’s terrible.”

Nik turns, gives her a wry smile and says, “Thanks, but we really are both better off.” His eyes flick over to Aaron’s and the smile fades and they’re left just staring at each other.

“There was somebody else?” he hears his own voice say quietly.

Nik looks at him for a long beat before he angles his body toward him and responds in a hush. “Well, yeah. It sucked, for both of us, but I think we’re both right where we need to be.” Nik’s smile is tentative, strained, and Aaron can’t stop looking at him.

Stephanie, of course, has apparently missed this altogether and has been working her way through another bite of olive oil and rosemary pasta. “And graduate school is next for you too, I heard? Where are you going to be?”

Nik glances at Aaron. His smile falters before he says, “Well, actually, I’m going to—”

Alex yells, “OKAY! STATUS REPORTS!” Chat time is over, and this is going to be a working dinner.

There’s not much to tell this early in the game—he and Stephanie give their report from the beach this morn­ing and Stephanie goes on and on about the neighborhood and how difficult the homeowners’ association was to wrangle until Aaron pokes her in the side. Tu announces that they’ve reached the end of acting like idiots and pretending there isn’t a photographer in the house, and that he will start casual snaps tomorrow in preparation for Alex’s formal portraits on Thursday morning; everybody bitches about having to stay “on” while they’re trying to get things ready until Alex guilts them into submission. Nik says something quick about the music planning getting underway, and he and Jasmine share a nod, and then Mia and Nicole talk about the menu again and he has to pay attention to that, to press his point about the cake before the kitchen schedule turns into an absolute nightmare.

The conversation devolves again, with everyone newly focused on the week’s tasks. During his argument with Mia and Nicole about plating, Aaron glances over and sees Alex and David, leaning back in their chairs and presiding over their happy minions, and shares a smile with Alex. People get up and move around to be closer to somebody they have to talk to. Jasmine and Stephanie clear plates.

Stephanie comes back as the rest of them are draining the last of a bottle of wine, a maniacally gleeful expression on her face and a remote control in her hand. “You guys are not going to believe the video Daddy helped me put together. High school highlights in five minutes!” she chirps as she waves the remote. Despite groans and mutterings, everybody pushes their chairs away, eager to get on with the mockery.

Aaron is laughing at Jasmine’s muttered, “That girl—we’re going to need to slip Valium into her drinks in a day or two, too,” when Nik slides back into his space and stops Aaron with a hand on his arm and a low whisper. “Stay behind—I need to talk to you.”

Aaron’s belly flips. He winks at Jasmine and tells her he’ll be along in a minute, shaking his head at her cocked eyebrow. Once everyone has filed out of the room, Nik goes to the corner where his bag sits against his guitar case.

“Listen, this has to be quick, but—David had me put together an arrange­ment of some­thing he wants a bunch of us to do at the wedding as a surprise for Alex.” Nik pulls out a folder filled with sheet music, flips through it and finally hands a sheet to Aaron. “There’s a solo part in it for you, if you’re interested. Do you still sing? I mean, for real?”

Across the top of the page in Nik’s scrawl is his name, which brings back memories—so many notes, old love letters—and Aaron skims the rest. Nik’s right—there are a lot of parts here that he’s well suited for, but the song… “Oh my God, I’m going to have to make sure both her mascara
and
her eyeliner are Oscar-grade waterproof.”

Nik just grins. “Yeah, should be a showstopper.”

Aaron glances up with a smile to see the look on Nik’s face—a bit awkward, thanks—and finishes skimming his copy of the full arrangement. “It’s a big arrangement. Who all’s doing this?”

“A mix of people—a bunch of my high school friends, although Tu is sitting it out because he never did any of the music stuff, and he really wants to get good pictures—he’s going out tomorrow to get another tripod because he wants to get several angles of film on it. But, yeah, everybody David invited from that group has already been looped in, plus a few people from their a cappella thing in College Station that he thinks can really do it justice—he says some of their guys will join you on the tenor, but some of the parts can be only you, if you want.”

Aaron frowns at him. “I don’t sing, Nik. Not really. I haven’t been in a chorus since middle school—I’m not you guys. You
know
that.”

“No, I know, but you know you have a good voice. And Alex would
love
to see you up there with us—that’s why David thought you should have some solo parts.”

“I thought
you
did the arrangement.”

Nik smiles at his feet. “Well, you know I’ve always liked your voice.” Aaron remembers: silly, giddy nights singing along with George Jones and his mom while they washed the dishes, Nik grinning and kissing him when Aaron sang about how lucky he always got with Nik. “You always will—so, so lucky,” Nik had whispered, hot against his ear, while his mother had pretended not to notice. It’s a good memory, and it leaves Aaron unable to fight the little bubble of joy that pops up; he knows that joy is written across his face.

“Come on, man, say you’ll do it. It’ll be awesome.”

It will be
spectacular,
as long as… “You think we can have it all ready in time?”

Nik’s grin doubles in size, and Aaron’s grows to match. “I do—everybody’s freaking out to make it happen, and we’ve already had Skype practices to get started. They’re all coming in for the party on Thursday, and then on Friday we’ll sneak away to do a last-minute rehearsal on the mainland. Just tell Alex you have to help us with clothes or something. Jasmine knows—she’s been helping a
ton
with some of the chorus guys so David doesn’t have to worry about it too much. It should be fine.” Nik looks confident, and it’s a good look on him.

Aaron’s palms sweat; between Nik’s smile and the pressure of performance, there’s a lot to take in. It’s been a long time since he felt singled out in this way, and singing was never something he was confident about. “You heard me the other night—you really think I’ll be okay?”

Nik takes a breath. He looks as though he wants to say some­thing, and then catches himself. More than anything, Aaron wants to know what he wanted to say. Instead, Nik puts his hand on his shoulder and says, “Aaron. You’re never anything less than good at anything you do. I don’t see any reason this should be any different.”

Aaron shakes his head. “I can’t believe we’re singing in each other’s weddings. Well… I mean, not, you know—
each other’s
weddings,” he says, waving the sheet music.

“No, that would be horrible,” Nik says, with a sad smile. “But yeah, I know what you mean. It’s really… yeah.”

“Very
adult,
” Aaron ventures, because wow, didn’t
they
some­how get from friendly to strained in a hurry.

Nik looks at him, his eyes suddenly serious. “Yeah. It’s time, I guess—time to move on, to finally give up the playing around and go ahead and grow into the people we really are.”

“I guess,” Aaron says. The moment is serious, solemn, and there’s been too much tension tonight. He has to break it. “But before we do that, wanna go see the people we used to be?”

Nik grins at him and waves him forward. “Lead the way! But here, give me that first.” He tucks the music away. “I’ll give it to you tomorrow, when you’re less likely to leave it on the end table for Alex to find.” Aaron rolls his eyes.

In the living room, Stephanie is running a video of news­paper head­lines from high school, narrating as she goes.
Of course she is
. Stephanie has always been the most irritating per­son Aaron knows; she’s infuriating, but so familiar that she’s become very special to him, in her own way. It isn’t always easy, though; last week in the city, over sushi, she’d described the last of her meetings as “not quite an interview, but definitely a little more than just a courtesy meeting,” whatever that meant. And even though he has known for a few years that Stephanie is a marketer by nature and at least half full of shit at all times, especially when it comes to competing with him and her own judgment of her success, it is still hard not to be jealous. Years after they fought over headlines and editorial duties on their high school newspaper and slugged it out all the way to the Texas State Championships in feature writing, she is doing it; of
course
Stephanie Baxter will be the one to make a successful career in journalism happen, while he dicks around in grad school. She has that
thing
, that natural bulldog nature that makes her a great journalist.

But then, after so much laughter and sweetness and joy in her company, and after the sushi and drinks and dancing—which she paid for, naturally; it’s always been good to be friends with the princess, and years of etiquette classes organized by the Jack and Jill mothers had some advantage—it was also good to sit down to his laptop in his crappy little apart­ment and write about the experience, to pour every­thing he had into words about his friend and rival and turn bitter memory into pithy memoir, to remember where his own voice lived now. That night he sprawled, drunk and so full he could burst, on his bed in Brooklyn and, laptop at hand, spared a moment to be grateful to her: In addition to all the other gifts she so graciously bestowed, she had made him feel like a real writer. He felt a solidarity with all the others, in their various garrets. He’ll never be Hemingway—that homophobic asshole—­but for a minute, then, he knew the cruelty of the city, the grasping sting of competition and how it rubs right up against the sheer, craven gratitude for the wealthy friend. Their relationship has always been full of love, but it has always been complicated, too.

Now he watches her, smiles and shakes his head at her, even while he settles down in the house she’s provided for Alex’s wedding.

Aaron and Nik squeeze into the narrow spot left at the end of one of the sofas farthest from the TV. Aaron leans hard against the arm; the full length of his leg tingles with awareness of the inch or two of space separating him from Nik. Alex wrestles the remote from Stephanie, reminds her that “this is a
group
activity,” and holds up a DVD case Aaron recognizes: Alex’s senior year digital media class project, an edited collection of a bunch of the video she’d shot over the course of their high school years.

Aaron smiles in surprise; he remembers this project, remem­bers her doing it and bitching about it, but he hasn’t seen it since she put it together
.
He’d almost forgotten about Nik’s silly high school hair, slicked down the way his mother always liked it, but mostly he just can’t believe how young they all look. There’s a lot of Alex and Andres on this video, because God, Alex loved him, but there’s Stephanie and Josh, and Jas­mine and her high school boyfriend Joe; it’s the three girls, Aaron and the people who came with them. And there are a few shots of David in the background, because he was with Nik so much of the time, and for years if Aaron went somewhere, Nik was there too.

They look young, but they also look… so happy. They were so transparent when they fell in love with each other, and he can’t help smiling, bittersweet as it is, because they were only babies. But he’s still never felt anything else like it, and, as puppyish as his crush was when it began, it grew into something that still has the power to move him.

“Hung up on somebody else,” and, “the people we really are,” Nik had said. On the screen is Aaron’s babyish face next to Nik’s, their cheeks pressed together in the middle of a group of their friends. Aaron was so self-conscious and anxious then, felt so much safer in a group than on his own. He’s not ashamed of how he felt about Nik, not embarrassed as he can still sometimes be about his fumbling attempts at aborted relationships. Being with Nik was his first time out, and while it lasted it was profoundly real. Aaron had been so lucky, and he can finally simply be grateful.

There’s a section Alex edited to look like photographs piling up on each other, so she could work still photos into the video. He remembers her swearing a blue streak trying to figure out how to get that to work; now he’s glad she managed it. There’s a whole series of stills of them on the Boardwalk the week­end before school started their junior year. He and Nik had been friends for about a year by then, keeping their friend­ship going with phone calls and weekends and the odd intramural competition—being so involved in school activities had helped them get to know each other. But that weekend was special: Aaron had come out to Nik a few days before, just after they ran into a guy Nik knew from his Gay-Straight Alliance at school, and that night, on the Ferris wheel that stood at one end of the Boardwalk, Aaron gathered up the courage to take Nik’s hand for the very first time. It was the culmination of over a year of longing, and the beginning of almost two years of what is still the most important relationship of his life. And there it is, a photo of everybody who was there that night, one of those mass-selfies that make up about half of his photos from high school. Their cheeks are all pressed together to fit into the frame and he can see the flush high on his own, and remembers that Nik kissed him for the first time the very next night, in Nik’s car in front of his house.