The Luckiest (12 page)

And it’s on Aaron’s lips to tell him, to say everything he’s been carrying around that is roaring up in him like a untapped well, but then Nik rolls against him and he smells so
good,
and he’s warm and pliable and his mouth is wet and morning-sour, and the words are lost in just one more slip of the tongue.

They’ll keep
. He wraps an arm around Nik and holds him there.

* * *

Aaron lingers in bed while Nik goes on his run, staring at the ceiling. Nik left the door ajar when he went back to the room he shares with Tu to change, and, already anticipating Alex’s arrival, Aaron lets it stay that way.

He thinks about his conversation with his mom and lets his mind wander back to that spring, to overhearing his mom talking to Aunt Karen in the kitchen late at night. At the time he felt vindicated, a little victorious, to hear the anger at Nik that was buried in her voice. He was
so
hurt, dumped and jilted and abandoned after they’d shared so much, and hearing his mom rage on his behalf threw him right back to the day, years before, when his mom had finally told his dad to get lost. He gloried in it, wallowed in his righteous anger and the fact that, no matter what, his mother was always on his side. He had stayed angry for a long time, and he hadn’t allowed himself to tip over into melancholy and mourning until sometime in his sophomore year in college, long weeks after he and Nik had tipped into bed after too many drinks and savagely taken advantage of each other. That episode had changed the way he thought about their relationship so much, and, even though he still hates that it happened, he also thinks now that maybe it
had
to, that that closeness, that flip side to their intimacy, had burned off much of the rage and let him carry on.

He’s thinking about that morning after, how he finally gave in and cried in the shower after he made it home, how free he finally felt once the weeping was over, when Alex pushes open his door after a soft knock.

“’Morning. Nik already gone?” She stands in the doorway in a green tank top and plaid boxers with her hair loose around her shoulders.

“He’s running.” He gives her a grin that’s all teeth. “Come stare at the ceiling with me.”

She flops down on the bed, mirroring his loose and easy position. She rolls against him, bumps him with her shoulder and asks, “What are we looking at? Is it like the clouds?”

“We’re looking for answers, Alex. Don’t be silly.” They lie there for another minute, just resting together quietly, and then Aaron says, “I called my mom this morning.”

“About Nik?” He keeps his eyes on the ceiling, but he nods, and the big breath she exhales out lets him know that yeah, she saw. “Whoa, so that’s intense. How did that go?”

“Better than I expected, really. I went in expecting to have to defend him, but she seems to be willing to go with it.” After a second he asks, “When did you know the reasons he didn’t come to New York?”

She sighs. “God, Aaron. That was…
years
ago. Right after that party where you guys hooked up again.” She pauses and then rolls toward him, resting on her side. “David and I had an argument about it—it was our first really big fight. The next morning Nik was super quiet, but it was pretty obvious what had happened—you marked him up pretty good.” He winces, thinking about Nik spread across navy blue sheets, bruises on his throat and hips.

“I was pissed, because I couldn’t believe that after every­thing, the two of you had just rolled back into this fucked up
thing,
and I took it out on David—God, I was
such
a bitch that morning,” she continues. “After everybody left, he dragged me into the living room and we had it
out,
and he told me everything then. About what a mess Nik was after you broke it off at his prom, how he called that night, feeling like he’d given up like two years of his life and gone deep into all this conflict with his parents and just had it all thrown back in his face at the last minute. Do you know he spent the rest of that weekend at David’s?”

Aaron shakes his head and keeps his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“Okay, so David went to prom with some girl he wasn’t really into—”

“Livvy,” Aaron supplies. “They were math club friends. Nice girl, pretty hair, boring dress.”

“Right, fine, whatever. Anyway, so Nik called David right after he left your house and David ditched her because Nik didn’t want to go home. He slept on David’s bedroom floor for the rest of the weekend because he was so pissed at his parents, and by the end David called in Tu to sit with them and bring them food and stuff, because Nik was a
disaster
and he didn’t want to leave him even to go down to the kitchen or whatever. He makes it sound like it was a hell of a weekend. It’s part of why they’re all still so close, I think. Kind of like us and how we had to put you back together.”

He remembers; he remembers crying, screaming—so much drama. He finally turns toward her. “Why didn’t you ever tell me any of that?”

She shrugs one shoulder. “What was the point? Did you not
know
that Nik probably hadn’t had an easy time of it? And besides, by the time I knew all
that
it was like months later and the damage had been done. I told David that I would, if you ever brought it up—that was the end of the fight, when we just decided that we needed to stay out of it. Well—when David convinced me that we needed to stay out of it. He was right, though—it wasn’t up to us. And God, you were… you were a mess, anyway. And then there was Ollie, so.” She shrugs again.

“But what about now? Like when we were shopping? You couldn’t have told me
then
?”

She just stares at him with her face going stormier by the second, and he starts to feel regret before she even starts speaking. “Aaron, your relationship with Nik is not my job. I have had enough of the bullshit between the two of you to last me forever, and besides: I think I have enough going on right now, don’t you?” He kicks her, just a little, tangling their feet. “And to be honest? It really pisses me off that this has been going on for so long and that David and I are just supposed to be graceful around it all the time. It’s been forever, and it’s too much to ask. I have
never
asked you not to mention Andy, have I? So I thought, okay, they want to do this? Then
they
have to fucking well do it.”

Aaron quirks an eyebrow at her. “We’re doing it now.”

The furrow in her brow smooths and her face melts into a smile, still a little bit sad. “I know you are. I’m happy for you, even if you’re both idiots.”

“Well, I say that—we’re not doing
it,
now are we?”

She rolls her eyes and flops over onto her back. “Look, those two are
ridiculous
, especially when you get them together. I swear they regress to high school instantly. I don’t care
what
you do, just keep it down.”

“Nik and his absurd sense of honor, and you know how he is about David. It won’t happen until Saturday night, because David said he couldn’t.”

“Glad I’m going to be out of the house, then. I have plans of my own for that night.” Her grin is lurid, lascivious, and he rolls his eyes.

“Yeah, so, about that. What on
earth
made you think that was a good idea?”

She laughs a little and looks down at the mattress between them. “He proposed in bed, did I tell you?” He shakes his head. “Yep. And you know that it started with David way before it ended with Andy. I’ve always felt a little weird about that—not that it happened like it did, because holy shit it was romantic and so fucking hot.” Her smile is all filth and mischief, only for a flash. “But this is the beginning of something, and this is my
husband.
Someday I’m going to have this man’s children; we are going to get old together, and I just… I don’t know. I think that part of me wants to wipe the slate clean, to start over, to put some kind of really clear before and after there.” She always has talked with her hands, and this time she punctuates her sentence by bringing down the side of her hand, as if she can carve her life into pieces by the power of her will.

He frowns at her. “Don’t tell me you’re going all wife and mother here, Alex. It’s disturbing.”

At that, her face is suddenly brightly beatific. “Aaron, I
am
going to be somebody’s wife and mother. It doesn’t mean I’m a different person than I was when I was sneaking off to fuck David on a Thursday afternoon,” she says, giving him a savage grin. “But this turned into something much more important than sex a long time ago.”

“But why does it have to be one or the other?”

“What do you mean?”

He thinks for a second. “I mean, you
like
having sex with David—I think we’re all pretty clear on that much, at least.” They smirk at each other. “I don’t get why suddenly not doing it is a good thing.”

She sighs and rolls back to look at the ceiling. “I don’t know, maybe it’s a girl thing. Or a Latina thing. A feminist thing, even.” She pauses and then says, “For as much as it’s some kind of norm, it gets strangely complicated, you know, being a woman who
likes
sleeping with men. It gets weird—there are all these expectations about what you’re supposed to do and how you’re supposed to feel, and sometimes the one thing I can’t quite figure out is how much of all of that is about me and how much of that is about what, like, the
culture
is expecting me to do.”

He’s missed this, he realizes with a tiny grin—Alex and her sharp and critical mind, her insistence that she is important and worth understanding. It’s not that he’s not used to these conversations; he’s a memoirist at heart, and so conversations like this with his colleagues and with himself are his bread and butter. But Alex is the person he learned to do this with, back when they were just kids in middle school who were trying to figure out what could ever be special about them—they were so sure they were, and all they needed to do was figure out why—and her voice is sometimes the one he hears inside his head. He feels lazy, out of practice and so eager to dive back in.

He grins at the ceiling and says, “So, wait, before, you were sleeping with David while you were still dating Andy, which is a bad thing—”

“Total slut,” she interjects, lazily. “And also, I mean, besides all that: just kind of mean? And I am not mean.”

Her kindness has always been something he could rely on. “No, you’re not mean, that’s fair. But now you’re not doing that anymore, obviously, so you’re going to be a good girl and have some kind of… white wedding?”

She laughs, sounding a little bitter but mostly tired. “Right.
Or,
before I decided to do this waiting-for-the-wedding thing I was giving David exactly what he needed, which is what a woman is supposed to do, and now I’m taking a little space and control over my own body and my own pleasure, which makes me a frigid bitch.”

He looks at her and then breathes, “Oh my God, I have never been so glad to be a gay man.”

She elbows him in the ribs. “Thank you for your support.”

He thinks about it before he speaks again. “Hmmm. Still. Do you want to sleep with him?”

“You mean right now?”

“Not, I mean, not really at”—he cranes his head to look at the time on his phone—”eight forty-seven on a Thursday morning, but just, you know, in general.”

She stretches and gives him a naughty little smirk. “I actually like it in the mornings.”

He grimaces. “Don’t
tell
me these things.”

“You asked. No,” she says upon his reaction, “you didn’t, I know, I get it. But that’s kind of the point. Like, I can’t always tell what’s me and what’s everything else?” Her hands juggle an unseen weight, tossing it back and forth, and right then he knows exactly what she means. “So that’s part of why I was just like, let’s wait and see what happens after, like, three weeks. And what I
can
tell you is that I have never been so hot for him,
ever
, even back when I had to throw over all of my morals to get him into bed, so.” She shrugs. “I mean, there is
that
.”

“
Nice
.”

“I know, right? So it’s weird, but. We’ll see.”

It takes a second to take this in, to figure out what it might mean. Aaron finally chimes in with, “You’re sort of doing it all backwards, you realize.”

She grins at him and says, “You’re one to talk. Look at yourself.”

He flops onto his back and groans at the ceiling. “I know. I keep trying to figure out how to write about it, and all I can think is: God, we are
all
so fucked up.”

“I blame high school. Think about where we were and the shining examples we had when we were learning how to be in relationships. Everybody we went to school with is basically a disaster—we’re the only ones getting it close to right, and you only figured it out
this week
. I must be a
genius
.”

He pulls a face and means to argue, and then there’s another knock on the door. Stephanie’s there, wearing a tank top and boxers too—although hers are color-coordinated and involve rhinestones.

“Hey, Stephanie,” Alex says. “We were just talking about you.” Aaron pinches her leg and she kicks him softly.

“Forget
me
—for once, I think I’m the really boring one. Let’s talk about Aaron and Nik,” she says with way too much energy in her voice for this early, and jumps onto the bed. Aaron groans and rolls over to press his face into his pillow.

She drums on his back, one-two-three-four, utterly relent­less. “Don’t be like that! Tell me
everything
.”

* * *

When Aaron makes it down to breakfast, Nik is leaning against the kitchen counter drinking a glass of water. Aaron goes to him, leans against him and kisses him. It’s not until he feels the glass, cool against the back of his neck, that he realizes Nik didn’t even take a moment to empty his hands before he wrapped his arms around Aaron. Aaron loves it. He whispers, “Good morning again,” against Nik’s mouth when they part. Nik’s smile is radiant.