The Luckiest (14 page)

“Well?”

“Taken care of—my friend Nathan is running up with the equipment tomorrow night, and he’ll do the recording at the rehearsal session. David thinks you’re a genius, by the way.”

“Of course he does,” Aaron responds automatically. “And we’ll see, tomorrow.”

“When are we going to manage putting the CDs together?”

Aaron lifts the first bowl of buttercream out of the stand mixer and starts packing it into piping bags. He’s helped his mother with this so many times that he barely even thinks about it; she paid for every single school trip he ever went on by baking cakes from her kitchen. “That will be the easy part—software will help with that, and I want to ask Tu if he has a good shot of Alex and David to use as the cover, and we can hit a Kinko’s or something and abuse their largesse with the paper cutters. No, the
hard
part will be keeping Alex’s grabby hands off of them once they’re done.”

Nik leans against the kitchen counter and makes a move for the frosting bowl. Aaron slaps his hand away and then pulls out a spoon. “No double-dipping.”

“Okay, so
when
?”

“Tomorrow morning I’ll put the layout together on my lap­top, and you can run out and get the discs. You’ll transfer the playlist to my machine on Friday night, and then we’ll crank them out. It’ll take a while, but it’s not impossible.”

Nik digs into the icing bowl, bringing out a glob of rich white buttercream almost too big for the spoon. “Aren’t you supposed to be icing the cakes tomorrow? And won’t you be busy on Saturday morning?”

He shrugs. “So you might have to man both machines for a while. I’m not saying it’ll be
fun,
but it’ll be manageable, and then it’ll be perfect.”

Nik frowns a little. “What is that face?” Aaron asks.

Nik looks up, smile a little chagrined. “It’s nothing.” Aaron gives him a brow, and he shrugs. “I’m just starting to get why David thought this was a bad time for us to get back together.”

Aaron is taken aback, and his face must show it, because Nik hurries to add, “No, it’s—I want some more time with you.”

“So stay here with me while I make the cakes.” Aaron is shaken, but he knows his voice sounds cool. Good.

“I will, but that’s not exactly what I was wishing for.” Aaron can’t believe there was
ever
a time when he found Nik inscru­table; the uncomfortably hungry look on his face isn’t difficult to interpret.

“
You’re
the one who made that agreement with David. Be­sides the obvious, what do you want that you’re not getting?”

Nik smiles at him, a little predatory, and then sticks the almost empty spoon back in his mouth and hollows his cheeks around it, raising one brow at Aaron, who laughs and says, “Oh, I
see
.”

Nik pulls the spoon out with an audible pop and licks it. “There’s a walk-in pantry right behind you. I bet I can still make it so, so quick.”

Aaron’s hands slow in spooning the frosting into bags. He remembers racing against the clock, against curfew, against his mom’s regular half-hour checks that his bedroom door stayed open, and he remembers one particularly ill-advised race against the alarm on Nik’s phone telling him he had to leave
now
or be late getting back to school at the end of his lunch period. He also remembers the anxiety that came with every single one of those experiences, especially that last one, and as much as he wants Nik’s mouth—hot, wet, beau­tiful, wrapped around his dick, lips rosy and shining where they pull tight and wet, God, so wet and
warm
, and it’s ridiculous that after all the blowjobs he’s had, that that image is still so clear in his mind—he says, “God. Later? Later, I
promise
.”

Aaron puts the spoon back in the bowl and, kisses Nik quickly and rests their foreheads together, and he lets his fingers push against Nik’s mouth until Nik pulls two fingertips into his mouth and presses against them with his tongue. Nik always had loved giving him head, and
God.

He doesn’t quite whimper, but he knows he makes a noise close to it when Nik inhales tightly.

Aaron pulls away, letting his fingers trail wetly over Nik’s mouth. “David really was right,” he says, the remorse clear in his voice as he washes his hands and goes back to the buttercream.

Nik wraps his arms around him from behind, presses a kiss to his neck and whispers, “I’m holding you to your promise,” before he lets him go.

They pass the next three hours in work and quiet con­ver­sa­tion. While Aaron carefully cuts each layer in half, Nik asks about Aaron’s writing, about how he turned one blog to docu­ment his move to New York into four blogs and came to think of himself as a developing memoirist. And as Aaron drizzles the cooled syrup over the surfaces of the cakes, he tells Nik what a surprise it had been to be valued for his ability to write about experiences he always saw as so uninteresting, even worthy of some degree of shame, after so much time thinking it would be journalism and his ability to find distance that would actually get him somewhere. He pipes dams of frosting around the edges of the cut surfaces, neat and steady circles, while he tells Nik what it had been like to let go of that old perspective and take small freelance writing opportunities, what it had felt like the first time he submitted to a literary journal, and what he thinks about his chances as a critic. And while he spreads the jam inside those circles, he tries to find words for the sweetness of how each comment and quote and citation and reference leaves him feeling full, appreciated and understood in a way he hadn’t even been able to hope for when he was just a poor kid from the Texas Gulf Coast.

Nik listens and watches and asks pointed, interested ques­tions. He brings Aaron new jars of jam when he drops the spoon with a clank into an empty jar, and when they’re fin­ished, when Aaron has three layers of unfrosted white cake with champagne syrup and strawberry filling sitting on the counter, he realizes that he’s
never
talked this long and this openly about his work, about what it
means
to him. For a while he’s forgotten, forgotten everything that had hurt about this relationship, and fallen back into a place where Nik is his best friend, his confidant, the person who understands him better than anybody else ever could.

Aaron wipes his hands on a kitchen towel and says, “I’m sorry. I’ve rambled on so much.”

Nik wraps him in his arms and says, “I loved it. I’ve missed you, too, you know.”

Just for a moment Aaron forgets about the cakes, forgets about how they need their crumb coat before they go into the refrigerator, forgets again about his hurt and clings back.

At around six, after the cakes are back in the refrigerator and the group has long returned from Alex’s adventures in portrai­ture, a party bus pulls into the long driveway. Jasmine drags Alex out to the porch, “Surprise! And you thought we wouldn’t have time for a stag party!”

Alex squeals and runs back into the house to rouse the masses and quickly throw on a short skirt and her favorite party shoes. David looks flummoxed until Nik laughs and hus­tles him up the stairs to change into something more appro­­priate. Aaron is glad that he and the rest of the house pitched in for the bus, because trying to coordinate transport would have been too much.

Twenty minutes later Jasmine is dragging Alex to the bus, telling her she can fix her makeup on the way, and they all stop milling in the yard and pile in. It’s ridiculous to turn on the dance-floor lights when it’s still daylight outside, but the drinks start flowing immediately and as soon as they’re halfway to Houston, nobody seems to care about the lights. David has a grip on Alex’s bare knee, Nik is leaning against Aaron, Mia and Nicole have pulled Tu, Jasmine and Stephanie into some kind of drinking game, and fuck it—they’re young and they’re supposed to be ridiculous.

Jasmine has clearly given the driver thorough previous instruction, because the bus pulls to a stop in the valet circle of a strip club lit up in harsh neon. Nik says, “Okay, gentlemen, this is where we get off.”

“Not likely,” Aaron snipes under his breath, and Nik kisses his temple and squeezes his knee.

“No, that’s more your end of the deal tonight, I think. No dancing with strippers, unless you send me a picture.” He pauses for a moment, and then says, “No, wait. Don’t do that. That would suck.”

Aaron raises a brow and says, “We’ll see.”

Nik grins at Aaron and then he and Tu disentangle David from Alex and sweep him out of the bus. They flank him and march him into the club, where some of David’s friends are waiting. Aaron grins as they go.

Then the bus is rolling again, just a few blocks down to the oldest male strip club in town. Once they’re inside, they’re met by a wave of Alex’s friends including Shelby and Bianca, with whom he hasn’t spent time in far too long and greets with hugs and hellos. Shelby seems excited to be out of the house, and she looks as gorgeous as she ever did. She was closer to Alex at the beginning of high school, before she joined the drill team and got scarily gorgeous; now she’s a real estate agent and the mom of a two-year-old, with a sensible haircut and the hungry look in her eyes to go with it. Bianca he knew better, because like will always find itself.

As she lets him out of the hug, Bianca says to him, “Okay, this is unfair. How did you end up with the girls tonight, and where are the boys?”

Bianca had come out not six months after he did and never looked back. Facebook tells him that she’s still in Hous­ton, liv­ing in The Heights, working in an insurance office and mak­ing her way through a string of girlfriends, the very pic­ture of stereotypical lesbian serial monogamy, bless her heart.

He smiles. “Maid of honor’s prerogative—Jasmine insisted, and I
really
didn’t argue. I’m sure you’d be welcome to join them, but I think the fun is going to be in watching what hap­pens to Stephanie’s face when there’s a gyrating cock shoved in front of it.”

Bianca chokes on her drink and her eyes go wide, then she sighs and says, “Dammit, I can’t miss that.”

* * *

From: Aaron

Alex is marking things off her Single Bucket List at an alarm­ing pace. Please tell me that things are a little calmer over there.

From: Nik

Now I’m *really* sorry I’m here. This is nothing you haven’t seen before. David’s sitting here like he’s in the middle of a board meeting, Tu is beginning to unwind a little (which is terrifying) and most of the other guys are acting about like you would expect.

From: Aaron

Classy to the end?

From: Nik

Something like that, although I’m shocked by what a horn­dog Richard has turned out to be. What did Alex do, anyway?

From: Aaron

Among other things, she kissed a girl and she liked it. At least her Babycakes stock rose a little bit higher, even if she will never have that hair.

From: Nik

Damn. Jasmine?

From: Aaron

Stephanie, actually. Bianca and Shelby are here—you should have seen the looks on their faces. Totally opposite, both com­pletely hilarious.

From: Nik

I bet Stephanie is a good kisser. She looks like she would be.

From: Aaron

This is how much I hate you right now (he attaches a picture of his own hand tucking a five-dollar bill into a loaded g-string).

* * *

The drive home is a whole new kind of absurd.

Nik is pleasantly drunk, greeting Aaron with “I missed you” breathed hot against his ear, and he’s handsy, indulgently affectionate. The bus seems bigger, somehow, with everybody else crowded around the bar at the other end, still drinking and swapping stories about the night they’ve had. Aaron reels Nik in close and tells him about their time at the bar, about Alex’s friend Jennifer making eyes at Bianca, about Alex’s friend Camille’s obvious distaste for the surroundings. Nik rests against his shoulder and lets his hand slide over Aaron’s chest, then presses it to Aaron’s cheek and turns his face for a kiss that starts out needy.

Twenty minutes later, Nik has Aaron pushed into a the corner at the back of the bus, one hand shoved into his hair and the other worming its way under his shirt, blindly groping for skin. Aaron lets his head fall back against the glass of the win­dow a little harder than he’d meant to, and he stutters out a gasp and stares at the flashing lights and swirling colors of the ceil­ing of the bus as Nik mouths at his neck, sucking a kiss to the tendon beneath his ear while he rolls one of Aaron’s nip­ples between his fingers. Aaron feels drunker than he actually is.

Nik shifts suddenly, making Aaron’s hands fall away from his back, and then suddenly Nik is looming over him and stuff­ing his knee between Aaron and the wall so that Aaron has to shift his ass to the side to make room for Nik, who falls gracelessly so that he’s perched across Aaron’s lap, straddling him. Laughter erupts, one of the girls yelling, “Damn, get it, Nik,” loud enough to be heard over the thump of the bass. The others seem far enough away that Aaron can use both hands to send the same obscene message before they laugh again and he has to stop flipping them off so he can tangle both hands in Nik’s hair.

The world narrows sharply; the seat beneath him is perched directly over a subwoofer, and it shakes and vibrates just right. Nik is warm and heavier than he looks, the press of his hips insistent. Aaron slides a hand down the convex curve of Nik’s back to tuck up under his ass, pulling his hips in tight while his torso bows away so he can keep his hands up Aaron’s shirt, so his fingertips can drag and press.

“Gonna suck you, can’t wait to taste you again,” Nik mum­bles against his neck, and Aaron has to grab at his hips to keep Nik from rutting against him.

For one small, dark second he thinks about it, imagines Nik on his knees in the back of this bus. He’s done it before, held a head between his palms while he locked eyes with somebody else, and it’s heady, intoxicating—it’s so
good
to be so wanted, and for the world to see it.