The Luckiest (9 page)

It took a long time for Aaron to make sense of what had happened way back then, and it wasn’t until after he came out to his mother and she just smiled and ran her hand over his hair and said, “Of course you are, baby,” that he understood some of it. He mostly never thinks about any of that, and he certainly hadn’t connected it with what happened with Nik before, but maybe some of that is in there, somehow. They say that you learn how to love from watching your parents, and while his mom had a lot to teach him, his dad remains a mystery. Maybe he learned some things he wasn’t supposed to.

Now Aaron tries to imagine what Nik might have been through, how it must have felt to have his own dreams shat­tered and torn away and then to have his boyfriend refuse to work through it
with
him, and he’s suddenly so, so ashamed. God, he’d been such a self-righteous dick at eighteen. He really hopes that’s been beaten out of him, because if he’s lucky enough to have people who still care about him after all of that, then they definitely deserve better.

He lifts himself onto one elbow, and Nik’s hand tightens again but he keeps his gaze steady on the ceiling. Aaron cups Nik’s face in his hand and pulls his head around so their eyes can meet. Nik’s eyes are a little glassy with unshed tears—his face is so open, so pained.

“Oh. Oh, Nik. I am so sorry,” Aaron says, and of all the heart­felt words they’ve ever exchanged, these might be the ones he means the most.

Nik whispers, “Me too.” And who cares about morning mouth, really, because this kiss is sweet and tender, poignant and heal­ing and so
honest.
Nik’s other hand comes up to slide into Aaron’s hair and hold his head there. Aaron deepens the kiss and, just for a moment, imagines what it would be like to never let this man go.

They kiss for long, sweaty minutes; the bedroom heats up as the sun rises and Aaron has to throw off the covers and then kick them down. The kisses are long, lush, exploratory, and Nik keeps breaking them to say Aaron’s name or to just look up at him. Nik’s eyes have gone golden-green in the light, and Aaron can’t get enough of the feeling of Nik’s hair between his fingers; it’s growing out into thick, wild waves, and he loves it. Aaron finally shifts so that he’s more on top of Nik than not; he can feel Nik hard in his underwear and God, that seems like
such
an amazing idea—he wants to kiss him and kiss him until they can’t take it anymore, until they’re desperate for it and they can break apart together.

Nik suddenly rolls him, and Aaron is afraid it’s going to be a reenactment of last night. He doesn’t
want
to slow down to talk again, he’s through talking. But Nik gathers both Aaron’s hands and brings them over his head, leaning his weight on them and hovering over him. He looks beautiful and happy and wild. And then he murmurs, “Yeah, I have you where I want you now,” before diving back in to kiss him again and gently rock above him.

Nik had quipped about what Aaron might have learned while they were apart, but this is a new side of Nik, this kind of raw sexual aggression, and it makes Aaron gasp and wish for his hands to be free so he can cling, clasp, pull Nik closer. Instead he simply takes what Nik wants to give him, which appears to be everything.

Nik lowers his head and works his way down Aaron’s body, starting at his ears and his jaw and his throat, sucking softly across his collarbones. He’s dropped Aaron’s hands to push further down the bed, and Aaron is sliding his hands back into Nik’s hair when they hear, from the hall, “WEDDING CAMP 2015! FUCK YEAH, RISE AND SHINE, WEDDING BITCHES.” Alex bangs her way down the hall, knocking on doors and throwing them open as she passes. Aaron’s room is at the far end of the hall, but she’s moving fast—

Nik looks up at him, eyes wide. “Did you—”

Alex hits the door and tries the knob, then jiggles it again. “Aaron?”

Aaron clears his throat, looking up at Nik as he does, men­tally thanking his long history with the
weirdest roommates ever
for ingraining some good instincts.

“Put the coffee on, Alex—I’ll be down in a minute.”

After Alex stomps away, Nik collapses against him, giggling, and says in a low voice, “You’re a genius. I’ll never doubt you again.”

Then Alex is back at the door, knocking again, this time a little more quietly. “Aaron? Have you seen Nik?”

Aaron’s mind goes blank, and it’s a good fifteen seconds before he can just say, “Coffee, Alex!”

It’s quiet for a few seconds—maybe he’s gotten away with it.

“Aaron!” Alex is going for faux-scandalized, but her excited giggling is sort of ruining it. “Oh my God, Aaron, do you have a
boy
in there?”

“Alex, darling, I’m getting in the shower now, and if you don’t have coffee by the time I make it to the kitchen, you’re eating Sara Lee on Saturday. You’re not the only bitch in this house,” he calls, but it’s hard to get the attitude right when Nik is crushing him, trying to muffle laughter in his shoulder.

“I understand,” she calls back, a little more subdued.

“Thanks. And hey, babycakes—between us?”

“You got it, mouse.” If Jasmine is his Doris, then ever since a long, sweaty Tuesday after their freshman year in college when they’d holed up at his house and watched the entire
Tales of the City
miniseries, Alex has been his Mona. Only with, as she’d said then, “Strictly theoretical lesbian action. And oh my God, why don’t I have her
hair
?”

Nik gazes down at Aaron; a grin lingers at the corner of his eyes. “Not gonna happen this morning, is it?”

“Alas, no. Although—you’re welcome to join me in the shower?” Aaron hopes he will, even though the shower is small—to get his hands on all that skin he’d put up with a lot.

Nik looks as if he’s considering it, too, and his eyes go a little hot. He pushes himself up to his knees, and runs his hands all the way down Aaron’s body, shoulders to hips to knees to feet, two slow parallel lines of contact and warmth ending with a double squeeze to his feet while Nik sits back on his heels. “I hate myself for saying this, but I think later? I wanted to get a run in this morning, and maybe not being in the kitchen for the first round of breakfast isn’t a terrible idea.”

Aaron watches him, stretches a little and runs his hands down his own torso to his hips, where he lets one hand drift over the front of his underwear, shapes it to the length of his cock and shows off a little. He knows they need to go, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it or make it easy.

Nik groans and dives back on top of him, muttering, “God, you’re evil.”

Aaron laughs, pushing at him. “No, no, okay, maybe a little—I just wanted you to
feel the pain
.”

Rolling his hips, Nik sucks at Aaron’s neck and says, “That’s what we’re calling it now?”

They both collapse into giggles. Eventually they giggle them­selves out, and the mood is still, intimate. Nik looks down at Aaron, his eyes warm, and says, “I am so happy to be back here.”

Aaron lets the words hang in the air, basks in his content­ment and watches Nik back. Finally he pushes some of his hair out of his eyes and says, “I can’t believe it’s happening.”

Nik kisses Aaron’s forehead, his nose and his chin and then leaves a sweet, lingering kiss on his mouth. “We’ll work on that. You going back to your mom’s on Sunday?”

Aaron nods. “Just for a few days, then I have to get back.”

“So we have over a week now, and then at least two years, and Aaron, we’re going to make the very most of all of it. Then we’ll see what happens next.”

That’s something he can spend the day mulling over, so Aaron kisses Nik and smiles when he gets up. Instead of pulling Nik back to bed, he wraps a robe around himself and looks both ways for Nik before ushering him out and watching his underwear-wrapped ass dash down the hall. It’s a delicious way to start the day, really.

* * *

When Aaron makes it down to breakfast, Alex not only has coffee ready, she’s sliding a pile of scrambled eggs, potato, and sausage onto a tortilla for him. He smirks as she puts it in front of him along with a mug of coffee; it’s so good to drive her crazy, and he can’t help it—he’s
happy.

“Okay, mister: spill,” Alex says as she slumps into a chair, both hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, her eyes locked on him.

“Where’s everybody else?” Alex flips open the tortilla and adds more pepper before he wraps up the breakfast taco and takes a bite.

She rolls her eyes. “We have maybe three minutes before they’re all in here, so either do it now or we can discuss this with an audience. I’m sure Stephanie would
love
to know—”

He laughs. “I always forget how good you are at blackmail. You’ve gone soft—five years ago you’d have had my neck under your boot already.”

“Flip-flops aren’t nearly as intimidating, it’s true, but I can still take you out, Mister Wilkinson. So, again: spill it.”

He pretends to be absorbed in stirring more skim milk into his coffee so he doesn’t have to meet her eyes. “I don’t know what to tell you; I don’t think it’s quite ready for prime time.” He takes a sip of his coffee and sits back in his chair. “But… something, anyway.”

Aaron shrugs. Alex must be able to tell he’s not just being cagey, because she sits up and claps her hands together with a little smile and God, it’s so like Stephanie he can’t help but laugh and shake his head. Alex’s time with her sorority sisters has changed her, and not all for worse, but it’s sometimes still unexpected.

“And he told you about Columbia?”

“Why yes,
Alex,
he did. And how long have you known about that, by the way? Yesterday’s conversation makes a whole lot more sense now, but a little advance intelligence would have been useful.”

She smiles. “No way,
Aaron.
That was his bombshell to drop; he’s been waiting for months to do it.” She pauses and reaches to squeeze his hand. “It’s been hard, watching both of you. David and I have…
so
many conversations, you have no
idea,
and David always wants to stay out of people’s business and I don’t know what they talk about when it’s just the two of them, but… I’m really glad, for both of you.”

She’s gone
so
soft, so sweet, so daffy, in love. It’s lovely, if also a little embarrassing. He doesn’t tell her to slow down, to not jump to conclusions. He just lets himself pretend he under­stands what he’s doing and lets her come along for the ride.

He should have known better; trust Alex to take the wind out of his sails with the very next sentence. “So, is he still good in bed?” she asks, a mischievous leer on her face. Last summer he’d gotten drunk at a party and used the opportunity to tell both Alex and David about his sex life, both with and after Nik. It was another reason to be angry that Nik hadn’t been around that summer, as far as he was concerned.

“Funny you should ask—I was about to find out when some shrew started banging on my door,” he says with a raised brow.

“Oh shit, sorry,” she says, eyes wide. “If I’d known I was interrupting
that
glorious reunion, I’d have… well, no, I would still have done it. Just maybe half an hour later?” she says, biting her lip and raising her brows.

“Half an hour? Hell no—after all this time?” He gives her his best sexy face, which can still make her laugh, and thinks about everything he’s not telling her about last night.

She’s still laughing when almost everybody else—everybody but Nik—floods into the kitchen in one giant herd. Then she’s up from her chair in a shot, giving him a wink as she pulls huge boxes of frozen waffles out of the freezer.

Aaron quickly finishes his breakfast so somebody else can slump into his chair and leans against the sink, listening to the chatter fill the room and lazily swiping a sponge over his plate. It seems as though they missed quite a lot last night, another in a long string of drunken Cards Against Humanity battles that have taken the place of their games of Apples to Apples from high school. Stephanie is cheerfully recounting her all-time favorite cards played in response to “What never fails to liven up the party?” to a defeated and increasingly overwhelmed-looking Nicole when Nik bangs through the kitchen door, sweaty and still breathing deeply.

He walks to the cupboard and stretches to grab a clean glass, and Aaron can’t be bothered to turn and see if he’s the only one who notices how Nik’s running shorts ride up his thighs when he does that, because
fuck
his legs are still tight from the run. He comes to the sink and steals the tap from Aaron to fill his glass. He smells like grass and sweat, and Aaron concentrates very hard on getting the last bits of egg off his plate and trying to listen in on the conversation behind him. Nik finishes the first glass of water in one go. As he pours himself another, he murmurs under his breath, “Good morning again.”

Aaron clears his throat, turns to Nik and says, “Good morn­ing. Good run?”

Before he takes another drink, Nik smiles at Aaron over his glass and says, “It was all right. It’s beautiful out, but it was hard to get out of bed this morning.”

Aaron wants
so badly
to kiss him, to lick that mouth, cool from the water, and curl his hands into Nik’s wet, sweaty hair. It’s a feeling he’s grown used to, over the last six years. The difference now is that he
can,
again; at least he thinks he can, but it’s really, really unlikely to go unnoticed, and they haven’t talked about this enough yet. Just for a little while and as much as he can, he wants to keep it theirs.

So Aaron says, “Yeah, I know the feeling,” and gives Nik a small smile of his own. He puts the last of his dishes in the drainer and says, “I’m gonna go get those bags out of the hall­way,” and leaves the kitchen.

He’s made it to the entryway and bent to pick up the bags they’d left there when he hears footsteps behind him. Still bent over, he turns his head to see Nik standing beside him.

“Hey,
hey,
” Nik says, placing a hand on Aaron’s lower back. “What was that?”

Aaron looks at him, at his hurt and earnest face, and
fuck it
. He stands and immediately crowds Nik against the front door, one hand sliding around his neck to twine into his hair, the other sliding down his thigh to pull those shorts up and work his hand under so he can cup Nik’s ass, and pulls Nik into a kiss that’s wildly possessive. He licks into Nik’s mouth lewdly, suggestively, and Nik’s hair is damp around his fingers and so are his shorts, limp and clinging from sweat.