The Luckiest by Mila McWarren Read Free Book Online Page B

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