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still planning their moves.
    Jasmine called Aaron the next morning, pissed at Alex, pissed at her girlfriends and really pissed at David, whom, she had decided, was the real problem. Dragged out of bed by her phone call while trying to sleep off his own disastrous Last Night before he had to pack for home, Aaron assured her that it was just one of those things that happened in college. He reminded her that Alex and David really didn’t run in the same circles, they shared no mutual friends and years from now Alex would still be with her high school boyfriend Andy; everything would be out in the open and they would all share a laugh about that one crazy night in college. He believed it, too, and kept telling her the same thing over the long, awkward Christmas break when Jasmine and Alex hadn’t been talking, and Alex and Andy had done everything but talk, and Aaron did his best to stay out of it.
    Only that never happened, that happily-ever-after for Alex and Andy, because Alex and David ran into each other during their first week back at school in January. They sat together at a talk that both of their psych professors had offered as an extra credit opportunity, and then they went to lunch at the Student Center food court, and then they ditched their afternoon classes and went to David’s dorm room. A week later, Jasmine came back to the dorm room she shared with Alex to find her sobbing on her bed, clutching her phone to her chest—she’d just called Andy and broken off with him, because she was gone over David. Jasmine had looked at her, gone downstairs to the dorm store to get ice cream and then come back upstairs to clean Alex up and call Aaron on Skype. That night, after the call ended, he’d felt shaken—if not Nik and him, he’d been sure Andres and Alex were the real thing. But maybe none of it had been real; maybe they’d all simply been using each other until they could get out of the crappy little suburb that had always felt a little like prison. This thought never seemed true, not even then, but sometimes he wondered.
    The real horror of the situation didn’t hit him until that sum­mer, when he’d made it back to Texas, walked into a cook­out in Alex’s backyard, and seen Nik standing near the grill. David saw him freeze and came over to greet him as if Alex’s home was his own; that was the first real sign that this awk­wardness was Aaron’s brand new normal. Going to separate high schools had always been hard, at least right up until the moment he and Nik broke up; then he’d been grateful that he had a separate group of friends to carry him through the last few weeks of school. A year later, with David in the picture, all of that had changed.
    And now they’re getting married, and it will be this way for as long as he and Alex are friends—and he’s never planned on an expiration date for that. And now Alex and David are upstairs sharing a shower, and, as Aaron packs up his lap­top, he tries hard not to think about where Nik is in the house.
    In the late afternoon, Aaron chops vegetables for a salad while Mia and Nicole bump hips and prepare pasta and a sim­ple sauce. He listens to their ever-larger plans for food before he stops them and reminds them that he’s taking the kitchen on Wednesday night and on Thursday and Friday mornings for work on the cake. They share a look, and he’s not convinced they believe him, but they continue their planning and he makes a mental note to press the point later.
    Jasmine strikes up a conversation with Mia and Nicole about people they all knew at college and what they’re up to on Face­book, and so Aaron ends up between Stephanie and Nik at the dinner table. He and Nik pause as they recognize the seat­ing configuration, and then sit down, and Aaron tries to laugh off the awkwardness as he shakes his head and pours wine for all three of them. Before December he hadn’t really talked much to Nik for years, and God knows Stephanie can talk enough