July 14th 2020

Chapter 196
Their Circle Around Love

"Hey, are you awake?" Maya whispered, poking her head through the crack she'd opened in the doorway. She got her answer when she found Ray Choi sitting on his bed with his laptop. He motioned for her to go ahead and come in, which she did. "We have known each other, what, like eight, nine years? All this time, I have never seen your hair all… sticky uppy like that… I like it. Makes you look like a normal person," she smiled.

"As opposed to?" Ray laughed, absently reaching to push his hair a bit more into place.

"King of the Good Hair Brigade?" Maya shrugged, sitting at the foot of the bed as he nodded appreciatively. "Hey, you're getting married today," she pointed out, nudging his foot with her own.

To see that smile on his face, overpowering his ability to respond with words, she knew exactly what that feeling was, remembered it from not so long ago. It also made her realize that they were just days away from her and Lucas having been married a month already, which just felt impossible.

"Been awake long?" she asked, nodding to the computer.

"A movie and a half," he confessed, showing her the screen. He'd kept it on mute, with the subtitles on. "I woke up and I couldn't get back to sleep," he added with a shrug, his eyes traveling to the other side of the bed, which she guessed was Asher's side.

"You could have woken us, we would have kept you company… There might have been candy."

"It's alright, I like the quiet," Ray told her, shutting the laptop and setting it aside.

Maya had come to check on him, in part because she was awake and Lucas was still asleep, but also because she wanted to make sure he was alright. In the last few days, it had been difficult not to see that, as much as he put on a good show of not being affected by the constant presence of Asher's family, while his own was nowhere to be found, save for Min, who could hardly make the trip every day without raising suspicions.

She was still a minor, and Ray didn't want to get her in trouble when she wasn't the one who'd been shunned by the family. Whatever their thoughts on him and his sexuality, Min needed them, and because he needed to keep her, too, they had to be careful. Her trips to Houston had been carefully planned, thanks to a budding friendship with Sarah Hillard, who she'd met while her family had been out looking at colleges out there. Sarah and Evie both had made fast friends with her, and would have gladly helped to fake an excuse for her to be around for her cousin's wedding, but Ray had insisted that Hank and Tanya Hillard should be made aware of the situation, so they would not be caught in the middle of this. Thankfully for everyone involved, they had been on board at once. Everything now hinged on the rest of the Choi family not finding out about the wedding. They'd be able to put two and two together, and then…

With all this weighing on him, Maya and Lucas and the others had done their best to focus on the good things, encouraging Ray to think of this happy day and little else. Now though… Now the day had come, and he was bound to let his mind wander. So, he needed his family, the one he'd made for himself, which included her.

"It's about to get real unquiet in here, you know that?" Maya smiled, and Ray nodded, his own smile showing a mixture of butterflies in his stomach and just a whole load of happy anxiousness. "Today is about you and it's about Asher, and that's what you're going to remember," she told him, infusing all her confidence into her hands as she pressed them to his shoulders before pulling him in a brief hug. He held to her like he was trying to imprint the words in his mind for the rest of the day. "Alright, let's go."

The group in the Garcia-Choi house had breakfast, all the while keeping contact with the other group, over in the Zvolensky-Mantovani house across the street, via texts exchanged between Lucas and Dylan. In the spirit of how those four of their friends had become so close in the last two years, they were having the ceremony in the girls' yard, before moving to the guys' for the reception.

"I don't want to say it too loud, but that is one beautiful blue sky we're having today," Maya informed the others as they cleared up the dishes.

"Would it be too on point to want it to rain? Just a little? Just so there'd be a rainbow up there?" Rosa smirked, tracing the arc in the window.

"Wouldn't mind it," Ray chimed in, the amused look on his face bringing the rest of them back to the previous afternoon when, after they'd finished all they could possibly do and right before Asher was taken off to the girls' house, they'd all sat in the yard together. The conversation had risked taking a turn down the absentee family road, which had sent them all instead into trying to conjure up the image of 'the gayest wedding' they could possibly have, in defiance of those who had rejected them. They could barely breathe for how much some of the ideas would make them laugh in the end.

"We can always turn on the sprinklers," Lucas suggested, finding the glint of ideas in Maya and Rosa's eyes.

When it came time for all of them to go and get dressed for the day, it got to be like something of a relay race, where they would want to go ahead and make sure that there were at least a couple of them with Ray most of the time, instead of leaving him like he was on his own. It wasn't as though it took him all that long to get dressed and fix his hair, and he got all that done by himself, but then all that really mattered what he got, which was support, from his friends, his family of some years.

Lucas had known him the longest, of course, the two of them having been in school together since kindergarten, up until seventh grade, when Lucas's suspension had taken him one grade below. Over the years he could count both good and bad things to have come out of his suspension. Then there were those things existing in the middle, like where the day's grooms were concerned, if he had not been suspended and had remained in the same graduating class as Ray. He would still have been friends with Asher, so the two of them may still have had that connection existing as something like an ice breaker. He liked to think that they would have found their way to each other no matter what.

"You know what, all of us guys in suits, you pull it off the best," Lucas told Ray with a confident nod as the groom finished doing up his buttons. Ray laughed. "I mean it!"

"Oh, I know, I'm not denying it either," Ray turned an equally confident grin his way. "Maya told me this morning that I was the 'King of the Good Hair Brigade.'"

"She's not wrong," Lucas laughed. When he'd woken up and found no sight of his wife, he'd just known she would have gone to check on Ray.

"You know you don't all have to do this," Ray told him after a beat. "I'm good, I'm… I'm better than good."

"I know," Lucas assured him. "And don't think for a second that any of this was a lie. We are every one of us man enough to admit it: you're the best looking one," he nodded firmly, getting a hearty laugh out of his long time classmate and friend.

When it finally came time for the group to cross over to the girls' house, they spotted Ray's cousin waiting outside on the front steps, with a box in her lap. They went inside, leaving the two of them to talk in private, though they did happen to look back in time to see Ray, with the open box in his other hand, reach his arm to embrace his cousin.

"Hey, what do you think, is this okay?" Dylan came up to Lucas and Maya, drawing their attention away from the cousins outside.

"Is what okay?" Maya asked.

"I mean do I look… official enough?" he motioned at his clothes, his hair…

"Depends, an official what?" she couldn't resist teasing, but then that was kind of the way to go with Dylan, as it would make him relax at once. "You look great," Maya told him now.

"Okay… Gotta go practice my speech," Dylan nodded to himself before moving off again.

"I just started thinking about whenever he'd have to do presentations in school," Lucas watched him go.

"Yeah, I just got it, too," Maya covered her mouth to hide her laugh. "He'll be fine, right?"

"I think so… Yes…"

"Want to try that again?"

There had been very little question as to who Asher and Ray might ask to stand as their officiant. If any of them stood to be like the family Ray no longer had, Dylan would be as good as his brother once he was married. That was what he had been to Asher since the two of them had known one another, and he eagerly awaited the day he could do the same with his best friend's husband. Now, he would get to be the one who went ahead and joined them. To look at Dylan, you would think they had decided to name their firstborn after him.

In the girls' yard, they found most of the guests already in their seats or near enough. There were all the Garcias, Asher's parents, and Joey, Uncle Fernando from the diner with his wife and kids, Aunt Isabel from the restaurant with her husband and kids… There were some absences, those few who hadn't taken to Asher's coming out so well and over the years had drifted away, but the mantra for the rest of the family was that it wasn't up to them to turn those minds around.

They had the usual suspects, of course, their group cultivated through years in Austin, New York, now Houston, in school and at work… Bolstering their numbers that much further were the old basketball teams, boys and girls both.

Back in high school, Ray had been one of those, by virtue of having been in the eleventh grade when the teams were disbanded, who had never gotten to play for them again before graduating. That didn't matter. For all of them who'd gone through those two off years, the rule was set: the school could disband the teams but it could not disband the players. And today two of their own were tying the knot, so where else would they be? Some of them had to travel in from far across the country, some from overseas, and they'd ended up making a home vacation of it, with the other team wedding of the summer just a few weeks past.

The added grace of the day, without a doubt, was the presence of Thomas and Melinda Friar, right up front. Ray may have been thrown out by the parents who'd brought him into the world, but all those years ago, on the worst night of his life, it had been the Friars who'd finally taken him in, looked after him as good as if he'd been their own. And today they were here, to see him wed, as they had seen Lucas earlier that summer.

When they'd come to stand before Dylan, the grooms were both of them floating, their hearts feeling like hummingbird wings. And looking at all their guests, all these people who had happily come to see them wed, they couldn't find anything or anyone lacking. It was all exactly as it should be. They turned back to their officiant, a grin on his face as he extended a fist to each one. With a chuckle, Asher and Ray had responded to the requested fist bump.

"Yeah, that's right," Dylan pressed his hands together, pulling his face back to as serious as he could get it. "Here we go."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners