A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now up!

July 15th 2020

Chapter 197
Their Circle Around Family

The migration of the Garcia-Choi wedding guests from one house to the other must have looked so strange to anyone on the street or looking through their windows at the time. Certainly, those cars who were left to wait until they'd all gone by must have been left to wonder, and there was no telling if their honks were 'hey, congratulations!' honks or 'would you hurry up already?' honks.

But finally they had all gone through, and around the house they'd gone, into the yard where the last of the set-up had been done, adding flowers all about, and here at least they had that bit of rainbow touch Rosa had sought in sunlight and rainfall. The newlywed Asher and Ray had wanted this day to represent the life and the love ahead of them and how bright, how colorful it would be. They had achieved a lot of this with the flowers, of so many colors, here and there over the tables, the yard itself… It brought that exact spirit to life for all of them as they arrived.

"You're going to have to stop me from taking it next level," Rosa told Maya and Lucas as they took it all in.

"What's that?" Lucas asked, not following. Maya smirked, pointing out one centerpiece after another. Red roses here, orange tulips there, yellow marigolds, green chrysanthemums, blue daisies, purple hydrangeas… "Oh, got it," Lucas nodded.

"We could make crowns, you know? At the end of the day, press them, preserve them…" Maya suggested to Rosa, and she was on board at once. "Speaking of which, you know who would be really good at those?"

"A lot of people," Rosa slowly nodded, her few words carrying others as well, like 'I know what you're doing, and I'm not going to fall for it.'

"Like…" Maya did the same, her secret words going 'I haven't said a word since before the honeymoon, I gotta know…'

It was Rosa's own fault, wasn't it? She had been the one, when Asher and Ray had been preparing for this day, to mention how her friend/very complicated crush Jenna's mother was a florist, and Jenna had taken her to her shop before, where she also worked, and it had been so beautiful. The guys had gone and checked it out, and in the end they had put in their orders through her. She had really delivered nothing short of a heavenly garden.

"I was going to invite her," Rosa finally sighed. "As my… well…" she frowned to herself for how she struggled to speak the word. "I had her come over to the house a few times while I was sitting for you guys, you know, just to hang out. She helped me with colors for the basement." She paused, made small by words just on the tip of her tongue. "I… I like her so much…" she finally admitted. "I mean, I finally get… all these things… It's like I've been going around needing glasses all this time and now I have them, but they're still new, and my eyes haven't adjusted so I'm just tripping over myself a bit."

"But you haven't told her any of that," Maya guessed. Rosa shook her head. "What about her? I mean… where does she stand, do you…"

"Hasn't exactly come up?" Rosa almost winced in answering. "I just didn't press on the subject too much, or… at all… I'm not ready to find out, if it's not… if she doesn't…" She let out a breath, and she looked so much like she had already said way more than she'd intended to. Now she just wanted to move on to something else, having nothing to do with her feelings for Jenna.

"Ready for the ball toss?" Lucas tapped her arm, pointing to the basket, where some of the old teams had already started to cluster, along with some of their dates, boyfriends/girlfriends, or spouses, and some of the Garcias.

"Yeah, let's do that," Rosa moved off to join them, while Maya turned to her husband. She had a look in her eyes like she might have been cooking something up in her head, and she needed him to either talk her out of it or help her bring it to reality.

For now, they could only go and join their friends for the game. Somewhere in all the planning – Asher would swear it to have been born out of one of those late nights when there had been a few drinks in all of them while they had been deciding on how to organize the yard – the ball toss had been conjured up. They weren't even sure which one of them had said it, possibly it had been an amalgamation of a few smaller comments and ideas, but there it was. Asher and Ray had fallen in love, all those years ago, in great part for their being on the basketball team together. And one of the staples of the teams' gatherings would be shoot-offs. Well, there was a net in their yard, naturally, and they weren't about to have any bouquet tosses at this wedding, so what if they sort of combined the two? They'd have a shoot-off, but with the added twist that the players would have to toss the ball while facing away from their target.

As expected, the whole thing was a bit more chaotic than their regular shoot-offs, though it had to be handed to the old teammates, a lot of them did pretty well for themselves, and it really kicked off the party in a great and lively way.

"Do I look that concentrated when I go?" Lucas asked Maya after she'd taken her latest shot and succeeded in getting the ball through.

"Yeah, you do," she laughed, imitating his face. "As competitive as we all were when we could actually see what we were doing, it's even worse now." Looking around though, she looked suddenly conflicted. "This would be perfect for me to get away and make that call though…" she whispered.

"You don't want to throw the game though, do you?" Lucas guessed.

"I could win this!" she tugged at his arms, conflicted.

"What if you say you have to go to the bathroom, and you appoint me to take your shots until you get back?" he offered.

"Like a shared bank account," Maya sparked at once. "Okay, good, yes. Aim well, husband, I'll be right back," she kissed him before dashing for the house, telling the others that Lucas would shoot for her until she got back. Zay called after her that she could do that and Nadine tapped his arm with a smirk.

Snatching the card from the kitchen counter as she passed through and headed to the upstairs bathroom to 'maintain cover,' Maya put in the number for the flower shop. She had expected to find herself speaking with Jenna's mother, after which she would have had to find a way to be put in touch with the woman's daughter. Instead, she'd only had to say the girl's name that she was told to hold on. And seconds later…

"Hello?"

"Jenna?" Maya blinked. It was. "Hi, this is Maya…" She almost said 'Hart,' then stopped herself. Technically, she still was, but it didn't matter right now.

"Oh, hi," Jenna replied with recognition. "Are you guys missing something out there?" It took her a moment to realize that, oh yeah, she would know that the wedding was today. She might have used that as a means to an end, but it wouldn't have been the right one.

"No… No, I just… Are you working late?"

"I'm making deliveries for my mother today. I just came back to fill up the van again, two more to go," Jenna revealed.

"Right, well, here's the thing. We were thinking of making some flower crowns at the end of the day… It was Rosa's idea," Maya added. Technically it was her idea, but it had started from Rosa's rainbow goals.

Returning to the yard, Maya only remembered they had been in the middle of a shoot-off as she landed back in the kitchen and heard the cheers from outside. She stepped out to find Lucas taking the next shot… and missing.

"Was that yours or mine?" Maya asked as she moved to join him.

"Mine," he passed her the ball. She caught it swiftly, but rather than turning for her shot she instead squinted at him.

"Was it really? Or are you just being good ol' Huckleberry right now?" she inquired. He responded only by indicating the net and stepping back to rejoin the others, who were now calling for her to take the shot. After giving her husband the 'I've got my eye on you' gesture, Maya turned her back to the net, taking her aim before throwing. At the sound of the swish, she smiled and moved to Lucas. "You didn't have to do that, you know?" she told him, locking her arms around his waist.

"You would have lasted longer than me anyway," he shrugged, doing the same with her. "Figured I'd give the household its best shot." She couldn't deny that. "So, how'd it go?" Lucas asked, whispering.

"We'll see," she whispered back.

The shoot off had gone on long enough that, by the time they all had to get to their tables for dinner, they had only gotten it down to the last few players, in this case Asher and Ray both, along with Nadine, Dylan, Maya, and Nathan and Julianne Shelby, this one holding steady at nearly six months of her first pregnancy.

"Hey, you alright?" Lucas asked Zay, sitting at his side at their table. Somewhere in the middle of dinner it had gotten to feel like his best friend had started to appear just on this side of lost in thoughts. By the look on his face, it was unclear if these were good thoughts or not.

"Yeah, just thinking about GiGi," he explained. "She would have been out there, you know?" he nodded over to the table where Lucas' parents were chatting with Asher's. It hadn't even occurred to the rest of them, but now that he said it, they knew that yes, of course, she would have. GiGi had been notorious for loving weddings, to the point where she bordered on qualifying as a wedding crasher. She didn't actually crash them so much as she only needed to hear about a couple anywhere in her social circles to end up scoring an invitation. The wedding of her great grandson's friends? She would definitely have been right there to see it happen.

"She would have," Riley smiled, nodding along with the others.

"She was so mad when she heard about Ray getting kicked out, she probably would have talked Susanne into taking him in if the Friars hadn't done it," Nadine recalled, making her husband smile, remembering it as well.

"She nearly gave them a piece of her mind, too," he went on, and one look to the rest of the table, save for Nadine, told him that they'd never heard about this. "Oh, well, you know, she already couldn't get around on her own back then, and she'd get my cousin to drive her around. She'd just tell him where she wanted to go and he'd drive, no questions asked. So one day, she tells him 'let's go,' gives him an address, and they're off."

"Oh, no," Rosa laughed quietly, knowing as the others did exactly where this was going.

"If Aunt Susanne hadn't called him and figured out where they were going, they might have made it out there and Mr. and Mrs. Choi would have gotten called out by a tiny… ninety-nine-year-old woman," he had to count back. "Would have been legendary…"

"Like her," Maya beamed. Before the end of the night, they would raise a toast to the dearly departed.

With dinner behind them, the opening of the dance floor had been preceded – because they really couldn't leave a competition half done – by the end of the 'ball toss' shoot off. When Asher had gone and missed one, Julianne Shelby had volunteered to sit out and let him keep going in her stead. The next thing they knew, when Ray had missed, Nadine had been next to take this loss for her own and let him carry on. This had gone on until, in the end, the only left were the new Mr. & Mr. They had called it a tie, right then and there, and they were off for copious amounts of dancing, friends and family all together.

"So, who do you think would have won if everyone hadn't let us keep going?" Asher asked Maya when the two of them met on the dance floor.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Maya innocently promised.

"Uh-huh," Asher smiled. "But…"

"Oh, Dylan, no doubt," she responded with confidence, making him chuckle.

"Thought so, too," he told her.

"Yeah, but this is better, I think."

"Probably… We get to keep it in the family," Asher went on, with a happy little smile that suited him so, so well, thinking of how he now had a husband. For her part, Maya received the words and just as quickly had a thought, not for her friend here but for a potential solution for another not present on that night.

"Maya!" Lucas came up to find her just then, nodding across the yard, where she was able to turn her head just in time to spot the arrival of a young woman. She scanned her surroundings like she was looking for someone in particular, and that someone saw her now. Rosa looked surprised for all of a second before a smile won out as she went to greet her friend. It wasn't going to take long that she found out exactly what had brought her here, and the look she turned to Maya felt like a shrill little alarm of 'what did you do?' Maya smiled, waving back at her with a covert 'woman up, Shorty.' Rosa took a deep breath, turning her smile back to Jenna as she led her through the yard.

The night was not yet over, and so until the time came for those remaining few to get their craft on with some rainbow flower crowns, Rosa asked Jenna if she might like to dance, which she did. Whatever came of this night for the two of them, they had loads of fun, and anyone could see it. Maya and Lucas both agreed that maybe, just maybe, this night would have enough power in it, for being the celebration of one couple, to bring two more hearts closer to one another.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners