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It wasn't every day you got a text message from Ray Gordon that read: You free Sat?

In Gene's case, it literally wasn't every day. It had been every day once -- or at least every day, several times a day, that he'd gotten some kind of text from Ray. 80% of the time it was at work. 80% of the time it was some variant of Bored, dance for my amusement or something funny a student had done, or something unfunny his boss had done. In turn Gene would text him the funniest recent patient name or the stupidest new lie a patient had tried to tell him -- it was to the point where they both got cell phone plans with unlimited texting for this reason. This had been years ago, though -- he couldn't remember the last time they'd done this. He made a point of not trying to remember, nowadays. He'd sent his last text message to Ray six months ago. He couldn't remember the last time he'd gotten a reply.

So when his phone vibrated three times to tell him he had a new text, he expected it to be something from Verizon, or his brother complaining about his other brother. So he didn't check it until he was in the break room -- but then he stared, because: You free Sat?

Gene stared at it for a while, to see if it turned into leaves or dust like fairy money. But eventually he replied: No - ER rotation. Sun?

Two minutes later: Feelings on Curry Spectrum?

This didn't turn into fairy money either, so he typed: Spectral, why?

1:30?

You're on, typed Gene, and this time he didn't get a reply. And that was more the normal order of things with Ray Gordon. At least now it was, and had been. So when this didn't turn out to be another dream, and his cell phone did turn out to have all these messages stored reliably on it, he felt his vague surprise was at least marginally reasonable.

Saturday came and went, as did the ER rotation. Sunday came. Curry Spectrum was in downtown Destiny City, not far from Destiny City Memorial, a little farther from the 'burbs and Meadowview. It -- did what it said on the tin. It had a spectrum of curries. None of them claimed or proved to be utterly authentic, but it was the only place in Destiny City where you could get Thai green curry and Japanese brown curry in the same place, and neither was bad, so it was popular with kids and yuppies during the week anyway. It was about two blocks from the subway stop, and not as busy on Sundays, as evidenced by the line staying inside the restaurant.

The girl at the counter looked up, but she didn't have time to greet: Ray had picked a booth near the front and was waving to him already -- that was a strange, jarring moment. But Gene raised his hand anyway and picked his way over to the table.

He looked -- good. He looked about the same. He hadn't slept well the past couple nights, it looked like, but otherwise: he was clean-shaven, he had a new haircut, he was smiling, always looked pretty much the same when he was smiling. It was a weekend, but it was a little chilly, so Ray must've opted for a button-down rather than a T-shirt for that reason: he had on khakis, looked like he'd actually bothered to iron all of that. New watch. Well, newer than two years, anyway. He was wearing contacts. More or less he looked, well, he looked like Ray.

"Hey, Gene," Ray greeted him. He had the menu fanned out in front of him like a puzzled tourist with a map. "Damn," (he said it like day-umn), "looks like someone went and got all gussied up today. I should call me Mario."

Ray burst out laughing. That hadn't changed any -- he put his head in one of his hands and laughed into the menu, which prompted Gene to grin entirely in spite of himself anyway, and wasn't done laughing until the waitress came by, dropped off two waters and gave them both looks like they were about to burst into a spontaneous musical number on the table and she had to tell them, don't try anything funny. "You know, I don't know what was so funny about that," Ray said eventually. "Maybe it's that winning smile. Maybe it's Sense and Sensibility. Maybe it's the dull and humorless existence I've been leading these past couple years, Genya." He fixed Gene with his own version of a winning smile, which was, of course, fairly winning, anyone could tell you that. He had blindingly white teeth. Unnaturally blinding. Colgate-Whitestripped-last-night-just-for-this blinding, not that Ray would ever do this.

He looked back at his menu. "Let's see," he said, "hey, they still have the Five-Alarm Red Curry Challenge open -- you know, we never did take the Five-Alarm Red Curry Challenge. You wanna take a chance on me or do you not put out for blind dates?"

"Yeah?" Ray sounded briefly disinterested, or some other word that started with dis-, anyway. "Can't have been too high-standards. Cayenne, at that rate I'd just do it to be like, don't insult me, sister. Cayenne's a gringo pepper. I'd know, I'm nerdy to the extreme and whiter than sour cream." Of course, it was unlikely he would've chased that girl anyway. Ray Gordon didn't really chase girls, any more than Charlotte probably chased her afternoon snacks before going back to weaving the praises of Wilbur the Wonder Pig. And if he did, that girl wouldn't have been his type -- he always had a pretty predictable type. Cool girls, normal girls, girls who liked Joss Whedon and Stephen Colbert and quiz night at hip bars. Girls Ray could hang out with. Girls Ray could figuratively bring to meet the figurative folks no one ever saw. Girls with normal, white-collar-but-no-tie jobs. Girls he could never see again and no one could have told them apart in the first place.

He leaned back in the booth and rested his arm along the back of his seat. With his other hand he flipped the menu over and then tossed it to land squarely on his plate; Gene braced for either or both of the water glasses to come crashing over, but neither did. "I don't think you're allowed to take any of the Challenge home in a box," Ray noted, now looking back down nonchalantly. "You'll have to poison Brillo some other day."

Before Gene could rise to this foul slander, his college best friend rummaged in one of his trouser pockets and produced a phone: a new phone, it looked like. Upgraded on the Verizon plan, it looked like. Ray always did take forever to cash in on his upgrades. Instead of dialing it, however, he pushed a button and then raised it to eye level. Click.

"I took a picture," said Ray. "It'll last longer."

That produced more awkward silence than expected as Ray inspected the image on his cell phone screen, turned it this way and that in the light, and then presumably pushed the 'save' button and pocketed the phone again. "Caller ID," he said in way of explanation, and then cocked his head at Gene and said, "Sweetheart, you got grey in your hair from somewhere. Lemme get that for you." And reached over and ruffled Gene's hair like he was looking for bubblegum.

The waitress came by to take their orders. Ray had leaned back and interlaced his fingers behind his head, so he just nodded and smiled brightly when she, a middle-aged woman with her hair in a fat bun, stopped and looked at him first for his order. "Call me crazy as a loon," he said, "but I'm taking the Five Alarm Red Curry Challenge. So's he. Oh, and could we get some garlic naan to dislodge the capsicin from our poor taste buds? That's a beaut, thank you."

Gene blinked a couple times as he was promptly ordered for, but his lack of vocal objection caused the waitress to nod to both of them in return, offer a glib "Thank you, we'll have that right out," and walk off again. Ray for his part looked entirely unrepentant, and also looked like he was contemplating treating his half of the booth like a chaise lounge. It was known to happen. To Ray Gordon, anyway. Less often since he got out of college, but as he sometimes said, you could take the boy out of the DCU Department of Theater, you couldn't take the DCU Department of Theater out of the boy.

"Don't look so glum," said Ray, though Gene had not really been looking so anything as far as he could tell, 'glum' being especially low on the list he might've been looking. "Cheer up, Funshine Bear. We're on a date. I'll get the check. Yes, I know you make more money than me, allow me to live in my little fantasy world where this affirms my masculinity rather than shows its true colors as a naked gesture of overcompensation." Apparently dissatisfied with just stirring the ice in his drink, he picked the straw up with his teeth like a cartoon farmer with a piece of wheat. "So hey, I realize you and that spoon are having some special time right now -- you don't bend the spoon, honey, you bend yourself -- but have you ever considered just buckling down and investing in a compact mirror like you know you want to?"

"I live and die by the sword, gentlemen," said Ray, though the closest other gentlemen in sight were a pair of clearly buzzed DCU frat boys struggling their way through the pronunciation of saag aloo on the menu. It hadn't been so long ago that Ray and Gene had been their age, would've shot them disdainful looks and disparaged them over their Cokes. It would've been a mix of natural social group animosity and pre-emptive defensiveness, a perception of a kind of Your Kind Ain't Welcome Here sign tacked up over Greek Row at DCU. Well, Tainted Love was too fast to dance to, and they'd left them all behind. Those were their college years. Maybe it had been a long time.

A lot of things could change in eight years.

Ray folded his napkin over his lap: one of the few things he ever did neatly at a table. He would always sit up straight, unfold the napkin, orient it carefully over his legs, straighten it so the edges were parallel to the table, fold his hands in his lap and then promptly go back to slouching, kicking his feet up on things and his various other Rayish mannerisms that indicated his cheerful but harmless contempt for polite society. Gene had always supposed that the one vestige of civilized manners was something that Mama Gordon had beaten into him too hard to forget, but it would've been awkward to ask.

Speaking of awkward, this was the most awkward silence they'd had since Gene had sat down. They were clearly both starting to notice. Ray leaned on one of his elbows and blew into the straw wrapper for his drink, inflating it. "But tell you what, Comrade Yevgeniy, I'll go this with you if you go it with me," he said. "My girlfriend, she never wants to go here -- 'I know why you want to go there, and I know you'll drag me into it too,' she says. Personally I think she's quite adept at saying no, and she just doesn't want to look phenomenally unhardcore while I burn off my nerve endings in the pursuit of true manhood."

The naan basket was slapped down in front of them unceremoniously and their waitress left again. Ray took small sips of his water like a Steel Magnolia and ignored the bread as he considered Gene's question -- which didn't appear to faze him in the least, of course it didn't, who would have expected it to? Any irony either escaped him or flew right over his hairgelled brunette head: or pinged right off his button-down shirt, like you could expect to find an "S" emblazoned behind it. You could never, of course, expect anything different of Ray; there were select topics that broke his titanium facade, naturally, he wasn't actually superhuman. He had an ego like any man: worse than any man, really, and that was saying a lot. It had the usual sore spots. They just didn't include who he was dating, or anything anyone else might think of that.

"Her name's Steph. She's a music teacher at Crystal, and half-runs the theater program over there." Crystal Academy had been one place that had turned Ray down at the interview, at age 24. He'd sworn a half-joking moratorium. Apparently Steph was reason to break this. "I dunno, she likes a lot of Wii games and got me into watching Glee. This is our -- sixth month seeing each other?" Ray did not date women for six months. "It's been pretty good. You can meet her if you like."

Ray, for his part, reacted fast. That'd always been true of Ray Gordon. He was a real Quick Draw McGraw. Sometimes Gene wished that something he did, just once, ever gave Ray enough pause to just sit there and look flabbergasted like a normal person. But he didn't, just closed in on the situation smoothly like he did every time Gene did something that threatened to become a scene -- in this case, he took a thoughtful drink of his water and smacked his other hand down over Gene's when Gene reached for a napkin after the naan. "Now, you just hold on a sec," he said like he'd just caught Gene stealing office supplies. "You just hold your horses there, pardner."

In the ensuing silence Ray picked up his water, still without looking up, and drank the rest of it down, tilting it back to finish it. The ice rattled around in the cup when he was done. He gave it another rattle and set down the glass.

"So where is it exactly you think you're going," he said, saying goin' like he always claimed he didn't, "before we put both our names on that wall up there?"

"Oh, so there are. Deepest apologies, ma'am." Ray obliged and disentangled his hand, albeit taking his sweet time of it, and retrieved another napkin for to replace his stolen one. Once Gene stepped out of her way, touching his hair a bit (he had this inexplicable disheveled feeling) the waitress put down both plates of curry, which had a deceptively mild brownish color. At this point there was really no option for Gene to do anything but sit down, which he did opposite Ray, a little breathless. Ray didn't betray any victory except with an introspective little smile at the napkin he was now straightening over his lap -- a little row of white teeth. He then transferred his gaze to his plate.

"Now look what you've gone and done," remarked Ray. "Another place for our collection of places I can't go back to. Why do you do these things, baby? I can't take you anywhere." He clapped his hands together. "All right, armistice declared on the irony or unirony of my watching of the hit TV show Glee -- which, by the way, I will note I never said I did watch unironically," he picked up his fork, "let's dance to the masochism tango."