“Fuck off. Cyrus? Cyrus from high school? The guy with the hair?”
I was so happy that she understood the importance of Cyrus’s past hotness. “Yes! I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” And then I said, “You’re wondering why he suddenly loves me back.”
“Of course he loves you back. You morphed into a cross between Snow White and Iron Man.”
“What was I before?”
“One of the Seven Dwarfs. Bashful, if I’m being generous.”
“I can’t wear a sari and get pinched by aunties. You have to come.”
“I’m sorry. Ahmed and I are trying to get pregnant.”
“Oh. Can’t you just bring him and have sex in Cambridge?”
“It’s not sex, it’s IVF.”
It was the first I’d heard of it, and I felt like a jerk. “I’m really sorry, I didn’t know.”
“I have a bicornuate uterus. It’s shaped like a heart yet is totally inhospitable for babies. You should probably get yours scanned too, just in case.”
“You want me to come over?”
“Oh God, no. I don’t suppose you can wait?”
I knew I couldn’t. “I’m on a high. I can’t explain—I feel like it needs to happen right now, this very minute.”
“I get it. Go—take selfies and tell me everything later.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, baby.”
* * *
Julian flew in from Hong Kong and came straight to city hall. When we arrived, he was already there, waiting under a small rectangle of shade in front of the bell tower. He and Cyrus greeted each other with excited cries like they’d been apart for years, even though it had been only the summer.
“Jules, this is Asha. Asha, Jules.”
Jules turned to me and threw open his arms. I was wearing a yellow sleeveless dress, and he squashed my elbows against my ribs as he hugged me.
“What’s this I hear about a wedding?” he boomed.
Cyrus said, “You’re it, friend. You’re the wedding party.”
They could’ve been brothers. Their haircuts were different （in that Julian believed in haircuts and Cyrus didn’t）， but they were both tall and bore their bodies in similar ways, with a kind of casual swagger. That they had met on a mountaintop was fully apparent. But whereas I thought of Cyrus as big/small—a large person who often commanded an entire room just by walking into it, and yet could become almost invisible at will—Julian was just big in every way, as if he’d lost his volume control and settled on a kind of outside voice no matter where he found himself.
With a flourish, Julian reached into his front pocket and pulled out a hat—not a fedora or a beret but one of those cones that children wear at birthday parties. The cone said CONGRATULATIONS. We made our way merrily inside. On the second floor, a tiny seed of doubt took hold. What was I doing? It had been a summer—not even that—and here I was in a plain dress and flip-flops. I went over the arguments that Cyrus and I had rehearsed with each other. We both hated weddings. It would save us months of dating, which neither of us had ever liked.
But really, it was none of those things. There was both a very good reason and no reason at all for Cyrus and me to get married within a few weeks of meeting again. The good reason was that we were in love, or at least we believed ourselves to be in love, and for me the feeling was so strong that it felt like the first time I had ever believed in anything. But also, doing something so irrational both fit into who I wanted to be—a person who chooses her own destiny—and yet told me something entirely new about the world, which is that things that seemed impossible and out of my reach, like marrying a man I had teenage dreams about—were actually within my grasp, and all I had to do was stretch out my greedy little hands and take what was mine.
When we approached the town clerk who would marry us, I suddenly wished I were holding a purse, one of those things people call a clutch. I would’ve liked to be clutching something—flowers! God, why didn’t we have flowers? We had nothing but a giant friend in a paper hat.
The clerk, a woman in a blue pantsuit that was perhaps one size too small, was stationed behind a podium. Cyrus handed her the marriage license. Julian pulled out his phone and started recording. The clerk asked us how to pronounce our names. SIGH-RUS and AH-SHAH, we said. She examined each one of us in turn and, seemingly satisfied, turned to her podium. Cyrus and I held hands and waited.
“We are gathered here at this hour to join Asha Ray and Cyrus Jones in marriage,” she began.