Hawaiian Wedding

Chapter 1-2

Remy was an urban planner, a profession he went into because he had an almost anal need for order and schedules in his everyday life. He liked to map out his world in neat little compartments—in his mind’s eye, he saw his days much as they appeared in his day planner, narrow boxes with where and when penciled in. Every calendar he had was filled up: the large one that covered his desk at work, the one in his email program that synced with the one on his phone, even the old-school, leather-bound planner he still carried around. He took pleasure in writing down his days, not just what he had to do but, in the evenings, what he had done. And he kept the day planners going back years in a box in his closet. He could open any of them and recall in an instant any moment in his past just by reading what he wrote down for that day. He knew some people flew through life by the seat of their pants but how they managed to do that, he had no clue.

One thing Remy hated was when his carefully laid plans went awry. That had happened over the holidays when he’d planned to spend two blissful weeks alone with Lane, isolated in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. At the last minute, his ex-wife Kate wanted to take a couples’ cruise with her current beau and had dumped their son Braden onto him. No, that wasn’t fair—she was a full-time mom, and Remy only saw Braden every other weekend, so she deserved a much-needed break from parenting. But Remy hadn’t planned on having his son tag along on a romantic getaway with his lover, and to make matters worse, not only hadn’t Braden met Lane, the boy didn’t even know the men were dating. The evening Remy picked his son up, Braden caught the two kissing in the kitchen, unaware they were being watched, and that set him off on a bad foot with Lane from the start.

Eventually, though, Remy managed to talk things out with Braden, who might be young but was more perceptive than Remy gave him credit for. To him, “gay” was an insult, and he had a hard time understanding how a man once married to a woman might be attracted to another man. But Lane was funny and hip and cool, a lot cooler than Kate’s boyfriend Mike, and in the end Braden came around to him. The only caveat Braden had was that Remy couldn’t kiss Lane in front of his friends. As if someone might catch Remy and Lane necking on the playground during recess, or something.

With Braden in tow, needless to say their romantic holiday was anything but, and Remy was put out that the final meeting between the two most important men in his life hadn’t quite gone off as he’d originally planned. When he got home from the cabin, he had to erase the original date on his calendar for the meeting, May 10th, when he’d hoped to introduce Braden to Lane over ice cream. He had a new date to pencil in, though—a wedding date. But how far out would give him enough time to plan the biggest day of the rest of his life?