Chapter Text
Ray was mindlessly scrolling through his phone. Approximately two hours ago he had just finished playing basketball with the bros and after eating a hefty meal, his phone was his new best friend.
Slouched over at his desk, his left hand supporting his face—the other one holding his phone, Ray was wasting time on TikTok. After having played 2K for a bit too long, he felt TikTok was a nice change of pace, craving some quick dopamine hits.
Or so he thought, until he landed on a weird video—the kind he seemed to be getting quite a lot of recently. Staring at his phone with a different kind of attention now, he quickly reposted the TikTok, like he usually did when it was about him, and watched it. He smirked a bit, finding it amusing that people made these types of videos about him.
The video itself was another one of those edits—slow motion clips of him closely laughing with his friends, paired with some overly emotional song, with captions like “they don’t know it yet” and “this is endgame”. It was the kind of thing people clearly spent way too much time making.
Truthfully speaking, Ray wasn’t new to this sort of attention. His first “accomplice” was Tota. Initially, he remembered being shocked, in a funny – totally nonchalant way, when he saw an edit of him and the Brazilian. An edit which seemed to be conspiring, assuming, and theorising that he and Tota might like each other. And not in a bro-to-bro kind of like, the other kind of like, which Ray had found so hilarious that he had immediately shown Tota. They both had laughed together, bonding over the gay conspiracy a lot of people seemed to be having about them.
Looking back, maybe he hadn’t exactly helped his case.
This time however, Madi was the new face of the homoerotic edits featuring Ray. Noticing a pattern, Ray started to get a bit confused. Maybe people didn’t understand his sense of humour, he thought.
Ray usually teases people, especially his friends. Making jokes, specifically gay ones that seemed to get people confused about his sexuality, brought him closer to his friends. For example, in Taiwan, he was both a perpetrator and a victim of the playful finger-gun poke game to a person’s butt. He remembered talking about it one time with his non-Taiwanese friends, recalling the almost concerned looks on their faces when he had brought it up.
Culture shock perhaps?
Ray decided to send the TikTok to Madi, eager to find out what he thought about it. Madi responded surprisingly fast.
“Ayooo, chop rice.”
Ray smiled seeing the expected no-homo answer. He didn’t respond back and let the conversation die out.
Ray can’t be gay. He had never gotten hard seeing a man, and that was the gayest thing in the world. He also had a full-fledged girlfriend, who he proudly had had sex with. That’s right, he concluded satisfied. The fact that he enjoyed making gay jokes didn’t make him gay.
What it did make him, however, was something he refused to define. Something harmless. Something irrelevant.
He left the question unanswered and continued doomscrolling on TikTok, hoping the distraction would stop him from overthinking.