It was a date! With the Date Guy! Turns out he doesn't drink- can you even imagine? Thank God he gave me wine anyway when we made dinner at his house, which activity initially consisted of kind of endearingly stilted attempts at conversation while showing me how to roll dough through a hand-cranked pasta maker. All too soon, it was time to go to the airport! This was all part of the rather unorthodox plan! Going to the airport to pick up some friends! Date Guy fed me a lovely beet and rocket salad so I would not be too hungry since we were so not ready for the actual dinner part yet, then we cruised to the airport, blasting HIP-HOP music all the way. It was sort of like being picked up by gypsies in a foreign country! We retrieved the friends, who were lovely and bless them for also drinking, cause that's what they came over to do. They brought liquor, and a very small dog with a very enormous penis. Yea, this dog features a member SO COLOSSAL that it does not at any time actually fit all the way inside it's little sheath. The poor thing walks around with a massive boner most of the time, and a demi-boner the rest of the time, but always with half an inch of chapped pink tip assaulting the world of the seeing. I found him endearing and more than a little revolting; and I haven't even mentioned the skin disorder!
ANYWAY. Back at his pad Date Guy sauteed some lovely scallops and combined them with the homemade linguine and some other things and it was very nice, and then came The STEAK. The STEAK was thick, and weighty and looking rather like it had been sliced off a cow maybe an hour ago. A big cast-iron skillet went on the stove (Date Guy has an impressive salvaged stove and cupboard set in vintage yellow metal and laminate- hurray for some sense of style!), the steak went into the skillet and the smoke filled the room! This steak was getting BLACKENED. Now I must say, I grew up vegetarian, and have only a few years steak-eating experience under my belt, and much less steak-cooking experience, and I have mostly eaten my steaks pretty on the medium side. So though I've been learning to like my meat progressively pinker, this was like nothing I've ever seen. We all picked up dish towels and tried to waft smoke from the house, and then, shockingly soon, it was time to eat The STEAK! The Steak of All Time, that is; perfectly black on the outside, and perfectly purple between. And I did eat it. And it was delicious, so, wow.
Then we all chatted a bit and I was nervous, as I had been the entire time, and then (somewhat blessedly by this point, though I liked them immensely) the friends bid us goodnight. Now I'll go back a little and tell you that beginning in the car on the way to the airport and then all through dinner and afterward, Date Guy made little intimate gestures to me of TOUCHING me, like putting his hand on my knee or at the small of my back, or holding my elbow or other of these little kinds of sort of possessive moves that couples do with one another and it was as though he felt already like my boyfriend. I found the whole idea of (dating in the first place, plus then throw in) touching to be QUITE novel and actually for awhile almost intrusive as no one has touched me really at all lo these four months now, almost four months exactly. I really haven't wanted anyone to touch me all this long time, but it turned out once someone, well- he, did lay hands on me a little, I was totally thrown by how tender and how good it did feel.
Oh! and I almost forgot- because he almost forgot until nearly the very end, that he gave me a WRIST CORSAGE, which I found sweet and hilarious, but which he, oddly, did not seem to really find hilarious. So though I had a notion that his intention was in fact to be hilarious by giving me a wrist corsage, I still became somewhat worried because he was NOT LAUGHING. In fact he treated the whole thing rather earnestly, and like maybe the wrist corsage was really meaningful and I was missing the emotion of it or something. Then I thought, "Shit, I can't hang with a guy who doesn't think a wrist corsage is hilarious, but is that actually the deal here? Because I can see that this boy does indeed know what hilarious IS so maybe he just doesn't want to make too big a deal of the hilarity, or maybe he takes wrist corsages really seriously and I am fucking up by laughing too much, but I wish he would be laughing but I am misreading the whole thing..."
Anyway I figured I'd better stop obsessively worrying about it, and just wear the damn thing and like it. And then I kissed him. I kissed him because I knew he wanted to and wished we would but wouldn't go so far as to hold hope of it happening and would never never ask. And I kissed him because I wanted to. And that was the much bigger deal about it, because I haven't kissed anyone or wanted to kiss anyone or I may as well admit it had an orgasm or, for that matter, a libido even, for a very long time. And it turns out I've missed those things, and I've wanted them back, and once we got started I did not want to stop.
But after awhile we did stop, and I got in my car and I drove myself home, and I believe we'll be seeing each other again.
