A Girl...

Dated

Just now I realized how shocking/disturbing/titillating it must have been for those of you who came here yesterday expecting the date story and found an entry titled "Suck a Fuck." Sorry to have let you down like that. I'll be keeping those types of details to myself, thank you.

Anyway, I'll tell the date story shortly, but first let me say that already today I have dropped my home computer's hard drive from a great height, possibly losing a year's worth of photographs and data; I opened up a package of pudding cups only to have them dump all over my kitchen floor; I sliced my finger open one of those plastic pudding cups when I got to work; and I still hate my computer. All this and it's not even noon yet. Suck a fuck indeed.

Okay. So. Cleansing breath. The Date.

Enjoying the lazy flipside of a late-night work "party" (there were worksheets involved), Simon the Fox and I spent the late morning hours of Saturday last yawning in the sun and rubbing the sleep out of our eyes. (Being in love is exhausting when you can't ever get to bed before 1 a.m., what with the neverending pillow chatter, you know.) Our laze was shortlived, however, and soon we were attired in bandanas and saggy pants and back-support belts for the hauling of yet more loads of furniture into Simon's new (fantastic) place. We spent the afternoon putting dishes into cupboards and clothes into closets and sushi supplies on the special sushi shelf (three times fast! say it!). When I tell you this boy comes with a lot of stuff, mentally picture what "a lot of stuff" looks like to you, and then multiply it by two and add another truckload and you'll have an idea of what we were dealing with. Good thing he went with the two-bedroom instead of the studio...

After a day spent moving boxes, scrubbing grease-coated drawers, and shelf papering the second third of the eighty-seven kitchen cabinets, by 5:30 p.m., when Simon announced it was time to get ready for our date, I was in the perfect mood to do nothing else but shower myself all fresh and clean, pull on my most comfortable lounging attire, and be entertained. Good thing that's exactly what he had in mind.

My outfit turned out to be p.j. bottoms, a tank top, tennis shoes, and borrowed socks (his). He wore p.j. bottoms, a T-shirt, and Birkenstocks. We got in the car and headed up into the Oakland hills near Redwood Regional Park (more of a wooded wilderness area than a park) and stopped at a pull-off with a view of the city, the water, the Bay Bridge, and San Francisco and the Golden Gate beyond. "I thought we'd start off with a sunset," he told me, "and I think I know you well enough now to guess that you don't totally hate sunsets and think they're boring and/or offensive." No siree. Sunsets are just fine with me. Long walks on the beach too, if you're taking notes, my dear.

So the sun set behind a thick layer of clouds and we watched it through our sunglasses and then through each other's sunglasses, pointing out the landmarks over here and the silver-rimmed cumulus over there and the trail of a jet shooting out from behind that tree. We had a good twenty or thirty minutes of golden time to bask in before dusk settled, the city lights blinked on, and a thick rolling fog tucked in around the car. I put on my seat belt, wondering where we were going next.

Instead of shifting into drive, however, he looked at me, smiled in his special crooked way, and leaned the driver's seat all the way back. I mirrored him on my side thinking, okay, fine, we can make out for an hour or two first, you don't have to twist my arm. Then I saw that the back seat was full of pillows and couch cushions and blankets. And there was a cooler. And two boxes of my favorite granola bars. And then he pulled out two huge bags of DVDs and let me have my pick while he hooked his laptop into the car speakers for our own private drive-in movie. Clever, clever boy.

I chose romantic (Legend) and we snuggled in with our blankets and rootbeers and pillows galore and enjoyed the movie against a backdrop of alternating fog and a city twinkling in the distance below. The volume was up, the pillows were down, and it was a perfect night. Of course, we could have done without the police spotlight blasting through the back window during the climactic battle scene between Tom Cruise and Tim Curry (weirdness!), but you know me--I was secretly tickled that we were caught being naughty, even though we didn't get even a little naked.

Having been informed via megaphone that we were parked on the wrong side of the road and in a No Parking zone (fancy that, the sign said so right there!), we reluctantly scooted to the front seat, drove about two minutes to another, legal pull-off spot, and finished our film. What fun! Imagine now, please, the picture that I didn't take: Me and Si, sitting in his back seat, a heap of snuggle, heads together, the blue glow of the screen lighting our faces. There was nowhere I'd rather have been.

After the movie, we needed a bathroom and dinner break before starting another flick, so we drove down the hill, pit-stopped at my place, and then made our way to Top Dog, a walk-up sausage joint that has become our home away from home. When it's not Sushi Night, it's Top Dog Night; a lemon chicken sausage for me, a kiel and something else (he's working his way through the menu) for Simon. At eleven o'clock on a Saturday night in the heart of the tight jeans and shiny party shirts of Fraternity/Sorority Land, we were the googly-eyed oldtimers standing on the sidewalk eating hot dogs in our jammies, kissing the mustard off each other's lips and not caring that one of us had bed head and another of us had on cotton pants so thin everyone could see through to the flowery underwear beneath. Funny how the world disappears when you have a hot dog in one hand and love in the other.

We never did finish that second movie, catching only fifteen minutes of it in bed at his place before zonking out, but the movie was just gravy all along, so no matter. Blankets, pillows, a boy to hold hands with--everything I need right there.