Here’s the deal: I’m fucking in love. It’s amazing and insane and every day I could post something here about it. But I feel protective and maybe a tiny bit shy about it in terms of blogging and also self-conscious that maybe it’s obnoxious to go on and on about it here, even though I’m guessing its been obvious, anyway. But it’s also why, lately, I’ve not been posting very much. And then this morning, I thought fuck it, this amazing thing is happening in my life, I’m just going to be upfront and write about it more directly, and with that sentiment in mind I’m going to tell a story about a date that happened this past fall.
We were feeling high on each other that night and we’d gotten kind of dressed up to go out to dinner. Ties and nice belts and MTB had on this awesome leather vest. I’d gone to her house to pick her up and we’d bolted from there pretty quickly because the trick or treaters on the street we’re making her dogs a little nuts. In fact, we sort of ran out to my car and then turned the music up loud. Driving to the restaurant, we kept looking at each other and grinning almost every time we stopped at an intersection. We sat side by side at the Indian place and we laughed about how we couldn’t get our chairs closer together because how bulky the arms on the chairs were. We held hands, anyway, though, and we leaned over the chair arms and kissed each other’s cheeks as we talked about how our weeks were going. I remember looking at MTB at throughout dinner and thinking that I couldn’t quite believe this was happening; “this” being that I was going on dates with her and that dates with her could feel so amazing. I’d said as much to her at some point before this date and she’d said something similar back to me.
After dinner we headed out for a drink. Location was our main consideration in picking a place and because we were in southeast, on upper Division, I suggested the Sapphire Hotel, which I was thinking of as a queer friendly place, although I don’t know why I was thinking that. Maybe because I went there once with VR and the waitress had flirted with us. MTB and I were talking and laughing and leaning into one another as we walked into the Sapphire. Holding hands tight. Right away we both noticed that we were getting stared at, as if our walking in that door was like sliding a needle across the record. It was weird and we tried to laugh it off and find a place to sit, but the only two seats, side by side, were at the bar and one of the stools had some kind of schmutz on it. We stood at the bar and tried not to figure out if the bartender was purposefully ignoring. I might have even tried to clean up some of the junk with napkins before we finally got the bartender to give us a rag. Even with a rag it was impossible to fully clean up the schmutz, which most likely was some kind of mustard. Little globules kept showing up everywhere — on the floor, on the stool rung, under the seat — and the bartender stayed too busy to pay any attention to our efforts. I started to feel like I was in a really bad TV show, which seemed so absurd because MTB and I were so impossibly high on each other. We finally got some water from the bartender and gave back the nasty rag. This is stupid, I was thinking, and I just looked at MTB and said “lets get the fuck out of here.” She smiled so big at me and squeezed my hand and told me good call.
We made a b line to Crush and fell into a small, early in the night, Halloween crowd — a couple of handfuls of people in costumes, the only one I remember being an insanely hot gay guy dressed up as sailor. It was such a fucking relief to be in a “gay” bar. We lamented the demise of the E Room. MTB and I sat close to each other on the couch in the back room and watched people dance and talked and laughed and drank our drinks and made out. Someone got up on the little stage and did some air guitar and we clapped when they were done. A guy who was dancing with a larger group of people came over and asked to take our picture. MTB was immediately suspicious. Why did he want a photo of us? What was he going do with the it? On our very first date at TBA, there were roaming photographers and MTB had purposefully scooted out of the way when this woman was tried to take a picture of us eating ice cream. This gay guy answered that we were hot and really cute together. We laughed. MTB blushed a little bit. I told her I didn’t think it was big deal and also that she is fucking hot and it’s not like he knew who we were, anyway. Not like he could post a photo and say this is MTB and LM at Crush. He took a couple snapshots and said thanks. It didn’t really make sense, but it made us laugh more and squeeze each other tighter and smile bigger. And normally I’m shy about saying things like this, but it was like something magical was happening.