Last night was incredible. The Geminids! Ah!
I biked over to Dustin's after work. OMG, I had so much crap strapped to my bike, haha. Once the weather cools down, it is a true challenge to get three days' worth of clothes onto a bicycle with laptop and the book I'm reading and everything else. My backpack and purse that I tie both on there regularly were stuffed, and I also had a plastic grocery bag strapped on with a bungee. But taking the car was not an option because I couldn't leave Rider car-less that entire time.
So I get to Dustin's and he's just waking up from a post-fishing-trip nap. He was soooo excited telling me his fishing stories, haha. It was very cute to behold. I love his slight accent and how it comes out more when he's animated.
He also sent me some info on some debt consolidation stuff he'd done a while back. When I'd told him that I was considering going back East for a while depending on how things shake out, and that the main reason was to try to haul myself out of debt, he'd told me he'd done this thing a some years ago that had really helped him. He couldn't remember the details, so he'd reached out to the ex who had turned him onto it, and he'd forwarded me her response. I actually found it cute to see all their little pleasantries in the email—how have you been, how's the fam, nephews are getting big, etc. It was like a little window into the friendly relationship he still has with someone who was once very important to him, and I like to see that.
After I'd looked that stuff over, we were both hungry, so we sat down to a light dinner of leftover shrimp+broth from the other night paired with toasted baguette and some of the cheese he'd brought me back from his trip. It was delicious!
A friend called him during dinner, worried about their mutual friend's recent depressive-sounding Facebook posts. I could tell just from Dustin's half of the conversation who and what they were talking about before he reported it to me after getting off of the phone.
It dawned on me that I'm now integrated enough into Dustin's life that I just know a lot of that stuff and can understand it in context—the friend being worried over was the friend that he works with every Tuesday all day and Sunday night, so he's a logical contact point for inquiring after the fellow's well-being. I'd also seen the Facebook posts in question and said to myself, "yikes." Dustin did not seem to be worried about the guy, but he texted him to check in just in case, saying that people are worried about him and asking whether they have any reason to be. Typical good friend stuff.
We had plans to pick up stuff to mull wine and then go watch the meteor shower. Dustin also wanted to try to buy some fancy soap for Eve for Christmas, but when we got down to the store, it was already closed, so we just went to the grocery for the mulling stuff.
As we walked around running errands, I was just feeling so lovey toward him. I'm not sure why, but it was kind of overwhelming, even. We were holding hands, and I was thinking super-cheesy stuff like how wonderful it feels to be walking through the world hand in hand with this particular creature, and I was involuntarily smiling in his direction, and he turned and saw me and giggled out loud, then kissed me.
We got the mulling spices, wine, and a cheesecloth, and returned home. Derek and Eve were Christmas shopping for the family on the computer, and Dustin decided to regale them with the fishing tales too, while I spiced the wine.
I'd gotten the idea to watch the meteor shower by seeing the topic trending on Facebook, haha. Dustin and I have these crazy-awesome travel mugs that I picked up a couple months ago, and they keep things cold/warm for
hours. I've had iced coffee still have ice in it eight hours later. So I'd proposed that we fill them with hot, spiced wine and go out to the canyons to watch the show. Dustin was 100% on board and had been researching locations while I was at work.
We'd decided on one tentative location, but once we were in the car and on the road, he decided spur of the moment to change course.
"I bet it'll be darker up north than over by the water. Looks like the marine layer is coming in. Let's drive an hour north and see what it's like up there," he said. And so we did.
That was the best idea! We ended up finding a little winding road off the highway in the mountains and stopping at a pull-off. Other people had had the same idea; the road was sporadically littered with cars. We bundled into a pile of blankets in the grass and watched the sky and talked.
It was the best meteor shower I've ever seen! It was like, zoooom, zoooom, zoooom all over the place! There were two times when I even saw two at once!
We would gasp and exclaim every time we saw one. It never got old.
And the conversation was phenomenal too. We got into pretty interesting spiritual and philosophical shit, like ya do when staring into the sky. He said a lot of stuff that made sense to me, coming from a different direction and perspective than I've ever had. I began to see and understand some of the underpinnings of the places that we differ, even if I may still not be on the same page. It's good to understand.
After about two hours of stargazing, we both started to yawn and decided it was time to return. The drive back was uneventful and we crawled into bed and cuddled and talked some more, eventually getting sexy. The sex was good. We tried a new position that I'd never done before, where I'm on top of him but fully stretched to my entire length, with my legs on top of his all the way down and my arms holding my top part up while he uses his own arm strength to press my hips up at intervals. He actually does a fair number of similar things to that, where I'm on top but not really having to do any of the work because he's moving me or holding me up and moving under me. I like it.
His face while we were in that position looked like the most beautiful thing in the world to me. I cannot describe it. I saw 100 different things coexisting in his eyes at once: lust and passion and love, yes, but also wisdom and innocence and fury and peace and hope and desperation and so many other things. It felt like he was—or we together were, I'm not sure—flicking through an entire deck of experiences, catching little flashes of the different cards as they whisked by. It was something both intimate and infinite. I sometimes get that feeling with him, like the entire world lives within him somehow and I experience it through him when we come together—it's almost like the LSD thoughts of "we are all one" and "everything is everything" except it happens without drugs. I'm not sure what it is, really, but it makes for really great sex.
When we were done, we cuddled, and I could feel the happy post-sex, high-on-NRE hormones just washing over me in waves. He snapped out the light, and I instantly slept like a baby. It was a good night.
Tonight I think we're just having dinner and then I'm accompanying him to his three-hour Christmas music rehearsal. I'll probably bring a book.
Rider had a good night last night too. He had fun at his poly meetup with Annie and Iris and Annie's partners and their mutual dude friend. He said he also met a handful of cool new people. He's got a date with Annie tonight that will be their first overnight. He said he might try to cook for her. As far as I know, he knows how to make only three things, so I asked him what, and he didn't know yet. I'm curious to see what it ends up being and to hear how it turns out.
Kind of an odd thing happened in communication with Rider and me yesterday, where he told me that Annie had been talking to him about a trip in the summertime to go to the city where Reina lives and then to a neighboring city, and that he knows it's awfully far in advance to be planning that, but he wanted to let me know. The weird thing about it is that he had proposed the exact same trip to me for the exact same time frame a couple of months ago, and I told him that time frame would probably not work because it'd be too close to another trip we're due to take for a friend's wedding. I'd told him I could probably do it later in the summer.
"So would the plan be that you'd do the same trip twice?" I asked. "Once early with her and then once later with me?"
"Oh, hm. I hadn't thought about that," he confessed. "She'd just been talking about it and it sounded super cool. I didn't remember that we'd planned to do that too. I'm not sure I should do the same trip twice in one summer. But maybe. I know I've been talking about showing you around [Reina's city] forever, and I'd still love to. Nothing's set in stone with her though. I could tell her it won't work and I'm sure there'd be no hard feelings."
"Well, don't tell her no right now on my behalf," I said. "It's not even technically winter yet. Summer's more than half a year away. Let's chill on making the way-far-out travel plans for now. Let's just get to 2018."
I think it's great for him that he has met someone who likes him enough to want to plan trips with him, and who thinks enough alike to him to literally suggest the same trip as the one he'd suggested to me. I do want to go visit that city, and Rider would be a great person to show me around because he used to live there briefly, long ago. But I do feel weird that he legit
forgot that we'd had that conversation until I reminded him. You'd think that the convo with her would jog a memory of the convo with me. But you'd be wrong.
