Opening A Bottle Rocket With Your Teeth (Part 7: Returning A Bottle Rocket To Its Shelf)

Dmitri is on the phone with the airline. It's snowing. And while the snow looks heavy from inside the house, I know it's not heavy enough to ground him here for one more night. Dmitri is leaving to return to his what passes for normal life. Landlord has offered to drive us to the airport whenever Dmitri's flight leaves.

"Hello?" Dmitri asks, signaling he's finally through the robot barricade and talking to an actual living person over the phone.

I stare at his bags because I think this will make him more comfortable than if I were to stare at him. I hate it when most people look at me while I'm doing something uninteresting. And because I'm neurotic, and Dmitri is neurotic, I just assume he feels the same way, so I stare at his bags, then his shoes, then...his ass?

In the days before wireless phones, my mother used to tangle the fuck out of phone cords during nervous conversation. She always had to be doing something with her hands. Her nervous behavior, and my father's ascent into obesity are just a few reasons I'm glad I'm not biologically related to them. Of course, my birth father was a rapist, so maybe obesity wouldn't be so bad.

Rather than tangle the cord on the phone, Dmitri is playing with his pants. As he giggle something about "So you can't tell me whether or not the plane is leaving?" his pants ride just low enough for me to make out a few inches of crack. I hope this is a signal. The snow will pick up. The pants will come down. We'll soon be making out, and I'll be running my fingers down that crack and...look at the bags, Safey, look at the bags.

He hangs up the phone and repeats the conversation that I just half heard. He's impossibly cute.

Whatever we talk about for the next hour must be fleeting because all I can think of is want to kiss want to kiss want to kiss want to kiss. Then, it's time to head to the airport. Landlord gets the car running, we grab all of Dmitri's bags, and head to the car. We should be at the airport in...wait, we're headed in the wrong direction. Maybe Landlord is helping me kidnap Dmitri. This idea would intrigue me, except that Landlord is a sixty-something year old guy who likes to go to foreign countries and pick up young boys and do...whatever he does. I don't share well. But we are not on our way to the airport, we are clearly at the T station. I am tempted to say "This isn't the airport", but this week has gone particularly bad in every way except for Dmitri, and I'd rather just spend some time on the T with Dmitri anyway.

want to kiss want to kiss want to kiss want to kiss Talk about nothing. want to kiss want to kiss want to kiss want to kiss

And we're here. The airport. Dmitri is leaving. The lady behind the counter won't let him bring his bags carry on this time, so he checks them. I want to say how sorry I am that my friends let him down (because I'm used to them letting me down, that's no big deal to me, I let them down just as often). I want to say I wish we'd had more time. I want to kiss him, and follow him to the gate, and on the plane, and back to Chicago. I could move my life to Chicago. Steggy is there. Dmitri is there. I know loads of people in Chicago, why I could...kill myself rather than move again. I'm no longer a satellite in search of a planet. I am a star, and someone will make their orbit around me.

And it's time for him to go, and we shake hands. A handshake. We met because he liked the way I wrote about being a complete whore, and the only physical contact is a handshake? I'm so far off my game, I'm playing patty-cake.

His plane takes him home where his Mutually Exclusive Hookup Partner will soon become his Boyfriend. They'll make forts out of blankets and play video games. I'll be at home playing solitaire.