OK Josh, I am falling for it. Tell us how you met the last love of your life.

Waiting, waiting, waiting...well, at least you do other things other that the internet cafe thing now.

We haven't had to tell our story at the dinner table yet. Don't know how that would go... trying to decide if we need a cleaned-up version.

We met in a bar.
I was leaned against a wall watching a movie, determined that tonight, of all nights, I wouldn't get too drunk to carry a conversation.
A boy came and stood beside me and looked at me, with insistence.
Oh, god, I thought, another Turkish 20-year-old, very cute, very just what I already lived, and rolled my eyes until he left.
But he came back.
And stood there, edging closer, until his finger was against mine.
You know that feeling of another's desire. The slow increments of closing distance as their skin comes closer and you feel, just in increments, the warmth of the other's body. It was just a finger. There was something about the way the warmth radiated from his skin. I had only felt that with a person once before (an aborted affair on a sailing trip fifteen years ago that I never forgot).

The finger pulled on mine, finally. He looked skinny and dark and far too young, there, in the back of the bar, but already ('scuse the melodramatics as I open my 4th beer...) there was something I trusted in him. I was thinking, like, "You really want to go to the back room? We don't have to do that. But if it amuses you... " I guess I lost my head. I just followed him, not from desire, but just because it - it was his fancy, and I deferred.

He took me into a solitary space, and I knew the space wasn't right, but I enjoyed knowing him, holding him to know how his body felt. He was hard, and curiously, he had his penis shoved up into the waistband of his underwear, with the tip out above the line of his pants. I knew I couldn't, couldn't there. I pulled him away to another space. And then to another.

Finally, there was another man who came. He was, I had no doubt, though it was dark, older, and ... you know the type: jaded, with lines, flippant, only there to get off, and with his shirt off: a torso so perfect you knew his face had to be ugly. The three of us stood there a minute. I touched the perfect torsoed guy. He did, too. The perfect torso whispered, "Come to my hotel. It's close."

So the three of us are going up the stairs, and he raises his eyebrows, he's following me, and I'm following the perfect torso, and I wait for him to get his coat, and then we're on the sidewalk, and into the hotel, and he raises his eyebrows again and smiles and shrugs his shoulders.

Arrive: the perfect torso guy's room. We stand there. It's like being on cocaine. Something is going to happen, and no one knows what. We don't know what we want. Perfect torso suggests "my boyfriend" fuck me.

You see where my problem is? Polite dinner conversation this is not. Much better to have met online.

At first I'm disappointed. I could happily get off with my guy while Perfect Torso stands at a distance, visible. Because my guy has a belly, and isn't a joy to look at under such harsh lighting. But Perfect Torso is behind him now, blocked from view. And then, suddenly, I want my guy. We come, both of us, without doing anything, and it's all us. The scene is ended.

Perfect Torso, standing in the center of the room, says, "So how long have you guys been together?'

And we look at each other.

"You're boyfriends, aren't you?" he says.

And we look at each other again.

"Where are you from?" he asks me, as I go to the loo to wash my hands. And I hear him next asking my guy, "Where are you from"

"Israel," says my guy. I hear it from the bathroom.

"Israel," says Perfect Torso. "I know a guy who swears by Israelis."

My heart is sold. Perfect Torso knows a guy in Birmingham or wherever who swears by Israeli guys. So this is it.

"Good luck, you guys," says Perfect Torso. "You're a lovely couple. I've got a flight tomorrow at 8."

We go out to the street. He asks what I do. He asks what books I like. He asks me to dinner the next night, all excited, and gets in a taxi.

A day later, we meet at a party for a journalist friend who won an award for a broadcast on a philosopher who, coincidentally, was a major influence on my dissertation. We go to a restaurant, and he takes me to a room in the back, and licks his finger to pull of a ring, and puts it on mine with his saliva. That sealed it.

Voila. Any tips on how to clean this up for the dinner table? I mean, people ARE going to ask. They already have. And he's coming home to meet the parents at Christmas.