Kept company

"Hey sailor, looking for a good time?" Kelly calls out the window to his friend Liam. A tower of a bear (or wolf, rather...I need to check my gay field guide), Liam smiles wide and calls something back that I can't hear over the radio. Kelly parks the car and gets out to do the gay greet (a kiss on the cheek and a sassy back-handed compliment). We get his bags into the car; shift from one topic to another, all of which I wouldn't be able to repeat without changing the security settings on this blog to "mature"; and head off for what Kelly has described as "Iron Chef with booze".

The dynamic changes as soon as Liam and Kelly start to catch up. In our relationship, I'm an Ionic column...pretty in a simple way, but mostly I'm just there to be supportive. With Liam, Kelly fades a little himself, becoming more reserved (if only by a breath). He blushes at some of the more off-colored comments and looks at me as if he expects me to be offended. (He clearly hasn't gotten to know Samantha very well...) "I told you he'd be like this," Kelly says with a half-hearted sigh. We get to the restaurant/bar/hotel (?) and Liam manages to say "hello" properly. He lifts me three feet off of the sidewalk and squeezes me in a bear hug that breaks everything from T1 to L5 of my spinal column. "It's so great to finally meet you, dearheart."

Inside, we do a shot of something banana and cognac (much to Kel's disgust) and Kelly orders the first round: gimlet for him, aviation for me, and something bright pink and fruity for Liam. After introducing us to a few groups of people, Kelly gets sucked into industry talks and I get prepared to do my usual people watching. Liam grabs my neck in a buddybuddy squeeze and I almost forget that for once, I'm not alone at one of these things. "Oooh, take a look at that one!" He hisses, pointing out a man in a button-down done from the top button down, khakis that hit two inches too high above the knee, and shoes that are only appropriate to wear as you lash your sailboat to the dock. "Very J.Crew," I tell him and roll my eyes, snickering into my drink. Liam snorts and sips his, shaking his head. "J.Crew has more style than that."

In the course of drinking too much, I found another non-foodie to add to my list of foodie friends. For all the wonderful things I can list about Kelly's friends, they all have the same item that could go in the center chunk of the pro-con Venn diagram...they're all foodies. Michael and Karen (the first two members of Kelly's "family" that I've met) are another pairing of foodie/non-foodie, and my first introduction into the Wine Widows Club. "I swear, sometimes it's like another language," Karen once told me. "You pick it up after a while...but still, I remember sitting there with all of his wine friends and not knowing what to say."

I lose sight of Kelly within an hour (a new record), but still have Liam to keep me company. "It's such a small town," he says and orders us another drink of something that I can't name but belongs on Carmen Miranda's head. "I can't go anywhere without running into someone I've boffed." I laugh, if only because Kelly has run into some industry person at almost every night/morning we've risked outside his apartment. "You have no idea," I tell him and wave to two more of Kel's friends that I've come to know over the past few months...two more of my new foodie friends.