Columbus is beautiful this time of year.

Columbus, Texas that is.

I'm dropping Intro to Chem. I'm not getting the hang of the class. It's part the professor and part me. I'd rather retake it next semester than stick with it and do poorly. This is germane to this post only for one reason: doing this means I have Thursdays off. Also germane only for a similar reason: the ex has been taking the girls Wednesdays & Thursdays because those are the days he has off work. They also, coincidentally, are the days my sweetie has off work.

So Wednesday afternoon he and I were chatting on Facebook, as we generally do in the afternoons/evenings and he asked what I was doing and I told him I was trying not to think about the fact that we both had Thursday off. He said something about College Station being 200 miles away for both of us, and I asked him how something 200 miles away from me can be halfway from a guy who lives only 300 miles away. He said it was the closest-to-midway city of halfway decent size that he knew of. So I pulled up Google and plugged his home town and mine into their mapping system and told him that it looked as if Columbus was about halfway. Columbus is also bisected by I-10.

So we joked around for about half and hour before he said we should hit the road. Are we doing this? Yes, yes we are.

So about an hour and a half later (two hours after the idea was floated, more or less), I was on I-10 headed east and he was on I-10 headed west. We know each others' names, of course, and each others' faces and we talked about what we drove and what we'd be wearing...all of the stuff that I suppose is typical for something like this. Or maybe not, but who cares?

My friend Marie had said of he and I that if we were that into each other, we wouldn't wait around for the planned November visit, we'd get it done ASAP, driving to meet each other halfway if need be. And you know what? I think she was right. Because it got to a point for both of us where the ridiculousness of not putting in the two and a half hours or so to see each other was just overwhelming and we had to do it.

I have been trying to avoid overplaying my hand. Trying to avoid any man I thought might be a real danger to my heart. Fred was never a danger to me that way. My sweetheart is. Not that I think he'd ever hurt me--he is the only other person I know who is as honest as I am, and who values forthrightness as much.

The truth is, you see, that I love him and he loves me and though I'm not going to say "Well, this is how it will be"...hand to God I feel about him a way I never felt about my ex-husband, though I did love Rob.

So we met up at a hotel just off the interstate. I got there first and hit HEB, because that is just what you do in this part of Texas to kill time. Then I went back to the hotel parking lot and read Eats, Shoots and Leaves (the title of which I put in here just to amuse him--I told him I'd brought a book, but not which) and looked up every time I heard a vehicle pass--and being that I was sitting in a parking lot right beside an on-ramp, this was an awful lot. Even growing up here, I never took note of all the pickup trucks until I was looking for one in particular.

But he did get there and I got out of my car as he was getting out of his truck and the Heavens parted and the angels sang...OK, not really. Actually, he wrapped his arms around me and he kissed me and I kissed him and the mosquitos decided it was the perfect time to have a late dinner on my feet.

Other than my kids, I haven't slept with another person in bed with me in I don't know how long. Longer than I'd like to admit. I kept waking up and looking at him in the light that was coming in through the window from the back parking lot. Yeah, he's real. Yeah, he's still there.

And that, my friends, is the short (really) version of how I woke up with the Pistolero in bed with me.

And because, as I said before, the cardinal rule of the Internet is pictures or it didn't happen:

There is more to it--a lot more--but I shall leave it to him to tell what he wants to tell. Suffice to say that him being who he is it involved weaponry and old country music, and that fucking rocks, y'all.