As the summer of 2004 progressed, Angel and I spent more and more time together. I helped her find an apartment, pack up her house, and move boxes to and from a storage facility. Once she moved into her own place, we started being regular companions. I was relatively free, as a Stanford faculty member, since it was summer. We started shopping together sometimes and often met at restaurants for meals. After Labor Day weekend, we became much closer. I started dropping by almost every night, and we'd talk for hours. We talked about everything -- the news, politics, music, movies, relationships, real estate, computers, books, TV, clothes, health, our pasts and our present. Occasionally, we would talk about our friendship, that it was odd and unprecedented for both of us to have such a close friendship with someone of the opposite sex.
By July, three months after we'd met, I knew very well that I was attracted to her physically, as well as all the other ways. But she'd made it clear on a number of occasions that she wasn't interested in our friendship becoming romantic, so I cooled those jets best that I could. The truth was I could think about nothing else much of the time; I'd become obsessed, mesmerized by her. I loved the way she thought, and how she used words. She became ever more beautiful to my eyes, her gestures were a visual poetry for me, and her laughter was music.
It was hard to convince her to get out of the house in those days, so my invitations to events were usually turned down. But she went with me to a Giants' baseball game one night, and had a grand time. Among the crowd, she spotted a girl with copper-colored hair, and said, "I want her hair." Soon after she dyed her hair a similar shade.
I'd gotten her a small design job creating material for a event at U-C, Berkeley, where Sy Hersh was to speak. The night of the event, I managed to convince her to come along with me. She stuck close to my side the whole evening, saying she didn't like crowds or parties. I introduced her to a bunch of people backstage, including Sy, then I introduced him to the crowd of 1,000 waiting in the auditorium.
Afterward, she and I had dinner together near campus. Later that night, after I had dropped her at her apartment and returned to my neighborhood, I had to park several blocks away from my house. A gentle rain was falling. I remember feeling ecstatic as I walked home in this rain. "Life is so beautiful," I told myself. She now felt closer to me than ever before.
A week later was to be an even more interesting event. She had committed to go with me to the coming-out party celebrating BIG magazine's San Francisco edition, which I had edited. The party was going to be held in a fantastic venue, a castle-like structure in Bayview, with natural underground freshwater pools, on the site of an old independent water company.
Neither of us yet knew it, but that night would turn out to be a turning point for us.
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