I’m poking at his arm hair. I remark on how it’s a completely different color than his chest hair. He says something about his leg hair, and I throw off the covers to inspect. My face is inches away from his leg.

We’re lying in his bed, facing each other. Both his arms are wrapped around me. My face is buried in the crook of his neck as he holds me tight.

I poke at his Adam’s Apple. He asks me if I’m hungry. I lean in to nibble at it, making silly munching sounds and causing him to squirm away, guffawing.

He asks me a question. The world spins in and out of focus. Everything lurches as I lie still. It’s probably because I skipped dinner last night and didn’t eat a proper lunch, but I like to think that it’s him.

I bite my lip. “Mmrnph,” I mumble.

“Ready to give it a try?” he asks. I nod, and we switch positions.

Clutch. Brake. Emergency brake. Neutral. First gear. I take my foot off the brake and glacially ease my foot off the clutch. Slowly, slowly. Nothing happens. I keep going. An eternity later, or maybe only 5 seconds, my new car lurches into forward motion. I’ve shifted into first gear.

Later, we lie in bed, our limbs tangled, skin touching. It’s late. We’re tired, stuffed with food, and covered in a lingering blanket of cigar smoke. I sniff my hair and his. It’s my hair. There’s no trace of cigar in his hair or rum on his breath. It rolls right off him, leaving him untouched. He grazes the back of my neck with his fingertips, triggering a twinge in my groin. I am overwhelmed, feeling simultaneously vulnerable and protected. I want him to bite me there. Hold me down and do things to me. Teach me skills no one else knows. I want to forget the rest of the world and everything outside my bed.

He places a protective hand on my head when we sleep. I haven’t slept properly in a week, but I’m wide awake. As comforting as it is to be in his arms, I want to stay up just a little longer to breathe him in. When I turn, he turns with me and envelops me in his arms. We shift, I catch a whiff, and the whole world snaps into over-sharp focus. It’s a moment of existential exultation. Clean and masculine and subtle, it arouses something primal and visceral in me. He radiates it through his clothes and I whimper inside. Millenia of evolution make my body ache to mate with his, to produce progeny with a superior immune system.

The next morning, it lingers in my sheets. My favorite part of someone new: appreciating all the little things you forgot you missed. I’m dizzy drunk delighted at life’s possibilities. And happy.

“Talk me down.”
“Whats the matter?”
“Same thing as before.”
“Stop it. You’re better than that.”

A fine thread of happiness weaving its way across my vision.

“Do you think you have a high self esteem?”
“No.”
“It probably accounts for a lot of your malarky.”
“Malarky?”
“Malarky. Tomfoolery. Shenanigans.”
“Malarky.”
“Anyway. Today isn’t over yet. You agreed to speak your mind. So what’s on your mind, kiddo?”

I like what it does to me. How it makes me feel. The person it inspires me to be.

“You’re going to tell me to tell him that.”
“I wasn’t, actually. If you were predisposed to take that advice, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Okay. Tell me something else.”
“I already threw out both of those, and you didn’t bite to either.”

I want to reach out and grasp it, but it’s so new and small and delicate. I wouldn’t know how to fix it.

“Do you know what would make you happy? It’s non-rhetorical.”
“No.”
“That’s a problem, then.”

And if I did manage to snag it? What else would it dredge up? All those questions that I left unanswered so long ago. Lurking. Waiting.

His bedroom is a vague mix of San Francisco and Oriental, with sheets that he has picked out himself. For him of course it would be unacceptable otherwise. Thirty is incomprehensibly old. A lifetime of milestones past twenty-two — twenty-three, now. He has had half a lifetime to perfect these little touches; three times longer.

That’s why, unprompted, he puts an arm around me. It’s a gesture that is at once completely natural and absolutely free from anxiety and neuroticism. He kisses me. I note that this is the first time in three months that I have been kissed outside of bed. I snuggle against his body, soft and warm. We, too, are watching TV on his couch. But we are watching with no prologue of awkward negotiation or compromise. On his couch that is much larger than it needs to be to hold him, holding me.

Two days later we meet up somewhere. He hugs and kisses me hello. I’d forgotten that people do this sort of thing. It took me much too long to figure out how desperately I crave touch, and to realize how I’d been living a string of little deaths. I am euphoric, though it probably doesn’t show. He leaves my skin prickly and electric: I can almost hear it hum.

He is a checklist of everything I was looking for 10 years ago, and I don’t know what that means.

The server-side configuration doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere, so I looked through the code to find the property to set: webdriver.firefox.bin

Mac OS X:
java -jar "[path to selenium server]" -Dwebdriver.firefox.bin="[path to Firefox.app]/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin"

Example:
java -jar "/Applications/My Folder/selenium-server-standalone-2.2.0.jar" -Dwebdriver.firefox.bin="/Applications/My Folder/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin"

Windows:
java -jar "[path to selenium server]" -Dwebdriver.firefox.bin="[path to firefox.exe]"

Example:
java -jar "C:\Documents and Settings\MyUsername\Desktop\selenium-server-standalone-2.2.0.jar" -Dwebdriver.firefox.bin="C:\Program Files\Some Folder\Firefox\firefox.exe"

(of course, you can also use backslash to escape the paths instead of double quotes)