Steve is Not a "Crisis Gay"

The Scene: I'm driving Steve and myself home from a hike. We're in the red Mini Cooper.

I feel a tickle on the back of my neck, reach back and touch something... a small fuzzy bump... that's moving.

"A bee!" I say, immediately snatching it in my fingers. Too late. STICK! I feel it sting the back of my neck and I let go of the insect. "It stung me," I say low and steady, trying to remain calm.

"You're allergic," Steve says, worry in his voice. It's true, though I've never fallen into anaphylactic shock. But the last time I was stung on a finger my whole hand swelled up, so I am nervous. Then, as we stop at a red light, I feel something again.

"It's in my shirt!" I yell, yanking off my thermal and T-shirt and toss them... into Steve's lap.

"Don't throw it at me!" he screams, shaking the shirt. "It's in there! I can hear it! It's in there!"

To be fair, Steve's bruiser father, military brother, and he all hate buzzy flying things. They usually deal with such encounters by screaming.

"Ahhhhhh!" he screams as I begin to accelerate and the bee starts buzzing around his face. I know the stinger is in my neck. I know the bee is, for the most part, on its way to dead town. But still, it's buzzing and he's screaming.

"Open the window!" I command, trying not to think of my swelling neck while not swerving across Hollywood Boulevard and hitting a tourist.

"It'll fly at me!" he screams back, flailing about. So I roll down the window... and true enough, the bee does not fly out it flies right at Steve's face again. "Wewewewewewewewewe!" he screams and tosses my shirt out the window.

The bee remains in the moving car.

I grab my thermal, whap the bee into the back seat, and it remains there until we get home. I do force Steve to use tweezers to get the stinger out of my neck, then put peroxide on the wound. One Benedryl later and I am not dead. I do have a bump on the back of my neck but that's it. Crisis averted.

Upon telling the story to Amy, who experienced a similar crisis at our friend Troy and Craig's wedding, and where I swooped in to save her dress emergency while Steve sat crouched on the couch eating Doritos to sooth his panic, the answer was very simple. "You're a Crisis Gay," she said. "Steve is cute, but he's most definitely NOT a Crisis Gay."

Truth.