lot for him to kiss you and want to make love to you the way you want to be made love to.
But fuck Ed, because Ed is over. Ed is dead.
After it’s over that day with Aidan, after Lina comes a second time, she turns on the radio and says, So the Cubs got hammered Sunday.
Hmm, he says.
Oh! Did I tell ya Danny was in the bath yesterday and the water bubbled and I said Danny! Did you just toot in the tub? And he said, Momma! I just tooted in the tub!
Aidan laughs. He is about to say something and she goes, Shh for a sec, let me hear about the Cubs, and she turns up the radio. This is a huge victory for her. To be the one who pretends there is something to her life beyond him. He smirks. She turns to look out the window at the brown river and the trees. He grabs her face and starts kissing her. He is the best kisser in the world. It’s her Princess Bride moment. A few months from now she will try to plan an all-girls Princess Bride party that would include watching and then drinking wine afterward in her hot tub. Just two people will reply and one of them will say she needs two weeks’ notice to take off work and the other will send a frowning face and say, It’s my hubby’s birthday weekend!
When Aidan kisses her like this, it’s impossible to enjoy herself in the moment. Her brain is congested with thinking about the end of their time together. These are the moments she must imprint. Some people, among them her doctor who prescribes her progesterone, say, There’s a whole world out there, Lina. Everything is waiting for you. It pisses her off so much because these people are in happy places in their lives.
That he kissed her first, before she could kiss him, made her feel she had won something. Even in love Lina understands there is competition—a frantic need to be the one who will hurt less than the other. She was also victorious after they made love, in pretending she cared more about the Cubs than what Aidan had to say. But now she becomes again a tangle of need and anxiety. She feels like her mother.
She quietly murmurs that she doesn’t want him to go. That she doesn’t want him to stop kissing her. He gives her several short but wonderfully passionate kisses. She moans sexily and says, More, more, more. To last me another month before we see each other again.
The next kiss is the most unbelievable one she’s had in her life. He pulls her into him and keeps kissing and kissing and kissing and kissing. His tongue is moving in her mouth and never once comes out. She moans inside his mouth. He keeps pressing into her so much that his mouth is bringing her lower and lower into his lap and they kiss and moan there together for a very long time.
This is the only thing she has ever wanted. Lina believes that getting laid by the person you think is the most attractive at that moment is the most important biological need that many people subvert on an hourly basis.
He gives her one final, lingering kiss. Then Aidan walks out to pee into the brown trees. He gets a beer out of his truck and leans against his door and cracks the beer and stays for a few more minutes.
Later she will text him, Thank you for taking the time, for spending so much time with me today.
If you ask her how long it was she will say, Gee, I’d say it was almost thirty minutes.
Maggie
Gripping a rosary, Aaron Knodel takes the stand.
His lawyer begins the direct examination. The court is quieter than it has ever been. Hoy asks the Dickensian questions, where the defendant was born and where he lives. Aaron Knodel describes himself as a true native of North Dakota. He conjures the dark rivers and the long, flat roadways. He was born in Beulah, to two schoolteachers; his father died when Aaron was seven and his mother remarried a doctor. Six siblings from his mother’s two husbands, plus some adopted siblings from the Marshall Islands. Knodel was active in clubs and sports at Beulah High School. He graduated in 1997 and went on to NDSU, where he studied electrical engineering, he says, only to end up a teacher. In the courtroom