the boy that he still is even though he’s more of a man than anyone else she knows, and she gets hot across her whole face. She sees a thousand images the way it’s supposed to be when you die and not for your first kiss. She sees her mother at the foot of the stairs calling her lazy and she sees her father walking out the door, he keeps walking out the door and the door keeps closing behind him and her mother is saying, Lina clean up your filthy mess, Lina what are you going on about, Lina where are you up there, are you still in the damn bathroom, and she sees her sisters narrowing their eyes at her and she sees her pet rabbit that died in the night and in the morning her mother made her scoop it out and she wanted to bury it but she sees the trash bag with the twisty ties, and she sees her father walking out the door and then all of a sudden this beautiful man’s lips are on her lips, she feels his tongue slip inside her mouth and it’s something she’s only imagined and read about in a book she and a friend shared called How to Kiss which talked about tongues moving around like goldfish, but her tongue and his tongue are not like goldfish, they are not tongues at all but actual souls, moving against the wet bone of teeth. Lina feels that she could die right now, that if she did her life would be complete.
Aidan, she breathes into his mouth.
What’s up, Kid.
For some women, preparing to meet a lover is nearly as hallowed a time as the actual meeting. In some cases, it’s better, because at length the lover leaves, or someone loses interest, but the tender moments of anticipation remain. Like the way Lina can more easily remember the beauty of snow falling than the gray slush that lingers.
Lina stands naked and pale behind a yolk-colored curtain in a recessed rectangular shower stall, holding her mouth open to the stream, pushing her wet hair back the way that girls in movies do—one thumb over each ear and both palms at the top of the head, then smoothing the wet hair back. She shaves her legs and her pubic area, leaving what she’d heard some older girls call a landing strip. She soaps herself with Camay, taking care to deeply clean the areas his mouth might kiss, scrubbing these areas harder, perhaps, than she should.
She times it perfectly so that her sister would be heading for the bathroom just as Lina is on her way back to their shared room, so she could be alone. Naked on her bed, on top of her towel, she caresses pink lotion into her skin, not missing a single spot. Then she applies makeup but not too much because he had once made a comment about overly made-up girls, how they were trying to look older but they succeeded only in looking whorish.
She blows her hair out in large sections so that it will lie straight but full of body, so that it might bounce across her back and shoulders as she walks.
She applies perfume behind her ears, at the backs of the knees, and on the insides of her wrists. It’s a lemony floral scent evocative of beach house afternoons, of iced tea with mint leaves, and clean breezes.
The perfume is the final thing to go on, so that it lasts. Lina will be silently pissed if she passes a smoker along the way. Aidan is a smoker and yet she wants to come to him clean, not smelling of cigarettes, even though the chances he’ll be smoking when she approaches him are high.
There is a nervous, weightless feeling in her bowels, as if she hasn’t eaten in days. She has, in fact, been eating less, because that is what love does, Lina has begun to see. It feeds and eviscerates you at once, so that you’re full but you are also empty. You don’t want food or the company of others. You want only the one you love, and your thoughts of him. Everything else is a waste of energy, money, breath.
The secret place is a river, but it is more than a river. Even now, nearly two decades later, Lina thinks of the word river when she thinks of the secret place but it doesn’t fit. The problem is, there’s no better word