Kid. Heya. Well I’d love to see you. I got a couple of things . . . But I can try.
In that instant, Lina feels no pain. She takes medication for her fibromyalgia but nothing helps and when the anxiety creeps in about her life slipping away she can actually feel the pain in her bones. There are people, like Lina’s parents, who say it’s bullshit. They think that pain from an injury or a disease is more crippling. They think Lina’s pain isn’t physical. They say it’s all in her head.
She gets to the dinner portion of the bachelorette party at P.F. Chang’s. The women have ordered the chicken lettuce wraps. They are drinking sweet white wine. They greet Lina politely, the bride-to-be wraps her in an embrace. None of them know what’s going on at home. They go back to talking about the new supermarket and The Bachelor.
After dinner the women go on to a bar, don penis hats, and remove cardigans to reveal one-shoulder shirts. They laugh loudly and order volcano drinks and Lina laughs along with them, but she is very far away, smiling inside herself, imagining what it would be like if her secret visitor came to her room later; if, after all these years, she were to touch his beautiful face.
There is a knock at the door. She feels like someone in a movie.
She has the television on and has been waiting for the knock and trying to watch a program in the right sort of offhanded way; she’s been trying to be in a breezy frame of mind, to have an elegant flush to her cheek and a bright, cool glint in her eye, but then the knock comes and all of her preparations are dashed. The second Aidan knocks, any game for which she has been training is lost in an instant by her own florid heart.
She opens the hotel room door. She hasn’t seen him in over fifteen years except on Facebook, holding his kids and cutting a large, blue anniversary cake with his wife.
Now here he is at the door. Aidan.
He’s bigger, with a considerable gut where once there was a six-pack, but she thinks he is as gorgeous as ever.
Ed is smaller than Lina but Aidan is so much bigger. He is a loaf of a man. He’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt and work pants and his hair is buzz-cut. He’s a little drunk, having come from his stepfather’s funeral by way of a bar in between. He drinks cans of beer and his breath always has that taste, which Lina has come to associate with pure passion. For all these years, every time she smelled Michelob Light, the tang of light beer in a can, she felt a tingle between her legs.
Hey, Kid, he says.
Hey yourself.
They sit down on the bed. He’s not a talker. He never was. She asks trivial questions and stares at him. She shakes her head at his beautiful face, as though she can’t believe he’s in the same room with her.
It takes years to get to the first kiss, maybe it’s only minutes but to Lina it feels like years. She grasps him, gently, at the chin and brings his face to hers. She inhales the acid of his breath. At first it is unsure and slow and gentle and then it explodes off a precipice, into something that cannot be contained between their mouths.
The way he French-kisses me, she will tell the discussion group later, it’s like he’s inside my body and flipping a big ole switch and I just turn on, all of me lights up. She will shudder, recalling the weight of his firm tongue.
Lina has lived an entire lifetime between her first kiss with Aidan and this kiss with Aidan. She has gotten married and had two children and more than one golden retriever has died and she has peeled four thousand garlic cloves. But the whole time it’s as though she has been a sleeping beauty in between these two kisses.
The way he French-kisses me, she will say, is the best kissing in the whole world. She says this so many times the other women will have no choice but to believe her.
One of her favorite movies is The Princess Bride, and in that movie Peter Falk narrates the three truest-love kisses of all time, and this first adult kiss with Aidan and all the kisses to follow are Lina’s real-life Princess Bride. The other women might judge