and until you have felt my pain, you shouldn’t judge me. Women shouldn’t judge one another’s lives, if we haven’t been through one another’s fires.
Aidan uses the towel she brought from the bathroom and wipes his semen off her stomach and stands up and tries to put her jeans on and says, Hey, Kid, these almost fit! He laughs down in his throat and she swallows her spit down. Her heart is beating so fast she thinks it’s going to run away. She thinks, Oh gosh, please don’t leave.
He starts putting his own pants back on without showering. His crotch is sticky with her blood and his semen.
Hey, bud, she says. Dontcha wanna clean up before you go home?
But Aidan says he doesn’t have to, that he’s been sleeping with the dogs the past few nights. Lina guesses that means he’s been passing out in the living room or the basement. His wife won’t smell the blood of another woman on him. Only the dogs will.
Maggie
Maggie walks, atremble, into Knodel’s speech and debate classroom. This is first day of school after the break and she has missed all of her classes, except this one. Earlier that morning she’d found out her cousin passed away, suddenly and unexpectedly, the night before. She is shocked and unmoored, but she could not miss this class. She could not not see him. It’s the only thing that might help. She wears her fallen cousin’s old yellow soccer shirt and a pair of maroon University of Minnesota sweatpants, because she really wants to go to school there.
She hasn’t seen her teacher in weeks and yet everything between them is changed. She wonders if it’s all been in her head. It has, in any case, been in her phone. She worries about how he will act toward her, if he’ll be distant. She can feel her heart breaking in anticipation. She finds her seat and then she looks at him, and it’s perfect.
The way he looks at her is absolutely perfect.
He has this way of normalizing a situation while also acknowledging the spark. It’s hard to put her finger on what, exactly, it is that he does. She is in thrall to it. The way he smiles at her as he would at any other student, yet with an added tilt of his head that seems to say, Here I am, and there you are.
He slips a DVD into the player. It’s The Great Debaters, a movie Maggie had recommended to him the year before.
She can barely concentrate on the screen. She feels him watching her the whole time. When their eyes meet, he grins. He is utterly comfortable. Here is a man at man’s best, she thinks. Divinely sensible, wholesomely carnal, wearing a drugstore cologne but possessing the strut of a movie star. He watches with his rear on the edge of his desk and his palms on either side of his legs, the way that young male teachers sit. Holy shit, she thinks, did he make it a movie day so that he could look at me and we could share these thoughts in the dark?
She can feel his eyes moving along the length of her body, admiring her hair, her clavicle—schoolgirl parts, but parts of her all the same. For the length of the film her face is warm like it’s been resting in an open oven. She’s smiling, too, a bemused and dogged smile, as though her ears are pulling the ends of her mouth in opposite directions. She tries, a few times, to undo it by pursing her lips, and then by blinking her eyes.
The first of many exhilarating moments comes on a Sunday. In the future she will think of it as the first date.
Maggie is at Melani’s house. She doesn’t say anything to Melani about lovecrush. This muteness, which is virtually insufferable for a teenage girl, turns their whole friendship into a lie, because of how large lovecrush looms and how it overshadows all other things, so that when they speak about parties and classes and clothes and television, Maggie feels she is being a fake.
Maggie missed going to church in the morning with her parents so she’s supposed to make it up by herself in the evening. She’s getting set to leave Melani’s for Mass when her phone double-buzzes and it’s him.
What are you doing?
This question, because she is simultaneously at the apex of lovecrush and unsure of his position, whereabouts, and schedule, cannot be answered truthfully. It