be there. But something about the orgasm made her feel very cold, like something was taken from her. In the past, when she’s brought herself to orgasm, she never felt that way.
Although he has not technically been inside her in the traditional sense, she feels fucked. In this aftermath she senses a finality like death. She feels there is a hospital smell about her. This is not one-nightstand sex, she realizes. This is so much more. It’s terrific and warm and cold all at once. She fears that she may never actually enjoy sex. That she may forever be too worried over its blithe end. Her orgasm and his will be the death knell of her week, month, life. The end, though it murders her, is more euphoric than the start. Her heart breaks. She feels it breaking in every move he makes to put himself back together. At the same time that she feels this acute, carving pain, she also feels thrilled, lobotomized. It is the sexiest thing a man has ever done to her.
They tell each other a few more times that they love each other. He looks at her, she is sure, like he wants to marry her. She’s too young to know that men can be like this one day and then not need to see you for a week.
She says she has to go. She’s already late for her curfew. He walks her to the garage, where he kisses her good-bye. She barely absorbs anything. She’s very nervous. Her legs tremble like the balsa she uses in woodworking class.
At home, she wakes her parents so they know what time she got home. It’s one of their rules. She gets grounded because it’s past her curfew. Her mother looks at her with angerlove. She says something like, I will yell at you in the morning. Maggie feels very strange. She has done so much worse than break curfew. She wishes she could say so. She looks at her mother’s book by the bedside, and her heart cracks.
Back in her room, her phone is lit. It’s Aaron. Lovecrush comes back, filling all the cold holes the orgasm shot up in its wake.
Aaron is checking to see that she has gotten home. Good, he writes, you’re safe.
I’m safe, she replies.
Then he writes, I just went back in there, the spare bedroom, and it’s a good thing I did. You bled on the comforter.
Maggie is slightly surprised, as she did not have her period. She apologizes for bleeding because she feels that’s what he wants her to do.
He writes, If you had just unbuttoned my pants, it would have happened. I mean, I did want to wait until you were eighteen. I mean, I do. But if you had just.
Also, he says—because it’s easier to convey emotional gestures on text or through the phone—that he had wanted to give her a tour because he had laid down a blanket and a rose in the upstairs bedroom, and he wanted to read Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet 17 out loud to her and give her the rose. It was a sonnet he’d sent her often.
She feels exhilarated by this and also confused. His sons were sleeping upstairs.
He writes, Had you called me Mr. Knodel, I probably would have stopped everything right then.
She thinks, Thank God I didn’t call him Mr. Knodel.
Last, lest she forget, he says he had to wash the comforter on the bed because of the small amount of blood. He does not say whether he destained it first with a Tide pen or Shout gel. He does not say whether or not he used bleach.
• • •
Her cheeks are hot with loveflush for most of January and February. She spends a lot of time in her room because isolation allows her to be completely available to him. He calls on his way home from school if she isn’t working a shift at Buffalo Wild Wings. She showers when she gets home and waits, fresh, on the bed. She showers for his phone call. She likes to feel beautiful waiting for him. Her parents don’t bother her. It’s as though they know she’s a sort of Rapunzel; they can sense her inaccessibility.
At night he texts. Later in the evenings, after ten, he’ll usually call. The weekends are less free. If they talk on the weekend it’s because he leaves his house to call her or because Marie has gone shopping.
One weekend afternoon Marie goes to the mall with their elder