son and Aaron is at home with the younger one. It’s nap time but the child is not sleepy. Aaron is on the phone with Maggie and the boy asks, Who are you talking to? Aaron says, My friend, do you want to talk to her?
A small voice comes on the phone, saying, Hello?
Hello! Maggie says brightly.
It makes her feel strange but closer, also, to Aaron.
Aaron returns to the line and says he has to set the phone down for a moment, which he does for longer than a moment, and when he comes back again he says he didn’t want her to hear him sing “You Are My Sunshine” as his child fell asleep.
Because his wife doesn’t have any more overnight trips planned, their burgeoning physical relationship is limited to cars and classrooms.
Maggie has Aaron for fourth-period English, and after class one day he tells her, quietly, to meet him in his classroom during lunch.
They begin to kiss when she gets there, at the table by the cupboards. She’s wearing sweatpants because he likes it when she does. Sweatpants, he once told her, are “easy access.” He takes one of her hands and moves it onto his chest and says, Feel how fast my heart is beating. Then he takes her other hand and moves it onto the bulge of his dress pants. Feel how hard you make me.
She’s heard that line in movies before and has always wondered why men say it. Did Aaron want her to be captivated by the heft of his penis? Or proud about the absolute Good job! on her end, that she’d inspired an army of blood vessels to fatten the flesh out to this length and stiffness?
Some days they don’t do anything but talk and kiss. Like the day of parent-teacher conferences. Aaron wears a suit because he will be meeting parents all afternoon. He will speak to Maggie’s father, Mark. He tells Maggie he’d like her to stick around for the conference. At the time Maggie will think it’s because he just wants to see her as much as possible. In hindsight, she will wonder if it’s because Aaron got a rush from talking to her in front of her father, who was ignorant of the affair. At the meeting Aaron will say that Maggie is doing very well in school, that he’s aware she has not yet decided where she wants to go to college, but that good things will come, in time.
During their lunchtime date Maggie doesn’t eat but Aaron has some leftover spaghetti. She makes fun of him, says it looks nasty. They kiss after he’s done eating. She says, I didn’t realize we were sharing lunch today. She means that his breath, the whole room, is thick with the smell of his leftovers. The Tupperware is stained orange with the sauce.
Another time they meet in his classroom before school. He starts to kiss her, then he moves his hand down her pants. He turns her face and body away so the front of his body is pressed up against her back. Then he moves his face against the back of her neck. He lightly kisses her there, making her knees buckle with the sensation. Then he begins to finger her and to simultaneously grind himself against her backside. She casts her head back and moans. For seven minutes this goes on and she feels she might come at any moment. Then someone wiggles the knob on the door. Aaron jumps back like he’s been burned, deftly retrieving his hand. Like a man doing a parlor trick; he hands her a quiz—there is suddenly a quiz in her hand—and she sits down, breathlessly, and pretends to be taking it. Anyway, he didn’t have to be so careful. As it turned out, he’d remembered to lock the door.
A group of Maggie’s friends gather at someone’s house. It isn’t a remarkable evening except that a picture is taken, of Maggie and her friends Lora and Nicol, and the reason those three appear in a photograph is that they are the only blonds in the room—all the others are brunettes—and it’s funny, so they take a picture.
During the course of the evening Maggie looks at her phone a lot. Nobody seems to notice. Everybody looks at their phones a lot. She has been texting with Aaron the way any girl would text with her boyfriend when they are both out with others. Aaron is with Mr. Krinke at TGI Friday’s, near