is specific about why he loves her. Two of the reasons are the way she smells, the way she walks into a room. The letter also speaks of the future, how he cannot wait until the day they can be together. She has never before felt any of the feelings that the letter makes her feel. Everything she has ever wanted is wrapped up in one person. It is almost too convenient to be real.
He has begun to call her Love. Which is what she calls people. He says that on her eighteenth birthday, they will skip school and make love. The whole day, they will be entwined.
Around this time, she gives him her copy of Twilight, the first book in the series. She is obsessed with the correlation between the story of the human girl and her vampire lover and the story of herself and Aaron. Both love stories are forbidden and passionate and timeless. He tells her he is making notes in Twilight, and she is so happy, so elated, that she makes him read it fast because she can’t wait to see how he has interpreted it. She wonders where he is when he reads it. Perhaps he keeps it in the children’s room, on the shelf with The Gruffalo, and volunteers to put the kids to bed each night so that he can sit by the night-light and read it after they fall asleep.
He returns the book a week or so later, filled with Post-it notes, little yellow tabs sticking out like plumes.
One note says that he cannot wait to wake up cuddling next to her.
One says, “Remember when I turned down the heat?” He means in his basement when she came over and they said I love you a hundred times and he fingered her and ate her out and they kissed and she bled on the comforter. He turned down the heat so she would ask for a blanket.
“I wanted to be alone with my perpetual savior,” Bella the human girl says of her vampire lover. A yellow tab beside it reads, “Is this how you feel about me?”
Another paragraph is highlighted and beside it a note says, “Without conditions, like our love!”
There are people who will say that nothing that happened was against her will. That she was seventeen. In another few months it wouldn’t even be statutory rape. But imagine a girl, who has idealized a fairy-tale love story, reading notes effectively saying, Yes, yes, I am your vampire lover and you are my forbidden fruit. We are your favorite love story. For the rest of your life, nothing will taste like this.
Can you imagine.
She calls him her manfriend. They agree that boyfriend is silly. After all, he’s a married man. Their love is not like Sammy and her boyfriend’s or Melani and hers. He is not a boy, so how could he be a boyfriend?
All around her kids start to make plans for the senior prom. Her friends go shopping for dresses in bright hues of rayon.
To Maggie, the idea of prom seems suddenly uncool. So small and young and forgettable. There were two boys, right before she and Aaron got together, whom she had been seeing, and she would probably have gone to prom with one of them. One was a coworker of hers and Aaron did not, even before their flirtation began, approve of him. The other went to a different school but Aaron knew him from student congress. He gave Maggie a hickey that Aaron noticed. Back then Aaron said he didn’t like the guy very much. He said it offhandedly, Maggie comes to realize, in the way that smart people say they don’t like other people so that the person they are trying to control will adopt the same opinion.
Maggie says on the phone one night that she isn’t going to prom, because she thinks it would be weird. Aaron lets her statement hover in the air. He doesn’t say anything.
That same evening they have the conversation about how many sexual partners each of them has had. Maggie has had three and Aaron says he’s only had two—Marie and his high school sweetheart. Marie was his college sweetheart. Maggie wonders at what point someone stops being a sweetheart and becomes the next thing. He asks her about the ones she has been with. Mateo, plus the two others. He wants to know about them but at the same time he says he hates thinking about them. He