On April 13 some people’s mothers died, some people’s children ran away from home, some people moved to another continent to start a new life. For Lina, April 13 marks the day when she felt loved. When she took possession of everything she wanted and when she, in turn, was possessed by the universe. There was a lightness in her bones. She was able, for once, to experience the joy of love and not just its strangling pain.
Aidan was wide awake when she got to the hotel. Not only awake, but present. He sat beside her many times—on the bed, on the couch. In fact, there were multiple moments when he came to her. He wasn’t on his phone and he wasn’t drinking. He was attentive. Talkative. He asked her questions about Della’s birthday party, which had come and gone in the flurry of parental activity that existed on its own plane. He had follow-up questions about her answers.
She felt comfortable and pleasant and nice. She noted these emotions, wrote them down, because she so rarely felt them.
They made love several times. Lina will tell the women at the discussion group, she will tell whichever friends will listen—those who have had their own affairs and won’t judge her—how wonderful a lover Aidan is. That he is an exalted being in the realm of lovemaking.
In school she studied psychology, and she remembers bits of Freud: “The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.”
But this is not true of Aidan. Aidan is not the same in sex as he is in life. He can be an asshole in life, a loser, but in bed he becomes something else entirely. A lord.
When Lina first walked into the room, she had put the television on. She stared at the screen because she didn’t expect any conversation. But instead of going into the bathroom with his phone, as he usually did, Aidan brought a restaurant menu over and sat on the bed beside her. She just about jumped. He wrapped one arm around her and gently rubbed her back while holding the menu with his other hand so that she could see it.
What would you like to get? he asked.
I don’t know, she said.
They contemplated ribs, burgers. He was open to anything she wanted. Lina was not hungry and nothing appealed to her but she didn’t want to ruin the mood. The mood was so perfect.
It took her a few minutes to become comfortable with his affection. To stop shaking. Slowly, so as not to startle him, so as not to disrupt any vibrations in the atmosphere, she slipped her left arm behind him and began to run her palm up and down his back very softly and affectionately. She could have lived in that moment forever. If he never moved, she knew she wouldn’t move either.
After some time, he got up. She retrieved her hand and looked at it. He picked up the phone and called in the order. He went to the bathroom, talking to her all the while. She felt comfortable enough to walk in there as he peed and then splashed water on his face.
They had never talked so much. They walked out of the bathroom together, just talk talk talking. They moved to the edge of the bed and absently watched television together, laughing occasionally about something on the screen. They sat very close.
He began to lean his body into hers and her pelvis heated up. She was tingling all over. She badly wanted him inside her but at the same time she didn’t want the moment to end. She worried that fucking might erase it.
He looked at her then, in a way that made her nearly cry. In fact, she’d caught him looking at her a lot that night and it made her feel so good that she figured he’d never really looked at her before. She laid her head down on his lap because she couldn’t handle having his eyes on her. His gaze made her heart thrum violently against her ribs. She considered every move she made; she tried to quantify how much of it was her thinking about what the best thing to do might be, to keep him engaged, versus what her body naturally wanted to do.
He bent down and kissed her. He kissed her ears and her neck and her lips. It felt like crystals exploding under