Surely he would not cross the lawn to make sure Sarah wasn’t crushing her clitoris over a white-knuckled fist in the passenger seat of her ex-boyfriend’s car, in the hope of the sort of orgasm that feels like one’s pleasure torn out by the root: a punishment for the pleasure as well as a final end of it. Still Sarah froze, heart racing in her chest, skull, and crotch. The scent of her lonely exertion wound into the car like an unwilled and shameful secretion, fear’s trickle of urine or mystery’s trickle of blood from the nose.
