Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer

watching you undress—”
    “I know. I felt it.”
    “You look every bit as beautiful as you did ten years ago.”
    “That’s plainly untrue. But thank you.”
    “It’s true to me.”
    “Thank you.”
    And Jacob would have found himself in the middle of the invisible bridge, above the chasm of potential hurt, at the farthest point from safety: “Why do you think we aren’t having sex?”
    And Julia would have stood beside him and, without looking down, said, “Maybe because the expectation is so great?”
    “Could be. And we’re genuinely tired.”
    “I know I am.”
    “I’m going to say something that isn’t easy to say.”
    “You’re safe,” she would have promised.
    He would have turned to her and said, “We never talk about how I can’t get hard sometimes. Do you ever think it’s you?”
    “I do.”
    “It isn’t you.”
    “Thank you for saying that.”
    “Julia,” he would have said, “it isn’t you.”
    But he didn’t say anything, and neither did she. Not because the words were deliberately withheld, but because the pipeline between them was too occluded for such bravery. Too many small accumulations: wrong words, absences of words, imposed quiet, plausibly deniable attacks on known vulnerabilities, mentions of things that needn’t be mentioned, misunderstandings and accidents, moments of weakness, tiny acts of shitty retribution for tiny acts of shitty retribution for tiny acts of shitty retribution for an original offense that no one could remember. Or for no offense at all.
    They didn’t recede from each other that night. They didn’t roll to opposite sides of the bed, or withdraw into two silences. They held each other and shared a silence in the darkness. But it was silence. Neither suggested they explore the room with their eyes closed, as they’d done the last time they were there. They explored the room independently, in their minds, beside each other. And in Jacob’s jacket pocket was the stopped clock—a decade of 1:43—which he’d been waiting for just the right moment to reveal.
i’ll keep making you cum after you beg me to stop
    In the hardware gallery parking lot, she sat in her car—her Volvo like everybody else’s, in a color she knew was wrong the second after it was impossible to change her mind—not knowing what to do with herself, knowing only that she had to do something. She wasn’t sufficiently adept with her phone to waste the kind of time she needed to waste. But she could squander at least a little. She found the company that made her favorite architectural model trees. They weren’t the most realistic, they weren’t even well made. She didn’t like them because they evoked trees but because they evoked the sadness that trees evoke—the way an out-of-focus photograph might best capture its subject’s essence. It was extremely unlikely that the manufacturer intended any of that, but it was possible, and it didn’t matter.
    They were featuring a new line of autumn trees. Who could be the market for such things? Orange Maple, Red Maple, Yellow Maple, Autumn Sycamore, Light Orange Aspen, Yellowing Aspen, Turning Maple, Turning Sycamore. She imagined a tiny, younger Jacob, and a tiny, younger Julia, in a tiny, scratched and dinged Saab, driving shoelace roads bordered by an infinity of tiny, turning trees, under an infinity of tiny, massive stars, and like the trees, the tiny young couple weren’t realistic, or well made, and they didn’t evoke their bigger, older selves, but they evoked the sadness that they would grow to evoke.
    Mark tapped her window. She tried rolling it down and realized the car needed to be on, but the key wasn’t in the ignition or in her hand, and she didn’t have it in her to go through her bag, so she clumsily opened the door.
    “I’ll see you at the Model UN trip.”
    “What?”
    “In a couple of weeks. I’m the male chaperone.”
    “Oh. I didn’t know that.”
    “So we can continue our talk then.”
    “I