Free The Humbling by Philip Roth

But it's not her sexuality on its own that does it—it's us. It's we who endow her with the power to wreck. Pegeen's nobody, you know."
    "You wouldn't be suffering so if she were nobody. She wouldn't be here if she were nobody. Look, you might as well step inside. Then you can see everything up close." And he could hear more about Pegeen, seared though her observations would be by Pegeen's having "exploited" her. Yes, he wanted to hear her speak out of the depths of her wound about the closest person on earth to him.
    "This has been more than enough," the dean said.
    "Come inside," he said.
    "No."
    "Are you afraid of me?" he asked.
    "I've done something foolish for which I apologize. I've trespassed and I'm sorry. And now I'd like you to let me go."
    "I'm not holding you. You have a way of trying to turn the moral tables on me. But I didn't invite you here in the first place."
    "Then why do you want me to come inside? Because of the triumph it would be to sleep with the woman that Pegeen used to sleep with?"
    "I have no such ambition. I'm satisfied with things as they are. I was being polite. I could offer you a cup of coffee."
    "No," the dean said coldly. "No, you want to fuck me."
    "Is that what you want me to want?"
    "That is what you want."
    "Is that what you came here to try to get me to do? So as to pay Pegeen back in kind?"
    All at once she could conceal her misery no longer and burst into tears. "Too late, too late," she sobbed.
    He did not understand what she was referring to, but he didn't ask. She cried with her face buried in her hands while he turned and, with the gun at his side, went back into the house through the rear door, trying to believe that nothing Louise had said about Pegeen, either there outside the house or the night before on the phone, could possibly be taken seriously.
    When he called Pegeen that night he made no reference to what had happened that afternoon nor did he tell Pegeen about Louise's visit when she came for the weekend, nor, while they were having sex, was he able to keep the red-haired Valkyrie out of his mind and the fantasy of what hadn't happened.

3. The Last Act
    T HE PAIN FROM the spinal condition made it impossible for him to fuck her from above or even from the side, and so he lay on his back and she mounted him, supporting herself on her knees and her hands so as not to lower her weight onto his pelvis. At first she lost all her know-how up there and he had to guide her with his two hands to give her the idea. "I don't know what to do," Pegeen said shyly. "You're on a horse," Axler told her. "Ride it." When he worked his thumb into her ass she sighed with pleasure and whispered, "Nobody's ever put anything in there before"—"Unlikely," he whispered back—and when later he put his cock in there, she took as much as she could of it until she couldn't take any more. "Did it hurt?" he asked her. "It hurt, but it's you." Often she would hold his cock
in her palm afterward and stare as the erection subsided. "What are you contemplating?" he asked. "It fills you up," she said, "the way dildos and fingers don't. It's alive. It's a living thing." She quickly mastered riding the horse, and soon while she worked slowly up and down she began to say, "Hit me," and when he hit her, she said mockingly, "Is that as hard as you can do it?" "Your face is already red." "Harder," she said. "Okay, but why?" "Because I've given you permission to do it. Because it hurts. Because it makes me feel like a little girl and it makes me feel like a whore. Go ahead. Harder."
    She had a small plastic bag of sex toys that she brought with her one weekend, and she spilled them out on the sheets when they were getting ready for bed. He'd seen his share of dildos, but never, other than in pictures, the strap-on leather harness that held the dildo secure and enabled one woman to mount and penetrate another. He'd asked her to bring her toys with her, and now he watched as she pulled the harness over