The Circle

rubbed its tip with her index finger, and together they watched
     the numbers rise to 152.
    “You’re so easy to excite,” she said. “Imagine if something were really happening.”
    His eyes were closed. “Right,” he finally said, his breath labored.
    “You’re enjoying this?” she asked.
    “Mm-hm,” he managed.
    Mae thrilled at her power over him. Watching Francis, his hands on the bed, his penis
     straining against his pants, she thought of something she could say. It was corny,
     and she would never say it if she thought anyone would ever know she’d said it, but
     it made her smile, and she knew it would send Francis, this shy boy, over the edge.
    “What
else
does that measure?” she asked, and lunged.
    His eyes went wild, and he struggled with his pants, trying to remove them. But just
     as he pulled them to his thighs, a sound came from his mouth, something like “Oh god”
     or “I gotta,” just before he doubled over, his head jerking left and right until he
     crumpled on the bed, his head to the wall. She backed away, looking at him, his shirthiked up, his crotch exposed. She could think only of a campfire, one small log, all
     of it doused in milk.
    “Sorry,” he said.
    “No. I liked that,” she said.
    “That was about as sudden it’s ever happened with me.” He was still breathing heavily.
     And then some rogue synapse within her connected this scene to her father, to seeing
     him on the couch, helpless over his body, and she wanted badly to be somewhere else.
    “I should go,” she said.
    “Really? Why?” he said.
    “It’s after one, I should sleep.”
    “Okay,” he said, in a way that she found unappealing. He seemed to want her gone as
     much as she wanted to be gone.
    He stood and retrieved his phone, which had been propped upright on the cabinet, facing
     them.
    “What, were you filming us?” she joked.
    “Maybe,” he said, his tone making clear that he had.
    “Wait. Seriously?”
    Mae reached for the phone.
    “Don’t,” he said. “It’s mine.” He shoved it into his pocket.
    “It’s
yours
? What we just did is
yours
?”
    “It’s just as much mine as yours. And I was the one having you know, a climax. And
     why do you care? You weren’t naked or anything.”
    “Francis. I can’t believe this. Delete that. Now.”
    “Did you say ‘delete’?” he said, jokingly, but the meaning was clear:
We don’t delete at the Circle
. “I have to have a way to see it myself.”
    “Then
everyone
can see it.”
    “I won’t advertise it or anything.”
    “Francis. Please.”
    “C’mon, Mae. You have to understand how much this means to me. I’m not some stud.
     This is a rare occasion for me, to have something like this happen. Can’t I keep a
     memento of the experience?”
    “You can’t worry,” Annie said.
    They were in the Great Room of the Enlightenment. In a rare occurrence, Stenton was
     to give the Ideas talk, with the promise of a special guest.
    “But I
am
worrying,” Mae said. She’d been unable to concentrate in the week since her encounter
     with Francis. The video hadn’t been viewed by anyone else, but if it was on his phone,
     it was in the Circle cloud, and accessible to anyone. More than anything, she was
     disappointed in herself. She’d let the same man do the same thing to her, twice.
    “Don’t ask me again to delete it,” Annie said, waving to a few senior Circlers in
     the crowd, members of the Gang of 40.
    “Please delete it.”
    “You know I can’t. We don’t delete here, Mae. Bailey would freak. He’d weep. It hurts
     him personally when anyone even considers the deleting of any information. It’s like
     killing babies, he says. You know that.”
    “But this baby’s giving a handjob. No one wants that baby. We need to delete that
     baby.”
    “No one will ever see it. You know that. Ninety-nine percent ofthe stuff in the cloud is never seen by anyone. If it even gets one view, we can talk
     again. Okay?” Annie put her hand on Mae’s. “Now watch this. You don’t know how rare
     it is to have Stenton doing the address. This must be big, and it must involve some
     kind of government thing. That’s his niche.”
    “You don’t know what he’s about to say?”
    “I have some idea,” she said.
    Stenton took the stage without an introduction. The audience applauded, but in a way
     that was markedly different from the way they had for Bailey. Bailey was their talented
     uncle who had saved every one of