The Signature of All Things

have heard each other.”
    Ambrose closed his grip gently around her hands. The sensation that this provoked up her arms was beautiful.
    How could she extend this?
    She considered pretending that she was reading his mind, if only to draw out the experience. She considered whether there might be a way to repeat this event in the future. But what if they were ever discovered in here? What if Hanneke found them alone in a closet? What would people say? What would people think of Ambrose, whose intentions, as ever, had seemed so unmingled with anything foul? He would appear a rake. He would be banished. She would be shamed.
    No, Alma understood, they would never do this again after tonight. This was to be the one moment in her life when a man’s hands would be clasped around hers.
    She closed her eyes and leaned back a bit, putting her full weight against the wall. He did not let go of her. Her knees nearly brushed against his knees. A good deal of time passed. Ten minutes? A half hour? She drank in the pleasure of his touch. She wished to never forget this.
    The pleasant sensation that had begun in her palms and traveled up her arms now advanced into her torso, and eventually pooled between her legs. What had she supposed might happen? Her body had been tuned to this room, trained to this room—and now this new stimulus had arrived. For a while, she contended against the sensation. She was grateful that her face could not be seen, for a most contorted and flushed countenance would have been revealed, had there been a trace of light. Though she had forced this moment, she still could not quite believe this moment: There was a man sitting across from her, right here in the dark of the binding closet, inside the deepest penetralia of her world.
    Alma attempted to keep her breath even. She resisted what she was feeling, yet her resistance only increased the sensation of pleasure growing between her legs. There is a Dutch word, uitwaaien , “to walk against thewind for pleasure.” That is what this felt like. Without moving her body at all, Alma leaned against the rising wind with all her power, but the wind only pushed back, with equal force, and so did her pleasure increase.
    More time passed. Another ten minutes? Another half hour? Ambrose did not move. Alma did not move, either. His hands did not so much as tremble or pulse. Yet Alma felt consumed by him. She felt him everywhere within her and around her. She felt him counting the hairs at the base of her neck, and examining the clusters of nerves at the bottom of her spine.
    “Imagination is gentle,” Jacob Boehme had written, “and it resembles water. But desire is rough and dry as a hunger.”
    Yet Alma felt both. She felt both the water and the hunger. She felt both the imagination and the desire. Then, with a sort of horror and a fair amount of mad joy, she knew that she was about to reach her old familiar vortex of pleasure. Sensation was rising quickly through her quim, and there was no question of stopping it. Without Ambrose touching her (aside from her hands), without her touching herself, without either of them moving so much as an inch, without her skirts lifted above her waist or her hands at work within her own body, without even a change of breath—Alma tumbled into climax. For a moment, she saw a flash of white, like sheet lightning across a starless summer sky. The world turned milky behind her closed eyes. She felt blinded, rapturous—and then, immediately, shamed.
    Dreadfully shamed.
    What had she done? What had he felt? What had he heard? Dear God, what had he smelled ? But before she could react or pull away, she felt something else. Though Ambrose still did not move or stir or react, she suddenly felt as though he were brushing against the soles of her feet with a persistent stroke. As the moments passed, she perceived that this stroking sensation was, in fact, a question—an utterance coming into being, right out of the floor. She felt the question enter through the bottoms of her feet and rise through the bones of her legs. Then she felt the question creep up into her womb, swimming through the wet path of her quim. It was nearly a spoken voice that was gliding up into her, nearly an articulation. Ambrose was asking something of her, but he was asking it from inside her. She heard it now. Then there it was, his question, perfectly formed:
    Will you accept this of me?
    She pulsed silently with her reply: YES.
    Then she felt something