This time I did laugh. I couldn’t help it. I did see her pain, wrung into the raised, canine set of her shoulders. I didn’t want to make fun of her. It was just that, Do something, whore, was the funniest thing anyone had ever said to me. I dropped my head between my knees.

“Jane!” There was real hurt in Harry’s voice. I bit the tips of my fingers to stop laughing. It didn’t quite work.

“Shit,” I said, “Shit. Okay.”

We were lucky that Harry plucked her eyebrows, I guess, because I only had to go into her makeup bag for tweezers instead of trying to unpack anything. I went and opened the door, and she leaned forward out of the driver’s seat, swearing continuously under her breath. “Does it really hurt that badly?”

“Yes.”

The light was watery and indifferent, Harry’s arm resting on her knee too much in shadow. “You need to move forward,” I said softly, “I can’t see.” I put a hand on her waist and urged her toward me gently, until she was holding her palm in the sun. “Okay,” I said. My legs were shaking a little; I knelt down on the asphalt.

“It smells like cow shit out here,” Harry complained.

She was right. I picked up the tweezers. “Hold up your hand.” She did, until I was within kissing distance of her knuckles. I held her still by the bare tips of her fingers. I caught the first spine between the tweezers, and pulled.

Those little thorns were so thin and so many that they looked like a layer of fur growing over her arm. It took me nearly an hour to get them all out. Neither of us really talked, except when I would say sometimes, “Hold out your palm.” Or, “Turn it this way.” And Harry would do as I said. It was meditative, the sound of our mutual breathing, the way our bodies kept the air between us warm, the layer of sweat dampening the places where I touched her. Her lashes, casting needle shadows on her cheeks, were almost the same color as the cactus spines.