This month’s cast of Nerve’s Best Literary Sex Scenes really suck, but this scene, from Julia Slavin’s Carnivore Diet, made me chuckle. It’s been a long day; I needed the laugh.

I led him into the bathroom. I pulled back the curtain. He knelt in the shower. I placed one foot on the side of the tub and stood over him. He looked up at me in the dearest worship. I put my fingers in his hair. Here goes. We resumed our position, though now I was stooped from a stabbing sensation in my gut.

But alas, I couldn’t. I adjusted my stance. He rearranged himself to take the pressure off his ankles. Go. Go, go, go, go. But still, I couldn’t. I pictured the first runoff from a mountain, a melting ice cap, water escaping, a pool in a hollowed rock, rings and ripples, rain dripping from roof tiles, spattering the wet, wet ground.

“Do it, Wendy. Please.”

“Yes, I want to.” The storm was coming. I lowered my hips over him. He rose to meet me. “Could you wait here for one moment?”

“Certainly.”

I got out and turned on the sink. Just a trickle, rain bouncing on a leaf. That always helped when I was at a party and there were people just outside the door. I stepped back into the shower. Nothing happened.

“I’m so excited, Wendy.” Water running off soil, soil so dry it can’t accept the gift of rain.

“Me too, Ben.” Runoff. Water. Irrigation. Get water to the desert and anything will grow. But you’ve got to have water. The crop report. Calling for rain. Birds fluttering their wings in grandma’s birdbath, don’t bring Grandma into this, worms unearthed, washed out from the ground and into the streets.

“Wendy, darling.” Again, he rose up on his knees.

I looked down at my stomach, puffed out from my engorged bladder.

“It’s not working, is it?” Ben leaned back on his heels. “You’re grimacing.”

“I have to go so badly,” I said.

“Do it. On me.”

“I can’t.”

He stood next to me in the shower, stroking my hair.

“This is good for you, Wendy. Dominating me like this. Feeling your power.”

I’d lose him if I couldn’t give him what he wanted.

“Maybe if I tried something other than water or juice,” I said.

“I’ll call room service immediately.” I leaned against the doorframe of the bathroom, my hand on my stomach, panting.

I have a hard time pissing on cue, too. The last time I took a drug test, the nurse actually knocked on the door and asked me if everything was okay. “Yeah, yeah.” Then I stared down at the empty cup and cursed my inability to just get this overwith.

I have a feeling I’d make a bad sperm donor.