Exactly how steamy is this story?
R
It's a reasonable expectation to assume there will be some steaminess in a story called "Passion," but the R rating is not due to explicit steaminess, but rather the story's honest discussion about sex.
There's Neil licking Grace's hand, which incites in Grace a feeling like "a hundred, hundreds of flicks of his tongue, a dance of supplication, all over her skin" (204). There's the driving itself, which in Grace's memory, is "hardly distinguishable from her idea…of what sex should be like" (204). We hear about Grace and Maury's confused groping toward sex, but Munro is more interested in exploring the emotional toll of that confused groping than its actual physicality.