Free The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family by Kathryn Trueblood

absolute beseechment. Constonnnnnnce. The sweater was slack on me. Her fatness must have been a delicious luxury, a softness yielding to heaven.
    It was not the first thing belonging to a woman that I had found. A lipstick: tea rose. I was wearing that too, as we lay together, listening to the sounds of the corner market—casual greetings, children counting change for candy—the sounds overlapping like wet pieces of paper. He didn’t notice the sweater or the lipstick. He stroked me and I stroked the cashmere. The next woman would obliterate me. Constonnnnnnce, where are you? Fleetingly, I longed to go to her.
    But that first time in his apartment, the blue twilight washed down the walls, and the smell of whole milk and eggs baking filled the hallways. What if I can’t feel? I asked him. What if I can’t feel? He asked me if I liked my hair brushed. If I liked my back scrubbed. If I liked warm soup on my tongue. I put my arms around him then and began to laugh. Of course I can feel, I told him, it’s only when I should start to feel more, that I begin to feel less, until it diminishes down to nothing. Usually the man comes then.
    He said I must tell him, I must describe each sensation with each touch, so that he could be like the shadow I cast, never losing me. I kissed him on the cheeks, on the forehead, and we left our shoes under the table toppled upon each other. But I couldn’t write on the air with my feelings; I couldn’t give that much away yet. He told me then I must only say warm, warmer, warmest. Then he stroked my face, the smooth underside of my jaw, the death opening at the base of my throat, the bony hollows of my collarbone, the incline of my breastbone. Stroking to the sound of the little waves that rush up to the sand but sink in before they can recede. Warm … warmer … warmest .
    Warm … warmer … warmest .… I said it.
    I stayed with him in L.A. and began by doing temporary secretarial work in the garment industry. Nigel bought me the clothes he thought women go to work in, dove grey skirts with slits that didn’t allow me to walk in my normal stride, and I had to learn to take short, mincing steps, and sit at my desk slightly knock-kneed. Real silk blouses with covered buttons and choir boy collars. Was I so sexy even my buttons must be covered? Nigel said I was and that he would begin his seduction by stripping the buttons with an an exacto knife.
    I got offered a job with a company called Saylor that made designer knockoffs in much cheaper fabrics. At first, I worked for the regional vice president of the western division, Mr. Tobin, a gruff, comforting man who wore a suit the way an overstuffed chair does its upholstery, pulled taut and tacked down with brass tacks, in his case, cufflinks and tie pin. He had eyes like buttonhole slits and a reputation for ruthless business. But he treated me with an offhand affection because I was not cowed by him.
    When I was still there on a temporary basis, my job was mostly to open his mail and stack it in piles for the executive secretary away on vacation, whose head was probably still ringing from four phone lines. I offered to do more but no one could be bothered to show me. So I made no pretense of being busy with their paperwork. Mr. Tobin seemed to like that. One lunch hour, he offered me the mini-TV he kept in his office, but I told him I liked to read. One afternoon, I’d set down my copy of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir to answer the phone. Hello, can you be helped? That was just how it came out. Mr. Tobin passed my desk, then he saw the book. “It’s not what you think,” I called out as he was closing the door. He held it open a crack, for just a moment. “Sure, sure,” he said still chuckling. I didn’t bother to explain. If Mr. Tobin wanted to think someone could write a 500 page porno novel about a second of sex, let him. Maybe it got me the job.
    I became a