Where Love Goes Read Online Free PDF

right now. But I can.”
    “When I’m ten I’m going to go live with Mommy,” she tells him.
    “If that’s what you want, then you will,” he said.
    “If I could, I’d go live with Mommy now. You just don’t let me,” she told him. “You’re mean.”
    “If you think so,” he says.
    F or the first year after Joan left it was all Tim could handle, just getting Ursula off to preschool in the mornings and getting out of work early enough to pick her up, maybe buy a few groceries, and get home in time to make the macaroni and cheese. After dinner they might do karate or cut out paper dolls before her bath. “I’m going to wrap myself up in paper, tie myself with string, stick some stamps on top of my head and mail myself to you,” they would sing while he scrubbed her. Running the washcloth over her tender pink skin—her tinkler, Ursula called it—Tim could hardly remember how long it had been since he’d touched the body of a woman. He felt like a eunuch.
    Then one day when he was grading papers in his office at the college, this very beautiful graduate student had come in and shut the door behind her. Almost spilling out of her halter top, she had bent over his desk, with its framed Sears portrait of Ursula and the drawing she’d made him for Father’s Day. “Listen, Professor Shepherd,” she said. “I want to fuck you.” How could he say no?
    Galen was twenty-four years old. She wasn’t anyone he’d bring home and introduce to Ursula, but after five years of politically correct and highly infrequent lovemaking with Joan, with her hard little breasts and the clenched, angry, joyless way she’d lie there, with her vibrator and her tube of K-Y jelly, and another year and a half of spending his evenings playing Candyland and reading Angelina Ballerina , Tim saw Galen as an angel of mercy.
    She had large, wonderful breasts and a round, wide ass she liked to get down on her knees and show him. “I’m your puppy,” she would say, and then she’d nuzzle against his cock and lick him. She even wore a collar one time. Or she might come to his door dressed as a nurse, late into the night when he was grading papers. She had amazing things in her doctor bag: Chinese balls she rolled over his body, feathers, massage oil. She was playful and shameless, with her Girl Scout leader’s uniform and her press-on tattoos and her tasseled pasties and G-string. One night she filled her mouth with ice cubes, to chill her tongue she said, then spit them out and took in his cock. One night she brought real police-issue handcuffs and asked him to clamp her to his bed. Tim had to work hard that time to get Joan’s voice out of his head, lecturing about the subjugation of women. “It’s okay,” Galen whispered. “We’re just playing. Nobody’s getting hurt. I want it, remember?”
    All that semester and part of the next they fucked like that, usually between one and four A.M . She only stayed overnight that one time, when Tim got his neighbor Paula to invite Ursula for a sleepover with her daughter, who didn’t really get along with Ursula very well. There was never any question of Tim and Galen spending family time with Ursula. He had no doubt she could think up great things to do in a bowling alley, but bumper bowl with a five-year-old was probably not one of them.
    Tim never felt he was using Galen. There wasn’t any question of love between them. He knew she was getting as much pleasure out of him as he got out of her. But there came a point when keeping up with his disconnected life began to wear Tim down. Rising from his bed after nights of burn-it-up fucking with Galen after maybe two hours of sleep, he’d stand there at the stove cooking Ursula’s eggs with his cock sore and his butt aching, and instead of feeling replenished, he felt spent. When he was with his daughter, the nights didn’t seem real. When he was with Galen, it was as if Ursula didn’t exist. Licking a piece of jam off his hand as he