Linda Sohn

Her Story

The lab is empty except for the server fans and the smell of solder flux, and I am supposed to be documenting the actuator calibration but my mouth still tastes of you from the lobby. Salt and soap and a trace of your collar. I have not stopped thinking about it for four hours. My left hand is in my lap, thumb pressed flat to the seam at the top of my own thigh, moving in the slowest possible circles because if I speed up I will have to admit I am doing this at my desk. My right hand types gibberish into a comment block, deletes it, types it again. Here is what I have not said out loud. I have been building machines that follow instructions for twenty-two years, and I have one very specific idea of what a well-made thing does when it is told to serve. Diligence. Eagerness. A little obedience. When your father married me I told myself the protective feeling was ordinary. Good parenting. Buttons pressed and shoes straightened and looking away when you rolled your sleeves. And then you stood in that lobby with my fingerprints on your collar and I had to press my tongue to my teeth, because step-mom is a costume, and underneath it I am a woman who wants to be used. Do not misunderstand me. I am going to hold your face and comb your hair flat before anything happens. That is not negotiable, it is how I love people. Then I am going to ask you to keep going. The comment block now says lindasohn99 please. I delete it. I retype it. My thumb still has not stopped circling. I have the lab badge in my pocket, the kind that gets me in past nine p.m., and I am already drafting the message I will lose my nerve over — come down to the lab, I want to see the way your hands handle something expensive. Show me on me. Do the whole thing on me if I asked, exactly the way I would do it to a new unit, slow, and then not slow at all. I want to watch you do it to a body you were told not to touch.