Chapter 1: Dan’s Morning

Dan and Renny were relaxing on the sofa of their tiny apartment watching television and enjoying being home together. That afternoon they had come back from the hospital with their four-day-old daughter Anita and a pile of diapers, and baby formula: Renny’s tiny breasts -- her fried eggs as she called them -- were not able to make enough milk to feed her daughter. Anita was asleep in the bassinet Dan had got from the local Freecycle. Renny shifted in Dan’s lap and felt he was getting an erection.

“I see you’re glad I’m home,” she said with a laugh, squeezing his penis through his tracksuit pants.

“We can’t fuck for another few weeks, until my pussy is better, but I can do this. Enikku ningalude limgam kudikkanam” she said in her native Malayalam, pulling down his pants and taking out his hardening penis. She bent over and began to suck on it, bobbing her head up and down and swirling her tongue around the tip. From time to time she removed it from her mouth and kissed all its length, then renewed her sucking.

Soon Dan felt his orgasm approaching and said, “Renny, I’m about to come.”

She made a thumbs-up sign and bobbed her head up and down faster, sucking hard on the upstroke and pushing against the tip with her tongue on the downstroke. Dan was very near the brink when...

“DADDY! DADDY! DADDY! WAKE UP DADDY!”

... his now seven-year-old daughter woke him from his dream, which was only a memory of his dead wife.

“You’re late, daddy. I’ve had my cereal and LaShonda’s mom is outside.”

Dan blinked twice, groaned, and rose, hiding his erection from his daughter, put on a robe, looked at the clock and panicked, why did he oversleep? He handed Anita over to his neighbour Whitney, mother of Anita’s BFF LaShonda. She lived nearby and they took it in turns to take the children to first grade and collect them. Whitney was a single mother and made no secret about wanting to merge her body and her family with Dan’s; Dan, for his part, was determined to resist this, for various reasons, prominent among which were her bossiness, whining complaints about every trivial annoyance, and that she was not physically his type at all, being taller even than Dan’s six feet, and muscular from bodybuilding. Renny had been a slip of a thing, less than 5 feet, and slender--she weighed about 85 pounds. Their skin was almost the same colour, but still.

Whitney looked at Dan in his bathrobe. His erection had not quite died down, and Whitney grinned.

“I can come back for a while after I have dropped the kids at school,” she said, and licked her lips sensually.

“Thank you, but I have tons of work to do.”

And off she went, scolding her daughter about something.

Dan went into the bathroom, grasping his softening erection. He tried to masturbate, calling up his dream, but grief overcame him, and he wept. Drying his tears, he sighed. That had not happened for months; he had thought he was ready to dip his toe in the pool, and see if he could find love again, but maybe not. Marion did not count; she was just an FWB, and it was clear that neither of them wanted more. Anyway he did have work to do, so after a quick shower and breakfast he set to it.

A boutique distillery had contacted him with a proposal to design, engrave and print some labels for their premium product. Dan had seen it in an upmarket liquor store, in a locked cabinet behind the counter. The price tag was $800. After some back and forth, they had agreed a design and a price--$5 a label, and a bottle of the whiskey, for a first run of 500 labels. You can get about 50 prints from an engraving plate before you have to recut it, so Dan planned to get 20 labels from the largest size plate his press would take. This would give 500 labels from 25 prints, allowing an opportunity to produce a repeat order quickly, if required. He started up his computer, and opened the graphic file of the agreed design. It was only a few minutes’ work to duplicate in a 5x4 grid, and then flip it so as to get the mirror image. In the old days the engraver would have had to draw the picture 20 times on tracing paper, then work from the back side. Isn’t technology wonderful?

The only problem was that the largest size paper his printer took was legal, not nearly big enough, so he had to take it to the nearby photocopying bureau to print a hard copy When he got back he pasted the sheet to the engraving plate, and then took a point and started to make little dots along the lines of the design. As he worked, he reminisced about his life with Renny.