Chapter 7 #2
“By that logic, so do you.” But Max played tennis at the University with a few of his department faculty twice a week after classes and did long bike rides with his recreational road cycling team at least three times a month.
Sloane and Max went to dinner with Max’s friends on occasion, with Isla in tow, probably every few weeks.
Both their social lives had definitely taken a hit since Isla’s birth, but Sloane’s was dead in the water in a way that Max’s was not.
And on purpose! Sloane had always been more concerned about Max’s sanity than her own—her love for Isla was so consuming, so richly rewarding that Sloane never felt resentful of motherhood’s undeniable pitfalls, nor did she necessarily long for stimulation outside of oxytocin and the pot-roasting VidStars she scrolled while Isla slept.
But it didn’t seem, from Sloane’s perspective, that fatherhood was quite the same.
Max’s happiness was dependent on breaks from his child that Sloane had never personally felt she needed.
But the thought of brunch with Alex—with Alex’s friends, who also missed the smell of their babies’ farts and could tell Sloane what shape her jeans should be and whether her forehead necessitated bangs and how to successfully force-feed Isla iron so that, for once, Sloane could escape the inevitable, unbearable shaming by her pediatrician—that felt pleasurable in a way it never had before.
It did not require Sloane to change shape or rearrange her priorities.
She could be among others of her kind. She was a sociologist, for fuck’s sake, this shit mattered, and that she was having to explain that to herself right now (to herself!) was suddenly hysterically absurd.
“Well, I guess I could try one meeting,” Sloane said without waiting for Max to contribute, or maybe he already had and she hadn’t been listening.
She knew she’d harbored some resentment toward him since parenthood had taken its toll on his fundamental sexiness—he was still hot, obviously, it was just nominally less arousing when he failed to accomplish certain tasks or suffered from the executive dysfunction he protested not to have—but Sloane, too, had degraded a bit from the attentive wife and perfect hostess she’d once been, the Good Mother in waiting that was the Good Wife.
Her ability to multitask, to listen to him while arranging her face in a way that suggested interest, was not at its most exceptional.
“Exactly,” said Max, like any contemporary supportive spouse who did not conform to their mothers’ gender roles and who did not cheapen her sense of individuality and who was, all in all, a really wonderful father.
Sloane entertained the thought of offering him a blow job.
In previous iterations of themselves, she had been the more sexually demanding of the two, a dynamic that had seen oceanic shifts since Sloane’s sixth month of pregnancy.
Other women got horny during the gestational period, but not Sloane. She got sciatica.
“What do you think about sex tonight?” Sloane suggested, in a tone not unlike the one an hour prior when she’d suggested pizza for dinner. (There was a 40 percent chance Isla would eat it and more importantly, it wasn’t spaghetti, and most importantly, it wasn’t spaghetti that Sloane had cooked.)
“Yes,” said Max instantly, leaping to his feet to kiss her sweetly behind the ear. “Please.”
“Assuming that Isla actually goes down and stays down.”
“Yes. Listen,” he said, turning over his shoulder to speak to Isla, who sat spreading sauce around in her high chair tray, “Daddy needs this. Go straight to bed, okay?”
“You know,” Sloane gently teased, “if you really wanted to be comfortably sure I didn’t get trapped in there with her, you could always be the one to put her down.”
Max laughed at her clever, clever joke. It was only for humor, after all. Everyone knew Max used those ninety minutes to decompress alone with Frankie the dog, that slut, the two of them catching up on the latest prestige drama that everyone but Sloane had already seen.
But in the end, Isla did fall asleep within a reasonable time frame, and Sloane texted Max to meet her in their bedroom, and they were both naked within seconds.
She began with a charitable blow job and Max went down on her in a perfunctory way as Sloane closed her eyes and told herself to come as quickly as possible, because Max was adamant about prioritizing her pleasure, primarily in the sense that if he didn’t bring her to the throes of ecstasy he’d take it not as a personal failure from which to ambitiously learn, but a disappointing turn of events.
She closed her eyes and tangled her fingers in his hair and enjoyed that her clitoris was more sensitive now, somehow, postpartum.
She ran her hands over her husband’s shoulders and dug into her personal file of erotic fiction, unveiling the slightly shameful visual of her TA’s hands (his name was Arya, as she’d learned from his email address) and the imaginary sequence of being fucked on a nicer, cleaner version of her desk while the door remained flung open, risk of punishment be damned.
She thought, absurdly, of Alex Carlisle’s red lipstick while Max curled his fingers around the quaking elevated peaks of Sloane’s thighs.
Of course, orgasm was ultimately an easy formula with an experienced partner of over five years. It didn’t matter what Sloane thought about. Fatefully speaking it was always inevitable that she was going to come.