Chapter 33
The problem was that Sloane had lost track of the deadline.
The problem was that she’d been lured by a homicidal cult.
The problem was that the skin of Arya’s bare torso was pebbled over lightly, a whisper of indecency.
Sloane pressed her hand flat along the ridges of his stomach like she might still push him away.
“Can’t keep doing this,” she managed to say.
“Remind me why not?”
“Because it’s wrong. Because it can’t go anywhere. Because I love my husband. Because this is twenty minutes I could be spending with my daughter. Take your pick.”
“Mm, could save you an extra five.” His hand was deep in her jeans, cupping her groin where she leaned, straddling him with acrobatics she hardly knew she’d possessed, against her colleague’s unused desk. “If you only want one this time.”
“This is ridiculous,” gasped Sloane, and it was.
Two of Arya’s fingers had worked their way inside her, curling up to hit a meticulously targeted spot.
She felt her balance give way and leaned harder onto Arya, pondering briefly how disgusting it would be to move all this to the floor.
She knew for a fact the custodial staff paid no attention to this part of the offices, probably because Burns’s board cronies didn’t pay them enough.
This deep underground, the eyes of all the buildings could be turned conveniently away.
The real problem was that Sloane suffered the constant pain of her injustices, the slights against her that she knew to be outrageous, indefensible.
The way every simulation still drove her right here.
But if she’d had a cock. Would any of this be what it was?
Speaking of cocks. Arya’s leapt where it was pressed to the inside of her thigh.
They could fuck right now; technically speaking, Sloane had the time.
She wondered what Isla was doing. It was music day at the daycare.
Every Friday they brought in a young guy with a guitar who sang “Old MacDonald” to her precious baby daughter, whose eyes shined bright with love for any chance to say moo.
Her daughter, who also didn’t have a cock, and would get so horrifically fucked one day, in a way that Sloane could predict but not prevent.
Sloane ran a hand up the back of Arya’s neck, grabbed a handful of dark strands, and pulled. If Isla was lucky, she would know love before sex. But statistically speaking the odds were against her.
Sloane wouldn’t have worn pants if not for telling herself this wouldn’t happen.
She told herself a lot of things these days.
Cannibalism, for example, continued to be ethically wrong but it was somehow better if it only happened once or twice a year; if some kind of reasonable steps were taken to mitigate harm.
Arya got on his knees and pulled Sloane’s new trousers down.
Britt had sent her the link for these pants.
They made her ass look shapely and full and young again; they yanked her back into her most desirably grabbable form.
From his knees, Arya shifted her around and bit the curve of her ass to prove it.
Lovely Arya, who could have any woman still in her physical prime, before she became aware of her back.
Before she had to routinely account for the place where her perineum had been imperfectly restitched.
A woman who still believed that desire had reasonable limits, or maybe the opposite, a woman who did not yet know the desperation she could feel; that she could find a man sexy and want his babies without fully understanding the kind of person he’d one day become under middle-aged circumstances.
Sloane closed her eyes as Arya pushed aside her underwear, widening her legs so he could fit his mouth carnivorously between her thighs.
The first time she’d initiated this little lapse in judgment, they’d simply fucked, hard and penetrative, no frills.
The second time, Arya had begun to exhibit some finesse, ostensibly to prove something.
Like showing her his résumé. He seemed to understand that there were limits to the work product he’d be given the opportunity to share—his position, such as it was, had time constraints.
Sloane felt powerful in that deeply frustrating way, because there was no real power here.
She was at least old enough now to understand that, which was what made her, in her mind, less attractive than Arya’s other theoretical options.
The imaginary younger woman who still felt like making a man come was the same thing as having power over him.
But could it get you tenure? Okay, well, maybe.
Sloane could try to fuck Burns and see where that got her.
But as soon as she stepped a foot wrong—as soon as it became clear that her interests and his were no longer aligned—it would stop being power and be what it was, which was sex.
Which this also was. And there was no power here, nothing being exchanged, because Sloane was having her lecturing hours cut to part time, and Max suddenly wanted to take a sabbatical, because he had work he needed to do on his book, for which he apparently did not have the time right now despite having so very much of it compared to Sloane.
“You can’t be serious,” Sloane had said when Max informed her of his intentions that morning, a few hours before she unwisely failed to suck Dean Burns’s dick during the department lecture he’d heavily implied was mandatory.
“If you take a sabbatical then we lose Isla’s daycare. I’m not considered full time anymore.”
“I told you not to piss off Burns,” Max muttered. Max, it appeared, was frustrated with her. “You know the University requires tenure track faculty to publish. And there was never any guarantee they could keep you on as an adjunct full time.”
“I’m aware of that, Max.” She, after all, had been working all semester on something extremely viable to publish, which she would have the time to do if Isla could stay in daycare, but not if she couldn’t. “But if you take a sabbatical now—”
“You complain every day about the time you’re missing with Isla,” Max snapped at her in visible frustration. “Now you can spend more time with her. Or is that something to complain about, too?”
“Okay, so are you going to watch her while I teach?”
Max waved a hand irritably. “Yes, fine, as long as it doesn’t interfere with my writing schedule, or we can just get a babysitter for a couple of hours—” Never mind how much that would cost.
“How much of this book do you need to write?” Sloane could feel herself becoming more shrill, which was never a good sign. “I haven’t even heard you mention a book all semester.”
“I talk about it all the time, not that you’re ever listening to me anymore—” The second half was a mutter under his breath, another jabbed accusation.
“I don’t understand why you need an entire semester to do it—I mean, can’t it just wait until the summer? Wait a minute.” It struck Sloane belatedly. “I have my courses for next semester—you should have yours. Why are you just now trying to take a sabbatical?”
Max sighed again, pushing to his feet. “Sloane—”
“Are they pushing you into it?” A dull thud sounded somewhere in Sloane’s inner ear, like the fall of the other shoe, the one she had known for so long was coming. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything, Sloane, I just need t—”
“It’s that girl, isn’t it? That undergrad? Nina Kaur.” Sloane swallowed hard, the truth materializing in her head, like finally recognizing the silhouette of a shadow on the wall. “What’d you do, fuck her? Did she report you or did you get caught?”
Max looked briefly torn between walking out and clenching a fist. “Sloane, Jesus, I am not fucking my student—”
“Then why do they want you out, Max?”
She had him, she knew she had him. There was a darkness over his face, an obvious inability to meet her eye.
Maybe she didn’t have the details exactly right, but she had something—she was right about some of it, if not all of it.
Sabbatical! Please. Not a chance that was his choice.
Who would laud Max then? Who would laugh at his jokes?
How would he avoid being at home with his wife and daughter if he committed himself to staying home?
And say that Sloane did leave Isla at home with him, knowing he wouldn’t engage her as Miss Lily did, as Sloane did, as Alex did.
How was she to know he’d even be there—that she could trust him even a little, or at all?
The resentment Sloane had been fighting spilled over, revealing the truth of itself.
The fact that Sloane trusted a bunch of fucking cannibals to take better care of Isla than her child’s own father.
She felt the tireless, jaw-tensing sensation of not allowing herself to reveal her disappointment, her fucking mortification over being the kind of woman who’d fallen right into the everywoman trap.
It didn’t matter how smart she was! How fuckable!
How beautifully she was aging! How much she hydrated or paid for eye cream!
There was no power in beauty because it still couldn’t grant her a faithful husband!
It couldn’t give her lasting value in the workplace! It didn’t offer her a goddamn thing!
“No,” said Isla then, sweetly, in response to the oatmeal she wasn’t eating. Sloane wanted to throw up and jump off a cliff.
“I’ll get her one of those Clif Bars,” Max muttered.
“Those aren’t real food. Fucking Christ,” said Sloane, to herself, to Isla, to everyone and everything. “She still doesn’t drink milk, she’s still not getting enough iron—”
“What do you want to do about it?”