Please Harder, Professor

Chapter 146

Sophie’s POV

The apartment feels hollow after everyone leaves. Adrian and I move through it like ghosts, careful not to touch, not to speak, not to ignite another explosion.

Amelia needs to be put down for the night. We gravitate to the nursery without discussion, falling into the one routine we've perfected through sheer repetition.

Adrian changes her diaper while I prepare the bottle. I feed her while he dims the lights and turns on the white noise machine. He takes her for burping while I arrange the swaddle blanket.

We trade her back and forth in synchronized silence—the only harmony we've managed in weeks.

When Amelia finally settles into sleep, her tiny face peaceful and unaware of the wreckage her parents have become, Adrian and I stand on opposite sides of the crib. Just watching her breathe.

I turn to leave. Adrian's hand catches my wrist in the hallway.

"Can we talk?" His voice is quiet, careful. "Really talk. Not shout or accuse or defend. Just... communicate honestly."

Every part of me wants to say no. To retreat to the living room couch and pretend to sleep until morning when we can resume our cold war with fresh ammunition.

But I'm so tired of fighting.

"Okay." The word comes out hoarse.

We settle in the living room. I take one end of the couch, Adrian takes the other. The distance between us feels carefully measured, like we're negotiating a ceasefire and neither of us trusts the other not to launch a surprise attack.

Adrian speaks first. "I'm not coping." His hands twist together in his lap. "I haven't been for weeks, maybe months. I don't know anymore."

The honesty cracks something inside me. The defensive walls I've been maintaining crumble just enough to let truth escape.

"I'm not either." My voice breaks on the admission. "I'm drowning, Adrian. Every single day."

He looks at me then, really looks, and I see my own exhaustion reflected back. We're both barely surviving.

"This isn't what I planned," he says quietly. "Any of this. I had plans—a tenure track position, published books, building something that mattered. An intellectual legacy."

He laughs, bitter and soft. "I was supposed to be someone important."

"I had plans too." The words spill out before I can stop them. "I was going to finish my degree, build a career, and travel. I wanted to figure out who I was before anything else claimed my identity."

My throat tightens. "I was supposed to discover myself before I disappeared into motherhood."

We sit with that for a long moment. Two people grieving futures that died the moment the pregnancy test showed positive.

"I love her," I say finally. "Amelia. I do. It took time but I love her so much it terrifies me."

I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. "But I also resent everything I lost. Every dream that died, every version of myself that's gone forever. And I hate that I feel both things at once."

Adrian's jaw works.

"I don't know if I'll ever feel like her real father." The confession comes out strangled. "Everyone talks about this overwhelming love, this instant connection. I keep waiting for it. Keep thinking maybe tomorrow I'll wake up and feel something other than obligation."

He meets my eyes. "What if it never comes? What if I'm just broken?"

"You're not broken." But even as I say it, I wonder if either of us believes it.

"We're both grieving," Adrian says. "Versions of ourselves that died the moment you got pregnant. The professor and the student who could have been anything, become anyone. Instead we're just…" He gestures vaguely at the apartment, at our fractured life. "This."

The silence that follows isn't comfortable, but it isn't hostile either. Just two people sitting in wreckage, acknowledging the damage instead of pretending the house isn't on fire.

Then Adrian's voice softens in a way I haven't heard in months. "Do you remember the first time we met?"

I wasn't expecting that. "What?"

"As professor Lewies and Sophie Hale. Your first day in my lecture hall."

He's not looking at me anymore, staring at something I can't see.

"You wore a cream sweater. Your hair was pulled back in this loose braid that kept coming undone. You sat in the third row, right side, and you actually took notes during my introduction while everyone else was on their phones."

My breath catches. I do remember. The cream sweater was my favorite—soft cashmere my dad bought me for my birthday. I was so nervous that first day, determined to make a good impression.

"I knew I was in trouble the second you walked in." Adrian's voice has gone quiet, almost reverent. "You were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen." He finally looks at me. "And the most dangerous."

Something shifts in the air between us. Adrian's hands twist in his lap. He's quiet for a long moment before he speaks, and when he does his voice is lower, rougher than before. "I should have told you about the job."

I blink at him. "What?"

"The adjunct position, three states away. I didn't tell you because I didn't know what it meant yet." He meets my eyes. “But you had a right to know from the first day the email came in. I hid it. I'm sorry."

The apology lands carefully between us. Not self-flagellation, not performance—just honesty laid out plainly, in the hush we've managed to carve around ourselves.

I don't speak, can't quite yet. I move closer without conscious decision instead, just a few inches, closing the careful distance we'd maintained.

Adrian's hand finds my face, thumb tracing my cheekbone with touch so gentle it makes my eyes sting.

"I miss you," he whispers. "I miss us. Whatever we were before all this, I miss it so much I can't breathe sometimes."

Tears spill over. "I'm right here."

"Are you?" His eyes search mine. "Are you really? Because some days I look at you and I don't recognize the person looking back."

The question hangs between us, heavy with everything we've lost and everything we're still losing.

I answer by closing the distance completely. My lips find his in a kiss that's desperate and hungry and full of months of loneliness. He responds immediately, hand sliding into my hair, pulling me closer with an urgency that mirrors my own.

This isn't gentle reunion. This is two people clawing their way back to each other through wreckage, trying to find something familiar in the ruins. His mouth tastes like memory—coffee and mint and everything I've been missing.

Adrian pulls me into his lap and I go willingly, wrapping around him like I can physically fuse us back together. His hands find skin beneath my shirt and I gasp into his mouth, arching into touch I've been starving for.

"Sophie." My name on his lips sounds like prayer and plea combined.

I kiss him harder, pouring every unsaid word into the connection of our mouths. All the loneliness, the resentment, the grief, the desperate need to not be alone in this apartment with our broken dreams and crying baby and futures that look nothing like what we'd planned.

His hands grip my waist, thumb stroking patterns on bare skin that make me shiver. I tug at his shirt, needing more contact, more proof that we're still real beneath all the damage.

We've been holding everything back for months—every touch, every need, every moment of wanting connection we couldn't sustain through exhaustion and anger.

Now it ignites all at once, consuming and necessary and possibly the only thing keeping us from complete destruction.