Please Harder, Professor

Chapter 122

Adrian’s POV

The smell hits me first. Then the sound—Amelia's screams cutting through the 2 AM silence like a siren, like an alarm system I can't disable. I extract myself from bed carefully, movements deliberate and quiet, determined to let Sophie rest.

She hasn't slept more than ninety minutes at a stretch in four days. I've been counting, watching her move through the apartment like a ghost, dark circles deepening beneath her eyes with each passing night.

I can do this. Change a diaper. Soothe my own daughter. It's not complicated—just mechanics, really. A series of steps executed in proper sequence.

I approach the changing table like it's a negotiation I can win. Confidence. Control. The same skills that made me formidable in lecture halls and faculty meetings should translate here, shouldn't they?

I flip on the small lamp, keeping the overhead light off so as not to fully wake Amelia. Her face is scrunched and red, mouth open in sustained fury.

I open the diaper and immediately regret every decision that led to this moment.

Explosive doesn't cover it. The contents have somehow defied physics—up her back, across her thighs, coating what appears to be every available surface. My stomach turns. I reach for the wipes with one hand while trying to support her with the other.

The baby squirms, surprisingly strong for something so small, and suddenly there's a stream of pee arcing across the table like a fountain, soaking the clean onesie I'd so carefully laid out in preparation.

"Fuck!" I grab for more wipes. They scatter everywhere—the floor, the table, one landing in the contaminated diaper itself. Amelia screams louder, offended by my incompetence.

My hands shake as I try to clean her, support her head the way I've seen Sophie do it a hundred times, fasten the new diaper I've somehow managed to extract from the package. The tabs won't stick. I press harder.

They curl back on themselves, refusing to cooperate. I'm doing something wrong. Everything is wrong.

‘Is this really what my life is going to be like now?’ Standing here covered in shit at two in the morning, unable to calm my own daughter. Unable to complete a task so fundamental that teenagers manage it without crisis.

I negotiated multi-million dollar deals when I was barely thirty. Controlled every aspect of my existence with precision. Commanded rooms with a single look, made grown men reconsider their positions with carefully chosen words.

And I can't figure out how to fasten a fucking diaper.

Amelia's cries escalate into something that sounds almost accusatory. Like she knows. Like she can sense that I'm fundamentally unsuited for this, that some essential component required for fatherhood is missing from my genetic code.

I try again with the tabs, pressing them down with more force than necessary. They stick this time, but crooked, one side higher than the other. The diaper sits awkwardly on her tiny body.

Good enough. It has to be good enough.

I lift her carefully, supporting her head the way I've been taught, bringing her against my chest. "Shh," I murmur, rocking slightly. "It's okay. You're okay."

She's not okay. The screaming continues, drilling into my skull, into the spaces where rational thought used to live. I rock harder. Bounce a little.

Try humming—something, anything to create sound that might soothe. Nothing works. If anything, she cries harder, face turning an alarming shade of purple.

What am I doing wrong? There must be a technique I'm missing, some secret everyone else knows. I review everything I've read—the books Sophie bought, the articles I skimmed, the advice Eleanor offered during her brief visit. Hold her firmly. Support the head. Rock gently. Speak softly.

I'm doing all of it. None of it matters.

Sophie appears in the doorway like a ghost. Dark circles carve hollows beneath her eyes, shadows so deep they look like bruises. Milk stains bloom across her shirt—she hasn't showered in three days, hasn't changed clothes in longer than that.

Her hair hangs limp around her face. She looks like she's aged years in weeks.

She doesn't say anything, doesn't ask if I need help or offer hollow encouragement. Just crosses the nursery in three steps and takes Amelia from my arms without a word.

Her movements are mechanical, efficient, joyless. Just survival. She adjusts her hold with practiced ease, finds the angle that calms Amelia almost instantly. The screaming drops to whimpers, then stops entirely.

The silence feels like judgment.

I watch her work—changing the crooked diaper I botched, wiping Amelia clean with confident strokes, fastening everything properly. She moves like an automaton, going through motions she's performed so many times they've become muscle memory.

There's no tenderness in it, no joy. Just grim determination to complete necessary tasks.

I think about the woman I used to know. The one who looked at me like I hung the moon, whose face would light up when I entered a room. The one whose body I knew intimately—every curve, every sensitive place, whose responses I could control with surgical precision.

I knew exactly how to make her gasp, how to make her beg, how to reduce her to pure sensation with nothing but my voice and hands.

Now I can't control anything. We haven't touched each other—really touched, with intention and desire—in months. Her body is still healing from the emergency intervention, still bleeding, still aching.

The baby takes everything she has. We move through the apartment like strangers drowning in the same room, close enough to see each other suffering but too exhausted to reach out.

Sophie finally gets Amelia settled, the baby now calm and quiet in her mother's arms. She turns and hands our daughter back to me with movements that feel more like obligation than trust.

Amelia immediately tenses in my grip, sensing the difference between her mother's competent hold and my uncertain one.

Sophie's voice is barely audible when she speaks, barely more than a whisper. "I don't know if I can do this."

I stare at her. At the exhaustion carved into every line of her face. At the defeat in her posture. At the milk stains and unwashed hair and trembling hands that give away just how close to breaking she really is.

I don't know if she means tonight or forever.