“Go to sleep.” I open her gown and smell the lavender, and take the first nipple I find into my mouth, and begin to suck it for milk.

“Baby, it feels beautiful. I could drift away.” Tina says lazily.

“That’s what I want. To take you into sleep.”

I reach inside my yoga pants and begin to move my clitoris up and down as I suck her milk. I sense her just half here. She slowly plays with the back of my neck as her other arm falls languidly off to her side.

“You love this don’t you, Bette?” She smiles a soft smile, her eyes still closed.

“I love the feeling of it flowing out of you, and so warm and sweet into me.” I feel her hand drop down to my shoulder and trace it softly.

“You know that I want you, I need you this way. Calming me, slowly taking me to sleep, that’s all I can do right now, Baby.”

“Your scar, it’s still too tender for me to be on top of you, isn’t it?”

Her eyes open a bit and she looks at me, “Much, much too tender. I want you, but you have to wait.”

I switch breasts and suck her milk and feel her warmth everywhere.

Eleven days later – Bette

I’ve secretly started a blog about pregnant women and their experiences hormonally, breastfeeding and lactating, newborns at home, life with their partners, and their new family. I’m very curious about what’s going on around me, and if I needed to underscore the hourly sense and newness of it all I would take out a knife and carve into the top of this desk, WTF? But nevertheless here we are, and I’m trying to buy a clue again.

I’m now a highly educated, out of work blogger, in my fucking pajamas with bills to pay, and yet all I want to do is read these incredible posts that are coming in hour after hour into my hidden from Tina blogging project. I’ll say this: Max can be inappropriate about lobsters all he wants to, and fuck it, I’ll give him all shellfish in the seas if he wants to disparage them, too: He knows how to connect websites and people to them on the Internet. A gift from him to me, and I am realizing what an extraordinary thing this is that I’ve begun. I needed a little something hidden away that is only mine.