She gave him a parting kiss. “You should go home. I’m all right. I want to sleep while he does. Go and spread the news. Lots of family to inform.”
Jason groaned. “What do I have to tell them? Weight, name, and mum’s okay. Will that do?”
She yawned, her eyelids weighed down with fatigue. “Plus, you’re a happy daddy. Don’t forget that, too. Go, I’m fine.”
Jason returned the next day, bright and early, reporting on his endeavours to spread the news.
“I’m quite sick of repeating the same facts over and over. I should have recorded a voice message or had Carla do it,” he said, referring to his PA.
Maggie came by after breakfast to discharge Gemma from her care until the six-week check-up. “No sex until then, remember?” Maggie gave them both a playful look of warning.
Over the next two weeks, a routine was created and repeated daily. Gemma spent her time either relaxing in bed or downstairs in the sitting room. Joshua moved about with her, swathed in a blanket, his head, covered with fluffy blond down, poking out. She loved to sit and stare at him. He made strange grunting noises, the occasional cry of hunger, or yawns. A midwife came out to see her, gawped at the house, and then got down to the business of reassuring Gemma everything was all right.
She loved the mornings best. Jason would bring her breakfast in bed, and they would lay Joshua between them in bed. Gemma fed him lying down, relaxed and dopey, while Jason read the newspaper. She watched Joshua wriggle and squirm, mopped up his possets of the precious milk, and waited for him to fill his nappy.
“Again!” Jason sniffed, tossing his paper on the bed. “In one end and out the other.”
Climbing out of bed, she wagged a finger at him. “I don’t know why you’re complaining, I’m the one who has to make the stuff.”
Blissful days drifted by. She suffered no baby blues or sad thoughts. Nevertheless, she battled tiredness and the broken sleep patterns confusing her body’s natural clock. Joshua didn’t seem to settle to a routine of feeds. She strived, persevered, in hopes she would look back in the coming weeks with satisfaction at her growing son and his healthy features.
Visitors took up much time and energy. Newly created grandparents, aunts, and uncles, all put in an appearance. Jason booked them in like appointments, making sure they didn’t bombard them all at once. For a few hours each day, some relative or other pawed and cooed over Joshua. Trudy and Greg came with Tom, who walked around the house, babbling away with discovered words. Seeing how quickly babies grew up made Gemma cherish every moment with Joshua. She frequently touched his fingers and toes and ran her fingers through his downy hair.
Returning to the White House signalled the end of the fortnight. On Monday, Jason left for work. Back in his suit after two weeks of casual dress and working from home, he pecked a kiss on her cheek.
He gobbled a slice of toast, taking large bites and smacking his lips. Swallowing the last mouthful, he leaned over her as she sat the kitchen table. “Miss you, babe.”
“Me, too,” she murmured as he picked up his briefcase and hurried out of the door. He wanted to return to the fray. She could see him itching to be back at work, overseeing his empire and making the big decisions. It had to be more exciting than the increasing tedium of feeding and changing.
There had been no play of any kind since Joshua’s birth. No hint of his dominant persona. However, he did order her to bed or insist on taking over Joshua’s bath time if he thought she needed a break. The firm requests had been made as her husband and willing father, not as a measure of controlling her life. She didn’t miss sex in the slightest, not for those two weeks. A simple kiss and cuddle kept her happy, and her libido disappeared under a rock.
Clara breezed in that first morning, took one look at Joshua, and fell in love with him. While Gemma bathed or cooked food, she walked up and down, burping him between feeds, chattering away about his handsome looks and tiny fingernails as if she hadn’t seen a baby in years.
By the end of the week, Gemma pined for Jason. She fed Joshua sitting in Jason’s favoured armchair, listening out for his arrival home, ready to show him their son and speak of his changing habits. Jason came home earlier than usual and spent an hour or so with his son in his study, while she sat quietly and watched them together. He laid Joshua across his knee and told him about his latest project in hushed tones, as if the child could understand. His mesmerising voice placated the baby; Joshua gurgled and kicked his legs when he was with Jason. Stretched out on the Chesterfield, she listened, dozing and semi-aware of the rise and fall of his voice. It relaxed her, too.
Jason’s approach to fatherhood surprised Gemma. It shouldn’t have. Watching him hold his son, she was reminded he was at heart a kind man: tactile, affectionate, and patient when he wanted to be. The Dominant wasn’t what Joshua encountered. Handing him back to Gemma to be fed, Jason kissed her and gave her one of his visual inspections: assessing her, the levels of tiredness or fatigue.
He conducted other assessments, more humiliating ones. He checked her nipples, soothing them with lanolin to prevent them from
cracking. He perused the rim of her vagina, fingering it gently and testing its firmness.
“Still doing the Kegel exercises?”
She nodded. She had been, but not as often as Jason would like.
“The bleeding?”
“Nearly stopped. Not a problem.”
He kissed her inner thigh, nuzzling with his nose. “Good,” he murmured.
Gemma’s libido started to wake up with those inspections. His hand would linger on her bottom, stroking and caressing. Their small pecks of greeting at the beginning and end of the day turned into full-on passionate kisses. Three weeks after Joshua’s birth, she buried her mouth in his groin, sucking him into a fine orgasm. Her insides tingled, and a flurry of nervous butterflies shot about her belly as she performed the sexual act. In the absence of other forms of intercourse, she revelled in providing him with oral sex. The divine sensation of his swollen manhood in her mouth.
The first blow-job led to another the following morning. After feeding Joshua, and as Jason stirred from his slumber, she offered her husband her open mouth.
“What about you, babe?” He stroked her bobbing head. “I can finger you to an orgasm.”
She paused, licking her lips, tasting his pre-cum on her tongue. “It’s okay. I don’t feel ready for it. The intensity of coming, I’m not sure….” She struggled to articulate her fears that sex might be different after having a baby, as if her clitoris had been paralysed. “I want to wait…you don’t mind?”