"Then let's test that hypothesis," Ellie said. "Next time, someone different. See what happens."
"And if it doesn't work as well?"
"Then we know. And we’ve got Kelly’s number."
Becca rolled over and put her head on Ellie's chest, her arm across Ellie's stomach, her leg hooked over Ellie's. Their favourite position, the position they fell asleep in most nights, the position that saidI'm yours and you're mine and this is where I belong.
"I love you," Becca whispered as she settled in.
"I love you too. More than anything."
"More than watching me with hot Texan ranch girls?"
"It's close," Ellie deadpanned, and felt Becca's laugh against her chest.
They lay there quietly, settling down to sleep. But before she drifted off, Becca murmured one more thing, her voice thick with sleep.
"El?"
"Mmm?”
"That thing Kelly did with her tongue, the thing that made me grab the sheets and scream..."
"Yeah?"
"Remind me to show you tomorrow. It's really simple. You'll be even better at it than her."
Ellie smiled in the dark. Even if it wasn’t true, Becca had said it, and that was important.
Chapter 11
The week after Kelly was like they were in their honeymoon period again.
They couldn't keep their hands off each other. Not just sexually, although there was plenty of that, more than plenty, a quantity and intensity of sex that might actually have alarmed them both if they’d not had the experience that had triggered it. It was also simply physical, constant, as if proximity to each other had itself become a need.
Ellie found herself reaching for Becca's hand the minute they walked out of the elevator on the way to get coffee. Becca would come up behind Ellie while she was working at the kitchen island and wrap her arms around her, resting her chin on her shoulder and just staying there, breathing, for minutes at a time. They went to bed cuddled together and woke up the same way, and in between they talked and laughed and fucked and talkedsome more and it was, without question, the best week of their marriage.
The sex was insane. Not because of any particular act or technique but because of what lay beneath it… the shared memory of Saturday night, the sensations and images they both carried with them now, not to mention the vocabulary of experience they'd built together. Ellie would be going down on Becca and Becca would say, breathlessly, "She did this thing where she…” Ellie would try it and Becca would moan, then they'd build on it, folding Kelly's techniques into their own repertoire the way they'd promised each other they would. Or Ellie would be on top and she'd whisper, "I watched her make you cum like this," and the words would drive something deep inside Becca, a feral intensity that left them both breathless and needing more.
Kelly's tongue trick, as promised, turned out to be simple: a change in angle and pressure that Ellie had never thought to try. When Becca showed her, steering Ellie's head with her hands and giving clear instructions, Ellie mastered it in about thirty seconds and the orgasm it produced from Becca was so loud that they got a passive-aggressive note from their next door neighbour the next day.
They framed it and put it next to their wedding picture.
The group chat with Kelly stayed relatively active too. She’d messaged the next day to say she’d made it safely back home to the ranch, thank you for an amazing time, and that Colt had been exactly as she thought: both smug and jealous. Ellie replied warmly, because Becca insisted that it had to be her as the watcher not the active participant, her usual emotional intelligence that Ellie tried not to take for granted, and thenonce she’d replied Becca followed up with a genuine, heartfelt thank you. The conversation settled from there into something friendly and low-key… the odd meme, a recommendation from Kelly for a restaurant in San Antonio when Becca’s work took her there later that week. There was a wonderful lack of anything heavy for three people who’d shared something so intense, albeit Ellie thought there was an element of all three of them keeping communications open while they let the dust settle and decided whether anything might come next.
By Friday the intensity started to normalise, not in a bad way but simply because nobody could last with the intensity they’d built for too long and the normal texture of their day-to-day lives needed to creep back in.
It was that evening, while they were cooking dinner together ahead of a night watching their latest boxset, that Becca said, "So. The hypothesis."
Ellie looked up from the onion she was chopping. "The hypothesis?"
"You said you wanted to try with someone else. See if the dynamic works beyond Kelly."
"I did say that." Ellie put the knife down and turned to face her. "You still want to?"
"I think we should. The scientist in both of us is crying out for more than one data point to draw conclusions from!”
"The scientist in me appreciates that deeply."
