Ellie kissed her, hard, then Becca kissed her back harder, and without delay they stumbled toward their bedroom. What happened next very likely served as an early alarm call for their long-suffering neighbour and it was, brilliantly, the best night yet.
Yet. Because they both knew, as they lay tangled together in the aftermath, that this was no longer an experiment or an adventure or a phase.
This was part of who they were now, and they were only getting started.
Chapter 18
On Wednesday evening Ellie and Becca went for a run together along Lady Bird Lake, the trail busy with other runners and cyclists in the evening light, the water flat and blue, the skyline reflected in it like a postcard of the city they'd made home.
They ran in comfortable silence for a couple of miles, matching each other's pace the way they always did, then slowed to a walk as they reached one of their favourite stretches of the path, pausing for a moment looking out at the water.
"I've been thinking," Becca said, slightly breathless from the run, untying then retying her hair.
"About?"
"About where we are. What this means. What comes next."
Ellie leaned against the railing and looked at her wife, sweat-sheened and flushed from the run, wearing an old Stanford t-shirt and running shorts, her necklace catching the evening light. She looked so ordinarily beautiful that Ellie's chest felt like it might burst.
"Tell me,” Ellie said.
"I think we need to acknowledge what's happened. Not just to each other, we've done that, but to ourselves as a couple. Because I don't think either we’ve fully sat, as a couple I mean, with the fact that in the space of not a lot of weeks we've gone from a completely conventional marriage to..." She searched for the right word and smiled when she couldn’t think of it. “Whatever this is."
"Hotwife life," Ellie offered, completely deadpan.
Becca laughed. "God, don't call it that. Not unless you want me to call you cu…”
“No. Please no,” Ellie interrupted, grinning back.
Becca’s laugh turned to a smile. “But yes, essentially, even if we’re absolutely not going to call it that ever. And I think we should talk about what it means going forward. Not rules exactly, but... guiding principles. What we want this to be."
Ellie nodded. She'd been thinking about the same thing, turning it over during quiet moments at work, running the analysis in the background the way her brain always did. "I've got some thoughts."
"Of course you do. You've probably got a spreadsheet."
Ellie looked at the ground. “I don't have a spreadsheet."
Becca raised an eyebrow.
"I have a list in my Notes app," Ellie admitted sheepishly. "Which is entirely different."
Becca grinned and took her hand. "Let's walk and talk."
They walked along the trail as the sun dropped towards the horizon, the sky filling with yellows and oranges. Runners jogged past them in both directions, and while they all went about their normal days Ellie and Becca talked honestly about whatever this had become.
"First principle," Ellie said. "This is ours. Not mine, not yours, ours. The moment it becomes something one of us is doing to please the other, it stops working. We learned that a little bit with Cass."
"Agreed. It's a shared experience or it's nothing. We’re doing this together. Always. It’s never something for only one of us.”
"Second. Kelly seems to be special. What we seem to be building with her isn't easily replaceable, and we shouldn't treat it as interchangeable with anyone else. If she's willing to keep being part of this, I want her to be. Not exclusively, I think we should stay open to you being with other partners, but I’d like to think she could be our go-to gal for this. She gets it. We’d be mad not to try to keep that going.”
Becca squeezed her hand. "I agree. And I think we should tell her that. Not in a way that puts pressure on her, but just... letting her know that we’d like something to develop beyond the sex. Something that respects her and Colt, not to mention her friends and whatever else she’s got going on.”
"Third, and this is more for me than for you, I need to stay honest with myself about what I'm feeling. The jealousy, the arousal, the complicated stuff. The moment I start suppressing any of it or performing ok-ness when I'm not ok, we're in trouble. I have way more time to think when you’re… you know. I need to be honest about it.”
“You need to promise me you’ll always be honest with me too. If you ever want to call it, and I mean ever, I’ll stop right away and come straight back to you. I promise you that.
"But also, honesty goes both ways," Becca added. "I need to be honest too. About what I feel with Kelly or whoever else, about the moments when I forget you're there." She glanced at Ellie. "That's going to keep happening. With Kelly especially if she wants to keep meeting, but with whoever. The better it gets between them and me, the more I'm going to lose myself in it. Are you prepared for that?"
