“We’re doing it again,” she said. “The thing where we both want the same thing and we’re both too careful to say it.”
“We really are.” Ellie was laughing too. “Ok. Cards on the table. I want to go.”
“I want to go too.”
“Good.”
“But it’s more than that.” Becca paused, choosing her words. “I want this for you. Alexa clearly wants you, and watching you with her was…” She bit her lip. “Remember what Kelly told you about the night after the gig? About wanting to say thank you to Colt?”
Ellie felt her pulse quicken. “Yeah.”
“This could be that. My thank you to you. For everything you’ve given me… the watching, the freedom, all of it. You’ve sat in that chair and let me have the most incredible experiences. Kelly, yes, but Cass too. If you want Alexa, I want you to have her.” She held Ellie’s gaze. “If you want that.”
Ellie stood there, holding her wife’s hands in a crowded bar on the Florida panhandle.
“I want that,” she said. “You want Mia too?”
“I want that,” Becca replied, smiling, and Ellie could read volumes in that smile. It was the smile that saidI love you and I trust you and let’s have some fun together.
“Then let’s go drink some rum.”
“Wait.” Ellie reached behind her neck and unfastened her necklace. Becca saw and grinned, doing the same. They put them on each other, then stood back.
Becca started laughing. “You look exactly the same! I knew we shouldn’t have bought identical necklaces…”
Ellie grinned back. “Yeah, we really should have planned that Christmas for when we’d go to spring break and fool around with other people.” She paused. “The important thing is we know.”
“Yeah, we know.” She took Ellie’s hand. “Now let’s go and find our volleyballers before someone else tries to hit on them.”
Chapter 27
They walked to Mia and Alexa’s hotel, which turned out to be three blocks from the final bar and about as far from Ellie and Becca’s rental as it was possible to get while still technically counting as a habitable space. The lobby smelled of chlorine and cheap air freshener, the elevator made a sound that suggested it was considering retirement, and when Alexa unlocked the door to their room Ellie got a pretty clear picture of what a week of spring break on a college budget looked like.
The room itself was decent enough: a double bed, a sofa bed pulled out under the window, a bathroom near the door and a window that seemed to look out directly onto another hotel just a few yards away. It was clean, functional, there was nothing wrong with it except that it was clearly designed to be slept in rather than lived in, and after a week of occupation it showed. Bikinis were drying on every available surface, a suitcase had clearly exploded on day one and never recovered, and there wasa precarious tower of empty cans on the chest of drawers that Mia seemed genuinely proud of.
“Welcome to the penthouse,” Alexa said drily.
“It’s… cosy,” Becca offered.
“It’s not luxury, but it’s got character.” Alexa grinned. “And hey, this is the full spring break experience, right? We promised to show you.”
“It’s a shithole,” Mia said cheerfully, rummaging in a bag and producing a bottle of rum that was about two-thirds full. “But it’s our shithole, and it has rum.”
She poured four generous measures into the only receptacles available, two actual glasses which she gave to their guests and two chipped mugs. They stood in the space between the two beds and the four of them clinked their mismatched vessels and drank.
The rum, if Ellie was being honest, was terrible, but nobody cared.
“So,” Mia said, looking between the four of them with an expression that was ninety percent bravado and ten percentoh God what now. “This seems to be happening.”
“This does seem to be happening,” Becca confirmed.
“Cool. Great. Love that.” Mia took another drink and winced at the taste. “So, Alexa and I have a method that works. We’ve done this enough times before.”
Alexa laughed. “Not this exactly, not a married couple…”
Mia smiled. “No. Not women either. But… you know. Hookups where we’re both in the room.”
“At the same time?” Ellie asked, and was surprised by how level her voice was given that her heart was doing something that felt like she may need medical intervention sooner rather than later.
