It was surreal. That was the only word she could think of for it. Completely, wonderfully surreal.
She reached for Alexa’s body, her hands finding the muscles of Alexa’s athlete’s stomach, feeling the hard definition under her fingertips. Alexa’s breath caught when Ellie’s fingers moved higher and they lay there in the dark, touching each other through and under clothes, mouths and tongues meeting and breaking apart and meeting again, building slowly becauseneither of them was in a rush and both of them were, in their own ways, feeling their way through something new.
Alexa’s hand moved lower. Down from Ellie’s breast, across her stomach, to the waistband of her shorts, and paused there, fingers resting against the bare skin just below her navel.
“Yeah?” Alexa whispered again.
“Yeah.”
Alexa’s fingers slipped beneath the waistband, beneath her bikini bottoms, and found her. The moan that escaped Ellie’s lips was entirely involuntary. Alexa’s fingers fumbled to start with, finding their rhythm and exploring her, but Ellie shifted her hips to help her find the right angle and when she got it Ellie pressed her mouth into Alexa’s shoulder to muffle the cry of pleasure that went with it… it felt good, really good, different to Becca but different good. She could tell that Alexa wanted to get this right, and Ellie moved her body to help her.
Ellie let herself be selfish for a few minutes, then forced herself to copy Alexa’s path, down, under the waistband, finding Alexa very obviously ready for her, and the gasp that Alexa let out into their kiss when Ellie started to touch her was gratifying in a way she’d not anticipated. She’d never made anyone but Becca make that sound, ever. The power of being able to draw that reaction, the novelty, the intimacy of touching a near-stranger in the dark while her wife was doing God-knew-what a few feet away… it was intoxicating.
They got into a rhythm and Ellie could tell that Alexa was following her lead, understandable since while she didn’t know whether Alexa had been with a woman before she did know thatAlexa wouldn’t be anything like as experienced as her. It wasn’t rushed, but it was very good, both of them breathing hard, their free hands gripping whatever part of the other body they could find. The sofa bed was creaking faster now, more rhythmically, and Ellie could hear Mia’s breathing getting ragged, low sounds that were climbing in pitch, and mixed in with that Becca’s unmistakable gasps and moans.
She was hearing her wife being touched by someone else, and she couldn’t see it. The darkness made it strange and abstract, yet somehow more intimate than watching had ever been: not the visual feast of Kelly in the moonlight, nor the kinetic intensity of Cass giving Becca exactly what she’d dreamed of, but something raw and reduced to the essentials. Sound. Breath. The knowledge of what was happening without the proof of it. And instead of the jealousy-arousal loop firing up in the way she was used to, it was different: less frantic, less frustrated, more tender, not so much about threat as a parallel experience. They were both doing the same thing, in the same room, at the same time, with different people. They were in it together, even apart, and Becca’s necklace rested around her neck while Becca wore Ellie’s, a reminder of who they both were.
Alexa’s fingers were moving a little faster now having found what worked, and Ellie felt the climax building, slower than usual, arriving from further away, the unfamiliar hand and the unfamiliar rhythm meaning her body had to work harder to get there, but she was getting there, she was definitely getting there.
“I’m close,” Ellie whispered, and felt Alexa nod against her shoulder, her fingers adjusting, giving Ellie exactly what the whisper had asked for, and when it hit it was quiet and deep and shuddering, a climax that rolled through her in waves while shepressed her face into Alexa’s neck and gripped her shoulder and let it happen as she felt her body clench around Alexa’s fingers. It felt good… really, really good.
She lay there for a few seconds, catching her breath. She’d just had an orgasm with someone who wasn’t Becca. The first in seven years. She was lying in a cheap hotel bed in Panama City Beach with a college volleyball player’s hand still down her shorts, her fingers still inside her, and she could hear her wife breathing hard across the room, and the ceiling she was staring at wasn’t hers. Nothing about this moment was anything she could have predicted or imagined, and it was ok. It was more than ok. It was extraordinary, life-affirmingly extraordinary.
She focused on Alexa then, moving her hand, finding the rhythm again, and Alexa buried her face in the pillow making sounds that were muffled but unmistakable, her hips rocking against Ellie’s fingers, her breath fast against the cotton, and when she came it was with a full-body shudder and a gasp that she tried to suppress and couldn’t, her hand gripping Ellie’s wrist, holding her there while the waves passed, her head turning to look at the ceiling and crying out once, twice, a third time… Ellie grinned to think that Becca, and Mia, would definitely have heard that.
They lay still, breathing, Alexa’s head against Ellie’s cheek, and in the quiet that followed Ellie heard it all from across the room.
Mia first. A series of sharp, climbing sounds that she clearly tried to keep quiet and failed at spectacularly, she came loudly, gloriously loud, before her breathing went ragged and then stopped entirely for a few seconds before she let out a long, shaky exhale that was followed by a breathless, whispered “oh my God, Becca, oh my fucking God.”
And then, maybe a minute or two later, Becca. Quieter than Mia, of course she was because it would be hard to be louder, but Ellie heard every nuance of it: the catch in her breath, the gasps and moans she always made right before she came, the silence that meant it was happening, and then the long, slow exhale that meant it was over. Ellie knew that soundtrack, could have identified it in a room of a thousand people, and hearing it in the dark, caused by someone else’s hand, was the weirdest and yet most beautiful thing she’d experienced all night.
Ellie lay there holding Alexa, who she could tell was drifting in a post-orgasmic haze, and stared at the orange glow on the ceiling, trying to organise her thoughts. It wasn’t jealousy, nor arousal, nor compersion, not any of the words she’d learned over the past weeks. It was something simpler and larger than all of them. Gratitude, maybe. For Becca, for this night, for the improbable chain of events that had led from a hand on her wife’s arm in an Austin bar to lying in a hotel room in Florida having just been touched by a woman she’d met six hours ago.
Life was very, very strange.
And very, very good.
The room was quiet. Alexa’s breathing had slowed. From the sofa bed, silence.
Then, softly, from across the dark room: “El?”
“Yeah?”
“You awake?”
“Yeah.”
A pause. Then: “Can I talk to you for a second. In the bathroom.”
Ellie gently disentangled herself from Alexa and rolled over, padding barefoot across the gap between the beds, bumping her shin but following Becca’s shape until she was near blinded by the bathroom light switching on.
“Hey,” Becca whispered, pulling the door shut behind them.
“Hey.”
“You ok?”
“Very ok. You?”
