That evening, after dinner, they were on the sofa, Becca's legs draped across Ellie's lap, both of them reading with music on in the background, and Becca said without looking up, "I've been thinking about last night."
"Me too."
"And?"
Ellie put her book down. "And I don't really know what to do with it."
Becca put her book down too and looked at her. "Do we need to do anything with it? Can't it just be a thing that happened? A really hot thing that happened that we can repeat sometimes in bed?"
"It can be that."
"But?"
Ellie smiled. "You always know there's a but."
"There's always a but with you. You're a big-but person." Becca grinned at her own joke and Ellie rolled her eyes, but the lameness of the joke felt good, it felt like them.
"The but," Ellie said, choosing her words carefully, "is that I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Not just the sex, which was..." She searched for the right word but made do with grinning. "I mean, you know. But also the feeling at the bar. Watching that woman with you. I've thought about it a hundred times since Friday and every time it does the same thing to me."
Becca was quiet for a moment. Then she swung her legs off Ellie's lap and turned to face her, cross-legged on the sofa, her expression changing to the one where she was listening intently. Not quite her therapy face, but something adjacent to it. Theexpression she wore when she was about to say something she'd been thinking about carefully.
"Can I share something with you?" she asked. "From a professional perspective, sort of, but also not really?"
"That's reassuringly vague."
"I know, sorry. What I mean is… what we experienced on Friday night isn't unusual. It's not common, but it's not unusual either. There's a lot of research on arousal through what's called 'mate-value recognition’. The idea that seeing your partner desired by someone else triggers a heightened attraction response. Your brain essentially re-evaluates your partner as a sexual being independent of your relationship, and that novelty produces a spike in desire."
"So I'm not broken."
"You're not broken. Neither am I. We're experiencing something that has an actual psychological basis, and honestly? In couples who’ve been together as long as we have, who got together as young as we did, it makes a lot of sense. We've never had the experience of competing for each other. We went from meeting to together in weeks.” She laughed. “Arguably minutes. We skipped the part where you see the person you want with someone else and have to deal with that."
Ellie thought about that. "Until Friday."
"Until Friday. And our response to it was intense because we're experiencing something for the first time at twenty-five that most people experience as teenagers."
"You've looked this up."
Becca smiled. "I've looked this up. I looked it up this morning while you were in the shower, and I've been thinking about it all day."
Ellie smiled too. “And what's your considered academic conclusion, Dr. Becca?”
"My conclusion is that what happened on Friday, the bar, the walk home, what we did in bed, was the hottest night of our marriage and I would very much like to not overthink it into oblivion." She paused. "I think we should just let it be what it is for now. If it happens again, we enjoy it. If it doesn't, we had one incredible night. No pressure, no analysis, no need for a plan."
“Happens as in we talk about it in bed? Or happens as in you get someone chatting you up?”
“Why not both?”
Ellie looked at her wife, sat cross-legged on the sofa in an old Stanford t-shirt with her hair in a messy bun and no makeup, and felt an almost overwhelming love for her. This was the woman. This was always going to be the woman.
"I love your brain," Ellie said.
"Just my brain?"
"Everything. But especially your brain right now." She reached for Becca's hand. "Ok, no overthinking. We let it be what it is."
"Good." Becca laced her fingers through Ellie's and smiled. "Although, if you wanted to take me to bed and let me tell youabout what would happen when I bump in to Sara at the gym, I wouldn’t say no.”
Ellie was pulling her off the sofa before she'd finished the sentence.
