The difference was that this time she wasn't confused by it. This time she recognised it immediately, let it wash over her, let it do what it was going to do, and when Becca eventually wandered back to Ellie's side and slid her arm around her waist with a casual "Hey, you," Ellie knew that Becca could tell how turned on she was.
Becca didn't say anything. She just smiled, a small private smile that was only for Ellie, and kissed her on the temple.
They left the party ten minutes later.
***
It didn’t become a pattern, more a rhythm to their nights out where Becca would talk to other women, never when it was just the two of them, only when Ellie had other company to talk to. She'd be friendly, funny, open, the way she always was, but with that extra edge now, that conscious deployment of her charm. She'd flirt with lesbian women who flirted back, with straight women who didn't realise they were being flirted with, and occasionally with someone who fell in between. Ellie would watch from wherever she'd stationed herself and feel the slow, delicious build of something she was learning to crave.
They never talked about it explicitly. That felt important, though Ellie couldn't have said why. If they talked about it, they'd have to name it, and if they named it they'd have to decide what it was, and if they decided what it was then it would become a thing they did rather than a thing that happened to them. The distinction mattered. This wasn't a project or an arrangement. It was organic, instinctive, two people who knew each other sowell that they could do this safe in the knowledge that if either of them didn’t like it they’d say and that would be it.
Becca knew that Ellie was watching. Ellie knew that Becca knew. Becca knew that Ellie knew that Becca knew. A hall of mirrors that they both found endlessly exciting.
Ellie watched all of it and said nothing, because saying something would have changed the nature of it. She just watched, and wanted, and took Becca home afterwards, and fucked her with a desperate intensity that was fed by everything she'd seen that night.
***
At home, the fantasies continued to evolve.
They'd settled into a kind of equilibrium… sometimes Becca narrated while Ellie went down on her, sometimes Ellie narrated while Becca did the same, sometimes they traded back and forth, hands on each other face-to-face, building the story together, and the sex was consistently the best they'd ever had.
But the content was evolving. Early on, the fantasies had been hypothetical, tentative, other than Sara populated by unnamed women doing vague things in unspecified places. Becca would say "she would" and "someone might" and they both made the scenarios deliberately hazy, safe in their abstraction.
Now, though, the fantasies were getting specific. Concrete. The women had faces, usually whoever Becca had been flirting with that night. The scenarios had locations, logistics, series of eventsthat spoke to the amount of time both of them were spending imagining this when they weren’t together.
Always, without fail, Becca was the one they fantasised about as the participant, Ellie as the watcher. Always.
And the language was changing too. Becca was no longer saying "she would”. She was saying "I want her to”. The shift from hypothetical to declarative was seismic, a tiny grammatical change that altered everything, and the first time Becca said while Ellie's mouth was between her legs and her hands were gripping the sheets "I want her to fuck me while you watch”, the desire that Becca showed did something very good to Ellie.
Becca wanted this. Not in theory, not as a fun thing to talk about in bed. She wanted it.
And Ellie, watching Becca's face as she came to those words, watching the way her body responded to the idea of it, feeling how aroused her wife got when she imagined another woman's hands on her, Ellie wanted it too.
***
One morning, a few weeks after the night at the bar that had started all of this, they were sat at the kitchen island having coffee before Ellie left for work. Becca was reading something on her phone, scrolling slowly, a slight crease between her eyebrows that Ellie had always found adorable… her concentrating face, Ellie called it.
"What are you reading?" Ellie asked.
"An article. Well, a research paper. About compersion."
"About what?"
"Compersion. It's..." Becca looked up and Ellie could see that she was being cautious in how she described it. "It's a term from polyamorous communities. It describes the feeling of joy you experience from seeing your partner happy with someone else. The opposite of jealousy, essentially."
“Polyamorous?” Ellie took a sip of her coffee, studiously trying to look entirely cool with her use of that word. "And you're reading about this because...?"
"Because I was curious whether what we've been doing has a name. Or at least a framework." Becca put her phone down. "I'm not suggesting we're polyamorous, before you panic. We're definitely not. But the emotional dynamic that's been happening between us, you watching me get attention from other women and finding it arousing, that sits somewhere in this territory. Or at least in the neighbourhood. It's been studied. It's a real thing that real couples experience."
"I wasn't panicking."
"You had your panic face on."
"That's my I need coffee face. You know they're similar." Ellie smiled and Becca smiled back. "So, compersion. Is that what I'm feeling?"
"Maybe. Or something adjacent to it. The research says it's most commonly reported by people in secure attachment relationships, couples who trust each other deeply and don'thave anxiety about the stability of the bond.” She grinned. “I think that’s us."
Ellie turned that around in her head. It made sense, in the same way that Becca's earlier explanation about mate-value recognition had made sense. These were frameworks, maps of territory that they were already travelling through, and having the map didn't change the territory but knowing that it was a thing made it less frightening.
