Chapter 19 #2
“Why are we here?” Ellie murmured plaintively beneath Jasmine’s gentle instructions as they sat back to back again, twisting around each other to hold the other’s inner thigh to balance their next stretch.
Estella felt the way she looked — tight, taut, shockingly warm to touch — and Ellie squeezed slightly harder than she should in her desperation to act normal.
“I thought you wanted to see what I was made of,” Estella said, squeezing Ellie’s inner thigh right back, literally as though she were testing out a peach in the grocery store.
Ellie begged all of her nerve endings to switch off, but they all lit up like needy lightbulbs under Estella’s fingers.
“You told me you wanted to understand my motivations, learn my mannerisms, watch how I moved?” She sounded genuinely confused.
“I figured coming along to my yoga class would be fun. I’ve never done the partner class,” she added casually, as they straightened and then stretched the other way, grabbing each other’s other inner thigh.
It was the boat pose that finally undid Ellie, because not only were both pairs of their bare feet pressed sole to sole up in the air, their legs split open, but they were holding both hands, facing each other.
It took more core strength and fortitude than Ellie had ever possessed in her life to stare into Estella Grant’s eyes between both their spread thighs and she fell back on the mat, laughing, dying for the release of tension.
Estella knelt above her, smirking and shaking her head.
“I win,” she whispered, her eyes ablaze.
After the class was over, they slipped back into their shoes and out into the night together.
Ellie could still feel it — this odd pulling sensation in her chest that she was sure was Estella gearing up to dismiss her — even despite the shocking intimacy of the yoga class.
So it took her by surprise when Estella gave her a sideways glance and asked, “Got anywhere you need to be?”
Ellie shook her head in mute surprise and Estella looked pleased.
She led Ellie to a gleaming black SUV and opened the back door, which was how Ellie found herself sliding into the back of a crime boss’s car and being driven at speed through the dark streets by the murderous looking body guard, who Estella introduced as Kenneth.
“Where are you taking me?” Ellie thought to ask as they moved further into the inner city, and Estella’s mouth turned up in the smallest of quirks.
“I feel like dancing,” she said, out of nowhere and Ellie’s stomach roiled.
“What?” she asked incredulously. “We’re not dressed for a club,” she said, gesturing down at her lycra clad body and running shoes.
“Sure we are,” Estella said with a shrug.
She tugged out her yoga ponytail and ran her fingers through her hair, effortless blonde waves unfurling.
Ellie scrunched up her nose and Estella snickered at her as the car came to a stop.
“Fine,” she said, undoing her seatbelt. “Here.” She produced a small handbag and pulled out her signature bright red lipstick.
Suddenly she was closer to Ellie than she’d been when they’d been breathing right in each other’s mouths, and Ellie’s eyes flickered up in panic, unsure where to look.
Estella cupped her jaw to hold her still, her hand warm and firm on Ellie’s skin, like a prelude to a kiss.
Ellie had sat in plenty of makeup chairs in her life — perfectly used to her face being poked and prodded, pimped and powdered - but it had never given her a shiver up her spine the way it did when Estella Grant leaned in and touched her lipstick to Ellie’s lower lip.
She moved it along Ellie’s mouth with breathtaking care.
“There.” Estella examined her. “Suits you.” Ellie could still feel the ghost of her touch as Estella took the lipstick that had just been on Ellie’s lips and spread it against her own, making a little kissing motion as she checked it in a compact mirror.
Then she turned to Ellie and smiled mischievously, one set of red lips to the other. “Come on, then.”
Without so much as a goodbye or a wave to Kenneth, she exited the vehicle.
Ellie caught his eye in the rearview mirror and wished she hadn’t.
His eyes were stone cold, his jaw clenched like he was barely holding back vicious words or even physical violence.
She shuddered as she escaped the vehicle.
What was she doing here with these people?
There wasn’t even a minute to collect her thoughts or reconsider before Estella grabbed her wrist, just as firmly as she had in the yoga class and tugged Ellie along with her to the door of a thudding nightclub.
There was a long line, despite the fact that it was a Thursday night, but of course the burly bouncer took one look at them — two women in yoga attire, one of them Estella Grant — and instantly let them in through the velvet rope with a respectful nod.
“Really?” she shouted in Estella’s ear, over the pounding music.
“Dancing?” Ellie felt whiplash between the quiet zen of the yoga studio to the crowded sweaty club, slammed by steamy body heat, blazing sound and strobe lights.
She knew the bar — a gay bar — but she didn’t read into it.
Loads of women preferred being in gay bars, perhaps particularly a woman with a ton of dangerous enemies.
Ellie spotted Kenneth, arms folded, on the other side of the bar, his eyes fixed on Estella.
Ellie turned her back, solidly uncomfortable with him in her line of sight.
“Yoga does that to me sometimes,” Estella yelled back.
“It puts me right in my body and now I want to use it.” Her words brushed Ellie’s earlobe, hot and vivid in the dark of the bar.
She grabbed Ellie’s wrist again and cut the line to the bar, smirking flirtatiously at the man about to protest, whose words quickly died on his lips.
The bartender swivelled instantly towards her, leaning in to hear her order with the manner of a nobleman bowing to royalty.
Just like that there were two tequila shots before them.
Estella didn’t pay and the bartender didn’t expect her to.
She handed one to Ellie, eyebrows raised — all but an order — and they both drank the shot.
The liquor burned, but Estella didn’t give her a second to feel it, already towing her out to the packed dance floor.
Ellie didn’t need alcohol in her bloodstream to dance.
Drama school had pummelled every inch of self-consciousness out of her body when it came to movement.
All she needed was music, sometimes not even that.
The presence of Estella Grant was a lot, though, so for a long moment she closed her eyes, and began to move, and when she opened them, Estella’s focus was close and intense.
“Oh,” Estella said, as the two of them moved together in the flashing darkness. “Oh.”
That was all it took. Slowly the shot of liquor reached Ellie’s bloodstream and rushed through her, along with the memory of Estella’s body entwined with hers in the yoga class, until finally the brush and collide of Estella’s skin against hers, there on a nightclub dance floor, felt inevitable.
She let the buzz overtake her, ignoring the question blaring in her brain of why Estella was doing this, ignoring for once, the question of motivation, letting that be a problem for later, when she would be lying awake, mind racing, trying to work out the impossible conundrum that was Estella Grant.
She surrendered completely and let the tease and the pleasure be reason enough.
“Do you want to come in?” Ellie heard herself say, as Kenneth pulled the car outside her apartment, because what was happening?
She wasn’t drunk, not exactly, just loose and hazy, the night still technically early, the pull between them sharp and ferocious, completely unable not to ask for more.
And so, somehow, Estella was unclipping her seatbelt; sliding out of the car; following Ellie in through the doors of her building; silently by her side in the elevator, right behind her back, breath tickling the nape of her neck as Ellie unlocked her apartment door.
This would be the moment that after dancing with a woman in a nightclub the way they just had, then asking her home, that Ellie would pull that woman into a kiss.
Or better yet, just look at her in a way that would bring the kiss to her.
She felt it, as clearly as if it had already happened: being pressed back into the door, the taste of someone’s desire shimmering on her tongue as their hips pressed in, the pleasure of touching her skin tingling in the air just about in reach. But this was not that.
Ellie toed out of her sneakers and padded to the kitchen.
She poured them both a glass of water, feeling every inch of the surrealism that was Estella Grant, barefoot in Ellie’s home, until they were both sitting on her living room sofa, gazing out at the lights over Lygon Street.
They were silent, for a long moment, not touching at all anymore.
Still, they were sitting closer than two women who were professionally entwined maybe should, even if one of them was trying to inhabit the other’s body, trying her on for size, seeing the world through her eyes.
A flash hit her — a whole other idea of being inside Estella Grant’s body, her bedroom right through that door — and Ellie felt herself throb.
She heard Estella inhale, about to speak, and she jumped in so quickly the words sounded wrenched from her chest. “Are you afraid of going to prison?”
For a second, Estella was totally still. Silence rang out. And then, she laughed. “God, Ellie,” she said softly, her voice wry and full of amusement. “I never know what’s coming with you.”
Regret sliced through Ellie, and she wanted more than anything to pull her words back, to say what were you going to say, sitting so close to me with that fucking look in your eyes?
But this was Estella Grant and Ellie wasn’t insane.
Was she? The intimacy still felt low and heavy in the room, pinning them close like they couldn’t move apart if they tried.
Estella took another breath in. Then, she sighed.
“Prison has been inevitable as long as I can remember. At least, since Mike. But then again, they haven’t managed to send me there yet.
” Her mouth quirked and Ellie noted that her lipstick had faded, disappearing until all that was left were bare, pink-bitten lips: less overtly sexy, but so much more desperately sensual. Ellie had to stop looking at them.
“But are you scared?” she asked instead, braving a glance at Estella’s startlingly close gaze to stop herself thinking about Estella’s lips, or, god, her tongue.
Estella’s smirk disappeared, her gaze becoming troubled.
Her voice got very soft, her eyes on Ellie, her tongue darting out to wet her lips.
“I’m fucking terrified,” she whispered.