Chapter 3
They'd met in the dining hall at Stanford on the third day of freshman year, which Becca always said was fate but Ellie reckoned was simply because she needed pasta.
The pasta bar was Ellie's thing. She'd found it on day one and had been back every meal since, partly because the food was good and partly because she was eighteen, far from home for the first time, and it was comfortingly familiar.
She was stood loading up a bowl of spaghetti when someone reached past her for the parmesan.
“Sorry, can I just…” and Ellie turned to see Becca for the first time.
She’d told Becca once, years later, that the first thing she’d noticed was her eyes.
That wasn’t strictly true… the first thing she’d noticed was her own body and her own mind doing something they’d never done before, a kind of hyperaware skip of excitement, and her immediate thought wasn’t about Becca’s eyes, it was quite simply oh no.
Because Ellie had known she was gay since she was fourteen but had never done anything about it beyond quietly panicking in her bedroom in Portland, and suddenly here was this beautiful girl with brown eyes she could get lost in and a shy smile that made her melt.
She realised right then that her careful plan to figure herself out slowly at college, to slowly reconcile her sexuality to her public persona, was in serious jeopardy.
Becca, for her part, had noticed Ellie right away too.
She’d told Ellie later that she’d noticed her the day before, across the quad, and had spent twenty-four hours trying to work out if the cute girl with the dark hair and the serious expression was gay or simply from the Pacific Northwest, two things that could easily be confused at a distance.
They'd eaten dinner together that night and every night after for the rest of the week, then the week after that, and by the end of the first month they were inseparable friends…
studying together, eating together, staying up until three in the morning talking about everything and nothing.
Like thousands of other eighteen-year-olds finding their feet at college, but there was an undercurrent that neither would have recognised.
Their first kiss happened on a bench by the Oval on an October Tuesday night.
Becca kissed Ellie, not the other way around, because Ellie would have waited another six months from sheer, terrified indecision and Becca could see that.
It was clumsy, quick, and after they sat looking at each other in stunned silence, their friendship changed forever.
“That was ok, right?” Becca asked.
“Do it again.”
Becca did, and they never looked back… by spring they were saying I love you and by the end of freshman year Ellie couldn't remember what her life had felt like before Becca was in it, nor did she want to.
That was seven years ago. They’d been together all through Stanford, through Ellie’s computer science degree and Becca’s psychology major, through Becca’s masters and Ellie’s first job at a start up in the Bay Area that worked her hard but at least paid off after a while.
They’d got engaged at twenty-two, married at twenty-three in a ceremony in Becca’s parents’ backyard in Connecticut that made just about everyone cry, and moved to Austin a year ago when Ellie got an offer from one of the big tech companies that was making the migration south.
The necklaces they both wore came from their first anniversary.
Nineteen, broke and wildly in love, Ellie had found a jeweller near campus who made simple gold chains with a tiny pendant…
nothing fancy, nothing expensive, but Ellie had bought two identical necklaces and given one to Becca on the exact date of their first kiss.
Becca denied to this day that she’d cried, but she had.
Ellie had too, also denied. They’d put them on each other that night and neither had taken them off since save to sleep.
They’d dulled slightly over the years, the chains had been replaced twice, but they were the most important possessions either of them owned, more even than their wedding rings.
***
Austin had suited them. Inevitably it had taken them a few months to find their feet, leaving behind friends and the familiarity of the Bay Area.
But by now, a year in, it felt like theirs.
Their apartment downtown had more space than they needed, two bedrooms, the open plan living area, the floor-to-ceiling windows.
They even had a small balcony where Becca kept some plants and Ellie kept meaning to put some chairs.
Ellie's job was demanding but she was good at it, a product engineer working on systems that she couldn't easily explain at parties but that paid her enough that they didn't worry about money.
She liked the work, enjoyed the problem-solving, got a lot of satisfaction from building something that worked.
It was a different kind of creativity to Becca's but it scratched the same itch.
Becca's practice was growing. She worked three days a week at a group practice in the city, seeing her own clients under supervision as she accumulated the hours she needed to be fully licensed, and was starting to pick up private referrals on top of that. Ellie thought that she seemed born to be a therapist… she listened, she noticed, she asked the question you didn’t know needed asking.
Her clients seemed to love her, as did her supervisors, and Ellie loved seeing her come home at the end of the day buzzing from how she’d helped untangle something that had seemed impossible.
Their routines were comfortable. Coffee together before Ellie left for the office, a run along Lady Bird Lake on mornings when they both had time, takeout on the sofa on Fridays watching whatever series they were into, friends over on weekends, brunch at their regular place on South Congress, even though the wait was always too long, because the migas were always worth it.
They were happy.
Not in an uncomplicated way, because no couple who'd been together since they were eighteen was uncomplicated, but in a real way, a way that had survived the ordinary stresses that wear at relationships and come out stronger each time.
They argued occasionally, of course, the usual things, but they made up quickly because neither of them could stand being at odds with the other for long.
They had sex regularly and it was good, genuinely good, the sort of deep familiarity that meant they knew exactly how to make each other feel incredible.
All of which was why what had happened that Friday night was so confusing.
***
They didn't talk about it the next morning. They talked about everything else over coffee, anything but that, neither of them quite ready to pull the thread in the sober light of a Saturday.
It was there though, absolutely, sitting just beneath their Saturday morning routine.
She caught Becca looking at her across the kitchen with an expression she didn’t recognise.
She caught herself looking at Becca while she did yoga in the living room, watching her body move through the poses, and thinking not about how beautiful she was, although she always though that, but about someone else thinking it.
Someone else watching her. Someone else touching her.
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.
The expression 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 you about 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.
***
The next week they went to a friend's birthday drinks at a rooftop bar overlooking the river, over-priced but more than made up for by the spectacular sunset view.
They were stood at the railing with drinks, talking to another couple they knew through Ellie's work, when Ellie noticed a woman across the bar looking at Becca.
It wasn't the same as last Friday. The woman wasn't approaching, wasn't flirting, was just... looking. But she was really looking, checking Becca out, the way you look at someone beautiful in a bar when you think no one is watching.
Ellie noticed though, and noticing was stirring up those same feelings as the week before.
She didn't say anything. She watched the woman watch Becca for a minute, then the woman looked away, but fifteen minutes later she saw her looking again, and there was something in her expression that told Ellie that the woman was thinking thoughts about Becca that it wasn’t normally considered polite to think about someone else’s wife.
Later, in bed, when they were lying in the dark Ellie said, "There was a woman at the bar tonight. She was checking you out."
Becca was silent for a moment. "Was she cute?"
"Yeah. Very feminine. Hot.”
Another silence. Then Becca rolled over and found Ellie in the dark, her hand on Ellie's stomach, her mouth close to Ellie's ear. "Tell me about her."
And Ellie did. And it wasn't Becca in charge of the narration this time, it was Ellie, describing what she'd imagined while she watched this stranger watch her wife, and it was different from their other night because Ellie was the one in control of the story, she was the one choosing what happened and when and how, and the power of it, of being the one who decided what Becca did in this imaginary encounter, added something new and very hot to the mix.
Ellie came twice while she narrated, Becca between her legs for the first time, the two grinding into each other, Ellie on top as usual, the second. The intensity was off the scale… it was insane.
Afterwards, still breathing hard, Becca said, "That was different."
"Different good?"
"Different very good. You leading the narration instead of me. That was..." She trailed off and Ellie could tell she was smiling in the dark. "I liked you being in control of the story."
Ellie filed that away. In control of the story. She liked the sound of that.