Chapter 4
It happened in little increments, like turning up a dimmer switch very, very slowly so that you don’t notice the room getting brighter until suddenly everything is bathed in light.
Becca started properly flirting.
Not with Ellie, because she’d always flirted with Ellie, they flirted like they breathed, a constant low-level trickle of teasing and touching, of looks that said things that there was no need to vocalise.
This was different. This was Becca flirting with other women, and Ellie was pretty sure she wasn’t imagining it.
The tell.
Except… was it now? Becca now knew exactly what that gesture did to Ellie, and she was doing it anyway, and when she glanced over at Ellie from across the bar there was a flicker of something in her expression… amusement? Satisfaction? The pleasure of a shared secret?
All of them probably. And did it matter? Because if it was genuine, then Ellie had a name for it now and it was thrilling. And if it wasn’t, then Becca was doing it to flirt with Ellie directly, which was also thrilling.
That night when they got home the sex was outstanding. Neither woman needed to narrate. The image of Becca leaning in towards the blonde, touching her arm, pushing her hair back, that was enough. It was fuel, it was kindling, and they burned through it together.
***
The next time was at a house party thrown by friends.
A Saturday night, a sprawling place out in the suburbs with a backyard and broad mix of people from Austin life.
Ellie was talking shop near the cooler with a colleague who was there when she looked up to see Becca on the other side of the yard, leaning against the fence, talking to woman that Ellie didn’t recognise.
The woman was straight. Ellie would have bet a lot of money on it…
there was something about the way she held herself, the way she laughed at Becca, the slight bewilderment in her expression that said that she wasn’t entirely sure why this conversation felt different from other conversations she’d had that night but wasn’t complaining.
Becca was in a summer dress that Ellie loved, one that showed off her shoulders and fell to just above her knee. She looked effortlessly gorgeous, even though Ellie knew it took twenty minutes and a very expensive moisturiser to keep on looking that way.
She was being charming, Ellie thought, that was the word for it.
Not flirting in a way that anyone watching would have identified as flirting, just being more charming than was strictly necessary, giving this woman the full force of her personality.
The woman was responding the way that everyone responded to Becca when she turned it on: slightly dazzled, a little off-balance, but not remotely able to look away.
Ellie watched for ten minutes, maybe fifteen. She watched Becca touch the woman's wrist when she laughed at a joke. She watched Becca tilt her head in that listening way she had. She watched the woman lean in closer, unconsciously drawn, the way a plant leans toward the sun.
And Ellie felt it. The same thing she'd felt at the bar that Friday night, the same thing she'd felt at the rooftop, the same heat, the same ache, the same confusing jumble of jealousy and arousal.
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 so well 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 events that 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't have 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.
"It's also associated with heightened sexual satisfaction in primary relationships," Becca added, almost casually, going back to her phone. "Which, I mean, we can certainly confirm."
Ellie laughed. "No argument there."
They were quiet for a minute, Ellie finishing her coffee, Becca scrolling. Then Becca said, without looking up, "There's another term I came across. Cuckquean." Becca was blushing, which looked adorable cute.
"Cuck-what?"
"Cuckquean. It's the female version of cuckold. A woman who derives sexual pleasure from watching her partner with someone else." She looked up from her phone, blushing harder now. "Sound familiar?"
Ellie felt herself blush too, which was absurd given what they'd been doing and saying to each other for the last few weeks. "Maybe."
"And the partner, the one being watched, is sometimes referred to as a hotwife." Becca was smiling now, clearly enjoying their mutual discomfort. "I quite like that one actually."
"Of course you do."
"Hotwife." Becca said it slowly, tasting the word. “Hot. Wife.” She laughed. “Accurate?”
They left it there, Ellie heading to work with the word cuckquean rattling around in her head.
She wondered whether it really applied to her, but she liked that there was a whole vocabulary for this type of thing.
Her inner scientist, she realised… if something has a name then it must be respectable.
But more than the word cuckquean, what stayed with her was the look on Becca's face when she'd said hotwife. Not just amused. Intrigued. The look of someone who'd found a door with her name on it and was wondering what was on the other side.
***
Neither of them said anything more about it.
The research, the terminology, the frameworks…
all of it got filed away. They didn't sit down and have a conversation about next steps, or boundaries, or what they ultimately wanted.
They didn't need to. The unnamed thing between them was working, evolving at its own pace, and forcing a structure onto it would have been like trying to stop a river with a fencepost.
Instead, they just kept living. Kept working, kept running by the lake, kept eating migas at brunch, kept going out with friends on weekends and watching whatever they were watching on the sofa on Fridays.
Kept having sex that was better than it had ever been, powered by an engine that neither of them had known existed a few weeks before.
And beneath all of it, quiet but growing stronger with each passing day, was the feeling that they were heading somewhere. Not rushing, not forcing it, but moving, pulled by a current that they'd both chosen to stop fighting.
Wherever it took them, they'd get there together. Ellie was sure of that.
She just didn't know yet that it would happen sooner than she expected.