Chapter 20
Ellie woke to the smell of coffee and the sound of a low, repetitive clinking that seemed to come from outside. She lay still for a moment, disoriented by the unfamiliar room, the white linen, the wildflowers on the nightstand, and then the previous evening came back to her and she smiled.
Becca was still asleep next to her, face-down, one arm hanging off the bed, her hair a dark mess.
She slept like someone who'd been switched off at the mains, completely, thoroughly, unreachably, and Ellie had learned years ago not to even attempt conversation before Becca's first, and preferably second, coffee.
She slipped out of bed, pulled on shorts and a t-shirt, and padded barefoot through the living area towards the coffee smell.
Through the window she could see the source of the clinking sound: Colt, out by the paddock fence, working on something with a hammer, the horses watching him with benign disinterest.
The kitchen was clean and bright, the early light coming in low through the windows. A pot of coffee was on the counter with a handwritten note:
Help yourself. Mugs above the sink. I'm fixing the gate.
Ellie poured herself a mug and went out to the porch.
The hill country in the morning was a different beast to the hill country at night.
Where the darkness had been vast, star-filled and slightly overwhelming, the morning was gentle and reassuring.
Clear sunlight on greenish-brown hills, a slight mist in the low places that was already burning off, the air cool enough to feel fresh but warm enough to sit outside in a t-shirt.
The horses were beautiful in the early sun, and hummingbirds were hovering at a feeder hung from the porch.
She sat in the wooden chair that she was already starting to think of as hers and drank her coffee.
She felt a peace that she didn't often feel in Austin, where mornings were about alarms and traffic, not to mention the anxiety of opening her work email and seeing what dramas her day had in store. This was completely different.
After ten minutes Colt came up from the paddock, wiping his hands on his jeans, and smiled when he saw her.
"Morning. Sleep ok?"
"Amazingly. I don't think I've slept that well in months."
"The quiet does that. Takes a night to get used to if you're a city person, but once you do...
" He poured himself a coffee and came to sit in the chair next to hers, stretching his long legs out and crossing them at the ankle.
"You must be a country girl at heart. Kelly's still out cold. Your girl too?"
"Becca doesn't function before coffee. It's pretty much a medical condition."
Colt laughed quietly. "Kelly's the same. Must be something about the type."
They sat in silence for a while, drinking their coffee, watching the world wake up around them.
It was funny, Ellie reflected, she'd expected being one-on-one with Colt to feel loaded.
My wife and your girlfriend are in all likelihood going to sleep together later…
weird, huh? But instead it felt like exactly what it was, two early risers sharing a porch and a pot of coffee, enjoying something that the two later sleepers could never fully appreciate.
Colt broke the silence first, and when he did it was with a directness that Ellie was learning was a Texan trait rather than a personal one.
"Can I talk to you about something?" he said, not tensely but with a slight change in his posture that told Ellie that something had been on his mind.
“Of course.”
“Kelly came home after the first night with you two and she was…” He turned his coffee mug slowly in his hands, searching.
“Lit up. That’s the best way I can put it.
Not just the sex, though obviously that was part of it.
The whole thing. You and Becca and how y’all do what you do.
She said it was a privilege. Her word, not mine. A privilege to be part of it.”
Ellie nodded her understanding. “That means a lot.”
“And after the second time, the concert weekend?” He shook his head and a grin spread across his face.
“When I saw her on the Saturday, for Solana’s launch, she was absolutely wired.
I have never seen her like that. Whatever y’all did to her that night, she brought the energy to the launch and let’s just say we had ourselves quite an evening.
” The grin turned slightly sheepish. “I probably shouldn’t say more than that. ”
“You probably shouldn’t,” Ellie agreed, laughing. “But I’m glad.”
“Point is, she came home both times and she was more connected to me, not less. That’s the thing that people don’t understand about this. They think it takes something away. It doesn’t. It adds.”
They sat with that for a moment, the morning quiet around them, and Ellie felt the strange recognition of being understood by someone she never would have expected to understand her.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“You and Kelly… how does it work for you two? If you don’t mind me asking.”
Colt took a slow drink of his coffee. “We’ve been doing this a couple of years.
Started with threesomes, sometimes a woman, sometimes a guy.
Sometimes I just watch.” He paused. “Watching her with a guy is my favourite, if I’m honest. But the jealousy is insane.
Seeing her completely open to another man, giving herself to him, the sounds she makes…
” He shook his head slowly. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever sat through and also the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.
The two feelings just tear you apart and put you back together at the same time. You know?”
Ellie nodded, because she did know, she really did.
What he’d said was it, exactly it. Different details, different bodies.
Different genders even. But the same impossible braiding of jealousy and arousal that she’d been trying to articulate for weeks and wasn’t sure that Becca had still fully understood.
“Women are easier,” Colt continued. “Purer, maybe. I’m not comparing myself, I’m just watching her be with someone who understands her body in a way I physically can’t.”
“And when it’s just Kelly on her own? Without you?”
“With a woman, she’s always been free to do that.
Always has been, since we first met. That’s just who she is, and I’m not going to be the guy who tries to put a fence around it.
” He smiled. “With a man on his own, different story… I’d have to be there.
But women…” He nodded toward Ellie. “Like with you and Becca. That’s her space. I trust it.”
“Any advice?” Ellie asked. “For someone who’s still figuring all this out?”
Colt was quiet for a while, long enough that Ellie thought he might not answer.
Then he said, simply, “Come back to each other. Every time. Whatever happens, however far it goes, however good or bad or complicated it gets, even if the jealousy feels like it’s overwhelming, you come back to each other afterwards and you don’t skip that step.
Don’t fall asleep without talking. Don’t let the sun come up on something unresolved.
Kelly and I have a rule: before either of us sleeps after a night like that, we hold each other and, if we’re not there together, we still make sure we talk and say what we need to say.
Even if it’s just ‘that was good’ or ‘I need to ask about this’.
The coming back is the whole thing. You short-cut that and it’ll eat you alive. ”
He said it plainly, without drama, like he was telling her the best way to fix a fence post. But for Ellie his words articulated something she already knew but had never heard someone else say.
“That makes sense,” Ellie said quietly. “Without the watching, what Becca and whoever she’s with would just be sex. Me being involved is what makes it something else. But you’re saying without the coming back, the watching is just watching.”
“Exactly.” He looked at her directly. “Kelly told me you two do the necklace thing.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s your coming back. That’s your ritual. Don’t ever let it become routine. The day it stops meaning something is the day you’ve got a problem.”
They looked at each other, and Ellie felt an affinity with Colt that ran deep.
Not just the start of a friendship, though it certainly felt like that, it was the understanding of two people who were wired the same unlikely way, who’d each found someone they loved enough to let go of, and who’d discovered that letting go was what brought them closest.
“I don’t own her,” Colt said, looking out at the hills where his horses were grazing in the morning sun. “I just get to be her favourite.”
He said it simply, but she’d rarely heard such a tender expression of one person’s love for another.
“That might be the wisest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she said.
“Best not tell my daddy. He thinks I’m an idiot.”
They sat there for another few minutes, the morning light warming the porch, the coffee cooling in their mugs. Two very different people with a lot in common.
Then Becca appeared in the doorway, squinting against the light, hair a disaster, wearing one of Ellie's t-shirts and her own pyjama trousers. "Coffee," she said, in a tone that suggested civilisation might collapse if the request wasn't met immediately.
"On the counter," said Colt. "Good morning."
"It will be when I have coffee."
Kelly appeared behind her, looking similarly destroyed, and the two of them shuffled past like zombies.
The next few minutes were consumed by the elaborate production of getting two non-morning people caffeinated.
Colt caught Ellie's eye and they shared a look: fondness, amusement, and beneath it the understanding from their conversation.
***
Colt left around noon.
He packed a bag, loaded it into his truck, and said his goodbyes on the porch. He hugged Becca warmly (“Take care of my girl") and shook Ellie's hand with his other hand on her shoulder, a little nod that spoke volumes about their conversation that morning.
Then he turned to Kelly, and the goodbye between them was something Ellie felt she shouldn't watch but couldn't look away from. He held her face in both hands and kissed her, slow and deep, and Kelly's hands went to his waist and held him, and they stayed like that for a long, unhurried moment that was so obviously intimate, so obviously genuine, that Ellie’s hand found Becca’s and held it tight.
"Have fun," he said when they pulled apart. "Be safe. Call me whenever."
"Always," Kelly replied. “Be sensible.”
He grinned, then they watched his truck disappear down the gravel road, dust rising behind it, leaving just the three of them, the house, the land, and the rest of the weekend stretching ahead of them.
The change in mood was gradual, and as Ellie thought afterwards rightly so.
It wouldn’t have seemed right if suddenly Becca and Kelly were all over each other.
But as the afternoon went on and Kelly showed them around the ranch properly the restraint that Becca and Kelly had shown started to dissipate, little touches here and there, easy physical intimacy.
Ellie noticed, and felt the loop start to crank itself up… not much, but enough to tease the night ahead.
The property in the afternoon light was beautiful in a way that photographs couldn't capture: twenty acres of rolling green studded with oaks, the horses in their paddock, a vegetable garden that Kelly claimed to maintain but that looked suspiciously like Colt's work, not to mention the watering hole itself, a spring-fed stock pond at the far edge of the property surrounded by flat limestone and old trees whose branches dipped towards the water.
“We’ll come here at sunset,” Kelly said, standing at the edge, the water reflecting the blue sky above.
“Then the fun can begin.” She looked at both of them with that grin, the Kelly grin, the one that said this is going to be fun and we all know it.
"Water's warm enough to swim in by this time of year.
When the stars come out it's like swimming in the sky. "
They walked back to the house, and the afternoon passed easily.
They drank cold beers, Kelly told stories about ranch life, some hilarious and some frankly terrifying.
Beneath it all the current between Becca and Kelly was running stronger by the hour, their body language more openly intimate, the touches lingering longer, the eye contact holding.
It was a form of foreplay, Ellie knew, and not just for the other two. She could feel it ratcheting up gradually too, the anticipation of what was to come.
Late in the afternoon, as the light started turning golden, Becca stood and walked over to Ellie without a word. She reached behind her neck and when her hands came down she was holding the necklace. She kneeled down next to Ellie, a little, excited smile playing around the edge of her mouth.
“I love you so, so much.” She leaned in to kiss Ellie slowly, right there in front of Kelly, and Ellie felt herself melt into it. “Will you look after this for me?”
“I love you so much too.” Ellie lifted her hair and Becca put the necklace on her. “You’ll come back to me later?”
A little nod. “Always.”
Kelly watched from her chair. She didn't say anything, but Ellie saw her eyes follow the necklace from Becca's neck to Ellie's, saw her register the two pendants now resting side by side against Ellie's collarbone, saw her look at Becca's bare throat and sit up a little straighter in her seat.
Becca turned and walked over to Kelly. “I’m yours now.”
Kelly held out her hand and pulled Becca down onto the seat next to her, kissing her, softly and gently. “Yes you are,” she whispered.
That was it, the mood had shifted and the night was happening. Even just sat there on the porch that loop was starting to get loud… good loud, but loud.
The three of them sat there, watching the sun start to set, Becca in Kelly’s arms now, until eventually Kelly said, "I think it’s swimming time.”
Becca laughed and nodded, while Ellie smiled. The light caught Kelly's honey-blonde hair and the evening began.