Ela's Performance: A Romantic Wife-Watching Novel

by Arnica Butler

  “What is it you're having trouble with?”

  Ela unfolded herself and stretched her arms across the desk. Somehow she had sucked up into her arms a copy of the textbook we were using, and she slid a finger into the pages and flipped it open.

  The movement was random, I could see that, and her eyes fell to the open page.

  “Plato,” she said.

  The electricity between us was almost palpable now, but I was wary. She had her eyes locked on mine and she seemed to be moving closer, at a glacial and nearly undetectable pace. Her grapey, Rothmans's flavored mouth was closer and closer to mine with every passing second.

  “Plato,” she repeated, and I had forgotten entirely what it was that we were talking about.

  There was a full minute of time where we said nothing. We were just staring at each other. My cock by now had gotten hard and my brain was trying desperately to talk to it, to weigh the consequences that were unfolding in front of me if I moved an inch too close to Graciela Pineiro, whose name I had stared at for so so long in her block handwriting at the top of her very coherent tests and assignments.

  She never came to office hours.

  It was the middle of the semester and there was no test coming. No hard assignment.

  Beneath her white sweater, her skin shifted as she leaned even closer to me. Her eyes looked to the door.

  It was weird. We would both say this later. Ela had never been the kind of girl to just jump on men, or so she claimed. I certainly had not imagined myself having the balls to do what came next.

  I'm not sure who started it, me or her. Though I feel certain it must have been Ela. Ela who leaned in. I think she said something like, I'm not really that confused.

  And I said, like all men say, said: We shouldn't be doing this.

  But maybe that was after she had already stood up, and we were already against the door that we closed with our bodies. Ela took her own white sweater off, of this I am sure. I watched it in slow, disbelieving motion, as she peeled the soft material from her pale skin and it rolled up and up, exposing her soft body inch by inch, until her small breasts, cupped by a lacy cream bra, were pressed against my chest and her mouth was right beneath my lips.

  I pushed her against the door, and this was not entirely unbridled passion. Part of me wanted to make sure no one would get through the door if they came to office hours. Which were still, technically, in. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the awareness that anyone could come in here and there would be no way to hide what was happening. Ela's hair was getting sweaty, clinging to her cheek and her neck. Her face was pink and her sweater was on the floor.

  Something about it – the possibility of getting caught like that - drove me even wilder.

  I moved my hand over her body and cupped her breast in my palm. As I squeezed her supple flesh, I felt her nipple grow hard against my skin. I slid my thumb beneath the fabric of her bra and stroked her nipple. I was anxious to tear her clothes away, to see what color her nipples were, if they were what I had imagined. To see if the body I had envisioned all semester was the same. Where she had small moles, the color of her skin, the shape of her hip bones beneath her skin.

  There was no time for that, though – not there.

  Ela herself was the one who slid her jeans off, and then, with a look that dared me to do it, she moved away from the door and sat on the table of the desk she had been sitting in, fully clothed, only a moment ago. Only now her jeans were hanging from one leg, and only a silky bra and a pair of white cotton panties covered her torso.

  She winked at me without winking, and she rubbed her tongue along her lip without actually doing so – that was the look she gave me. Her eyes alone told me what she wanted me to know: she wanted me to fuck her.

  No, her fingers told me. She moved them down to the line of her panties, and slid them under the fabric. Just quickly. Just enough to draw my eyes to what was there, to pull the fabric away and let me see a peek of her pink flesh, her dark hair, her pink flesh again.

  She was sitting on a desk in my classroom. My student. Looking about fifteen with those fucking braids in her hair.

  I knew she wasn't – I knew her birth date, it was on my roster, I had checked and re-checked it. It was two days ago. It was nineteen years ago.

  Cotton panties.

  Her fingers pulled from beneath the material, and I am sure they were wet. The smell of her was the only thing in the room: fresh, ripe, and sweet. The panties snapped against her skin. I looked at her eyes. Yellow-gold in the fluorescent light. The buzz swallowed me in its sound, and I couldn't hear anything else.

  I swept my eyes once more over the scene, and all the easy ways for me to get fired and ruin my academic and professional career in a few seconds.

  And then my mind was gone.

  My fingers fumbled only slightly with my trousers, and then I was out in the cool, still air. I pushed her panties to the side and felt the wetness of her pussy on the tip of my cock, a few soft feathery kisses from her downy hair as I searched for her sweet hole with my throbbing cock.

  And then I was in.

  No. Maybe I said, one more time: We shouldn't do this.

  But Ela just pulled me closer, and then I was in.

  She leaned back a little on the desk, and I watched her legs bounce as I fucked her – fucked a student on a desk in a classroom with the door open – and it was almost too much to make it to any amount of time at all. I looked down as my orgasm built up inside of me, to watch my cock sliding in and out of her little pussy, with her panties scraping against the side of my cock in a way that would have been painful if only I could have had a thought in my head. And the sight nearly sent me over the edge.

  She clung to me and pressed up against me, grinding herself against my cock. I was going over, when I realized that her sweet little cunt was clenching tightly around me and she was grinding her way to her own orgasm.

  And then, like just another cliche, we both came at the same time, and her pussy turned to hot liquid as we clung to each other on top of the desk. I had been holding her up by the hips and she was suddenly terribly heavy. She laughed as I nearly dropped her.

  “I meant to just...somehow get you to ask me out,” she said. Her eyes were unafraid to meet mine. She wasn't embarrassed, and her cool, collected gaze kept me from falling apart. My eyes, though, darted to the door.

  Ela stood up and dropped her foot neatly into her jeans, capturing her discarded shoes, like a ballerina slipper, in the same motion. She had her pants zipped by the time she reached the door, and she closed it. She threw her hair back as she stood up, and reached her arms over her head to put on her sweater, which had fallen to the floor.

  Her hair tingled with static and her cheeks were pink with contentment. She looked, very suddenly, much more like a nineteen-year old, and I was relieved. My head was throbbing with my fast-moving blood.

  “Say something,” she encouraged me. Smiling. Friendly.

  “I...” I searched my mind for something to say. “Thank you.”

  How dumb. Ela laughed. She brought her hand to her face and almost keeled over with her wet snort of a laugh.

  Then she straightened herself out, and slung her violin over her shoulders.

  “I don't actually have a problem with...Plato,” she said.

  “No,” I said flatly. What a gorgeous, magnificent, beautiful creature she was. And she was still talking to me. And my cock was covered in her pussy juices. And all I could think about was how I wanted to fuck her again.

  “So I'm not blackmailing you,” she said coyly. She wrung her shoulder under the second strap and let it fall on her holder with a dull snap.

  “I hadn't even thought of that.”

  She moved close to me, and kissed me on my semi-open mouth. “Okay,” she said. “See you in class then, TA White.”

  She saluted me.

  She winked at me.

  And then she left.

  A STRANGE HAZE

 
And now, even though it was eight years later, and Ela was my wife now, I couldn't help but wonder if some lecherous instructor would, as I did, think entirely with his cock when Ela stepped into his office hours.

  In that short skirt and white blouse, a braid over one shoulder.

  “Just...be careful,” I said, in reference to her outfit. I sounded more flustered than I meant to.

  Ela dropped the act and narrowed her eyes. “Oh Peter,” she said. “You're serious.” She was mocking me.

  She came closer to me and gave me a bear-hug. I know she was trying to be cute, but it actually irritated me even more. “Peter-otter,” she cooed. “You know you'll always be the only professor of mine that I fuck.”

  “TA,” I corrected, though it didn't make any difference.

  I wanted to say something else. I wanted both to actually re-iterate my warning, or to tell her to put a different skirt on. I also wanted to erase everything that had come out of my mouth, and bury my jealousy in a place where she couldn't see it.

  Because when she did get to see it, she rubbed on it, until it was raw. Maybe she didn't mean to, but she did.

  And it was a curious feeling: too hard, too intense, painful.

  But also fucking hot as hell.

  She kissed me on the mouth. It was a quick kiss, a comical kiss. She rolled her eyes, but I couldn't tell who it was for. Me, for being silly. Or herself, for calling me 'Peter-otter.'

  Of course I was being ridiculous.

  Of course Ela was a loyal wife, and of course what had happened between us, as teaching assistant and student, as older guy and younger girl, was a one-off. She had just fallen so madly in love with me. That's what she said, and wasn't there evidence enough that she meant it?

  She had a house, a loving husband, we were going to start a family soon...

  Also, she was 27 now. Not a barely-legal undergrad.

  I watched her skip away, down the steps and toward the bus stop. Her walk seemed coquettish. Her skirt seemed adolescently short. Her violin on her back gave her a schoolgirlish quality that was deeply unsettling.

  “Jesus, Peter,” I said aloud, and the refrigerator kicked in as if to emphasize my point. “Get a hold of yourself.”

  A strange haze came over me that morning. I was surprised by it, and it took me a while to figure out what it was about. After all, I had been the one to suggest that she go back to school and do her doctorate in performance. It would increase her chances of getting a teaching position, at least, and it would give her the chance to practice with discipline and feedback and take auditions again.

  I wasn't sure where all of that was going, in the end; but it was going to console me for a while about her loss of career momentum. It would also give her something to say besides “busker” when the snobby people I worked with asked her what she did for a living. The truth was, I didn't really care. But I knew Ela did.

  It was strange, then, that her return to school moved into my mind like a fog and refused to leave. I couldn't think straight. She had applied to the program almost a year ago – it wasn't as if this was a shock to anyone. This day had been coming for a long time and I hadn't given it much more thought than I give my choice of breakfast. Until now. Now it was suddenly filling my head: Ela's short skirt; her braided hair; her cinnamon-candy mouth last night; the way she had thrown herself at me when she was a student; her professors and her peers undressing her as she stood on a platform playing her violin with passion, swinging her skirt and revealing just a little bit more of her thighs...until someone caught a glimpse of her white panties under her little skirt.

  I tried to make myself think of anything else during the day. It wasn't as if there was nothing to think about: I had depositions to prepare for, clients to gently soothe, papers to review and shuffle all over my desk. But my mind stubbornly went from the numbers on a tax form to Ela, from a dry contract paragraph to Ela.

  Always back to Ela.

  Ela on campus, her dark hair shining in the autumnal sun. Ela's cheeks flushed with excitement and the prematurely chilly air, her thighs red with the cold, all the hormone-raging eighteen-year old boys turning to watch her as she walked past them. Boys – thin and lanky with youth, fun and charming, unhindered by real worries, playing Frisbee in the courtyards, winking at Ela as she walked by. Shirts off, flirting with every move.

  Asking for her number.

  Boys who would be startled when she flashed a wedding ring on her hand – a small, gold band, no diamond, so as not to slow her nimble fingers while she played.

  Cheap husband, they would think.

  How old are you? they would ask.

  And then the incredulity. You don't look that old, they would say.

  And then the curiosity. An older woman, they would think. Because at their age, 27 seemed so very old.

  A desire to see what time had done to a woman by that age (nothing, in Ela's case).

  They would follow her, sniffing like dogs.

  But Ela would skip away.

  She had a way of dismissing boys like that, easily and with grace, that she had learned on the streets busking. Flirtatious, not dismissive. She would lower her eyes halfway and grin, shrug and wish them better luck next time. She was taken.

  But it wasn't these boys who worried me, I had to admit.

  A PhD in performance was going to consist of a lot of – and by this I mean a lot – of intense, one-on-one, intimate instruction with some professor. A man, most likely, because they always seemed to be men. An older man, a suave man, a man who was there to guide and mentor and encourage her. A man who had a reason to touch her, first on the wrist, then on the waist. Pressing lightly on her lower back. Tiny movements, tiny little touches to adjust her stance or her posture or her fingers.

  That was how this kind of thing began.

  In a small room, with a power dynamic, and some reason to lightly touch a woman's back and whisper instructions to her behind her neck, where his breath could brush over her and make her skin prickle with unexpected desire...

  Letters and numbers swarmed in front of me, making no sense. I rubbed my eyes.

  Focus Peter, Petie old boy.

  Ela hated that kind of thing, I reminded myself.

  Didn't she?

  She would never allow herself to be such a cliche.

  She had said so herself.

  L A FOGATA

  (8 YEARS EARLIER)

  Ela and I couldn't be kept away from each other, and we hid our relationship (though probably poorly, for anyone who was looking closely) until the end of the semester. She was bright girl and I gave her an 89 on essay that deserved a real “A,” just to cover our tracks. The grade made her grimace and then laugh.

  I spent way too much time with Ela, at the end of my Master's degree, and produced what was probably the world's worst thesis. It didn't really matter: by then I was only finishing my program to be finished. I had already decided to go to law school, be a citizen, stay in the US permanently.

  Ela was beautiful and young, and she seemed to adore me. But I was always leery of her love, as if it were too good to be true. I tried not to pick that particular bone with her: I didn't want to seem as desperate or as needy as I actually was. I wanted to constantly confirm with her, and hear her tell me over and over again, that she was mine.

  At the same time, there was a perverse pleasure I got from bringing up her professors, her handsome, young friends. The members of her string quartet, who quite obviously salivated over her.

  “You spend so much time with those guys, though,” I suggested, one evening at La Fogata, a favorite Mexican restaurant of Ela's. (The mention of La Fogata made her squeal in pleasure and jump up and down in a chair shaking her tiny, balled-up fists in excitement. Consequently, La Fogata was a source of a great deal of debt for me.) “You never...get tempted?”

  “Ugh,” she said. “They're so....bearded. They listen to indie music and get uptight about their coffee.” She cocked her head and tossed her silky ha
ir over one shoulder. “I only like men who get uptight about their tea.”

  I smiled for her.

  What she said should have been enough, but it never was. I bit down on my own tongue to stop myself from prying further: But you stay at hotels together all the time...win things together, lose things together....you must feel some kind of camaraderie...late at night, you have some drinks, you don't ever think about...?

  Ela dug into her food, unaware of my inner struggle.

  A couple passed us, and Ela's attention was suddenly snatched away from her food.

  Without knowing precisely what it was, I got enough of a glimpse of the couple to get the gist: the silver-haired man, in a corduroy blazer with patches on the elbows. The Asian girl with well-trimmed fingernails and very long, black hair. Young. Younger than Ela.

  Music student. And professor. It was like they were wearing signs.

  “Oh god,” Ela said suddenly, placing her napkin over her mouth. She shook her head. “I think I have to go. I think my dinner is ruined.” She closed her eyes and shook her head vigorously.

  She was exaggerating, as Ela was wont to do, and I knew there was no way she was leaving her Fogata Special (a chili relleno stuffed inside a burrito and smothered in green chili) uneaten. Ela, a half-Spaniard raised in Arizona, was violently loyal to good Tex-Mex, and though no one had ever experimented with it, it was not hard to imagine her slitting someone's throat over a relleno.

  Her eyes popped open and she craned her neck, though there was no way she could see the couple who had disturbed her so greatly, and she pressed her napkin more firmly to her mouth, now like she was holding back vomit.

  “Oh god,” she repeated.

  I turned around and looked the way they had gone, knowing I wouldn't be able to see them in the next room, a cavernous, finer dining area with an actual fogata, where they served high-end Mexican food like chicken mole (which Ela wanted nothing to do with.)