Ela's Performance: A Romantic Wife-Watching Novel

by Arnica Butler

  But I wasn't sure what to do next. Not really. The truth was, that as I remember this, of course I know now what it was that I wanted. At the time, though, I wasn't as certain. I didn't know what I wanted her to do or say next.

  She pulled on a strand of her hair and looked at it as she wound and unwound it from her fingers. “I liked you watching me,” she said, suddenly tender. “That's why I didn't say anything. I saw you follow me,” she said, to cut me off as I tried to ask how she had seen me. “I knew you were in my closet. I mean, Jesus, Peter. Like I didn't know there was a man in my closet.”

  I felt like all of the air in the room gave a sudden pop.

  I liked you watching me. Her words ricocheted in my head.

  We stared at each other.

  Ela's face seemed to light up with excitement. A bad kind of excitement, like a kid about to steal something. Then, just as suddenly, the glow faded and her eyes fell. She gave a little shake of her head.

  “What?” I said.

  “No,” Ela sighed. “No, it would just end up getting too complicated.”

  Disappointment came over me, and she must have seen it on my face.

  “Don't you think?” she insisted. But now it was like when we decided to open another bottle of wine, and one of us said, “no, we should be responsible,” but didn't really mean it. Now it was clear that we both wanted to open this “bottle.”

  “It didn't before,” I ventured, meaning Copenhagen.

  Ela's face changed again, as she considered that truth. If anything, we had gotten even closer because of her adventure with Christian and my watching it, right? We had gotten married because of it; we had both liked it; we had both admitted it now.

  But her face fell again. “The thing is...neither one of us knew the other one knew about that,” she said.

  I plunged in, taking up the case like a lawyer.

  “Okay...so....this would be even less likely to cause conflict.”

  The excitement in my voice made her eyes snap back up to mine. She twisted some more of her hair in her fingertips.

  “You really want this, don't you?” she said.

  Now she had a kind of morbid curiosity lighting up her eyes. I hated this look in a lot of ways. It was the look women get when they know they have you over a barrel because of your cock. She twisted a little, amused by her powers.

  Fuck it.

  I suddenly realized I really did want this, and I was as close to the moment as I would ever get. If I didn't ask for it now, we might slip back into a cycle of games and teasing again. And even though I wasn't entirely sure of Ela's commitment to really doing it, I had to take a chance.

  “Yeah,” I said, and I moved close to her, sitting on the couch next to her in a crouch. I slid my hand up her torso, and then grabbed her by the neck – not too firmly, just enough to make her face change to a startled pleasure. I rubbed my thumb over her collarbone. “I really do want this.”

  Ela's eyes lit up with excitement. One corner of her mouth turned upward. I found where the fabric of her dress bunched up, near her hips, and pushed it roughly up to her waist. Ela turned and collapsed sideways, falling onto the small sofa so that I could lie on top of her. I undid my pants first, taking myself out before I got on top of her. I never lost eye contact with her as I did this, and she looked at me with her fiery eyes. She was reeling me in, amused, aroused.

  “Tell me,” I said, and I didn't even finish the sentence. Did I mean for her to tell me about Ari, or about being with another man, or just for her to talk dirty to me? I was opening my mouth to finish my sentence, and moving my hand down to her underwear, where I could feel her moisture through her panties. I curled my fingers against her through the fabric, and she raised her body up to mine.

  “Tell you how another big, hard cock feels inside of me?” she responded, with her mouth next to my ear. “Is that what you want to hear?”

  She had her arm around my neck and was pulling me closer. She found my cock with her hand and squeezed it, harder than I can remember her squeezing me before. She ran the pad of her thumb over the tip of my cock, and her eyes lit up with her discovery: it was wet with precum. She brought her thumb to her mouth, and sucked on it. “Or tell you what it's like to suck another man's cock until he comes?”

  I shuddered with pleasure, and pushed Ela's panties aside to get my cock inside of her. “Keep talking,” I whispered, watching her lips close around her thumb. I imagined them closing around Ari's cock, or around Christian's cock. Or really, anyone's. Any cock but mine.

  Ela sucked on her finger for a moment, and I found her overflowing hole with my cock. Her panties scraped against me and I pulled at them impatiently, stretching the fabric, tearing apart of it, pushing my way into her while I watched her mouth.

  She pulled me close to her as I sank into her to my balls. She whispered next to my ear. “I love being all filled up by another man,”

  I groaned and began to rock gently back and forth inside of her.

  “I like feeling his cock all the way inside of me. Deep inside my ass, stretching me open until I can hardly breathe.”

  “More,” I said hoarsely.

  “Fucking me until I scream. Hammering me with his big, fat cock, riding me like a little whore,” she whispered, and her own breath was coming in ragged gasps now. Her pussy had turned to a well of molten nectar, and she squeezed against me.

  “More,” I said. I was close to coming now, and only one more syllable from Ela would push me over the edge. I knew when I came it was going to come from deep inside me. In my mind I let the images of Ela fucking Christian replay wantonly. I imagined her ass, gaping and raw, and her mouth filled up with his cock, as she whispered her final, dirty comment:

  “I like to feel another man's cum filling up my hot, wet cunt.”

  I yelled and arched my back as I pounded my seed into her. Her pussy pulsed around my cock and she closed her eyes, her mouth open and frozen into a wide “O” of pleasure. She bucked up against me to make herself come.

  I lifted her, with myself still inside of her, and we rocked the final waves of our orgasm out with Ela sitting on my lap. Then she leaned against me, panting.

  There was a silence, and then Ela giggled.

  “You ruined my dress,” she whispered.

  I wondered if, like so many other times, we would just circle close to this...thing I wanted, and then Ela would brush it away, turn it into a joke, and never let me bring it up again.

  She surprised me by saying this next:

  “Okay. Truth.” She pulled away from me to look into my eyes.

  I held my breath. I had thought everything was on the table already.

  “I still have an attraction to him.”

  If I wasn't so spent, already, it would have filled my cock to hardness again. I felt myself twitch.

  “Ari,” I said. His name sounded strange on my lips.

  She nodded. She bit her lip.

  “I...listen, I only play along with this because...well, you seem to get off on it. For real. But is this something we really want to do?”

  “Why are you still attracted to him?” I said. I wanted to hear it. Now it wasn't just something dirty to say while we fucked, but a real question.

  She shrugged. “He's hot. Sort of...aloof. He was....good in bed. But...” she sighed, and raised herself up so that I slipped, still semi-hard, from inside of her. She moved to the bed. “Here's the thing, Peter, and I really mean this. It's like with Christian. He's good in bed because there's nothing else, you know...mucking things up, like trying to have a real relationship or connect in some real way. He's this...I don't know...”

  “Strong silent type.” I was a little out-of-it, with that fucked-out feeling tingling all over my body. Having this conversation seemed surreal.

  She smiled. “Yeah...and like...scary, you know. Like he really might be some kind of secret agent or something.”

  “Women like that,” I said.

  She collapsed on t
he bed, pulling her feet up so that she was facing me, at the edge of the bed, on her side. Her hair was spread out behind her and she pushed a sweaty strand from her cheek. She was gorgeous, in that particular moment. “I like it like you like bimbos. You know?”

  “I don't like bimbos,” I said.

  She waved at the air. “You don't like bimbos for relationships, but you watch all kinds of bimbo porn.”

  I didn't bother arguing with her, or asking why she knew that, or being pedantic about the point that the porn I watched was mostly stuff that emulated what I imagined her doing with other men.

  There was a long pause. “I just...I just couldn't be so dirty with you, you know. And it's fun with a guy like Christian, or a guy like Ari, because there's nothing to deal with afterward. I don't have to put up with their shitty personality all the time.”

  I was silent.

  “Hey,” she said, and propped herself up on her elbow. “I'm just being honest, here. I haven't ever done anything outside of our marriage, and I'm only talking about it because you seemed into it. Now you tell me. What do you like about the idea?”

  I closed my eyes. Wasn't this exactly what I had wanted all along, even without allowing myself to realize it? Why was I hesitating? I sat on the couch so that my back was against its back.

  She lay back down. “You like how dirty it is,” she said, with a lawyer's conviction. “You like seeing me be naughty, even if you don't want to actually...I don't know...defile me that way yourself.” Then she seemed unsure. “Is that it?”

  I liked seeing her with another man.

  I really liked seeing her get tossed around with a big, athletic man. I liked seeing her lips around another man's cock, and I liked the idea of her getting pumped full of another man's cum.

  That was the truth.

  I opened my eyes.

  “Can I just say, I like it, and I like it because I like it?” I said. I was feeling exposed for some reason.

  She sat up. She touched her fingers to her lips. I had no idea what the gesture meant.

  But she snorted. “It's a bit cryptic. Which is not why I married you, you understand.”

  She was smiling when she moved her fingers from her mouth. “Look, it's not something we have to do. Maybe...you didn't really want it to be real-”

  I felt everything slipping away from me. I flailed my arms a little, reaching forward to grasp her wrists, to stop her from moving away from the place we had reached. No, there was definitely something I wanted here.

  “No,” I said, firmly. “I do. I just...I have a hard time explaining why.”

  “Why's that?”

  I covered my own face with a pillow from the couch as I leaned back. It smelled like mildew, like most of London.

  Why, indeed?

  I felt Ela's hand on my chest. She had come back to the couch, to climb onto my lap. “Okay, look. Peter seriously. I'm into it. But only if you really want it.”

  There was a pause, and I knew she was smiling even though I was under the pillow. “I don't have to know what it is,” she said, to my silence.

  That was the first time it was clear as day to me: Ela had her own agenda. And even if I couldn't voice my own thoughts to her, or even articulate them to myself, it didn't matter.

  She understood them.

  She found my cock with her hand, and pulled the pillow away from my face. She seemed unsurprised to find my cock hard again, and she smiled with tenderness as she guided me inside of her for the second time.

  I felt her surround me, with all of her hot, liquid flesh, and I let myself give over to the feeling. With her eyes on mine, she rode up and down on my cock. It was a quiet, long lovemaking session, with Ela on top of me the entire time. Looking at me, communicating to me the same things we had discussed, but on some other, animal level. There was no dirty talk, just her body, moving over mine. Her eyes, telling me she loved me. Her smile, telling me everything was okay.

  When I came, it snuck up on me out of nowhere, and she pulled my face to her chest and stroked my hair as she ground her own body against mine to bring herself to orgasm.

  And like that, our complicity was born.

  T HE PLAN

  There were several versions of The Plan, each one hashed out over dinner. Playfully, and ending in giggling disaster. Ela suggested stuffing me into a hard, fiberglass flight case for an upright bass, which was amusing and somewhat appealing to me. It was, however, an idea we had to nix because she couldn't guarantee that she could get Ari to fuck her in the room where it was stored.

  “Or,” she said, mischievously, “get you out of the case afterward.”

  I was enjoying planning with Ela. It began a little awkwardly, but when we added some wine and began to relax it became fun and intensely erotic. It almost always ended in very hot sex. Most importantly, making this sordid little plan together was allowing us to talk about things we'd kept hidden from each other throughout our marriage.

  “You're good at stalking,” she teased me, referencing the now-shared memory of Copenhagen. “Just stalk me.”

  And then we laughed, together.

  All of our plans, the serious and the silly, seemed futile if I were to try to get a good view of things.

  And this was the crucial part, I realized. I wanted to see her.

  I was enjoying, though, the slow buildup to the moment, created by our inability to make a plan that would work.

  “Are you teasing him?” I asked her, stroking her hair in bed. I loved the idea of Ela slowly stringing Ari along.

  “I flirt with him. I have to take it easy,” she said. She was smiling.

  “What do you do?”

  “Look beautiful. Bat my eyes.” She blinked.

  I wanted more details, and I told her so. “Aggggh!” she said, craning me with another pillow. “See? This is why you have to see it. I can't...describe things like that without...I don't know, laughing.”

  I smiled.

  She put a hand on one hip, and threw her hair back, trying to recover her serious face and show me how she flirted with Ari. For a second it worked. She lowered her long eyelashes to her most doe-like setting, and fluttered them lightly. She bit on her lower lip with her slightly crooked tooth, and smiled. She was so masterful, so perfect. “Ari,” she purred, and her voice was sexy but it was wavering. “Can I borrow your rosin? You have such...” she was stifling a laugh now, but desperately trying to keep a straight face. “Such hard, beautiful rosin, and I want to rub it all over my bow.” She was hysterical by the time she got to the end of her sentence and collapsed on my legs, covering her face and laughing.

  “I hope you don't do that,” I said, when I recovered.

  She pushed her hair off her face and blinked at me. “No. No, I'm very serious.”

  And she was, suddenly.

  “What if we get a hotel and I hide there ahead of time?” she said, breaking a minute-long silence abruptly, turned on her side and propping herself up to look at me.

  She thought on her own suggestion, her eyes misting over as she planned the whole scenario in her mind.

  “No,” she said. “No, Ari is...tricky. He'd want to think he had control over things. I think it would...take away from the moment if I already had a hotel room. He would get spooked by it.”

  “Hmmm.” From what Ela told me, Ari was definitely a kind of control freak.

  Ela climbed onto me, resting her chin in my stomach and blinking up at me. “I have an idea,” she said. “I know it would work. But...”

  I stroked her hair. I already sort of knew what she was thinking.

  “But what?”

  Ela looked sideways and moved her jaw back and forth. It moved her throat over my cock, and even though we had just had sex, I was getting hard again.

  “Well...we could do it here. I was thinking if I told him you were out of town, and got a ride from him or something, which he is always asking me if I want, then I could invite him in...and I would text you to let you know, you know?
That way we couldn't miss.”

  It was a good plan. I was silent. Not because I didn't like it, or needed to think about it, but because I was imagining hiding behind the privacy screen I was going to buy tomorrow, and listening to Ela laugh downstairs, waiting for her to pull Ari Zurer up the stairs behind her and into our bed...

  “Is that too weird?” she said, mistaking my silence for insecurity.

  “I was just getting lost in a fantasy,” I said.

  “Mmmm.”

  “So I would hide behind...something over there?”

  Ela smiled, and began to move downward, trailing her chin along my hardened shaft. “Mmhmm.” She grinned.

  “And then you would do what?”

  Her chin had reached the end of my shaft, and my cock sprung up and pointed straight into the air. Ela moved her lips very close to my shaft, and brushed just the tiniest breath away from my cock, without touching me. Her breath grazed my skin as she said: “What do you want me to do?”

  My mouth was open, and I was watching her lips, moving up and down next to my shaft, promising to press against me but never doing it. I sucked in my breath.

  “Do you want me to suck his cock?” Her eyes moved away from my dick to focus on me. She smiled.

  “Or just tease him?”

  “Suck his cock,” I breathed.

  Her lips were at the top of my cock now, where almost unbelievably, a bead of precum had pearled at the end. Her mouth was very close now, and her warm, wet breath curled the tip of me as she whispered. “Do you want me to swallow his cum? Or would you rather see him come all over my tits?”

  She licked at the precum, very delicately, barely touching my cock at all.

  I was so high-strung I could barely speak.

  “Or maybe,” she suggested, “you want him to fill up my ass, so you can bend me over later, and pull my ass apart with your fingers, and see what he left in there?”

  “Jesus,” I said. I had never even imagined that Ela could talk like this.

  She giggled, which in other circumstances might have ruined the moment.

  I couldn't take any more, and I reached out to grasp her head, and push her down onto my throbbing cock. The smile only left her face when her mouth was too full to have any expression at all.