Ela's Performance: A Romantic Wife-Watching Novel

by Arnica Butler

  I moved my other hand down her writhing body, small and taut with excitement. I could feel the warmth of her skin through her thin cotton nightie, and my fingers were eager to push the cotton away so that I could get at the smooth, hot surface of her. I pushed my hand under the fabric, along her small frame, over each tiny rib that I could feel beneath her skin. As I did she squirmed and giggled, but her body arched upward toward me. Wanting me.

  I pushed myself up, pushing her hands down, and she winced a little at the slight pain of her wrists being pressured into the pillow. She twisted feebly to get more comfortable, but I distracted her by brushing over her breasts. Her skin dimpled with bumps of excitement beneath my fingers, and under my palm her dark chocolate nipple pebbled. Her breathing turned to deep, coarse pants, like an animal. In my hand her wrists went almost limp as she gave herself over to me.

  I moved my hand downward to her panties, made of the same thin white fabric, revealing the color of her trim bush, dark like her hair, silky and fine, advertising far more youth than she actually possessed. It was easy to find her slit, and work my forefinger into her hot flesh.

  I shivered as her wet, scorching lips closed around my finger, thinking of how the same delightful sensation would envelop my cock in only a few moments. In just a few moments, I would be inside of her, and her eyes would close like a cat's and she would purr while I enjoyed the deepest part of her.

  My fingertip found the hardened knob of her clit, and slid over it in her honeyed wetness. A ripple moved through her, hard and complete, as I rubbed the hypersensitive skin at the center of her clit. Her lips parted, and her sweet breath, still flavored with wine and a cinnamon candy she had eaten, escaped her mouth.

  Ela often ate things like bubble gum, and then washed them down with wine, or she snuck a cigarette with a busker friend after eating some Fun Dip. The intoxicating effect of her young appearance, and the taste of something childish mixed with something adult and illicit in her mouth never failed to get me wired. Like now. I plunged into her mouth, and the combination of the childishly-sweet cinnamon, and the dry red wine she had knocked back, made my whole body tense.

  I pushed her panties down her hips, almost frantic now to be inside of her. I wonder, often, if Ela knew how much I craved her, until I became like an addict, clawing my way into her like some junkie fumbling with a rubber hose.

  I held my breath, and tried to steady myself, stroking her clit and trying to bring her to orgasm before I entered her. Her eyelids, and her long lashes, were fluttering to half-mast now, and her breathing was quick. Her body became harder and harder beneath me, as her orgasm built up inside of her.

  She exhaled, and then didn't take another breath. A low moan warbled her throat as she wound up tighter and tighter, with my finger sliding over the smooth cap of her clit. Her pussy was welling up with her tangy juices, and my finger was sloshing between the lips of her cunt now.

  And then I felt it: the shudder of her body as she came. She gritted her teeth together and gave a light yelp. Her orgasm almost always seemed to pass through her and into me. My cock throbbed almost painfully as I watched her face flush and the breath ripple her nostrils as she exhaled hard and fast.

  This is, though it's rather mundane, the way we most often made love. Me, playing her like an instrument, until she burst. And then I rolled on to her, and slid my prick into her gushing, pulsing pussy. The heat of her enveloped me, and she wrapped her small body around me. Her heels crossed at the small of my back, and I released her wrists so that she could cling to me and dig her fingers into my shoulders.

  And then I fucked her, as she held on and squeezed my cock with her magnificently tight cunt, slippery with cum. She would usually come again, if I made it that long, and when she did she would yell and throw back her head. Or bite my shoulder.

  But tonight I was too worked up, and I could feel myself close to bursting in no time at all. I opened my mouth to tell her so, but her eyes were closed anyway. I felt the soft, superheated walls of her cunt clench one last time, and I yelled as I filled her pussy.

  I collapsed onto her body, my nose in the soft dip between her collarbone and shoulder. Her nightie had gone all akimbo and I could nuzzle her there. She smelled like wine, cinnamon, her silly strawberry shampoo, and beneath it all, like herself – a sweet, woody smell. Like rain, bread, honey, and moss.

  “You're altogether too heavy to be lying on me like this,” she complained, pushing against me. She was smiling, but she was serious.

  When Ela was done, she was done.

  Reluctantly, I peeled my body away from hers. I was gratified that she turned toward me, and placed her cheek on my chest. She untangled an arm from the sheets and drew lazy circles on my stomach.

  At moments like this, I believed Ela loved me as much as I loved her.

  But most of the time, I felt like I was the one who was obsessed. I had no hand. I tried to remind myself that she had moved her for me, that she had given up her career for me, that she had sacrificed so many things for me.

  But it never took away the unease that I felt nearly all the time, but especially in the bedroom, that I was an addict and Ela could take me or leave me.

  Like maybe she would be sad if I were gone or didn't need the inside of her so much. Sad the way people are sad to leave a dog at home on vacation.

  But not that sad.

  I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the sensation of Ela's fingers, slowing as her breath slowed and she drifted off to sleep. Her leg twitched, and her mouth opened. Her fingers rested on my chest.

  Her eyelashes scraped my skin as she woke suddenly.

  She was like this: when she was peeved she couldn’t let it go.

  “And do you know what really gets me?” she spat suddenly. It wasn't as if I needed to know what the topic was. She was back on Greg again. “That idiot has probably never worked that hard a single day in his life, and he has to know that about himself. Or do you think people like that think they actually worked hard while they were guffawing like a twat at 'networking parties' until some other twat gave them a job?”

  It was funny she would say this, because I had heard her, on more than one occasion, make the exact same statements about people with good careers in music, who had talent but also mostly the patience to schmooze.

  “I think he thinks he works hard,” I said, giving more thought to her idea than I meant to.

  She rolled her eyes. I couldn't see it, but I felt it in the movement of her eyelashes.

  “Being a dick, however, comes naturally to him,” I added.

  I felt Ela's mouth move against my skin, forming a small smile.

  “I don't understand why you didn't just explain that you're going back for your doctorate,” I said.

  Another pillow on my face. Ela released it, and she turned on her side again.

  I waited for it, beneath the pillow so that my smile would be hidden when she started in.

  “Why?!” she breathed suddenly, after a full minute or so, “why would I give any legitimacy to that idiot's thoughts by explaining myself to him? As if there's -”

  She cut herself short.

  “You're winding me up, aren't you?”

  Ela was a real Anglophile, so she loved to use expressions she gleaned from British TV shows (I certainly didn't say them anymore). I sometimes suspected she had married me because I am a Brit. Then sometimes I suspected her of being disappointed that I wasn't British enough, because by then I was fully Americanized to the point of actually watching football. The kind with the brown ball and all the helmets.

  “I am,” I said, muffled under the pillow.

  “Jesus!” she seethed.

  Whether Ela wanted to admit it or not, it was a sore point with her that none of my coworkers took her profession – or her talent – seriously. This was mostly because they had no clue what it took to become a professional musician, or to play like Ela, who was in a class of her own, even within the elite class of musician
she was part of. It was also not well-known that Ela had voluntarily given up taking auditions for me. Out of love.

  My biggest worry? Time had taken its toll on the adrenaline-soaked love at the beginning of our relationship, and now I knew that the kind of love Ela had for me – steady, true, hardened marital love – was perhaps failing to take the sting out of being a freelance musician instead of one with a solid job in a respected orchestra.

  And then there were the snide comments that people made about her job.

  The truth was that we probably should have done things differently: I probably should have moved to wherever Ela got a job. But at the time, when we had finally decided to end our trans-Atlantic and long-distance love affair of many years, I was already admitted to the bar. She was just enough in love and still full of youthful caprice that she believed everything would “work out somehow.” What that meant, at the time, hadn't mattered.

  Now...now we were here. With a tiny bit of bitterness hanging over us.

  Ela curled up next to me, saying no more, and she fell asleep, as she always did once she got things off her chest. Easily, and without troubled thoughts. I stayed awake, as I always did, with doubts and worries, a lot of them centering on Ela.

  B ACK TO SCHOOL

  “Are you all ready for your first day of school?” I teased, sliding an arm around Ela's waist and kissing the back of her neck. She squirmed, and I was pleased to see a ripple of gooseflesh travel down her neck to her collarbone.

  “I'm even packing my lunch,” she said, and turned, at that moment, to suck mayonnaise off her thumb.

  Seductively? Or not? Who ever knew, with women? I watched her lips close around the tip of her thumb and suck the mayonnaise into her red mouth, and I felt something twitch in my trousers.

  “That's cute,” I said, appreciatively, though my mind was on other things.

  She turned back to her sandwich, and began encasing it in layer after layer of plastic wrap.

  “Are you excited, though?” I asked, opening a cupboard in search of coffee. “Nervous?”

  Ela shrugged.

  One thing that I found fascinating about Ela is that she did not get nervous, which was an ailment I suffered from. I had very deliberately eased myself into contract law for a reason: I was terrified to be in a courtroom, and the more I could stay out of it, the better. I had performance anxiety. I couldn't sleep before a big deposition, or presentation, or meeting.

  Ela, on the other hand, did the seemingly impossible, and stood on a stage alone to play a violin solo from memory. When she did her entire body was placid, her heart rate steady and slow like a clock. She never shook, she never lost sleep beforehand, she never had a crack in her voice when she spoke.

  Today she was no different, even though she would likely be playing for people's scrutiny all day long. She leaned on the counter to bite into a bagel, and pushed her sandwich and plastic wrap aside to read her horoscope.

  Which she did not read aloud, or say anything about. She just munched on her bagel and raised her eyebrows.

  “Bad news?”

  I know I'm a terrible person, but something inside of me had a desire to rattle Ela a little. It wasn't possible, but I always had to try.

  She was just so calm.

  She shook her head. And stuffed more bagel into her mouth.

  “Oh my god!” she said, a second later. “Madonna is coming here.”

  You might think a classical violinist would not actually want to see Madonna, but you would be wrong. Ela's tastes in music ran to other extremes that startled people.

  Like Iron Maiden.

  “What time do you have to leave?” I inquired.

  Her eyes flipped up to the clock, back to the newspaper. A pause. Then she jumped. “Oh shit. I'm late.”

  She swung her violin case over her back, and it was only then that I really took notice of what she was wearing.

  “New outfit?” I said. A gorgeous wool skirt clung to her hips and flared out coquettishly more than few inches above her knees. Not short enough to be obscene, but...short. Ela was 27, but her thin frame, her features and her unblemished skin still delivered the illusion of barely legal, especially in a skirt like that.

  I'll admit, it was something I liked about her. I was five years older than her and it gave me a thrill to see other guys casting a look at me like I was doing something semi-legal in public by grabbing her ass.

  Atop her skirt, she was wearing a white blouse, and she had left the top button unbuttoned, but the buttons were spaced far enough apart that the neckline plunged as a result.

  She had braided her hair from the left side of her face to the other, and while it was not pigtails, it was a very young, very fetching, very...jailbaity...hairstyle.

  I watched as she dropped the left shoulder strap of her violin case onto her shoulder, in a particularly girlish manner. Her blouse dropped open across her chest, almost revealing her bra, and the small, perfectly shaped mounds inside of it.

  I pointed at her, and she shook her head to cut me off before I made any patronizing comments. Just to be sure it was clear, she said, dryly: “Don't.”

  But I couldn't stop myself. I want to, all the time, but I just can't.

  “You'd better be careful in that outfit.”

  She hooked her thumbs under the straps of her violin case, and tilted her chin up as she fluttered her eyes at me. It was a calculated move. She exaggerated her adolescent appearance by doing it, and she let me knew she knew exactly what I was thinking. It was a challenge.

  “Why's that, pops?” she said.

  I lifted my coffee mug to my lips.

  I had to be careful of where this was headed, and that's because Ela knew I was sort of on thin ice.

  She cocked her head to the side, and twisted her braid in her fingers.

  “All those boys at uni are too young for me,” she said, her voice serrated with a teasing edge. Sucking me in. Driving me crazy. “Unless...” She gasped, theatrically. “You don't think...one of my....instructors would try to....?” She let her mouth hang open in mock surprise.

  I smiled.

  I mean, she had me there. Because the first time I had fucked Ela was in an unlocked room on the top floor of the philosophy building, on a desk that seemed to be taken from a century schoolhouse. She had been nineteen for two days, and I was her instructor.

  S EDUCTION

  Anyone could have walked in, and I would have lost my TAship and probably my entire career had anyone done so.

  “Professor White?”

  I had seen her before. Of course I had seen her. Small and quiet, writing her class notes in tidy block letters, an unusual habit for a girl. Looking perpetually sleepy, as though she had just propped herself up on a pillow next to me.

  Now she was standing in the doorway of the small room to which philosophy had been banished, up flights and flights of drafty, institutional stairs and down a hallway with one fluorescent light casting an ugly glow and a vexing buzz on the gray-brown linoleum floor. The room was small and the windows on the top half of the wall, so that no one could look out on what was probably a lovely view.

  But even in the fluorescent light, Ela looked lovely. And it was all such a cliche, and I didn't like admitting to anyone, even myself, that one reason I had been willing to do such a stupid, stupid thing as the thing I was about to do, was because she looked quite under-aged, there in the fluorescent light, with her hair twisted into two braids.

  There was something so seductive about it all: lurid, naughty, and wrong, but seductive.

  “I'm not a professor,” I said, and my voice scraped out of my throat dry and wobbly. “Just a TA.”

  Ela smiled. “Just a TA,” she repeated, and her mouth had a curve of mischief to it. A very sexy, very inviting tremble in one corner. Her eyes seemed to glow from the inside, like amber stones. “Okay. TA White?”

  I replay the scene in my mind. No, Ela wasn't twisting her two braids in her fingers, like a schoolgirl in
a porno. But I remember it that way, somehow.

  She had her violin on her back. It looked like a backpack.

  “Are these...your office hours?” she said, when I did nothing but stare at her.

  “Oh,” I said, a little lost. “Yeah...yes. Come in.”

  I didn't really want her to come in. The door was open to the empty hallway and the other empty rooms, but something seemed, very suddenly, wildly inappropriate about having this girl in the office with me alone.

  She slid the straps of her case from her shoulders, but the way she did it and the way my mind was working, it was like a striptease.

  She was wearing soft, cashmere white sweater that fit snugly against her small frame. Jeans. Nothing racy. She just looked...impossibly cute.

  And young.

  And hot.

  “You play the violin,” I said, idiotically. As though I were informing her of it.

  “It's a machine gun.” She set it down with care and ease, and slid into one of the desks. She tucked her feet up, so that she was folded between the desk and the attached seat. She blinked at me with her long lashes. “It's the problem. I'm a music major. I'm totally lost.”

  Later of course, this blatant lie would be uncovered: there was nothing about philosophy that had Ela lost.

  “Uh...” Normally this type of question irritated me, because students often just hadn't read anything and wanted me to sum it up for them, or give them the questions to the next test, and possibly the answers. There was no way, though, that this girl, looking like a bunny in her white sweater, was going to get any huffiness from me.

  I sat down.

  It's easy to know, as a man, when you're being a total fucking idiot. When your dick is thinking for you, and when you're reaching for a cookie jar that will definitely get you caught.

  It's just so difficult to do anything about it.

  I was close to her, and on that particular day she had chewed grape bubble gum to cover up the smell of a strong French cigarette she had smoked with scrawny French cellist who was in love with her. Beneath these two scents was her own skin, not her soap or her shampoo, but the smell of Ela. It rose up through my nostrils and burned me right through my core.