Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 16

dance away with all your might

Your big toe’s kissed, indulgently, when you throw back your arms like a diva on the sunlounger and declare you’ll be staying by the pool a little longer. Neither Cole nor yourself has seen anything, yet, of the new city you’re in, even though you’ve been here for four days. Theo would berate you for this but marriage has made you soft, dulled your curiosity. The crush of robed and veiled people at the airport, the mountains of luggage and squealing children and machine-guns on guards were all a little overwhelming, so both Cole and yourself are content to stay wrapped within the hotel for a while. It’s like the one in the movie The Shining, with wide, deco corridors and a surreally spare lobby and the regret of some long-ago lost decadence. A bastion of French colonialism that’s now frequented by wealthy Europeans, but there are not enough of them to plump out its space. There are no Muslims. Perhaps they find it too ridiculous, or unwelcoming, or odd, but there’s no one to ask.

You would’ve sought the answers once, you shone with curiosity once. Now you’re almost too languid to care, for you’re distracted, deliciously so. You sit on the edge of the pool and dawdle your fingertips in its coolness and remember something from the day-old Times, that the urge to think rarely strikes the contented. You smile—so what?—and wave over a pool waiter for another Bellini. How you love them. You’ve never allowed yourself the luxury of laziness, or four Bellinis in a row before.

A donkey pulls a cart of clippings up a rose-bowered path of the hotel’s gardens. A man flicks a whip lazily over the animal’s back. It’s something of this land at least. You must photograph it.