Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 28

good habits are best learnt in youth

You sit by the concierge desk in the vast almost empty lobby while Cole changes some cash. A man passes, he wears the sun in his face, he’s a boy really, a decade or so younger than you and he smiles right into your eyes and you feel something you haven’t for years: it’s to do with university parties with bathtubs of alcohol and the smell of hamburgers on fingers and beer in a kiss. You should have been disgusted by all that but you weren’t. You’d be wet so quick; to get their clothes off, to have their weight upon you, to be rammed against a wall with your leg curled up.

You’re singing inside as you saunter back with Cole to your room of fresh roses. Every second day new roses await you, they’re never allowed to wilt in the heat. Inside, you kiss your husband fully on the mouth, surprising yourself as much as him with the ferocity of it. You taste him, drink him, and you so rarely do that. He kisses you back in his way, as if inside your mouth is the most exquisite, expensive morsel imaginable. You don’t like him kissing you on the lips very much; often you secretly wipe away the track that’s left by his mouth.

The last time Cole and you had made love, before this holiday, was your wedding night. The vintage Bugatti you’d borrowed wouldn’t start and all Cole’s distant relatives had to be met and Theo got too drunk. Cole and you had ended up giddy and sweaty back at your hotel room, ravenous, with just a Mars Bar from the mini bar to share between you. Still, there was a new sweetness to making love, even though it was soaked in a sudden tiredness and a little clumsy, and you didn’t get far: almost an afterthought to the end of a long day. It didn’t matter that the sex on that night wasn’t the best you’d ever had, for you’d been together for so long before that.

The honeymoon had been delayed because Cole was always accepting another commission and getting tied up. He finally found a window of escape four months after you’d tied the knot. You didn’t complain, you appreciate his attachment to his job, it’s so solid, so dependable: he’ll never let you down.

He’s never given you an orgasm. He assumes he has. You’re a good actress—a lot of women are, you suspect. You know what you’re supposed to do, the sounds you make and the arching of the back and the clenched face: it’s in a thousand movies to mimic, it’s everywhere but your own life. You’ve never had an orgasm by yourself or with any man that you’ve slept with. You’ve lied to every one of them that you have, that it’s worked. You’re curious about them but not curious enough. It’s like a language you don’t speak; you know you should make an attempt at it but you can get by perfectly happily without it, it’s not going to impede your life. You’re in your mid-thirties and have never even looked down there, at yourself. Cole could tell you about it if you were curious enough, but the intimacies of your own body are for someone else, you feel, not yourself.