Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 41

children should never sleep with their heads under the bedclothes

What you’re thinking as the two of you walk home, in silence, a metre apart: My husband’s name is Cole and that is the most remarkable thing about him, and is it enough? To keep you with him. For doubt has worked through you like poison now, doing its dirty work.

He will never tell you what happened. Perhaps the only chance you had was the afternoon of the hotel room, during the storm, still brittle with the shock of it. And what did you do? You chose to sit, with your thudding heart. Nothing else. For that’s always been your way, the retreat, the silence, and it’s only later, much later, that you find the words you should have said. But they’re never uttered in time, you’re too careful of hurting even when hurt, and too cowardly, yes that. You wonder what would happen if you ever let loose with the anger that’s silting up your heart. You look across at your husband and know you’ll never crack his closed face now, the moment’s lost, you’ve asked him what happened once too often and he’s thoroughly sick of your distrust: he’s shut up shop, the shutters are rolled down, the lights have been put out. You don’t recognise your husband any more, he’s become someone else. A stranger to you, who undresses Theo, bends to kiss her, holds her hips, brushes her closed eyelids with his lips, laughs with her in bed: you shut your eyes for a moment, trying to slam out the thoughts.

Cole opens the front door and strides inside without checking that you’re behind him. He goes straight to the bathroom. You stand on the doorstep, staring at the ghost town of a relationship ahead of you and not knowing if you want to step into it. So, it has come to this. In another life you’d be ringing Theo and getting her out of bed, asking if you could crash on her sofa and have a good cry. You imagine her saying of course, Lovebug, of course; you imagine her jumping in her car and collecting you because she doesn’t trust you could drive yourself, from the wobble in your voice.

You have nowhere to go.

You don’t know what to do.

You have no job, at Cole’s insistence, and you feel a hot little rush of anger at that; how dare he cripple you, how dare he diminish you on purpose.

You step across the threshold. Walk to the bedroom. Sit down at the dressing table, your head bowed, your temples propped.