Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 49

there should not be overcrowding in bedrooms

Night, bed, alone, and the glare of what’s happened during that meeting with Gabriel is imprinted in your head like the too-bright fluorescent lights that were never switched off in your school’s corridors. Cole’s fallen asleep on the couch in front of the television. You cannot sleep, cannot sleep, and then it’s dawn. Love is attention and you’re not getting any: you’re like a balloon that’s jerked free from the fist holding it down and is now climbing and swerving in a choppy sky.

You think of other things, in bed, alone. They’re with you most nights, to lull you to sleep. A group of men watching you being penetrated by a broom handle. You don’t know any of the perpetrators very well. It’s never intimate or tender. It’s filmed. Sometimes women will be watching the penetration; by candlesticks, by animals, sometimes the women will be participating. And the men. Hands will be running over your naked body, parting your legs, probing, slipping inside. Almost every night you imagine these things to drop you into sleep. The movies in your head were most vivid during your teenage years, you can still remember the effect twenty years later, the intensity of them. And now, following the afternoon of Gabriel, you’re vastly awake and holding your fingers snug between your legs and wanting to feel again with the spark of those teenage years, wanting that combusting under your skin.

You want to ring Theo, you miss your confidante, it’s a huge silence in your life. She was the only person you ever felt comfortable ringing beyond ten. You’d talk sex with her endlessly, what you wanted, what you didn’t; all the things you never said to a man. You loved her expression to describe a good fuck – dirt – meaning it’d be dirty, it’d be sexy sex. A man who’s dirt, you’d always loved the idea of that. And sexy sex.

Now, alone, you’re bound by caution. Have you ever acted, as an adult, exactly as you wished? You’ve been battened down for so long; the good teacher, friend, wife. And you’re most passive in bed, all surrender and wanting to please so much. Your fantasy life has never leaked into your real life. But in bed, now, alone, possibility is putting its key in the lock, like a stream of desert light in the morning, luring you out.

Cole stumbles into the room at five and presses his body into you, as if he’s trying to draw the warmth from your flesh. You shrug him off.