Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 50

there are few who wilfully injure their health, but many thoughtlessly destroy it

Ten a.m.

You reach for your handbag, hope you’re not ringing too soon, don’t even know what to say, just hello, will that do, and I wanted to say thanks for the other day; you’ve rehearsed it, the lightness in your voice. You’re living more boldly, you’re beginning, and Theo’s words sound in your head: it’s no use waiting for the light to appear at the end of the tunnel, you just have to stride down and light the bloody thing yourself. There’s nothing wrong with a new friend for there seem to be less and less as the years roll over in your narrowing life.

Ten a.m. and your thudding heart, your thudding heart.

The slip of paper isn’t there.

You’re scrabbling through your wallet and searching the floor and the steps and the ground outside but it’s gone and your fingers are dragging through your hair and your teeth are tearing at your nails, there’s no phone number under directory enquiries and you have no address, of course, and then you sit on the hallway floor, your head thrown back against the wall, for a very long time, very still, in the flat, with its silence like a skull.

He’s gone.

As if chunks have been ripped from the book of your future.

You can’t move, your whole life feels slumped: you don’t know what to do next. You sit there for so long, your hand tucked into your knickers, against your bare flesh. When you withdraw your fingers you stare at the glutinous shine on them, the shout of it. You gasp, your hand trembles; a teenager all over again, so abruptly.

But you have no number, no address. And he doesn’t have yours. He is gone.

You feel drained. It took so much effort to get to this point, to overcome the nausea and nerves, to resolve to pick up the phone. You didn’t realise how much you were counting on the possibility of him, a new something to fill your life, until he was lost.