Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 57

every girl can dance and should learn to do it well

There are three men and a woman at the pub and swiftly you’re telling them more than you ever intended, eager for contact, slightly drunk. They know nothing of you. It’s exhilarating, like moving to a foreign country where no one knows of your past; you can make yourself up as you go. As you explain your book you become authoritative, confident, witty, brisk, and plans for the project spark as you speak. You talk of the obedient wife writing secretly, late at night, galloping her pen through page after page and hiding it away when she hears her husband at the door and opening her Bible and stilling her face with her fingertips on her flushed cheeks. Hinting to her lover that she’s writing a book, for she has to have a lover; yes, yes, she must.

Her husband finds out. He drags her by the hair to the cupboard and locks her in, he shuts his hands over his ears at her cries; she begs him for mercy, he does not speak. Eventually, over many days, her screams become whimpers, they die out. The lover never knows what happens. He’s told by her maidservant the wife has been sent to a harsh and distant nunnery; he can’t find her, he searches the breadth of the land. And he never knows if she really loved him, or if she was making it all up. He dies a broken man. As does the husband.

Perhaps, perhaps.

Tonight works, magnificently. The group doesn’t have to know you’ll be going home to a very still flat. You watch, astounded, the woman you’ve become, insisting on the next round and then asking when they’ll be meeting next.

Tomorrow, says your man in the velvet trousers. Most nights, in fact.

I’ll see you then; and you’re out the door quick, as if you’re off to something else. The sense of the illusion, triumphantly executed, buoys you down the street.