Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 60

putting damp sheets on a bed is little short of murder

A light under the front door. You’re usually home first – you sober your face down. Cole asks where you’ve been and you say the Library, it opens late on Wednesdays, remember? Good, he says, I’m glad you’re getting something out of it. He looks up from his Evening Standard: he loves the urban, gossipy side of it just as much as yourself. Hey, you’ve got two red patches on your cheeks, he says, like a clown.

It’s the cold, it’s getting colder, can’t you feel it?

How easily the lie slips out, it’s stunning, so smooth, so quick. It’s because your husband’s trust in you is tethered like a buoy to a concrete block; you’re the good wife, everyone knows that. Your palms fly to your cheeks to hide the heat and you look at Cole and think in that moment how easy it’d be to do anything you want, and, suddenly, how heartbreaking is his generosity and trust. You think, in that moment, that perhaps he never had an affair with Theo. It’s so hard to imagine, as he sits in his shirtsleeves with his paper and olives and beer. You toy with the thought, for the very first time, that perhaps all along he was telling the truth. He never adequately defended himself from suspicion but maybe he couldn’t: your mind was made up. Time is fading everything and you’re beginning, suddenly, to doubt yourself: what you heard, what you decided upon so quickly. Perhaps, perhaps you were wrong.

That night you place your palm on Cole’s chest as he sleeps beside you and you cup his heartbeat in your hand like a glass over a leech. You can’t sleep, can’t sleep. If you commit adultery in your head, are you beginning the rejection of your husband and your marriage and your life up to that point? Or welding yourself to them? And if that’s the case, how does the marriage become, again, warm and rich?

Do you need an excuse?

You don’t ever lie. Except to tell lovers that you’ve just had an orgasm or your friends that you love their new haircut and all of that doesn’t count, it’s done to soothe and protect. You don’t steal. You don’t sleep around. But you think about it. It’s always been enough, just thinking about it, imagining sleeping with almost every man you meet.

What furious need is within you, you wonder.

Why must we crave the things we’re not meant to, you wonder.