Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 64

in some cases it is necessary to change stockings and flannels every day

Hey, you whisper, poking your head over the wooden desk divider during a long Library afternoon. I’m starving.

Go away, I have to work.

Come on.

He throws his pen at you, several heads look up, someone tuts. The cafe, you say, holding his arm with both hands and pulling tight.

Where are you up to?

The big scene. The bullfight. I have to get back.

Does the matador die?

Hardly ever now.

But I thought –

No, no, the sport’s changed, there’s not the tension that there used to be. The bull’s no longer brave, the matador even less so. All the beaut}’ in it is being lost.

The beauty in it, an erotic charge from that.

So, how should the bull die, you ask.

Like this, and Gabriel leans across the cafe table and caresses the back of your neck, he finds the vulnerable spot and whispers to you that that is where the dagger slides in, feel it, just there, it has to be clean, severing the spinal cord, he tells you there’s a magnificence to the perfect thrust and as he speaks goose bumps sprint across your skin. You sit back. Rub your neck. You’re shuddering for him, pressing your knees tight. There’s an innocence to your face still, at thirty-six you could pass as twenty-six, as still needing to be taught, in your cropped cardigan and ballet slippers and knee-length skirt. The ribbons of muscle in your upper legs tighten, often now, at Sunday brunches with Cole’s clients and dinner parties and in-law drinks; you’re distracted by a want, achingly, for Gabriel to touch your cunt. Cunt. You’ve always hated that word and yet suddenly it arouses you; you smile, secretly, dirtily, when you say it in your head.

And yet you cannot imagine it ever coming to that for the one time you kissed – a cheek peck that strayed, a goodbye that went too far after a soaring afternoon – he jerked like a mustang being broken in. And whenever your skin brushes a touch he will retract, you can sense it, the pulling back.