Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 66

nothing impure should be left in a bedroom one minute longer than is necessary

A letter, heavy on the doormat. Thick, creamy paper, watermarked, Italian, its edges feather-soft. A sensuality to it you want to kiss. The words typed, the thud of them as careful as braille.

I want to remove your clothes in the darkness, I want to unpeel you. I want to feel you, inch by inch.

Your fingertips run over the words, deft as a lizard. You’re trembling, you cover the letter with your hand, you have to sit with the strangeness of it.

I feel like you’re helping me to live.

No name, no return address. Your dipping heart, seduced by text. You stand by the lounge room window with one hand holding the letter to your chest and the other spidered wide on the cold pane and your breath frosting the glass and your cheeks are hot. It’s as if you’re entering, tentatively, a strange new path and swiftly the trees are closing over you and the sky is gone and the light, you’re lost, and in the thick of it, in a clearing, you’ll be tugged down, drowned, in a bed of silk.

Come away. Start afresh.

The phone. Cole. All fired up. You know what’s coming next: he’ll be a couple of days late, he’s still bent over that painting, can’t drag himself away. He’s always loved telling you the minutiae of his work, you’re a good listener.

You’re looking at your watch and the letter as he speaks, wanting him off the phone. He’s worried about his Venus’s lips, some idiot somewhere along the line has had a go, clumsily, at touching them up and it’s tricky to get them right.

Don’t change them too much. No botox, mate.

Yeah, yeah, and he chuckles.

The point of his job is to work to a minimum, to do the least amount possible of fixing up because he’s tampering with an original artwork. But sometimes, Cole’s told you, he just wants to be let loose.

I want to cover her nipples, he says, she looks so cold. She needs some clothes, poor love.

Maybe she’s blissfully happy, darling. Maybe there’s a man under her skirt.

Oy, Cole laughs. Steady down. What’s got into you?

Nothing, nothing, and you hang up the phone, grinning at the irony of a husband so absorbed in his job he hasn’t seemed to have noticed the changes in his own wife’s face over the past few months.