Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 69

some use pillows stuffed with hops, but the best preparation for sleep is honest hard work and a good conscience

Cole’s bags and coat crowd the hallway on your return from a late morning trip to Tesco. He’s home from Athens a day early, without warning. Another letter’s arrived but he hasn’t had a chance to sort through the mail and you push the envelope deep into a pocket, listening but not listening to his travel chat.

The bathroom, as soon as you can. You sit on the toilet seat, tear at the flap.

Some days apart from you I’m in pain, my yearning is so strong. At times you settle over me like a great warmth. I catch myself smiling into space. I dream of us running away, getting out.

The fierce pull as you read, like a hand inside your stomach. The words so close you feel you could almost put out a hand. You touch the letter against your belly, feeling the smooth, cold paper against your skin. You get up, you’ve been too long, you kiss Cole absently on the crown of his head as he unpacks his bag and it plunges you back to a time when the love glowed, for a moment, and then it’s gone. You sit at the kitchen table with the day’s paper unread before you, your hands cradling your forehead.

Perhaps Gabriel is like Ruskin who, it’s rumoured, idolised women so much he was incapable of consummating his marriage when he discovered to his horror that his wife had pubic hair. Perhaps he’s happily married in Spain, has seven kids; perhaps Martha’s made it all up to throw you off the scent. Perhaps he’s having an affair, is gay, caught by fear, can’t bear to let anyone see who he really is. Perhaps he’s one of those men who fell through the cracks – you know several, brothers and uncles of friends, lost men who’ve never found a sure footing with life, who are crushed by the challenge of living in this world and opt out and become loners or drunks. And put their parents, and lovers, through hell.

And then it hits.

What if he’s never been with a woman.

What if he doesn’t know how. A virgin, perhaps, and it all makes sense. The shyness. The pulling back at your touch. The ear tips blushing at a farewell kiss. Is it so implausible? You have an ex-colleague who’s a virgin at thirty-two and you’ve never been sure about Rupert, your cousin. And he, like Gabriel, is a tall, virile, masculine-looking man, and he, like Gabriel, never seems to be attached.

Would Gabriel be diminished in your eyes, if that were it?

No. It’s oddly endearing. And exciting.

An idea, beautiful in its simplicity. To initiate Gabriel, to teach him exactly what you want. To create a pleasure man, purely that, the lover every woman dreams of. You’ll be in control, for the very first time, you’ll be able to dictate exactly what you want. And there’ll be no expectation of how you should act.

That night Cole slips into your bed and curves his body in a question mark around your back.

An idea beautiful in its simplicity. And impossible.

For you don’t do that type of thing. It’s in the quietness of your clothes, your wholesome face, your ready blush. It’s in your horror at hearing of affairs, your stock response: but I could never do that to another woman.

Or Cole. You don’t think.