Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 72

the cold plunge: nothing can be more invigorating and delightful to a robust girl

He’s already seated and you feel a tremor deep inside you at the sight of him, you’re aching with tenderness as he sits in the café, across the street. He looks up and blooms a grin; your heart is filled up.

You run across to that greasy cafe with its beans on toast and stewed tea that’s never hot enough, to where it all began eight months ago with a water splash. The letters are in your handbag and you’re bold now, sure, and so thoroughly sick of all the uncertainty and tension, the games, the teasing, the waiting. You need to get this said, there are two red patches on your cheeks and you ask him straight out: why do we go on like this, we could, you know, just get a hotel room, or perhaps go back to your flat, or, I don’t know, and you stop, you smile, so confident of his response.

His face.

Pardon, he asks.

His bewilderment.

Um, you hear yourself laughing, off-key, too much, OK, I’m sorry, and your face is stinging with embarrassment. But the letters you begin to say and then you stop and you snap: it doesn’t matter. You excuse yourself, you have to go, you have to get out. You grab your bag, it’s caught round the chair leg and you stumble out and walk down the street, bashing into shoulders and almost walking into posts and wait…wait…you hear behind you, but you don’t turn back and at last there’s the mouth of the tube station in which to disappear, to sink.

What have you done, what have you done?

Your head is in your hands on the tube hurtling home, knuckling your temples, trying to press it all out.

Fool, fool.

To think you knew him.