Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 76

happiness and virtue alike lie in action

May. The weather is unclenching, there’s a lightness in the air.

The library stacks. The light’s buoyant outside but gloomy inside. It’s been a long time since you’ve come here. Each narrow passageway is illuminated by tugging a string at the end of it and your footsteps ring out on the cast-iron grates with the deadening clang of a jailer. A librarian returning books glances up from a floor below and you remember, too late, that you shouldn’t be wearing a skirt in this place, it’s an old Library lore: the wide spaces in the grates allow people to look up. To give you a shot of erotic courage you’ve not worn underpants but it feels suddenly wrong, you being here, in this state; trying to work but wondering if you’ll see Gabriel by chance, trying to erase one obsession with another and in a place so soaked with them both.

He’s not here. You just want to talk, to put your mind at rest. As you walk from the grills some of the grates shift slightly underfoot and the effect’s dizzying and unpleasant and you’re hating this ragged need in you that doesn’t sit at all comfortably with your public face.

You sit at a desk. Grip its edge. Breathe deep. You have to concentrate on your own book, you must make it work: you need a spine to your life.

And then it comes to you, as beautifully and obediently as a tangle of necklaces that you’ve spent so long trying to unpick, and with the simple looping of one set of beads through another the knot of them magically comes apart.

You will respond to your mysterious seventeenth-century author.

You will write a book in secret, just like her. Why not? All writing is revenge, is it not. Yes, yes. You lick your lips. Reach for your notebook. And in an afternoon lost within the deep, deep peace of solid, consuming work, you produce three lists:

Men you have slept with, what you remember most.

How they seduced.

And on what.