Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 78

April is the hopeful month for gardening

You visit the Library again and again. You walk the bold iron skeleton of the beautiful building, your building as much as his. Just because he comes here doesn’t mean you can’t, and you slip off your shoes and arch your soles and your stockinged feet thrum on the iron. Strips of fluorescent tubing cast baubles of brightness here and there; above and below you readers sit or squat, isolated in their little circles of light. Old wooden desks wait at the ends of the passages like rest bays on a highway and there’s the intoxicating smell of paper and leather, of words, waiting. You begin, finally, to tackle the book. To ask questions:

Why are women so constrained about pleasing themselves, why are they so focused on everyone else’s pleasure at the expense of their own?

What happens if they try to live selfishly?

But then a pool of light, philology, one vaulting spring day.

Your heart somersaults.

He is sitting on the ground with his back to a wall, reading and jotting on a notebook by his side. You do not go to him, you just look: his nape, his hair flopping into his eyes, his hand curled round the pen that clicks as agreeably as a lipstick, his watch from the forties with its broad, age-spotted face.

Something makes him glance up. He catches your eye.

His smile, like an umbrella whooshed inside out.

Yours back.

You’re both trapped in this, you can see that. It’s in his face.