Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 89

when a girl has a rosy, healthy face we know that her lungs do their work well

The more sex you have, the more you want.

Perhaps, now, a man who’s always insisted on doing it his way, which you haven’t liked enough. You sit at your desk, with your thumbnails hooked between your teeth, and smile at the challenge of that.

A Saturday afternoon. You tell Cole you’re stuck with the book. You laugh that you might end up throwing it all away and having a bit of fun; you might just write about what your Elizabethan housewife was really interested in – sex.

You?

You flick suds from the dish-washing brush. Yes, me.

Maybe I’ll write about what women really want, mate. Oooooh, he says, holding up his hands in mock terror.

Half an hour later, languid with laziness. Lemony sun through the tall windows, dust motes dancing in the light. The magazine supplements of the weekend newspapers are scattered across the bed and Cole comes into the room and he kisses you on the lips, in his special way, and he says, so what do you really want, and there’s a new intent: it’s as if he’s finally responding to the new energy that crackles around you and you do not shy away from his kiss. You whisper to him you want him to shave you; you’ve never said anything like that to him before.

His sharp, soft intake of breath.

His voice is barely audible, one word, yes, just. He looks at you as if he always suspected there was a woman like this underneath. He goes to the bathroom and retrieves your razor, and changes his mind and brings out his own: it’s sharper, he says, more effective, excitement in his voice and that strange new intent, and you lie on the bed with your thighs spread wide and outside is the buoyant sky, the air fat with the coming summer, and you don’t know what to expect. You wait for Cole with one hand between your legs and the other thrown above your head. Your nipples are erect, they’ve rarely been hard for him over the past few years, as if they couldn’t be bothered getting into that state. Now you want him, quick: you’re already arching your lower back, in soft waves.

What’s got into you, he asks.

You say nothing, your hand hooks him behind his neck and pulls him down to a kiss. And then he begins, and as he’s brushing his razor through your pubic hair a change plumes through you like ink shot into water, you start to feel young again, a teenager, to feel with all the intensity of those years. Something’s combusting within you, it’s like a varnisher’s hand whipped over a painting, as if all the leaden textures that have dulled your life for so long are shot through with light. You open your mouth and gulp air, you bunch Cole’s fingers in yours and squeeze them tight. At the end of it you both stare in fascination and horror at the childlike slash. Cole scrabbles off his trousers as if he doesn’t want to lose the moment, as if he, too, knows how rare it is. He comes quickly – too quickly, he thinks – but for you it’s perfect and you turn from him to the windows, to that lovely lemony light, and smile a Cheshire smile.

For you’ve just had your first orgasm with your husband.

Later that night. An Italian restaurant round the corner, your favourite. You haven’t been there with Cole for ages; you used to go often when the relationship was young. What’s got into you, he asks again, over a bottle of red that’s spreading warmth through you both. You smile, your hand hovers at your throat.

I’ve found this special section in the Library, you say, it’s full of these books, erotic books, and you stop, you blush, you cannot go on.

Cole leans back in his seat. He folds his arms like a headmaster who’s just heard a fantastical tale of remorse.

I keep on going back to them, you say.

Well, here’s to the London Library, then, and he raises his glass.