Читать книгу I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 8

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames

How far will you go? When do you stop? Have you stopped, have you shut down, did you ever start? Bow out, now, if you must. When is the spell broken so that the inhibition, the flinching, the admonition and retort come rushing back? Have you put this down yet? Once, Connie would have thought a woman could have died of shame but instead of which, the shame died. Just like that, so D. H. Lawrence wrote. Shame, which is fear. And judgement. And with the death of shame she was released. A regular, everyday woman, any woman, of demure and considered tastes; raised by an empowered mother to be an empowered woman and yet deep down she was plumed into transcendent life by this. How? Why? It doesn’t make sense, yet it seems like something deeply animal, biological, these moments of vividness when she surrenders to something quite disconnected from everything else in her life; baubles of otherness, oh yes. Surrenders her body, by relinquishing her mind, such a delicate balancing act. And so Connie is released, for nights like this, to become someone else. Entranced. On the cusp of an unimaginable fate …

The city peels away, the car drives on, out into open country and through villages bunkered down against the cold and they’re gone in a flash and then they’re bulleting along runnels of narrow, high-hedged green and then thick woods, on, on, through the waiting quiet. The snow-scrubbed day has absorbed all sound.

The car suddenly, smoothly, pulls over into a small clearing. Without a word from either man. As if this has been done before. As if all is proceeding to plan. As if they are in some kind of strange, unspoken collusion. Connie jerks up her head, like a dog suddenly alert; lights are in front of them, but at a distance, high, wide; something momentous is close. She has no idea what. She trusts.

‘For his little task I need you to lie across my lap, my lovely, but up, up, on all fours,’ Cliff requests politely.

When Connie is done, arranged, as to specification, he whispers to her, ‘Do you love me?’ a moth’s breath to her ear, the pen in his hand stroking her labia, the familiar pen.

‘Yes, yes.’

Something is reached for, it is hard and cold, it suddenly penetrates her anus, is switched on, it buzzes. ‘Yes, yes,’ she repeats as she flinches, groans, widens herself.

‘Will you do what I want? Are you my good girl?’

‘Yes, yes,’ as the car pulls away, soft, with barely a murmur and certainly no signal, no talk.

The gatehouse they come to, a short distance away, is a frippery of sculpted sandstone three storeys high. The car slows through its high arch and stops. Connie is on all fours, still, naked now except for her stockings and McQueen’s; her haunches across Cliff’s lap, her willing cunt exposed high to the side window which the driver now lowers. A shock of winter cold, a crunch of gravel, a low West Country voice commanding a flurry of dogs to ‘git, the lot of you, be still’. Torchlight sweeps the car. Connie does not turn, does not look, stays still, pliant, tremulous, waiting, entranced; anonymous, as she knows she should, as she knows she must. For it is what Cliff wants. She is the good wife.

‘We’re here for the doctor,’ Cliff says, the V of his fingers spreading her as if in some secret prearranged signal. ‘We’re ready.’

‘But is the lass?’ a man says with a rough laugh. The heat of a torch, suddenly close upon Connie’s cunt. Examining, considering. Fingers, gnarled, rough, brusque, brushing aside Cliff, roughly spreading her lips. Connie does not turn, does not look, she gasps at the shock, folds into it; signalling her need, her readiness, her want.

‘She’s been prepared. She’s wide enough where she needs to be.’ Cliff kisses her cheek lightly. ‘And narrow enough’ – another kiss – ‘where she needs to be.’

‘Off you go then. They’re all waiting.’

Connie’s rump is smartly slapped like a mare set off into pasture.