Read Online Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You by Nikki Gemmell - Free Book Online
Authors: Nikki Gemmell
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you has cared enough lately, the oven’s used to store pots and pans, it’s been a long time since a Sunday roast. There was such a tenderness to your little home, once: Theo used to drop in often, unexpected, as if she was cleaving herself to its warmth.
Now, Cole and you have stopped trying. You dreaded that once, that as a couple you’d stop the offers of a bath run or a cup of tea or the dishes done. Actually, it’s survivable. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. Indifference emotionally, indifference physically. You haven’t made love since the hotel room of fresh roses every two days, but tonight you kiss him on the crown of his head and let your lips linger and it wakens something in your groin.
I’m going to bed, you say.
Hmm, again; deep in The Simpsons and the soup.
He doesn’t seem to notice your gesture, or doesn’t want to buy into it right now: The Simpsons has ten minutes to
You smile. You don’t care. For you’ve walked back into the sun, it’s warm on your back. You have a new friend in your life, to play with, to be young again with, to wake you up.
Lesson 38
a cold bath will enable a person to sleep who otherwise cannot
Cole stays up late, it’s not unusual, he’s often gone to bed at a different time from yourself. He’s at his laptop most likely, trawling for porn. He was embarrassed when you first caught him, several years ago: he snapped down the screen. Now all he does is turn the computer away. The stutter of a courtesy, and it’s not enough.
Cole told you once, early on, that he stayed up late because he liked the bed warm, you’re my hot-water bottle, he’d said and you’d giggled and licked him behind the ear. You used to think your husband wasn’t near as churning and smudged as yourself but even: clean, open, uncomplicated. Now you know there’s a secret life you know nothing of and never will, and no one knows anyone’s secret life.
You see him more clearly now. A man who’s glidedthrough his adulthood with the serenity and distance of someone who doesn’t want any questions too close. He hides behind a mask of absolute calm, it gives the impression that he’s always reserving his energy for someone else. He seems comfortable with his lot, maybe he’s happy, maybe not. No one ever really asks him. He’s happy to maintain a slight gap between himself and the world and not give himself away too much.
You, now, want to be pushed up close. You no longer want the marriage retreat, the little bubble of togetherness that was so cosy once.
You’d visit Cole’s studio in the early days and sit on a high stool among the easels and palettes and harsh, blue-white lamps, the bottles of white spirits and surgical gloves. The room smelt of oil paints and varnish and turps, and had the clutter of a cobbler’s shop. You loved the man hidden underneath who emerged so spectacularly in this private space. His apron over his business shirt, sleeves carefully rolled, was always spattered with plaster and paint.
He was working at the time on an early nineteenth-century portrait of Madame Recamier, a renowned French beauty of her day. The canvas was flat on a heated table, to soften the surface, and he talked you through it as he bent over it. She was brought up in a convent and married off at sixteen to a wealthy banker. The union was never consummated; there was a rumour that her husband was really her father. Cole told you, as he worried her palecheek with a cotton-tipped spatula, that to compensate for the desert of the marriage she used her looks to snare dozens of men, but remained a virgin her entire life.
She was cursed by every single bastard who fell in love with her, he said, standing and assessing the bright square of his work. She had this incredible calm about her. They all fell for it.
I can see it, you said. In her smile.
You watched your husband bend over the crazed surface of the canvas with the care of a stonemason at the block, clearing
Now, Cole and you have stopped trying. You dreaded that once, that as a couple you’d stop the offers of a bath run or a cup of tea or the dishes done. Actually, it’s survivable. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. Indifference emotionally, indifference physically. You haven’t made love since the hotel room of fresh roses every two days, but tonight you kiss him on the crown of his head and let your lips linger and it wakens something in your groin.
I’m going to bed, you say.
Hmm, again; deep in The Simpsons and the soup.
He doesn’t seem to notice your gesture, or doesn’t want to buy into it right now: The Simpsons has ten minutes to
You smile. You don’t care. For you’ve walked back into the sun, it’s warm on your back. You have a new friend in your life, to play with, to be young again with, to wake you up.
Lesson 38
a cold bath will enable a person to sleep who otherwise cannot
Cole stays up late, it’s not unusual, he’s often gone to bed at a different time from yourself. He’s at his laptop most likely, trawling for porn. He was embarrassed when you first caught him, several years ago: he snapped down the screen. Now all he does is turn the computer away. The stutter of a courtesy, and it’s not enough.
Cole told you once, early on, that he stayed up late because he liked the bed warm, you’re my hot-water bottle, he’d said and you’d giggled and licked him behind the ear. You used to think your husband wasn’t near as churning and smudged as yourself but even: clean, open, uncomplicated. Now you know there’s a secret life you know nothing of and never will, and no one knows anyone’s secret life.
You see him more clearly now. A man who’s glidedthrough his adulthood with the serenity and distance of someone who doesn’t want any questions too close. He hides behind a mask of absolute calm, it gives the impression that he’s always reserving his energy for someone else. He seems comfortable with his lot, maybe he’s happy, maybe not. No one ever really asks him. He’s happy to maintain a slight gap between himself and the world and not give himself away too much.
You, now, want to be pushed up close. You no longer want the marriage retreat, the little bubble of togetherness that was so cosy once.
You’d visit Cole’s studio in the early days and sit on a high stool among the easels and palettes and harsh, blue-white lamps, the bottles of white spirits and surgical gloves. The room smelt of oil paints and varnish and turps, and had the clutter of a cobbler’s shop. You loved the man hidden underneath who emerged so spectacularly in this private space. His apron over his business shirt, sleeves carefully rolled, was always spattered with plaster and paint.
He was working at the time on an early nineteenth-century portrait of Madame Recamier, a renowned French beauty of her day. The canvas was flat on a heated table, to soften the surface, and he talked you through it as he bent over it. She was brought up in a convent and married off at sixteen to a wealthy banker. The union was never consummated; there was a rumour that her husband was really her father. Cole told you, as he worried her palecheek with a cotton-tipped spatula, that to compensate for the desert of the marriage she used her looks to snare dozens of men, but remained a virgin her entire life.
She was cursed by every single bastard who fell in love with her, he said, standing and assessing the bright square of his work. She had this incredible calm about her. They all fell for it.
I can see it, you said. In her smile.
You watched your husband bend over the crazed surface of the canvas with the care of a stonemason at the block, clearing
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