Read Online Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You by Nikki Gemmell - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Nikki Gemmell
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away the soot and grime until Madame Recamier’s face and then body glowed pale before you both. You were transfixed by his fingers that fussed with the attentiveness of love, bringing to life the lips, just the lips, in one golden afternoon, the pale swell of her breast in another.
Cleaning is always the riskiest part of the process, he told you. It’s all so unknown. What you find underneath might be magnificent, or something you just want to throw out. You never know.
You could watch him and listen to him for ever in those days: you loved the seductiveness of a man deep in work. You knew, then, it was a reciprocated love and it was a canopy of joy over your life.
You see your husband now. A man who hides in art, and porn, who’s nourished by an interior world you know nothing of. His work is a world you can never really be a part of, he burrows away into it, just as he does with his moated, secret life.
Why did you marry him?
Because he said yes. And you’d reached the stage where you never expected any man to want you that much. And he was such a good friend, right from the beginning, he was a mate; never one of those lovers where you wondered what you had in common apart from sex. And there’s the deep urge within you as your thirties gallop on, the furious want.
Give me children or else I dye, wrote the anonymous Elizabethan author of your old book.
Oh yes.
Cole has a favourite photograph of you, he says it reveals your secret self. It was taken for a magazine article about bright young things, the ones to watch, and their mentors. You’d been chosen by an old student of yours, now an ITV news reader, a hungry young woman who’d straightened her West Country vowels and had a meteoric rise from the local Bristol paper into prime time TV. There was also a celebrated violinist, a geneticist, an architect, a novelist.
You didn’t want to do it but didn’t say no, of course: it was good publicity for your faculty. You’d never actually liked her enough, had been jealous and a little afraid of her steely greed to succeed. She hid her determination within friendliness and flattery but you saw straight through it.
The photographer was Colombian. He was exasperatedwith you all, wanted the group to relax. He asked you to think of the most sensuous thing you could imagine and yell it out, and there was uncomfortable laughter and then silence.
Skin to skin said your former student suddenly. Someone else, foie gras. The softness of a baby’s thighs. Swimming, naked, at midnight. The smell of freshly cut grass. Fauré’s ‘Sanctus’. A girlfriend’s laugh.
Until there was only you left.
Kissing the back of your husband’s neck, you said, while he was absorbed in his work. Your voice stumbly and hesitant, your blush deep. The photo was taken and when it was published it was all, still, in your face.
Cole loved your look, he knew it well but had never seen it caught.
He had no recollection of you ever kissing his neck while he was at work.
Lesson 39
there should not be overcrowding in bedrooms
Night, bed, alone, and the glare of what’s happened during that meeting with Gabriel is imprinted in your head like the too-bright fluorescent lights that were never switched off in your school’s corridors. Cole’s fallen asleep on the couch in front of the television. You cannot sleep, cannot sleep, and then it’s dawn. Love is attention and you’re not getting any: you’re like a balloon that’s jerked free from the fist holding it down and is now climbing and swerving in a choppy sky.
You think of other things, in bed, alone. They’re with you most nights, to lull you to sleep. A group of men watching you being penetrated by a broom handle. You don’t know any of the perpetrators very well. It’s never intimate or tender. It’s filmed. Sometimes women will bewatching the penetration; by candlesticks, by animals, sometimes the women will be participating. And the men. Hands will be running over
Cleaning is always the riskiest part of the process, he told you. It’s all so unknown. What you find underneath might be magnificent, or something you just want to throw out. You never know.
You could watch him and listen to him for ever in those days: you loved the seductiveness of a man deep in work. You knew, then, it was a reciprocated love and it was a canopy of joy over your life.
You see your husband now. A man who hides in art, and porn, who’s nourished by an interior world you know nothing of. His work is a world you can never really be a part of, he burrows away into it, just as he does with his moated, secret life.
Why did you marry him?
Because he said yes. And you’d reached the stage where you never expected any man to want you that much. And he was such a good friend, right from the beginning, he was a mate; never one of those lovers where you wondered what you had in common apart from sex. And there’s the deep urge within you as your thirties gallop on, the furious want.
Give me children or else I dye, wrote the anonymous Elizabethan author of your old book.
Oh yes.
Cole has a favourite photograph of you, he says it reveals your secret self. It was taken for a magazine article about bright young things, the ones to watch, and their mentors. You’d been chosen by an old student of yours, now an ITV news reader, a hungry young woman who’d straightened her West Country vowels and had a meteoric rise from the local Bristol paper into prime time TV. There was also a celebrated violinist, a geneticist, an architect, a novelist.
You didn’t want to do it but didn’t say no, of course: it was good publicity for your faculty. You’d never actually liked her enough, had been jealous and a little afraid of her steely greed to succeed. She hid her determination within friendliness and flattery but you saw straight through it.
The photographer was Colombian. He was exasperatedwith you all, wanted the group to relax. He asked you to think of the most sensuous thing you could imagine and yell it out, and there was uncomfortable laughter and then silence.
Skin to skin said your former student suddenly. Someone else, foie gras. The softness of a baby’s thighs. Swimming, naked, at midnight. The smell of freshly cut grass. Fauré’s ‘Sanctus’. A girlfriend’s laugh.
Until there was only you left.
Kissing the back of your husband’s neck, you said, while he was absorbed in his work. Your voice stumbly and hesitant, your blush deep. The photo was taken and when it was published it was all, still, in your face.
Cole loved your look, he knew it well but had never seen it caught.
He had no recollection of you ever kissing his neck while he was at work.
Lesson 39
there should not be overcrowding in bedrooms
Night, bed, alone, and the glare of what’s happened during that meeting with Gabriel is imprinted in your head like the too-bright fluorescent lights that were never switched off in your school’s corridors. Cole’s fallen asleep on the couch in front of the television. You cannot sleep, cannot sleep, and then it’s dawn. Love is attention and you’re not getting any: you’re like a balloon that’s jerked free from the fist holding it down and is now climbing and swerving in a choppy sky.
You think of other things, in bed, alone. They’re with you most nights, to lull you to sleep. A group of men watching you being penetrated by a broom handle. You don’t know any of the perpetrators very well. It’s never intimate or tender. It’s filmed. Sometimes women will bewatching the penetration; by candlesticks, by animals, sometimes the women will be participating. And the men. Hands will be running over
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