Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (53 page)

Two jagged days.

You change your clothes just beyond sight of Woondala. The cheongsam, of course, nothing underneath. The buttons firm across your breast. Restraint, and flesh.

Uncontrollably wet.

He is waiting. He throws up his hands in triumph at the sight.

He takes you by the hand. He leads you inside to the drawing room. He picks up the blindfold that is lying, in readiness, along the mantelpiece.

He wraps it around your eyes and knots it firmly.

‘I want you to read Foucault, I will give you a book. He says we exercise control over sexuality by our knowledge of another person – but also, crucially, by a knowledge of
ourselves
. What our body can do, the amazing things it’s capable of. That’s the secret. The mind is truly extraordinary. And now, an introduction to it. I want you to surprise yourself. Imagine you are unlocking a door to a hidden room deep inside you, and you have no idea what’s in there – yet. Are you ready?’

‘Yes.’ So much.

He is breathing deep. He undresses you, slowly; lingering his tongue and his lips, pausing for a wisp of a kiss, here, there. Until you are quite naked except for the blindfold whose long silk ribbon trails down your back with the deftness and coldness of a lizard. Now a suitcase is being opened – you can hear it – things are being removed carefully, and placed upon the floor. It is taking time. Your legs are almost buckling now with want as you strain for sounds, clues. It is taking too long.

His tools.

A heavy leather collar of some type. Wound around your neck, buckled firm. You gasp. A chain is attached to it, its leather handle is whispered across your pubis. Its coldness is then looped down your back and threaded through your legs and pulled, firmly, once. Again, a gasp. You squeeze your groin on it, into it. Bend, instinctively working the metal deep into your fold. With a steady hand, with firm and gentle fingers, you are led through the listening, waiting house; every so often the chain between your legs is pulled taut – a reminder, a taunt. You are taken to an upstairs room, a room ringing with air and light, you can read it, read the sky in the dark. You are laid down, gently, upon your back on an empty mattress. Your legs are parted. You go to shut them, automatically, they are parted again; firmer. Your hands are taken, they are bound with a thick scratchy rope and secured to the iron bedstead. You are trapped, you cannot move them, you twist on your back. ‘Uh uh,’ he whispers, ‘you wanted this.’ Your legs are pulled apart and tied wide. ‘That’s better, that’s what we need.’

You arch your back, groan. We?

‘Now,’ Tol says, from above, looking down, ‘we can do whatever we want.’

The metal chain lying along your spine is jerked up, once, savagely, through your legs. You buck, exposing yourself more. You cry out. Tol pauses, you strain to hear anything beyond him …

‘Or should I say, whatever
you
want.’

A shardy silence. Shuffling in the room, breath, you can’t make it out.

‘Fuck me, quick.’

Tripping with wetness, coming, too quick.

Now he is unbuckling you, hauling you up on your haunches, exposing you – for what? Who? Opening you wide, dipping in a tongue. Fingers, many. Rim you, probe you. You pulsate, want it. All.
All
. Everything.

‘Well done. Perfect.’ At the end of it, the delight in his voice. ‘This is only the beginning, my beautiful, beautiful love. The very start.’

The tin roof above you talks in the heat, it cracks and stretches and creaks – or is it something else? In the room, watching. A feminine gasp, no, surely not, is your mind playing tricks? You are still blindfolded, you can feel it, you think, perhaps, you don’t know.

‘Again,’ you whisper to him in the dark, widening your legs further. ‘Now.’

You have tumbled out of yourself.

Your love has lost its innocence.

He is greedy. After the librarian, the demureness, the restraint – the whore.

‘Let’s play, come on.’ Gleeful, as if a fabulous world of riches awaits.

He has gone shopping, there are many new clothes, toys. Tassels at the nipples now of a beautiful satin bra, a slit in silken panties he jerks his finger up.

‘Be my stripper,’ he’s breathing softly into the back of your neck, a hand looped around your belly with a finger through the slash in your panties that are soaking wet.

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s such a fabulously glorious mass of erotic contradictions. The girl who promises everything but actually, gives very little.’ His voice drops, his fingertip swirls, inside you, you groan and clamp him tight. ‘It’s all look and fantasise and project – but don’t touch. Don’t possess. The potency in resistance, remember. She’s the girl who’s completely in control but she’s never quite going all the way and she’s revelling in it, that supreme moment of power where she’s got the attention
of an entire room and is calling all the shots but is always withholding that final moment.’

You gasp.

‘Imagine you, here, with a room full of men. Imagine the power of it. All of them. Rapt.’ His voice right at your ear. ‘But you don’t have to withhold at the very end … if you don’t want.’

You touch yourself over his finger, you curl him into you, tumble to the ground. He pulls away your panties but before he gives you the release of his own touch he is parting your legs and staring, appraising, teasing.

‘You want others, don’t you? Watching, touching, wanting; hands, everywhere, all over you. Dipping in.’

His breath brushes your arsehole, he doesn’t touch.

‘I know you do,’ as he spreads your legs wide, wider, ‘you’re ready, aren’t you? Just tell me what you want.’

You arch your back, your nipples erect, you feel all-powerful, tripping with it; you would give him anything in this moment, anything.

He touches you.

You explode.

‘I must know. Everything. What’s in that head of yours? Don’t be afraid. I need to know. So I can help. With absolute, utter trust. Always that.’

All his words, words, words, over the next few days of apart. Spinning in your head as you help your father with the engine of his ute, handing across spanners and wrenches and bolts. You’re in retreat, here, now – you can’t go back, everything is galloping too fast – you don’t know what’s next, where it’s meant to stop, who he’s bringing in to this; you’re a good girl really, you can’t.

You will not go back
.

What happens if you’ve fallen in love with a person who will ultimately destroy you?

It is not the first time you’ve thought this.

Woondala has woven a spell around you; you are different there. You don’t recognise yourself.

Your father needs to fix the chook house. It’s falling apart, a big job, you want to do it with him; need his silence, the solidness of hard work, the reassurance. Need the known, everything that is comfortable and secure and known in your life. In the heat that is so thick it is a presence in this place.

You do not go back.

A letter. Your name and address on the envelope, typed. Businesslike, anonymous. Your stepmother turns it over curiously, goes to hold it up to the light.

You snatch it from her. It is typed with his old typewriter, you just know.

‘It’s from my drama teacher at school. She said she’d write.’ Nonchalantly, already ripping it open. ‘It’s about the school play, next term, my lines. She promised.’

Rushing it to your room, as bored-looking as you can.

You run out the door with a slap of the flyscreen and leap off the verandah – clearing, cleanly, six steps.

Sobbing as you’re pushing him away then pulling him to you, animal fucking, eating his flesh, biting, branding him, feeling his seed dribble from your stomach as you lay back on a huge slab of rock and it scrapes your back and you want it to, need it, to be marked forever, scraped by this grit; need it to hurt, to always remember this; want this day’s rawness and hunger tattooed upon the flesh of your back.

‘Deeper,’ you command, craving. ‘Fill me up.’

‘You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,’ he says in the thick of it.

Holding you tight, thudding you into the rock, scrunching into your body as if he is clinging onto a lifebuoy in a wide ocean of fear, not wanting to let go, not wanting this to stop. He smells good, he always smells good and you nestle your face into his armpit, its animal smell, and drink him up – intoxicated, with all of it.

Soaring with happiness. That he could be so open, honest.

‘You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me.’

You love the vulnerability, the anchoring power of it.

A dome of secrecy over you both. As you lie there, limbs strewn, inside the raucous, ringing, bang-smash bell of heat and noise, cockatoos screeching above and the wheeling blue, the bubbling creek.

You look straight into his eyes which laugh back.

So, now you have it. That bloom of certainty that women who are anchored by a relationship have, that you have envied and craved your entire teenage life. A love that scorches self-hatred and insecurity and doubt. You are the love eaters in this place. Love gorgers.

Life eaters.

Yes. You feel so alive with all this.

You tell him, at last.

What he wants.