Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (65 page)
Read Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Online
Authors: Nikki Gemmell
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Erotica
We have come to view life in its entirety, instead of agonisingly puzzling over its disjointed parts
A letter, typed. You recognise instantly the intensity of the ink.
How to say this … I can’t meet you. Forgive me. I don’t want you to see me like this. My brokenness. Let’s remember how we were, just that. It’s better that way. Those extraordinary weeks. Don’t seek me out, don’t worry about me. I am writing. I have found other ways to work. Under other names. It has freed me, in fact.
So. You are back. All changed yet not. A woman now. A mother. Three boys. What a delight! And a good husband. Julian has told me that. He knows these things. You deserve it.
I hope you will write a book. I sensed it from that very first time together in my study. I always had faith in you to write out your questions and your curiosity and your bewilderment. To act with audacity. You are much more honest than me. Which is why you must do this. It is right it comes from you, from your perspective.
Just know one thing. You taught me. No one had ever given me the gift of that. I responded to what you wanted. Thank you for that. Yet I failed you in the end. I could never match you, be honest enough with you. I could never show you my real self. As you did. You had the courage. I didn’t.
If I taught you one thing it is this: to live life vividly and with passion. Remember that. We must wring as much happiness as we can out of life during our allotted time on this earth.
So. Turn around. Go home. Seize that happiness and be content with it. Close this chapter, this tiny chapter, in the vastness of your life.
T xxx
You look up to the roof, reeling in the light, and there it is. Through your tears, your gulps of wet, your shielding hand.
A shadow.
A movement – at the high window you stood at when you first came to this house and looked over the valley in audacious ownership, and felt filled up.
It could have been a bird, a possum, a cloud shift.
But something, definitely, is there.
You run through the house, up the stairs, holding back a sob, holding back a name. To the wing of padlocked doors but one is open and you run to it; fingers are just disappearing around the door frame as it shuts, beautiful useless fingers that tripped down a back once as speaking as a whisper, hands that have lost all their strength, are old, but the fingertips are familiar, the curve of them, the clean lovely moons that you once held in the cave of your mouth. They stop, for a moment, and you press your lips to the ring finger – trembling, vulnerable, impotent – through your tears you feel it.
The moth’s first kiss.
Then the hand slips away, and the door is shut.
You turn away.
You walk to your car.
Your thudding heart, your thudding heart.
You do not look back.
Your name, now, Released.
As you power down the road you will never drive upon again.
To the next phase of your life, the next tiny chapter within the richness of all that goes on, that you never appreciate enough.
A phase you own.
No one else. Not your husband, not your parent, not your long-gone lover or your children.
You.
‘She only comes when she’s on top’
James
She is now mistress over herself – she has learnt to understand herself, mentally and bodily
Back.
To the house held together by thatchers’ ladders and coffin lids.
You have changed the intensity of how you live. A gust has blown through your life, flushing it clean. Your perception of how well you are doing is measured by how serene you are feeling at any given time and here, now, you are at peace. With Rexi, who is hooking his hand around your throat as you lie beside him in his bed.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m holding on to you, Mummy, so you can’t run away from the boysies.’
You bury your face into the warmth of his neck and smile and breathe deep. Your beautiful son, who makes you laugh so much. All of them.
It is enough.
His firm, soft, nine-year-old hand holding you still as you lie in the voluminous quiet. You’ve become extremely vulnerable to kindness, it’s the quality you now cherish the most. And it’s
wondrous and moving to see your son transforming into a man. A gorgeous man. Whose kindness astounds you; the generosity of it. He’s a much better person than you. He teaches you so much.
Open-eyed.
At last.
The urge to return to Australia for good has softened. This is your lot, your life, and you are still with it. Finally. As you have aged you have felt the desire to belong, somewhere, above all, and you belong
here
in this tight, scruffy, imperfect little unit – in this place.
You feel rested too. Pip is finally sleeping through the night and with that comes repairing, an old energy back that you’d completely forgotten about. The balm of solid nights’ sleeps. For Hugh too.
You can feel it, something revving.
By the time she has arrived at half of those three-score-years-and-ten she will generally have become her own mistress
Rushing through the door on a damp Saturday afternoon, laden with midlife-crisis shopping bags. Topshop, French Connection, Zara. You can hear all four of them singing the World Cup anthem around the kitchen table and you head straight into them: they’re doing fine. Homework done. Mouths wiped. Lunch consumed, albeit the detritus uncleared but so what?
Hugh eyes the shopping.
‘Well, at least you haven’t given up,’ he remarks drily and you laugh. ‘But where’s the one from Coco de Mer?’
‘What’s Cocal din-
ner
?’ Jack pipes up.
You pull out a bra, ta dah! Three little boys squirm and cover their eyes in horror. But your husband comes up to you and pushes into your space in silence like a horse at a fence nudging for grass. Strong, gentle, hopeful.
You kiss him back. Hold, and let the holding wash over you, as does he.
You love this man. The knowing washes like a golden balm under your skin, washes through your body as you hold in the kitchen amid a cacophony of chanty, squealy, shove-y boys. Your husband amongst it is in you like the glow of a candle. Quieting.
You know now you are ready to lead a more honest life. A life self-created – or you will disappear. That is your choice as your forties gather pace.
And you have clever fingertips.
Because you were taught, once.
‘I want to fuck you tonight,’ you whisper.
Hugh steps back in astonishment.
‘Boys, straight to bed after
X-Factor
!’ he announces. ‘You all need an early night. And footy tomorrow. It’s about time we all went.’
Boys groaning. Dad rubbing his hands. Mum smiling a smile she hasn’t used for a long time, years.
Because you need buoyancy not weight, the older you get. Fun. A loosening. Your clever fingertips trip up Hugh’s back, under his shirt, reaping goosebumps.
A giggle in your heart.
