Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (48 page)

A constant state of readiness, now. Bare. Sublimely aware, and knowing you’ll have this raging sense of illicitness later, and days later – every time you move, as you peel the potatoes, eat the Sunday roast, vacuum and sweep, clean out the chook house – all the time you’ll be squeezing your legs together and thinking of
him
, what he has transformed you into; a woman bound. By want.

‘It’ll start to itch,’ he’s warned you, his fingers tracing his handiwork and bringing on the stirring all over again, the slightest touch triggering you off. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Well, we’ll just have to keep doing it. Maintenance. It’s always important, that.’

Aware, as you walk inside your house with a childish slap of the screen door.

Aware, as you brush past your stepmother and put on your apron.

Aware, as you greet your dad from his shift and yarn over the bonnet of an old Ford Falcon up on bricks, yakking away about the heat, how it’s bringing out the snakes, and the dams are dropping and church, on Sunday, you need to get back, yes Dad, yes.

Almost coming with it as you talk, squeezing your groin on it.

Do they see it in your face, your stroll, your stance? Your proud, walk tall love. Do they have any inkling, of any of it?

This threshold you have crossed.

You congratulate yourself on your cleverness. Squeezing your rawness, smiling, exquisitely calibrated.

He has taken to writing on sheets of paper, he has retreated from your book but he will not give up.

‘And I’m so jealous of it.’ He smiles a knowing smile as he holds up the page. ‘Ready?’

You nod. Bite your lip.

Delicately, he parts your lips. Licks, once; a shiver of tongue. You exclaim as if you’ve been burnt.

‘God has given women the most glorious gift imaginable.’

‘Which is?’ you groan, clutching his hair.

‘The only organ on the human body – on either body – that’s devoted entirely to one thing.
Sensation
,’ he chuckles, stroking, teasing. ‘Endless, lovely … sensation. It is, of course, the clit. Which has eight thousand nerve endings. Can you believe it? Twice as many as the boring old penis. And you must never, ever believe that the vagina is the explosive centre of female pleasure. Alfred Kinsey found that its interior walls, deep
inside, actually have very few nerve endings, that they’re really quite enormously insensitive – compared to what’s on top.’ He smiles conspiratorially. ‘But this is something, I think, that any woman knows.’

He kisses your clit in reverence.

‘This tiny, beautiful bud is the doorway to all the mystery and power of making love; a woman’s gateway to the divine. In Greek mythology, when Zeus and Hera visited the hermaphrodite Tiresias – trying to work out whether it was men or women who experienced the more pleasure from sex – Tiresias replied, “If the sum of love’s pleasure adds up to ten, nine parts go to women, only one to men.” And it’s all down to this.’ His tongue gently encircles your clit. ‘The one thing
guaranteed
to lay a woman waste. If she’ll let you near it.’

You push Tol’s face onto you, into you, can hardly bear it anymore; need all this talking to stop.

He bobs up, grins. ‘I need to get your toes pointing. That’s my next task.’

‘
What
? Just get on with it.’

‘It’s a sure sign of orgasm. And there’s an awful lot of toe-pointing with cunnilingus. It’s a much more certain way of bringing a woman to orgasm than vaginal sex ever is.’

Your toes as flexed as a ballerina’s, again and again, that afternoon. Until you have to push him from you, away, get him off. Because your nerve endings are aching, exhausted, screaming for rest.

A grave instruction, the next time: you must always,
always
tell him if you don’t orgasm, if what he is doing isn’t working, you must never pretend; this whole process will grind to a halt if you do that.

‘But wouldn’t you know?’

‘Sometimes, believe me, it’s hard for us Neanderthals to work out.’

‘I thought modern girls knew how to have orgasms like their mums knew how to cook Sunday roasts.’

He laughs. ‘You’d be surprised. It’s extremely easy for a woman to pretend. But if you do it means I’ve failed. I have married friends – women – who’ve never had an orgasm in their life. I need to know. So I can help. I need honesty, that’s all, you know that.’

‘Are you doing this for me, or for you?’

He rolls his eyes, he says nothing.

A chill, again, at why exactly he is doing this. You will never know him; you love him. The impossibility of that. You wonder if you love him because of the chip of ice within him
– that rangy, jittery distance you can’t quite broach. He says he is obsessed, can’t get enough of you and then he walks away, because of his work, apparently, shutting you out; he goes off to his room and locks the door and tells you to go away, time is up, he needs to be alone. For a day, two, sometimes three. And then he rushes to you when you walk your bicycle up his drive and you are so pathetically grateful; craven, greedy, lost. Ready. For anything. He knows it.

You are writing all through the notebook now, cramming the margins of the author’s written words, the bottom of her pages and the top of them.

The awful question, the perilous dynamism; a dynamism of absence and presence. If he wanted you completely and consumingly, if he conveyed that weakness – would
you
want him? Would serenity, stasis, knowing sink the boat? This love is a verb not a noun. It is galloping, withdrawing, retreating, surging – backwards, forwards – forever restless, refusing stillness and rest.

It is exhausting.

You are becoming thin with it, skin and bone. And it can only get worse.

You can’t get it stopped.

You need to know what’s next. Always what’s next. It’s how he has bound you to all this.

You are on a path.

And every morning now your little diary of observation is slipped into the pocket of your overalls, the new journal that your stepmother will never find because she would never think to glance at it; just another old book with a patched-up cover, from school no doubt. It is your explosive instruction manual for encroaching womanhood, the words you must never forget.
Your
words, now, more so than his; as you become more aware. As you step into being the woman he wants. And observe. Detach.

Exploring what your body can do.

To the limit
, he commands.

His project. That he will facilitate. That he will observe. And take mental notes, you are sure; so keenly he watches.

He tells you he wants you to be in awe of what your body can achieve, to learn it, revel in it,
unlock it
.

‘Work out what’s best; use me, come on. Position me. Find out what you want. Every woman is different. Should I be behind you, on top, underneath? Experiment. Live with audacity! Make your man a better lover. Every man you have.
Teach
them. We need to learn as much as you. Find the animal in you, the carnal, what you feel not what you think. What
works
.’

You do. Working out the best ways to orgasm while he’s inside you; angling him with hands on slim hips. So he’s rubbing against your pelvic bone, so he’s stimulating your clit; guiding him, talking him through it, yes, over there, yes, more, that’s it!

‘I’m learning
so
much,’ he pants his gratitude, ‘you’re like a blank slate, pure instinct, it’s glorious.’

You giggle to hear it and then suddenly, without understanding, you are crying. He licks up your tears in one long salty sweep, one cheek, then the other.

‘What’s this?’

‘I – I don’t know.’ Struggling to find words. ‘It’s just … all of this, it feels like it’s for … I don’t know, men, in the future, you said
every man you have
but I don’t want anyone else – I – you’re shaping me for … what? Someone else. Some
thing
else. My future? Like you’re not going to be in it? You want to create the perfect lover – but for who?’ You thump his chest. ‘
Who?
’

He stares in surprise.

‘I’m doing this for you.’ Finally, matter-of-fact. ‘Don’t you get it?’

‘No.’

‘One day you will.’ He rolls off you. ‘And you’ll be grateful. That you had all this at the start. Because believe me, most women don’t have the luxury of it.’

You thump him hard in the chest with your fists.

‘Ow!’

‘Come on,’ he soothes, ‘let’s have some fun. We both need it right now.’ He raises an eyebrow. Goes to the kitchen. Returns with a bowl of ice cubes.

‘Allow me to demonstrate.’

He parts your legs, pops in a cube, and leans down with the utmost tenderness.

Your back arched in a radiant flinch.

That afternoon, the shadow of a terrible truth. Whether you love Tol or hate him is indiscernible, not important anymore. You want him, just that. It is neither love nor hate but hunger: wolfish, rangy, focused.

Something entirely different.