Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (55 page)

Fingers, everywhere. You don’t know whose. You arch your back, giving yourself to them, wanting it all, all, everything. In your arse, in your cunt, your mouth, between your breasts, all at once, blinded but seeing all, in your head; but they don’t let you come, they stop just short.

Saving you for something else.

‘Surrender,’ Tol whispers.

You groan.

You are humping a tongue. Urging it deeper, deeper. Something slips into your arse. You fuck it all, all. You want everyone to see, you arch your back, you love that you are giving pleasure, dispensing it; you feel supremely in control – strong, victorious, holding this room captive. Wanted.

Noticed
.

That you can have this effect. You.

The power of it.

The gift of attention.

Sounds, coming from you, that you did not think you were capable of, in a register lower than you have ever uttered in your life. You are split wide open, stripped, they have seen the core of you and you have never seen it before, in yourself and you marvel at that; the next step. That such a thing exists. That your body is capable of this.

This tsunami of …
pleasure
.

As you come and come you push away, all of it, not wanting anyone, anything, curling in exquisite aloneness, need to savour, scissoring your body again and again and turning brutally, in this needing to be alone.

When the spasming has finally died down, Tol enfolds your trembling in his arms and holds you and holds you until you stop, until all is quiet.
Sssh
, he is whispering, smoothing back your hair, again and again,
sssssh
.

‘What exactly is freedom,’ he muses later, close, and you can hear the smile in his voice, ‘but doing exactly what we want to in life?’

Then he kisses you. Just. The moth’s kiss.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

You are still blindfolded.

He slips it off.

His eyes, soft, into yours. Just his eyes, nothing, no one else, in the room. He lifts you like his bride with the dearest and most sacred tenderness and he carries you across the threshold
of his bedroom again and he lays you on his mattress with consummate gentleness.

You have no idea of anyone else.

No awareness of anything, only him.

His gift.

One last fuck on that seared, soaked day: lying with his stomach pressed into your back, one of his hands across your mouth and the other strong on your pubis, fucking in silence, stifled. Muffling your cries with his hand,
you must be quiet
, he is giggling,
sssh
, as if he is not meant to be doing this, others are listening, they’re not allowed to know he is sneaking it.

‘I want you to be my woman forever,’ he is whispering deep inside you, moving so slowly, almost imperceptibly as his words pump through you, filling you up. Glow girl. Have you ever felt more alive, more sated, than this? He has removed you, shut the door on everything else, you are his only now,
his
– his woman, his world – and when he comes it is with a great cry of agony and distress and release, his whole life in it, all his past, all his future.

‘Thank you,’ he breathes again, panting, and then tells you he will never forget what you have given him – your trust, the gift of it through all these summer weeks. He will remember
this golden, burnished time for the rest of his life – your love, what you have done, all of it. And then he starts to weep.

The shuddering pressing into your back.

The tears, the wet, the weight.

You stay still. You do not turn to him. It is something deeply private, and you do not want to intrude upon it.

The house feels completely empty, except for you two. You have heard no one leaving, moving about, no cars, nothing. Just you and Tol and a world you have created for yourselves. You lie there and smile in the infinite depths of the silence of the softening day and the stopping and the rest. God in the quiet. Grace. You know now what it is to be a woman who radiates peace. Serenity.

In a life driven by love.

You sleep, you stir, you are the salt sweeper now, mining Tol’s body with your lips, your tongue, your breath. You taste regions, delve. The velvet softness of his flaccid penis, the toadstool head freckled softly, endearingly. You remember walking through his drawing room door once, unannounced, and Tol coming at you, rising from the couch, and in that instant you had a vision of him old – the thickness, the tiredness, the slowness – and felt an enormous tenderness for what he would become. You will be beside him, of course, you will not recoil from it; charging like crazed warriors at convention, still. You can see it.

You float your lips over his body like a metal detector at a beach, trying to know him, extract him, his essence. This man in your life who touches the world so lightly with his living, who has no need of anyone else. With his constant capacity to surprise.

Now, with stillness.

The coldness of night is leaking into the air. The real world awaits. You get up. You shower. You leave. With a breath of a kiss on the nape of his sleeping neck.

Your little Victorian volume is waiting for you on the verandah doorstep, your little manual of scrupulous honesty that has accompanied you the entire time you have been in this house. Smeared by insects and ink smudges and mud from a dam. You pick it up, puzzled. You’d left it in the pocket of your overalls, in the ditch.

Inside is a fresh inscription.

Up front, roguishly, in an area that has never before been written in – the writing messy, hasty, not his usual neatness – a person who has been shaken from themselves.

Your father looks up from his tea and chocolate biscuit as you enter the house. As if he knows, as if he can smell something on you. Change, perhaps, as simple as that. Bruises are pluming on your thighs and your upper arms but he cannot see them; you do not know what he senses but it is some subtle thing, perhaps a ripening, a readiness, just that.

‘How old are you again?’ he asks absently.

He always teases you with this, on the birthdays he invariably forgets or ignores, to toughen you up, to get your indignant reminder. He asks you now like he can’t believe you’re growing so fast; he needs affirmation of how young you really are.

You just roll your eyes and smile the disbelieving, mock-disgusted smile that you always give him at this question then retreat to your room – have to, suddenly an uncontrollable trembling in your legs. Have to rip away your clothes to examine the vivid map on your skin, the imprint of what went on: the bruise on your left breast, deep and angry, the strange colours dancing up. No idea how it got there. The savagery of the lovemaking, all over, an elbow, or a chin, a knee. Embedded.

Your nipples shrivel like dried grapes at the thought. The tingling between your legs, at all of it.

Wanting it, all over again.

But you must wait. Tol would want that. Restraint … and release.

Over the coming days you sleep and sleep, gulping up rest, burrowing deep into your lovely bed. Outside your father is burning off and the smoke wends its way through your clothes like the smell of a lover and you turn and smile, scrunching your body in its pyjamas as you repair, and rest. There is a prickling in your cotton pants as the hair starts to grow back; the itch of it, the grate. For three days you can barely get out of bed at all and your father comes to the door of your room and stares, perplexed. Unable to ask, unable to articulate. The great clotted silence of the Australian male, you know it so well – from him, from Tol. So apart yet so similar, the two men in your life, who cannot properly talk out their thoughts except in writing or in work, as they’re distracted, as they teach.

Sometimes your father comes back and strokes your cheek as he used to once, long ago, before stepmothers and boarding schools, before any of that, when it was just him and you, untugged, pure and solid and known and quiet. In the silence of the gesture you hug your glow to your chest and let the stillness seep in, vast and rich.

When he’s gone you roll over. Wonder what on earth’s next. With Tol. So much you want to do and have done; so much you want to do to him, to find out.

It is his turn next. What’s in his head, what he really, deeply wants.

Let’s see how far we can take this …

With knowledge comes generosity. You have learnt that.