Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (58 page)
Read Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Online
Authors: Nikki Gemmell
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Erotica
‘I bet you don’t even fart,’ he says, working his finger into your arse. You wince. ‘Real closeness between people is when they can fart in bed, don’t you think?’ He’s a talker, he giggles, wants you loosened, wanton, he’s roughing you up.
You let him go on.
You use him.
Ask him to shave you. To bind you to the bed post. Blindfold you. Later he asks if he can get out his video camera. You just look at him.
He’d never get close.
You knew this from the first kiss.
You get up. You leave. Without saying anything, without looking back.
As you have learnt.
But he has served his purpose. You are woken up.
Counting-house, shop or college afford him a clear future on which to concentrate all his energies and aims. He has got the grand pabulum of the human soul – occupation
It feels as if you are being returned to the world in a wheelchair, crippled and bowed but ready – you have survived. Suddenly it is different, the way you look at men. Every one a prospect. The old carnality back. Curiosity is how you began and you still have it in you and you smile at that, slipping it out like a long forgotten book that woke you up, once; thrilled you into life like a golden varnishing washed over a painting.
So. Other men, viciously now, other sexual experiences.
You have developed a laugh that could be described as filthy, at odds with your image of containment. It is an invitation. You use it often.
It works.
What you learn, what you jot down in your Victorian notebook that you vowed you would never write in again, in another life:
Example One: The shopping centre executive twenty-two years older than you. Because perhaps he, too, can teach.
He fucks you from behind with your legs clamped together by his as if he wants you a virgin again, wants you snug and tight. Cries
take me, take me
as he comes. You don’t want to. He tells you confidently you have not yet discovered your sexuality. You don’t tell him that with him you’ve shut your sexuality down like a snail in its shell, everything in retreat. He does not like women, you sense that from the start. It will never work. You walk away, you do not look back.
Example Two: The perfectly decent, gentlemanly, engineering flatmate you are not remotely interested in, who blackmails with generosity.
O worst kind! Crowding in, hovering, leaving roses by the bedroom door, chocolates and favourite books. You can’t ever hurt him but you will never sleep with him. You can’t bring yourself to say this. Don’t they realise that this knowing comes within the first seconds of meeting? He is not a possibility. You can’t be veered into that path. Love is an energy between two people – a recognition, a likeness – you catch something of yourself and it is there or it is not. As simple as that. It cannot be manufactured.
Example Three: The colleague. Almost.
His touch an echo of Tol’s, the tenderness and the expertise in it and you think, perhaps, oh my goodness, is this love, yes, and you open out, become younger for him, shed years, shine up. Fuck like a teenager again, abandon yourself.
But my God that vulnerability of saying you love someone – and feeling stripped. The solitude of love. Not hearing from him for a week and you’re going to pieces: unknowing fells you.
Just tell me,
you beg on his answerphone, so you can have your strength back. When he finally calls he tells you he’s slept with men, occasionally, and something contracts. So. It will never be. Because he may go back at some point, maybe you’re just an experiment, a one-off, and you can never compete with that thought. You walk away without looking back.
Example Four: The college boy into anal sex.
His reasoning – it’s quick and easy, and there’s no risk of pregnancy. He tells you of a Uni Drinking Society toast –
‘To anal sex!’ – and that it’s the girls always cheering the loudest.
‘Because if they’re tired they can just turn over and let the guy get on with it.’
They have a point.
So much energy expended now trying to make unsuitable men suitable, so many wasted fucks. The bleakness of it. The astonishing emptiness of one-night stands where naked, with another person, you’ve never felt more lonely in your life and the trembling never comes again and you’re faking so much and they never know it. It’s easy, just as Tol said; you’re becoming precisely what he didn’t want.
Inauthentic.
Searching, searching. For something to wipe away Tol, to release you into the light.
Example Five: The actor.
Textbook handsome. The remoteness, the bloodless sex. As if he’s never had to try too hard, never got his hands mucky in the mess of life. He never engages too deeply, leaving you cleaving to him. He says absently one night he doesn’t have a passion in life, for anything, and he’s right.
But then you. A world apart.
At night, late, after every one of them, taking out your little Victorian volume and flipping through the pages crammed with handwritten notes from both Tol and you, among rain
spots and sap and bicycle grease and snail’s trails and the knotted remains of clamped ants. So much text, from all those years ago – duelling, fuelling, itemising – that you have to scribble any new notes up the sides and in between and then leak them through all the Victorian declamations of the anonymous woman who would have applauded, once, long ago – for what you had, what you learnt, what you felt.
Then Tol’s hand, strong at the end of it:
‘Sex pleasure in a woman … is a kind of magic spell. It demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.’
Simone de Beauvoir
Did your Victorian author ever experience something of that?
You are sure. It is in her voice. You envy it.
It was love at first sight. A spiritual recognition you knew instantly and it cannot be cultivated, it is there or it is not.
‘Don’t talk. I don’t want it. Just be quiet.’
Your command to them again and again. So you can be alone, in your head. So they don’t crash into it. The movie that is bringing you to orgasm, that they know nothing of.
Reliving his tongue as thrilling as a trickle of water; reliving his touch springing you open like a trap released. You can’t expunge him no matter how hard you try, he is like a stain on a favourite dress that cannot be removed and has spoilt it now, you can never wear it again. Can never recover that girl from long ago, in her cheongsam.
Except in your head.
Graveyard sex.
Lune’s expression for sex with an ex. She’s the only person you have ever told about Woondala. Had to tell someone, as if to anchor it in reality; it wasn’t a dream, it did exist.
‘If you went back to him, sweetie, it’d be graveyard sex. There’d be something so sad, so deadening, about it.’
You laugh, shaking your head. It could never be that with Tol.
‘Don’t even
think
of finding him,’ Lune warns.
You hear rumours, in literary pages and from bookshop owners when you enquire about his next book. He’s disappeared, he’s still writing. He’s given up. Is changing tack. He’s working on the great Australian novel, a love story; has crippling writer’s block. There’s occasional speculation that he’ll publish something soon, next year or the year after, but eventually it dies out as new successes bloom for the media to gobble up. He’s vanished from the face of the earth. You have no idea where he’s living. Your worlds never collide.
You had nothing in common except love.
‘Stop thinking about him,’ Lune snaps.
Can’t. Imagining the coming together again after so many years – the matey, laughy, fragile tenderness of old lovers, the intense familiarity. The strangeness. Wrongness. He harasses your dreams but you cannot tell Lune that – how you hold and hold him, stirring him just as you used to, urge him deeper and deeper and wake up gasping, wet.
He is holding your life hostage. You do not know how to escape.
He is the roadblock on any experience of love you’ve had since.
Men may laugh at us, and we deserve it: we are often egregious fools, but we are honest fools
Lune despairs she’s being ‘flattened’ by her divorced lover, Luca, who she has brought back from France, yet does nothing to extricate herself.
‘He is the rock upon which I break, and break, and break,’ she sobs, one red-wine-fuelled night. She’s given up her Economics degree for him, the first man she’s loved in her life; is becoming dependent, fragile, weak. It’s as if she now has an obligation to succumb and there’s nothing her friends can say to stop it. She who was so striking once. Losing all ambition, confidence, strength.
You become a shoulder to cry on. A wise one. Yet she will not listen to reason; is throwing away her future for this one thing only – a man, an unsuitable one at that.
You can see it in another person but could never in yourself. Tell Lune we mustn’t let ourselves be dampened by the confidence of men, their unquestioning sense of rightness; we mustn’t ever be the yes girls Tol hated so much.
We won’t capitulate, alright?
We must never have that gulf of loneliness as we make love, in a marriage; that poison of never feeling
more alone in our lives than within the thick of a relationship. Which Lune will, if she stays with Luca, you just know. So easy to say.
What you cannot tell her is that you crave connection on the profoundest level. Wildness, madness, edge. Again. A holiness fluttering in both Tol and you – no one else – and it is a weakness you can’t bring yourself to articulate. You need obliteration, cleansing, a wiping of every memory of his touch. It was a spiritual intensity and it could never be replaced cheaply; this is the lesson you are learning.
He is the only one you want. If not him, no one else: you will wander the earth crazed, celibate, lone. Riddled by his ghost, a luminous light.
The price of love. So be it. You had it once, and so many don’t.
