Read Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You for Free Online

not engaged with anything much. And yet, and yet, you’d never wish for Theo’s kind of existence. She’s so free, so answerable to no one that she’s lost.
    The sky deepens, bathers pack up their suntan lotion and one by one leave, the baked breeze stiffens and umbrellas are snapped down for fear they’ll cartwheel away. You slip into the pool. The water’s ruffled like corrugated iron. You’re the only one in it and you slide through the coolness and strike out for the first time in years, feel unused muscles creaking into working order and think of your mother and her strong, confident hands and the ribbons of water when you were seven. You’ve no family consistently around you now, your friends have becomeyour closest relations: Cole, of course, and Theo, your sister of sorts, although at times there’s the intensity of lovers between you.
    It’s her birthday today, you must call.
    You smile as you pull your body through the water and at the end of the pool look up to great plumes of ochre dust blown in from the desert; it’s as if the dusk is being hurried centre stage. The attendants move with crisp deliberation now, clearing towels and cushions from chairs. Most people have gone. Palm trees toss their branches like the manes of recalcitrant ponies, twigs and leaves blow into the pool and you climb out of the water at the first fat splats. You smell the earth opening up as if it’s breathing, feel the thundery day sparking you alive and you lift your chin to it and inhale deep and gather up, reluctantly, your sun gear. You pass the man from the lobby, still reading valiantly. He looks up at you.
    You don’t look at him. You walk inside, to your husband, a fluttery anticipation within you.

Lesson 25
    lending is, as a rule, the greatest unkindness we can be guilty of, unless we can give
    The elderly man who looks after the roses lets you into the room, bowing and smiling his gentle smile. He’s presented you, gallantly, with a single stem and you’ve accepted it graciously; it’s a game played with some seriousness. The petals are deep red, almost black, and you plunge your nose into their oddness: it’s a wild plump garden scent from your childhood, not the tight manufactured whiff from the buds you buy at the supermarket. You enter the room soundlessly, you’ll surprise Cole, he’ll throw you on the bed and make you laugh and kiss you in his special way and you’ll melt, succumb, even though you’re still menstruating. Sexy sex, hmm, grubby, spontaneous, impolite kind of sex, you haven’t done that for years and all of a sudden it seems necessary. The room’sdim from the darkening sky and you can taste the thunder outside and lift your chin to it. Cole’s on the phone. You’re cross, he shouldn’t be doing any work during this trip, he promised.
    I can’t wait to get out of here, it’s driving me crazy, the heat, and he says this in his special voice, your voice, but there’s a playfulness, a lightness, it’s a tone you haven’t heard for so long. All she wants to do is run off to the markets and have rides in those fucking carts, I can’t stand it, I get so bored, I just want to relax. He pauses. Diz, Diz, no, you can’t. He chuckles. Yeah, me too. I’ll see you soon, thank God.

Lesson 26
    air ventilation oxygen
    You’re very still. You walk past Cole without looking at him. You walk through the french doors, to the veranda, and sit, very carefully, on the wicker chair.
    Your thudding heart, your thudding heart.
    You sit for a very long time, soundlessly, into the rich silence after the storm. At the end of it the sun feebles out and nothing has cooled down, nothing, it is as hot as it ever was.

II
    My soul waiteth on thou more than they that watch for the morning,
    I say more than they that watch for the morning.
    Psalm 130

Lesson 27
    there ought to be no cesspool attached to the dwelling
    The Monday after the return from Marrakech. A cafe in Soho, alone. An old London chophouse