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

browse the accessories counters. Buy six rings. Space them out on your fingers, blurring your marital status; your engagement and weddings rings are swamped and you smile as you stretch out your hand.
    But then it’s back, his voice. It always comes back. The tone of it as he spoke to her on the phone. It’s not so much the thought of them physically together, it’s the intimacy in his voice. It wasn’t until you overheard it in the hotel room that you realised how long it’d been since you had heard it. And you missed it, violently so.
    Your voice.
    Your teeth are clenched as you walk to the tube and with effort you soften your jaw and rub at your brow, at a new wrinkle between your eyes. At the end of each night you knead it, your fingertips dipped in the chilly whiteness of Vitamin E cream. Beyond you, the flat ticks. The rooms are dark except for the bedroom. Cole’s away a lot now, working late; that’s his excuse. There’s no light in the hallway to welcome him home. At the end of each night, seated at the dressing table, your fingertips prop your forehead like scaffolding. For it’s the long, long nights that defeat you.
    When you are blown out like a candle.

Lesson 29
    friends are too scarce to be got rid of on any terms if they be real friends
    The buzzer, too loud, blares into your morning. You groan: you’re still in bed. The intercom’s broken, you’ll have to go down three flights of stairs and open the front door to find out who it is; in your old bathrobe, without your face.
    Theo. Red lips and red shirt, the colour of blood. On her way to work.
    You close the door. This is ridiculous, she says, come on, we need to talk. You lean your hands on the door with your arms outstretched. Can’t we just talk, she pleads. Her knocks become thumps, they vibrate through your palms. You straighten, walk up the stairs, do not look back; your fingers, trembling, at your mouth.
    Theo’s betrayal is magnificent, astounding, incomprehensible. It’s her actions you can’t understand, not Cole’s. You always assumed she was the one person you’d have your whole life, not, perhaps, your mother or your husband. She’s a woman, she knows the rules. Men do not. You’re not interested in an excuse, nothing can put it right, for anything she says will be overwhelmed by the violence of the loyalty ruptured and your howling, pummelled heart.
    You can’t bear to think of them together. You have no idea how Theo is with a man. How she operates, if she turns into someone else; if she changes her manner and voice. It’s a side of your girlfriends you’ve never intruded upon. All you know is that your husband is trapped in her hungry gravitational pull: his voice told you that.
    As you were once. Theo was sloppy with your relationship—never turned up to dinner parties with a bottle of wine, never sent thank you cards, cancelled nights out at the last minute, was often late – but she was always forgiven for she made your hours luminous with the gift of her presence; as soon as you saw her all the irritation would be lost.
    Now, she tries to contact you again and again but the phone’s hung up no matter how quickly she rams in talk, her e-mails are deleted unopened, her letters ripped. You’re good at cutting people off, it’s always been a skill, a small one but effective; making things neat, moving on. Theo will hate being ignored. It’s what she fears most. You feela strange sense of power, the extreme passivity makes you strong; it’s how you can protest, it gives you a voice. Like, sometimes, with sex.

Lesson 30
    old medicines should not be kept, as they are seldom wanted again and soon spoil
    Cole needs you for a party. It’s hosted by a gallery owner with a painting that needs cleaning, a Venetian landscape by a pupil of Canaletto. Cole’s hungry for it; he suspects there’s something from the master hidden underneath. You don’t want to go. Don’t want to give him anything yet.
    Please, Cole