Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (43 page)

Cycling to him the next day, faster than you’ve ever ridden, shackled now by want. A water bag is looped over your handlebars, ‘Austral Canvas’ stamped across its honeyed cloth.

The next gift. That would have been placed over a car’s radiator once. You can barely think what will be yours in return.

Thunder threatens, the sky is bruised like a plum; you shouldn’t go today, you must. You glance behind you at a curtain of grey falling across the land and pedal faster, flint in the air and you push yourself to stay ahead of it and then the first, fat splats come; the rain has beaten you. Do you turn back or do you get caught? No time. A flash of lightning. You jump, you hate lightning. Pedal more furiously. The rain catches you, grows heavier, pounds. Mud splashes into your face as you fly down the dirt roads, you are freezing, teeth chattering, your hair hangs in ratty rivulets, wet – it is spitting into your eyes, blurring your vision and you have to drag it off to see, make progress.

The gate, at last.

His road barely there in the driving rain, you can hardly make it out, the dirt flies up and the leaves whip across your
face, you fall and get up, slimy now with mud and wet. Woondala is just ahead, finally, you are drenched. You see him waiting tall on the verandah and faster and faster you fly, grinning, waving; you only see at the last moment the pothole the rain has carved in the road, huge and filled with its needles of dancing rain. You swerve.

Too late.

You try to correct yourself; pitch over the handlebars.

And black.

Your earlobe, held in the hollow of a mouth. Hands, lips, the tip of a tongue, waking you up.

‘You’re my downfall.’ The whisper of a breath. A mouth in the clavicle of your neck and the violin dip of your hip; against the vulnerability of your inner wrist and on your eyelids, just, trembling.

Or was that air? A cloud shift? A moth? What are you dreaming and what are you not?

Your eyelids so heavy, they roll back, again, into the dense lovely rain of deep sleep.

‘I’m sorry,’ he is breathing, apologetically, ‘you’re soaking wet.’ As you are turned, as your clothes are slipped off. ‘You’ll get pneumonia if I don’t.’ Are you dreaming it, you cannot climb out; hands are hovering, fingertips, the softest of touches, learning you as if they have never learnt a woman in their life, as if you are lit. Eating the dirt and the mud from your skin, licking it off with a tongue-tip; a mouth finding yours, a soul in the lips, waking you up. You shoot up with a gasp.

You are on the hessian lounge in the piano room.

A blanket is over you.

Your clothes are dry.

You have no idea how long you have been here. The slant of the light tells you it is late afternoon; you have no idea how many minutes have passed, hours, days.

You are alone.

He is in the kitchen. His back to you, at the sink.

‘I’m here.’

‘Good.’

He does not look at you. He does not turn.

You are thrumming.

Unbearably close.

You know you should go now, you should turn around and walk from Woondala and never come back, you have to.

You walk up to him, to his back, and you stand on tiptoe and kiss him, a whisper of breath, on the back of his vulnerable neck.

‘I’m here.’

Done.

God in it.

At last.

A communication between you but more than that – a communion – that word of grace and connection; spiritually softened.

‘You feel beautiful,’ he says in the afterwards, a fingertip trailing from the dip of your neck to the top of your pubis. Your belly dips and you giggle, pushing him off.

‘You’re like a brand-new ballet slipper. Silky. Unscuffed.’ He shakes his head in wonder; at what has just happened, how it has got to this, how on earth it all began, here, in this lone man’s place.

‘Yeah, a ballet slipper just waiting to be all grubbied up,’ you tease. ‘To be flung into a corner and tossed out.’

‘Oh no,’ he exclaims, wounded, ‘no, not that. Never that.’

In the long golden stillness of late afternoon you lie in silence, Tol’s arm a seatbelt across your waist, and listen to the sky outside slowing, fading, in perfect peace.

The rain has stopped. The world is clean. You lift his arm from your sticky belly and put on your clothes. Slip away without saying goodbye. Without looking back. Your bike is propped by the front door, still with its water bottle looped over the handlebars. You sling the canvas bag over the knocker by the front door, a lion with a ring in its mouth.

The second gift.

That you have placed.

Days stagger by. You do not go back. Cannot. Cannot bear to return to find him gone, spooked, the gate padlocked; he didn’t want to do it, of course, his back was turned in the kitchen as if in shame, he was resisting, it was a dream – was it a dream? – he can’t go on, you’re a schoolgirl, you have exams to study for, a proper life, your father must never find out.

Too much no in it.

But then one – enormous – yes.

That moment when he turned from the sink, and kissed you.

When you forgot everything else.

Endlessly you flick through his little Victorian volume in your room on the back verandah. The brisk, sparky voice released by its anonymity, glowing with honesty and common sense. Then you come across it.

You snap the volume shut.

Jump on your bike.

Because you are the collator, the collector. Because this is the next phase of the experiment begun at fourteen and abandoned for a couple of years and now re-awakened, you need to know what follows, you are learning, deepening, opening up. Because he has shown you another way and it cannot stop yet. Because he pressed his disbelief into you at one point – that you were both doing this, that it had gone this far – and you don’t want that as an abiding memory for you both; a sense of wrongness, the stain of it.

Because you cannot stay away.

As simple as that.

Flying on your bike, arrowed to his north. Trembling between your legs, trembling in your chest. Your head telling you this is ridiculous, you have to stay away, he won’t be there, the gate will be locked – you feel too much, have to turn back, you’ll be hurt. You can’t. You must.

You stop at a willow tree and plait two crowns. The third gift.

The gate is ajar.

As you knew it would be. Your belly is somersaulting, you are wet. He wants this; he cannot bring himself to say it because of
the illicitness in it and you need to come back to show him it’s alright, your choice, you are absolutely complicit in this. Flying down his driveway and he is there, on the verandah, waiting; he sees you and stands, comes striding down the drive, runs.

With relief.

With so much else.

You are standing there, strong, a vast smile shining you up; stripping off your singlet like a miner at the end of a shift, crossed hands pulling it over your head in a clean yank. He is reaching you, helping, saying nothing, laughing, falling on his knees as he pulls down your pants, you are almost fucking into the car, you fall to the ground, both, ramming, hard, giggling in the dirt. His finger is suddenly enquiring around your arse and you recoil.
Sssh
, he soothes,
sssh
– and you obey, give in, can’t help it, want it, you spread your legs wider, you feel his two fingers between the thin membrane of skin, exploring, the extreme pleasure of it and you are giving yourself to him, you want to be swallowed up. You can’t bear it, you come and come in great floods of wet and he holds your trembling, he clamps it still like you’re an animal in its death throes caught in a trap and he’s soothing you into a stopping, into quiet,
sssh
. The cheeks of both of you are sudden-soft together and you say nothing and neither does he and above you, around you, is the wheeling sky and then he moves in you slowly, so slowly and he comes, too, withdrawing with a jerk and the hot spumy wet spreads over your stomach and then he flops onto his back in the dust beside you, spent.

You muddle together back to Woondala, dirt encrusted,
sex encrusted; holding, pushing, basking, wondrous at this force between you, that has taken over you both. You place one willow crown on his head and the other on your own; straighten his, giggling at the ridiculousness of it, brimming with laughter and light, both of you, as you walk back to his house, talled up.

You have entered the realm of surrender.

Your summer holiday, now, an enormous cleared path.

To whatever he wants.