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

newsagent takes your money. You’ll never go back to his shop, you’re not that young woman.
    That night, alone, in the bedroom, words you’ve never heard before:
    Californicate: copulating shamelessly in every possible position. Chili dog: defecating on a woman’s chest, thenmasturbating with her breasts. Daisy chaining: a number of people connecting through oral sex. Flooding the cave: urinating into a partner’s vagina. Hum job: oral sex given to a man while humming a tune. On and on and you close the magazine and smooth the cover down, you place it in the bottom of your bedside drawer, you check it’s well tucked.
    Repelled. Horrified. Wet.
    Thinking of the woman in the cafe, and the man who never came back. Thinking of anonymous, uncomplicated sex. Arousing yourself with it all, now, rather than sedating yourself into sleep; wanting it in your life.

Lesson 42
    every girl her own dressmaker
    The next day at the café you’re like an anemone unfurling within the silky coaxing of the water because you’ve decided that for the next six months you’ll live your life differently from the way you’ve ever lived it before: indulgently, selfishly, wilfully, before marriage and motherhood close over you. You dream of no commitment to anything but your own pleasure, you dream, with renewed vigour, of finding a satisfying fuck. If you’d ever have the courage for that.
    You were a serial sleeper once, during your final year of university, propelled by the thought of launching yourself into the world without any experience of men, a virgin at twenty-two and full of shame and self-loathing at the fact.
    You had an innocence then, in your early twenties. You could pass as sixteen, as still needing to be taught, your face hadn’t yet settled. So one Saturday night at a friend’s you became drunk and emboldened, you had to get it done. There was a man next to you in the doorway; he was taller than you, had clear skin, he’d do. Everyone else was deep into a double episode of The Young Ones, they’d never notice you’d gone.
    You took a deep breath: do you want to go upstairs, you asked.
    What, he said, leaning close.
    Let’s go upstairs, come on.
    You took his hand; he had no idea of your pounding heart. You never saw him again, didn’t want to, his name was quickly lost. There were many after that. They were always snatching the bait, thinking it was you, in fact, who’d fallen prey and not realising that the girl with the face who needed to be taught had become a collector, an archivist of sexual experiences. All disappointing; too dry, painful, anticlimactic, fumbling, bleak.
    So you tried something else. An older man. Your neighbour, a graphic designer who’d never settled down. The age difference was nineteen years. It was worse. He was from an era when sex was purely for the man’s satisfaction; he thought a good fuck was just hammering away vigorously while you lay there and thought of England; he thought condoms were a joke. He told you afterwards as he rubbed your flat belly that he could never sleep witha woman over thirty, he didn’t like them enough: the sagging skin on their necks, the lines on their faces, the bodies thickening out. But you know another reason, now; because by then women have lost their docility, they have awareness, they know too much.
    And they want things themselves.
    So, nothing sparked. Theo, meanwhile, seemed to be sailing her way through men and through life. For you the best moment was always the anticipation, the thrill of giving the men what they wanted and as soon as the clothes were off something was lost. It always seemed to be two people connecting but utterly failing at it, too, and there was a gulf of loneliness in that, and after several years you gave up and slipped into your dream world every single night. So your twenties passed.
    Whenever you did make love it was your thoughts that stirred you more than the touch of the man. He never knew that he wasn’t at the