I Take You: Part 2 of 3

I Take You: Part 2 of 3
Nikki Gemmell

Set in Notting Hill, this modern day version of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, sees a banker’s wife awaken to the erotic possibilities of her life.Connie Carven is devoted to her husband, who is left paralysed from the waist down following an accident. But this is no less than he demands – in fact, he insists on Connie’s utter subservience to his every desire. But unable to physically satisfy his wife, Clifford is eager to explore new, strange and troubling avenues of passion. Connie, ever the dutiful wife, follows wherever he leads.And yet Connie is bursting with unfulfilled desire. Unfulfilled, that is, until the communal gardener enters, and their affair accelerates to its tense, shuddering conclusion.

I TAKE YOU

Part 2 of 3

Nikki Gemmell

Fourth Estate • London

Table of Contents

Title Page (#u0af57054-ff22-5672-9b87-f74cc18bcb69)

Chapter 22 (#ub27eaa6f-2f9b-5b70-8823-c3b421757aae)

Chapter 23 (#uc2eb449b-61b8-52ad-81a3-673907c97c8f)

Chapter 24 (#u4197a4a2-047c-5576-8d7f-4cf61ef153d8)

Chapter 25 (#u24ff7086-9089-5919-aa6d-91fdeea8b007)

Chapter 26 (#u2728abcd-84dc-5af4-be77-0e441db1a740)

Chapter 27 (#u1b66d1d3-2a09-5091-aa51-785e4cd64a60)

Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)

Note (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Links (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

I Take You by Nikki Gemmell Published by Fourth Estate on 23 May 2013

This is Part 2 of a three-part serialization Part 3 unlocked from 23 May 2013

22

When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre

Connie walks up the grand staircase, slowly, carefully. She feels like a pane of glass with a thousand hairline cracks: one push will shatter her. She will not be broken, she will not. Her tread is so careful, contained, her back stiff. Onward she walks, onward.

To her room, its windows slammed shut by cleaners barked at by Cliff to keep in the house’s heat. Connie flings the panes wide and the cold rushes in and she collapses, belly down, on her bed. She remains there for the rest of the day and deep into the night. Her vocation of serving – submission – is not enough. No. Is meant to be enough. That is her role, as wife.

Everyone has a universal desire to be needed. How does Cliff need her? As his perversion, plaything, pet. That’s it. How much pleasure will she give the others of his choosing? How far will she go? For in the upended way of their world that is the proof of her love for him now: how voluminously she will submit. How removed she is from that girl he first knew. The easy blusher, in the Peter Pan collars and knee-length skirts. She stares at her Louboutins kicked off by her bed, their ridiculously high heels that bind her to her servitude. What woman would ever design a constraint, a buckling, an absurdity, as cruel as those?

And how often has she readily stepped into them.

A visible symbol of her servitude, compliance, decadence. The girl from Cornwall with the beautiful face, bound by all this. Her walk-in wardrobes, summer and winter, her jewellery boxes, her private safe. How she has always loved her shoes and her clothes; the quickening at a singular vintage dress that fits, the Edwardian necklace, the deco cuff, the Stephen Jones hat – grabbed! – and so often now. The thrill of which has never passed. Complicit, in all of it.

Rain comes. The windows stay wide. Usually Connie feels cocooned within that sound but tonight she feels pummelled by it. The wind is high, haranguing her as if pushing her away, far away, to somewhere else. Gradually it all clears, the sky is orange as it always is, the light pollution scattering a proper, rich, weighty dark; the dark of the land, the untrammelled earth. Water drips from the eaves, endlessly drips, deep into the early hours; it feels like her life leaking away, in wakefulness and worry. The whole house of cards has come tumbling down, just like that; she has lost the sexual urge, just like that, with Cliff, with any man.

He does not come, of course, he would not. She has humiliated him, stepped out of order, done what he did not want. And meanwhile she has surfaced into something else.

A new land, a strange new life, not sure what. No ballast to it, that’s all she knows.

23

He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink …

‘Would it perhaps be a good thing if you had a child by another man? Con? What do you think?’