Woman with a Secret Read Online Free PDF Page B

given up before I wrote the seventh email, however distraught I was. Gavin didn’t.
    This is it: why I lie, and keep secrets, and take crazy risks—for this feeling. No chemical could give me the same buzz: the thrill of being so wanted, so sought after.
    I start to open the messages, one by one. They were all sent within four days of my decision to break off contact with Gavin: four on the first day of my silence and then one on each consecutive day after that.
    Hi Nicki, I’m writing to check that my last email to you didn’t go astray. Let me know. G.
    It’s pathetic, isn’t it, me worrying because you haven’t emailed me for a few hours? Don’t want you to think I can’t last a day or even several without hearing from you, but you know what it’s like—once a pattern’s been established, any disruption to said pattern causes concern. And did you realize that we’ve emailed each other **at least** twenty times a day since we started? G.
    PS—in case you’ve forgotten when our exchange started, it was February 24. You made a reference once to deleting all your emails from me, for security. I deliberately kept shtum (not wanting you to think I’m careless about security, which I’m not) and I don’t know if you assumed that I delete all your emails after reading too, but I don’t. I keep them. I reread them. They mean a lot to me. I hope that’s OK with you. That’s why I wasn’t upset by the idea of you deleting your side of our conversation, because I’m keeping it safe at my end. Don’t worry. I promise you no one but me will ever see it. G.
    PPS—feelings, eh? They complicate things, don’t they? I hope I haven’t freaked you out by writing about what can only be described as noncarnal matters. I won’t make a habit of it, I promise. Let me know you’re OK and aren’t sick of me yet, and I’ll go back to talking mainly about your nipples, I promise. (Well, I might cover a few other parts of your body, to be fair. In my emails and, in due course, with my own body—I hope.) G.
    No, no, no . This is wrong.
    I feel dizzy, disorientated. I want and need words from Gavin, but not these words. This doesn’t sound like him. This sounds too much like a real person, someone I might know or be friends with. Gavin has always sounded like . . .
    What?
    Like something automated. Short toneless sentences, short paragraphs. Like an android giving erotic instructions. The kind of written voice that disembodied words on a screen might have if they had a voice.
    And that was exactly what you wanted, wasn’t it? What does that say about you?
    In due course with his own body? Did he really mean that? Do I want him to mean it?
    Gavin and I arranged to meet once, in May, after agreeing we were ready to take things to the next level. Then he had to cancel; he didn’tsay why. After that, neither of us mentioned rearranging. I didn’t mind. Secretly, I was relieved. If we didn’t meet, that meant that what I was doing wasn’t as bad. If I thought of him as unreal, one-dimensional, a computer program generating words designed to elicit a specific physical response, then I could almost persuade myself that I didn’t really have another man in my life, one who wasn’t my husband.
    Still wrong .
    Not as grievously wrong as a physical affair, though. Maybe. And the emails were enough. God, they were so much more than enough: endless, detailed, graphically descriptive orders from a man I’d never met, whose face I’d never seen, not even in a photograph. None of my real-life lovers has ever been so uninhibited in the words he used or the things he asked and expected me to do—and nor was I ever so . . . pornographic, for want of a better word, with any of them. Gavin swept away all my inhibitions by ignoring them completely, refusing to acknowledge they existed and simply repeating his demands. Eventually, I stopped bothering to mention that I was too shy and simply did as I was told.
    And loved it. Craved more