The Gilded Cage. Камилла Лэкберг

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СКАЧАТЬ children’s collection. They had had a row minutes before the pictures were taken. She couldn’t remember what it had been about, only that it had been her fault. But none of that was evident in the pictures.

      Faye went up the stairs. She hesitated outside the door to Jack’s study, then pushed it open. The room was situated in a tower, with views in every direction. A unique layout in a unique property, as the estate agent had put it when he showed them the apartment five years ago. She had been pregnant with Julienne at the time, her head full of bright hopes for the future.

      She loved the tower room. The space and all the light from the windows made her feel like she was flying. And now that it was dark outside, the arched walls enveloped her like a warm cocoon.

      She had chosen the décor herself, as she had with the rest of the apartment. She had picked the wallpaper, the bookcases, desk, the photographs and artworks on the walls. And Jack loved what she’d done. He never questioned her taste, and was always incredibly proud whenever guests asked for the number of their interior designer.

      In those moments, he let her shine.

      While all the other rooms were furnished in a contemporary style, light and airy, Jack’s study was more masculine. Heavier. She had put more effort into this room than Julienne’s nursery and the rest of the apartment together. Jack was going to spend so much time in here, taking important decisions that would affect their family’s future. The least she could do was to give him a refuge of his own up here, almost in the clouds.

      Faye ran her hand across Jack’s desk with satisfaction. It was a Russian desk, she had bought it at an auction at Bukowski’s, and it had once belonged to Ingmar Bergman. Jack wasn’t much of a Bergman aficionado – action films with Jackie Chan or comedies starring Ben Stiller were more to his taste – but like her he preferred it when furniture came with a bit of history.

      When they showed guests round the apartment he always patted the top of the desk with the palm of his hand twice and said, as if in passing, that the fine piece of furniture had once stood in the world-famous director’s home. Faye smiled every time he did that, because their eyes usually met as he said it. It was one of the thousand things they shared in their lives. Those covert glances, all the meaningful and meaningless gestures that went to make up a relationship.

      She sank onto the chair behind the desk and spun it until she was facing the window. Snow was falling outside, turning to slush as it hit the street far below. When she leaned forward and looked down she saw a car struggling through the dark February evening. The driver turned into Banérgatan, towards the city centre. For a moment she forgot what she was doing there, why she was sitting in Jack’s study. It was far too easy to drift away in the darkness and become hypnotized by the snowflakes pushing slowly through the blackness.

      Faye blinked, sat up straight and rotated the chair so she was facing the large screen of the Mac, then nudged the mouse and the screen came to life. She wondered what Jack had done with the mouse-mat she had given him at Christmas, the one with a photograph of her and Julienne. Instead he was using an ugly blue one from Nordea Bank, a Christmas gift to their private banking clients.

      She knew the password: Julienne2010. At least he didn’t have anything from Nordea as his background, and was still using the picture he had taken of her and Julienne in Marbella. They were lying at the water’s edge, Faye holding her daughter up towards the sky. They were both laughing, but Faye’s laughter was more sensed than seen as she lay on her back with her hair floating in the water. Julienne’s bright blue eyes were looking straight into the camera, right through the lens. Into Jack’s eyes, just as blue.

      Faye leaned closer, her eyes looking along her own tanned body, shiny with salt and water. Though only a few months had passed since she had given birth, she had been in better shape then than she was now. Her stomach was flat. Her arms thin. Her thighs slim and taut. Now, almost three years later, she weighed at least ten kilos more than she had done in Spain. Fifteen, maybe. She hadn’t dared weigh herself for a long time.

      She tore her eyes from her own image on the screen and opened the browser, clicked to bring up the history, and typed ‘porn’. Link after link appeared, sorted by date. She had no difficulty at all tracing Jack’s sexual fantasies in recent months. It was like a reference book covering his libido. Sexual Fantasies for Dummies.

      On 26 October he had watched two clips. ‘Russian teen gets slammed by big cock’ and ‘Skinny teen brutally hammered’. You could say what you liked about the porn branch, but the titles of the films were at least direct and to the point. No attempts to prettify or embellish, to lie about what was coming and what the person in front of the screen wanted to see. A straightforward dialogue, open and honest communication.

      Jack had looked at porn for as long as she had known him, and sometimes she looked herself, when she was on her own. She was scornful of friends who declared that their husbands would never dream of looking at porn. Talk about repression!

      Jack never used to let his consumption of porn influence their sex life. It had never been a matter of either/or. But now he no longer sought comfort from her, despite seeking satisfaction from ‘Skinny teen brutally hammered’.

      The knot in her stomach grew bigger with each clip she watched. The girls were young, skinny, submissive. Jack had always liked his women thin and young. It wasn’t him who had changed, it was her. And wasn’t that how most men wanted their women? In Östermalm there was no room for ageing and weight gain. At least not for women.

      In the past month Jack had watched one particular video seven or eight times. ‘Young petite schoolgirl brutally fucked by her teacher.’ Faye clicked play. A young schoolgirl in a short, checked skirt, white shirt, tie, socks and Pippi Longstocking pigtails appeared; it seemed she was struggling with her lessons, particularly biology. Informing her that they have arranged for extra tuition, her conscientious parents go out for the evening, leaving their daughter at home alone. The doorbell rings. A man in his forties, wearing a jacket with patches on the elbows and clutching a briefcase, is at the door. They go into a brightly lit kitchen. The girl gets her homework and opens her books. They go through the muscles of the body.

      ‘When I say a muscle, I want you to show me where on your body it is. Can you do that?’ the teacher asks in a deep voice.

      The girl opens her eyes wide, nods and pouts. She manages two muscles. When he says gluteus maximus, the buttock muscle, she pulls up her skirt, revealing the hem of her underpants, and points at the outside of her thigh. The teacher shakes his head with a smile.

      ‘Stand up and I’ll show you,’ he says.

      She pushes her chair back and stands up. He places his large hand behind her knee and moves it up her leg, under her skirt. He lifts her skirt higher and pulls her underwear aside. Pushes a finger inside. The girl groans. A perfect porn-groan. But with a trace of astonished innocence and guilt. An acknowledgement to the viewer that she knows she shouldn’t be doing this. That this is naughty. But she can’t help it. The temptation is too great for her to resist.

      He pushes his finger in and out a few times. Then bends her over the table and fucks her. She screams, groans, claws at the table. Begs for more. The whole thing reaches a climax when he tells her to put on her glasses – they have fallen off somewhere along the way – before he ejaculates in her face. Her face contorted with pleasure, her mouth half-open, the schoolgirl receives his semen.

      Porn films had to be the clearest indication of just how highly men valued their semen. It was bestowed upon breathless, reverential women with their mouths half-open, always half-open, as if it were a precious gift.

      Faye put the computer back in sleep-mode with СКАЧАТЬ