Free Better Than This by Stuart Harrison

nipple.
    A fleeting vision of an occasion when we’d once made love in a wood on vacation several years back flashed before me. The sun was slanting down through the high green canopy, like columns of light in a vast airy cathedral. The warmth of the ground rose up to us carrying with it the sweet loamy smell of earth and leaves which was somehow seductive. I remembered it was warm and the feeling of damp hair, and a trickle of moisture running between Sally’s shoulder blades which tasted salty on my tongue.
    Just then Sally glanced over and caught me watching her. She couldn’t miss the erection in my shorts, and for about a millisecond she hesitated, unsure how to react. Then she looked away.
    I was nervous the first time Sally took me home to meet her parents. I knew her grandfather had made a fortune in lumber, and that she had grown up in a large white three-storey house surrounded by six acres of grounds that was a far cry from the city neighbourhood I called home. Her grandfather, however, made a series of bad investments, a trend continued by her father in his younger years before he’d married Ellen. By the time I met Sally her parents were no longer rich, though that had never stopped
    Ellen from harbouring hopes that her daughter might be the one to restore the family fortune.
    I was in my final year at college when we drove through the gates and along the drive that led to her family home. We’d been dating for six months by then, and the view I had of the house matched with the impressions I’d formed listening to Sally’s stories about her childhood growing up in the small town she was from. I’d conjured an image of slightly decayed grandeur, which was borne out by signs that the cost of upkeep had become too steep. The house needed painting, and some re pointing work on the chimneys needed doing, the grounds were unkempt except where the lawns were maintained. Sally grinned.
    “I told you we’re just regular folks.”
    “Yeah, right. And your grandfather was just a lumberjack.”
    It was a joke between us. I’d always said her parents would be horrified if she brought somebody from the wrong side of the tracks home, like me. To which she’d always said she was going through a rebellious stage and she liked a bit of rough. In fact it was secretly less of a joke to me than it was to her. I hadn’t exactly been brought up in a slum but sometimes I felt as if I had.
    “Remember,” Sally reminded me when we arrived. “My mom can be difficult until you get to know her.”
    Her mother came out to meet us. She would have been in her mid-forties then and I remember thinking that if it was true that daughters end up looking like their mothers then I was in luck. Her hair showed no trace of grey, though she probably coloured it, but her skin still retained a youthful freshness, and she was as slim as her daughter. Sally introduced us and as we shook hands, though she smiled, her eyes remained cool as she silently appraised me. Sally looked on with what I realized was an expression of slight apprehension and it occurred to me she was hoping for her mother’s approval. All at once I was aware of subtle tensions in the air between mother and daughter. Uncertainly I made some remark about what a nice house they lived in. Ellen agreed that it was though a subtle undertone seemed to warn me that I shouldn’t get any ideas about getting comfortable.
    Later that day she contrived to talk to me alone on the pretext of us getting to know one another.
    “You must get Sally to introduce you to her friends while you’re here,” she said. We were in the sitting room which had large windows looking out the back where Sally’s father had his glass houses Frank had made a brief appearance before disappearing outside where I could now see him planting something. Sally had told me he was a lawyer with a practice in town, though his passion was growing exotic plants.
    “Has she mentioned Garrison?” Ellen asked