Free Drowned by Therese Bohman

greenhouse, he takes hold of one hand and locks it in a tight grip against the glass wall above my head, kissing me at the same time. I am also breathing loudly now. He holds on to my wrist as he draws me into the greenhouse, placing me firmly against the potting bench with my back toward him. Then he is behind me, quickly pulling up my dress, pushing my panties to one side. I was ready for this and yet I wasn’t, his hands clasping my hips and then one hand between my thighs, he is breathing heavily, pushing himself against me, thrusting inside me as far as he can.

    It’s Saturday, Stella isn’t working. Instead she is sorting out the plants in the greenhouse. There are palms growing in pots, a lemon tree and another angel’strumpet, much bigger than the one on the balcony, several feet high, a proper little tree in a big clay pot. I stand beneath it looking up at the heavy bell-shaped flowers, the sunlight filtering through the leaves and making them appear greenish-yellow as if they were filled with chlorophyll, glimpses of the sky between the leaves like flickering blue jigsaw puzzle pieces. I reach out and touch one of the bells. It is so big that it looks artificial, something about it seems almost menacing, the opening is like a mouth. I gently stroke it with my fingertips, it is as fine as a butterfly’s wing but still feels strong, like parchment.
    “That’s poisonous,” Stella says.
    She is sowing seeds in a small propagator, meticulously making holes with a stick and carefully dropping a seed into each one.
    “The flower?” I say.
    “The whole plant. Every part of it is poisonous.”
    I quickly withdraw my hand.
    There is a white wrought-iron chair next to the potting bench, I sit down on it, the image of me leaning over the bench shimmers before my eyes, Gabriel behind me, the grip of his hands on my hips, I think about the way he was breathing, the way he felt inside me.
    “We ought to do something,” Stella says suddenly.
    The sound of her voice makes me jump.
    “What?”
    “Do something. Anything. Go somewhere, maybe.”
    “Yes, sure. Where?”
    “Into town? To the sea? I don’t know. Go and visit something, maybe. The palace?”
    She looks at me with a challenging expression. I have to decide.
    “Okay, let’s go and visit the palace,” I say.
    As usual it’s impossible to tell what she thinks of my choice, her face is blank, but at least she seems full of energy as she brushes off the soil and heads across the lawn.
    “Marina wants to visit the palace,” she says to Gabriel when we meet him on the patio, as if it was my idea. “You don’t need the car this afternoon, do you?”
    It’s more of a statement than a question. He doesn’t need the car, he’s going to work. He takes a cup of coffee and disappears up the stairs.
    Stella is a good driver under normal circumstances, but today she seems distracted. I notice that she forgets her turn signal at an intersection, and when she parks she is so close to the car next to her at first that I hold my breath and wait for the bang, nervously fingering my seat belt. But it’s fine, she seems completely unmoved when she gets out of the car.
    “I haven’t been here for such a long time,” she says, twirling the keys around her forefinger.
    “How long?”
    She thinks it over.
    “I haven’t been here since just after I moved in with Gabriel. We came one of the first weekends. It was fall then, it was so beautiful, all the different colors of the trees along the avenues. I thought it was so lovely, I remember thinking we should come here often. But we haven’t been here once since then.”
    I nod.
    “You’ll have to come and stay with us again in the fall, then we’ll come here so that you can see. You can have coffee and cake by the open fire. And you can pick chestnuts.”
    I smile, she looks at me and smiles back. We used to pick chestnuts when we were little, bucketfuls of them. I remember very clearly the feeling of breaking