Free Shelter from the Storm by Elizabeth Gill

the doors.’
    She ran downstairs and did so, and then ran back. Dryden was sitting on the bed. They would have to stay upstairs, she thought; people were passing the windows. As she watched he let himself fall back, drop completely into the covers, and it was such an act of abandonment somehow, such a relaxation, that she started to laugh. She went over and sat down beside him and looked at him, and it was as though his eyes drew her. She found herself kissing him with no more encouragement than that, and it was a kiss like never before. She was frustrated because Dryden didn’t touch her and didn’t make more of it. She broke away and sat up and said, ‘This isn’t how I thought you were.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘I thought you were … low and mean and wicked.’
    ‘I am,’ Dryden said with a touch of humour. ‘Mind you, I did spend twelve years being birched and preached at and starved. You’d think I would be a much better person by now but I don’t claim owt. I can recite great pieces of the Bible. Would you like to hear some?’
    Esther Margaret said nothing and he laughed and sat up and then he put one arm around her and drew her down on top of him and after that he was everything she had thought he was and she was glad. It made up for what had happened since the first conversation she had held with Joe Forster in the churchyard. Things could have been so civilised, her parents could have reacted differently. Joe cared about her, she knew he did, hadn’tshe heard it from his own lips? Why could they not have been allowed to see one another? Would it have been so very dreadful? If his father hadn’t liked it they could have waited a year or two until Joe was older and could find some sort of business to establish himself in. She would have been proud to be with him, and surely in the end his father would have relented. Did it matter so very much that Joe had a pit and a crumbling country house and she had nothing but respectability? Was it such a difference? They could have found a house, it didn’t have to be anything special, and he could have come home to her in the evenings and they might have had a child or two. It hadn’t seemed like so much to ask, other people had that and more, but obviously it was, it was as unlikely as that they should gain the moon and the stars.
    She no longer cared. Dryden was familiar with women’s clothing and his hands were deft and her body went completely out of control as it had been threatening to do since the first time he had kissed her. It seemed so wicked too, that this was happening in her parents’ house, in her own bedroom, in a place where nothing but godliness had existed for as long as she could remember. Her parents always did the right thing and they had encouraged her to do likewise, had brought her up to be God-fearing and good. The only good thing about this was how it felt. Dryden’s look of innocence was camouflage. It soon became apparent that he had done this before and knew a great deal about it. His body was smooth and brown and to touch it was like a dress her mother had once had — silk. She remembered how when she was a little girl, and her mother could still pick her up, feeling the soft warmth of her mother through the material.
    He did to her what Esther Margaret considered extremely disgusting things and she realised why people ought to be married before they did them because it must be very sinful to enjoy anything quite as much as she enjoyed this. Embarrassed, her cheeks burning, wanting to stop him but unable tofind the will to do so, Esther Margaret was almost in tears. Nobody had seen her undressed that she ever remembered, and it was daylight. The curtains were open, and the rain lashed itself against the glass, stotted off the pantry roof. She was already regretting every second. She could not understand why nobody had talked to her about this. She didn’t know what was happening, just that the feelings in her body outweighed everything