Free In Between Frames by Judy Lin Page A

He was sullen in his defeat.   She knew she won the argument, but all the same, it left a queasy feeling in her gut, because she’d already crushed his ego by refusing to be his girlfriend, and now spent five minutes insulting him for not thinking of anything so basic as basic sailing safety.   How is he going to get me back for this, she wondered.  
     
    “Stephan,” she said tiredly.   “I know you meant well, and I thank you for offering to take Mabel on a boat.   But it’s not safe, and I don’t—“
     
    “You mean you don’t trust me.”
     
    Well, yes, now that you mention it, Sam thought, frowning in irritation.   “I never said that.”
     
    “But you mean that,” Stephan said.   He spat on the ground in disgust.   “And you let that strange man take your daughter—“
     
    “He’s not taking her on a boat.”
     
    “I teach you Greek for two months.   I eat with you.   I show you how to barbeque.   And you don’t trust me with your girl, but that strange man you meet only two days ago, you give your trust to?”
     
    She didn’t have an answer for that.   He did have a fair point:   what did she know of Miles?   And everything she learned about him last night and this morning—that his dead wife was named Nellie, that he was a photographer, his projects—became unknowable in the face of the doubt that Stephan injected.   What if he was an incorrigible liar, a spinner of consummate tales, and secretly a child molester?   Then again, what did she know of Stephan?   What she did know—that he was almost thirty and still lived with his parents, entertaining dreams of fast cars and pretty girls, and was capable of a cruel, cutting kind of jealousy—didn’t work in his favor , either.
     
    But Stephan didn’t stick around to listen to her.   He was walking back up the hill, in the direction of his parents’ shop.   She looked around, wondering just where Miles and Mabel had gotten to, and for a moment the paranoia that Stephan had invoked flamed into a panic.   Then she saw them sitting on a bench, pointing at the pigeons, playing an unknowable game with each other.   Stephan wouldn’t have thought to do that for Mabel, she thought.   He was not a bad man, she realized.    He was hopelessly locked in a permanent adolescence, one that would last until his parents died, unless he found a wife who would mother him. Was that why he likes me, because I’m a mother? Sam found the idea disturbing, and not a little offensive.   She was already a mother to Mabel—if he wanted a mother he ought to at least have had the courtesy to ask.  
     
    “Mummy, are we going to have Stephan as our Greek teacher again?” Mabel asked, as she walked up to them.  
     
    There was only one answer to that, an answer that Sam was tired of giving:   “I don’t know, darling. I don’t know.”
     

 
    Part V
     
    Miles headed back to Athens that evening, ignoring the blips and beeps of his smartphone telling him that he’d received fifteen emails and thirteen voicemails from Gary.   He’d fallen behind on his updates to his agent and he knew it—and, knowing Gary, fourteen of those emails and twelve of those voicemails consisted of various ways to say “What’s going on?”
     
    He had a few more shoots to do the next day, and he promised Sam that he’d come back tomorrow evening after he was finished. He couldn’t sleep at night in his hotel, so he put on a fresh shirt and stepped out.   The air was still clinging to the last traces of the day’s heat, but the sky had deepened to purple and the streetlights began to cast their liquid orange light everywhere.   He had no idea where he was going, or what to do.   He just knew that he was intolerably bored without Sam and Mabel.  
     
    And yet, it wasn’t as if he was doing anything especially fun with them.   He might, had he stayed there, have combed the beach for driftwood and pretty shells with Mabel, and would now be