"We went to Wolverbeck Hall & Gardens last week," Mum announced as we sat at the kitchen table. "Have you ever been there?"
I turned briefly to look at Holly, sitting next to me, before I answered, and her face gave nothing away. "Yes," I replied, turning back to Mum. "I once had a work away day there. Nice house, lovely gardens."
But I wasn't thinking about my own experience.
"You've been in Wolverbeck Gardens too, haven't you Holly?" I added, waiting to hear what she'd say, knowing that a particular verb could be inserted between the 'been' and the 'in'.
"I had a lot of outdoor sex in my early twenties," Holly once told me, as we lay together talking, after (non-outdoor) sex.
"Any particular favourites?" I had asked, trying not to sound too eager to hear about her sex life before me. We'd tried a bit of al-frisko in the early years. On a coastal headland, Holly had unexpectedly pushed me against the rocks, unzipped my fly and swiftly jerked me off. A few months later, towards the end of a friend's wedding reception, I'd hitched up her dress and fucked her in a secluded hotel doorway. But it soon petered out. Perhaps she'd already had her fill.
"Well, I did it once in the garden of my old house on Summerton Lane," she said. "During a house party. That was fun."
"And then there was that time I sneaked into the gardens at Wolverbeck with a boy from the rugby club."
And then her phone had rung, and the moment had gone. And though I wanted to hear everything, from start to finish, I never found the moment to bring it up again. Decided it would be weird to keep probing; left it to my own imagination instead.
So here I was, in a pause in parental conversation, filling in the blanks in her Wolverbeck story, which I knew I'd never know.
The hall was in the suburbs, round the corner from the rugby club. It must have been late June or early July: their end-of-season parties were legendary, though I never went to one.
Just after midnight, the evening almost over. Cider-aroused, skirted and bare-legged, Holly was dancing, and singing, and twirling. Sticky floor, sweaty bodies, and then a last-gasp try from one of the boys she fancied. His hand round her waist, her hand quickly on his as he spins her to face him. Sudden, passionate kissing. His hands straight on her arse, pulling her against him. The thrilling shape of his hard dick pressing against her through his jeans.