A Dangerous Affair (Lesbian Story)

Oregon

Elizabeth
19 September 2016

I hate driving. That's why my car is permanently parked in the garage and I use a rented driver for special occasions only.

Other than that, I use cabs to move around. They're quicker and save me the stress of participating in peak traffic.

Yet here I am meandering down the tranquil suburban landscape of Lake Oswego, Portland.

I pass a number of sweet outdoor décor that is so part of the fertile scenery that makes up the family home paradise.

One house has a steel grey bench on its front lawn with an inviting choir of flowers surrounding it. Everything about the homes here says perfect and cosy.

I grew up in the very definition of suburbia and white privilege. My parents placed us in the ideal family home destination with picket fences, yellow houses, shutters and window boxes, everything that could be described as 'so lovely'.

I make a left turn and can finally spot the lake that I use to spend most of my days frolicking in when I wanted to escape my cold house.

The lake is a wealth of happy memories of canoeing and laying out on float cushions with my Primary School friends.

The drive has at least given me a chance to filter my thoughts.

Very few people have the ability to keep me so off kilter and on my toes as my father's current wife Kalinda Posner.

An intelligent woman isn't someone who you just engage with without a clear head.

Not that Kalinda has anything against me that I have to particularly plan for. But because I've been too lazy to try and book a place, I've made arrangements to stay at home with her for a week.

Which means at some stage we'd have to speak, and I wanted to prepare myself for whatever would come.

My guardedness however has dropped a few inches as I pull up to the whitewashed brick English style house that was my childhood home.

Not much of the outside has changed.

There is still the copious amount of greenery that paves the way to the front door and the vines creeping on the side of the double story house.

The lake still stands watch as the guardian of my home and I can't help but inhale a memory of waking up to sparkles on my ceiling as the sun reflected off the water.

As I drive towards my childhood home, I recall moments with me and my dying father - and as much as I tell myself otherwise - not all of them are unpleasant.

One of the better memories I have of my father is of his acceptance of my sexuality. It was never a topic of conversation in our house. By the time I got to tenth grade, where our relationship had disintegrated to that of roommates, my father would bring home his women and I'd bring home my crushes at the time.

There weren't many, but the two lasting relationships that I had had in high school were evidence enough that I was into girls.

I was blatant about my girlfriends. Everybody at school knew and as such my father would've known too.

He'd never said anything about it and I had to find my own way around the confusion that was my coming out.

The only time my father ever addressed my love life was when he caught me and my eleventh grade girlfriend heavily making out on his couch.

He'd come in to my room at night - after making me wait the whole day for his reaction - and stood at my door with his arms crossed.

"Elizabeth you are an adult." He said.

"There are very few parameters that we have set about our behaviour in this house. However you must know that THAT is not something I want to come home to. Understood?"

I was ready for a fight, I had my points all lined up for why I loved Josephine and how he could not tell me to break up with her. I was battle ready, but at my confident 'yes sir' he'd turned and left my room.

And that was that.

For the longest time, I had thought this was just another thing that my father would resent me for.

It took me a while to understand that he meant he did not want to come home to me groping and swapping saliva with another human on his couch. His 'parameter' had nothing to do with me liking girls.

I learned that my father couldn't give two cents about who I slept with through one important conversation with a supreme court judge.