PSYCHOPHILIA: A Disturbing Psychological Thriller Read Free Page B

what I really am in this place.  A stranger.  I thought that my being
pregnant may elicit some form of excitement from my husband.  I had hoped it
might offer us a life raft back to shore, back to my lagoon where the waters
run warm and ripple around my shoulders as I float in them, spread out like a
starfish with the sun warming my skin.  But it hasn’t.
    There is something in my throat that
refuses to dissolve and it is doing it’s very best to suffocate me, like the
pillows I used to imagine stuffed all the way down to my guts when Gregory
still cared and almost killed me with his attention.  I might go back to that
now, to try his version of love one more time if there was still a chance.  I
would go upstairs and take my tablet and do as he says, if I thought feeling
nothing again was a better option.  I feel the urge to be sick, but I know it
isn’t morning sickness because that has passed.
    We met on a cold Saturday night, the
kind that numbs your fingers making simple tasks near impossible.  I stood
outside the party to light my cigarette, glad to leave the inane chatter behind
me.  With the wind working against me, I saw a hand form a cup in front of me,
the cherry glow of my cigarette illuminating his palms as he shielded me from
the wind.  I saw only the inside of his hand and fingers, and immediately I
thought how wonderful it might be to feel them on me.  They were strong hands,
man’s hands.  You see, I place hands above anything else.  The hand is an
object reflective of who we are, and highly innervated and sensitive to touch. 
They are the creators, the shapers, the doers.  It is the hand that I am sure
created Ishiko’s face.  It is the hand which can comfort a child or the
bereaved, show love when entwined, grip and break an enemy arm, or stroke a
woman to the point of pleasure.  The hand can speak, a language of sign for
those without words.  Hello, or goodbye in a simple wave.  The hand before me on
that night could have been the hand of God himself, for I had never seen
anything so perfect.  I was hooked before I had seen his face.  His hand said
hello, and as I held it I said goodbye to me.  I left with him that night, and
I never returned to my life.  Not fully.  Perhaps in reality I haven’t found
home since, because on that day when I stood picking at my scarred head,
watching her dance in front of him exactly two years later, I realised that I
was being replaced right before my own eyes.  As she danced in front of him,
teasing him with her grace and beauty, I stood there watching, barren and
childless and loveless and bleeding.  I saw that she is the one that feels his
hands on her skin, his breath on her neck.  I knew in that moment that he was
fucking her.  But then my womb whispered in my ear, whispered to me that now we
were in it together.  We were comrades.  I had been dealt a new hand, a second
chance by a lucky turn of fate.  The gift of a child.  It would be different, I
thought.  He had to love me once I was carrying a baby.  He would forget Ishiko
once he knew I was worthy of a child.
    That’s what I believed back then when
I took the test to confirm that I was pregnant, sat next to the toilet on the
locally quarried slate floor that I had, according to Gregory, insisted upon.
     

Chapter three
    By
the time I arrived at work some of the earlier mist had cleared and the first
of the tourist cruisers were setting forth for the day's maiden voyage.  I
parked my car on the brow of the hill, my breath caught by the wind as I
climbed the steep gradient towards the office.  The door bell chimed like a
remnant from Victorian times, something that had hitchhiked its way into the
future, tinkling every day so that it wouldn't be left and forgotten.  As I
opened the front door I smiled at them.  Phillipa smiled too, but as I turned
to close the door and shut out the sounds from the town outside I saw her
sideways glance at Martin, whose own eyes were