My Mate Rejects Me For Her Sister's Mate

I'm Andrew Johnson, and I have this thing-skin hunger, they call it.

The awful, longing desire to be touched.

To feel somebody near. But my mate, Sophia Lewis, is a she-wolf with a germ phobia so acute that it is as if I were anathema to her.

I touch her arm and she scrubs her hands raw with half a bottle of sanitary wash.

I steal a kiss, and she scrupulously brushes her teeth for ten minutes, as if I were a kind of a wrecking germ.

I once attempted to act the drunken role, and staggered to her bed, hoping to find a crack in the ice wall encompassing her, but she rolled me out-me and the whole bed-clothing set, too. She rolled it out with us as if we were the trash of yesterday.

She stood over me, her eyes glistening as with the ice cold light of the winter's moon, and said to me, sneeringly:

"What, are you that desperate?"

The words were like a slap on the face, tingling, and made me shiver.

We have been bound together three years, and I had tried everything imaginableto get in touch with her.

She is a mountain, immovable.

The lowest point? I had resorted to the artifice of stealing her worn clothes from the laundry, and clutching them in my hands as a sort of a creep, in the hope of finding some reflection of herself.

Pathetic, isn't it?

But I had gotten to that point.

I was completely through with it.

I was through to the point of being beaten.

I went into my study and printed some bond-breaking papers which I had had prepared for several weeks, and poising myself, made up my mind to go and find her in the guest room and get her to sign them.

But when I entered the hall I saw her leave her room and make straight to her workshop at the end of the hall.

Sophia had been almost exclusively a painter before she took up her family's business, and this workshop of hers was her heaven, where she spent most of her time. Even on the occasion of our bond, or so-called sacred bond, she had spent the whole of the time inher own private room.

I used to ask about it occasionally, just out of curiosity, and she would look at me with a sudden frost in her face more rapidly.

I learned rapidly to avoid it, as I did not want to embitter her mind. But now, with the bond-breaking papers in my hands, what of it?

I had to know what this strange thing meant, which held her in such close leagues. I followed her after the manner of one of the shadows.

A glance through the apt crack of the door opened my mouth and I bit into my hand to stifle a gasp.

The workshop had its walls furnished with innumerable sculptures, each swathed in purple silk, thereby hiding their shapes.

But