Don't Touch Me! - 26

"Yes. It was the next day. I was… I needed to find out. I called a friend. Asked him to come over." Cody chuckled softly. "Yes, I did have a couple of them. Anyway, when he got here, we went out into the back yard. I didn't…didn't want Mother to see, in case it had been a one-time thing. She'd have made me feel like an idiot again."

"Again?"

"Yeah. I had told her about it but since she could touch me, she said it was my imagination and to get over it." Cody shrugged. "So I took my friend out back, explained why I needed him, and asked him to touch me. He didn't really believe me until he did. I found out it wasn't my imagination."

"Was it after that that you decided to take the doctor's advice and see a shrink?"

"Oh yeah. I was scared shitless." Cody shook his head. "So was my friend. He said he never wanted to see someone go through what I did ever again."

"You said your mother never accepted you had a real phobia."

"Nope. After seeing the shrink, I told her what he'd said. She still insisted it was just my way of avoiding getting a job and… Well, it was the last time I said anything about it to her."

Brent rubbed his forehead as he stared at Cody. "So…one day everything is normal, the next it's not. Something has to have happened to you."

"Nothing did! I swear."

"Cody… Okay, the night before it happened the first time, what did you do?"

Cody frowned. "I… I was tense. The story I was working on wasn't doing what I wanted it to. It happens like that sometimes. I was stuck and had been all day. So I figured maybe if I got out of the house and went for a walk… Maybe stopped at a bar not too far from here for a beer…"

"I thought you didn't do things like that," Brent said.

"I don't… I wasn't into bars and clubbing, but it doesn't mean I never went to one—just very rarely. So, back to what I was saying. I walked, stopped in there. I'd never been in that one before, even though it was close to the house. It's kind of…not sleazy, but…" He shrugged. "I had one beer and…" Cody paused, trying to remember. "Maybe I had more than one?"

"Why do you think so?"

"Because one minute I was there then I was home, getting ready for bed," Cody replied slowly. "Like I'd had more to drink than I should have and phased out the interim."

"Do you remember what time it was when you got home?"

Cody shook his head. "I undressed, went to take a shower, and…" Again he frowned. "I must have taken a fall?"

"In the shower?" Brent asked unbelievingly.

"No. When I was showering, I realized there were bruises on my arms, like I bumped into something hard, and the palms of my hands was scraped, so I figured I fell—maybe on the walk home because I was so drunk? I didn't remember that happening, but I guess it must have."

Brent nodded. "So one minute you're in the bar. The next you're home…or so it seemed."