Every Touch by Nerika Parke Read Free Book Online

and devastating and despair threatened to overwhelm him.  He squeezed his eyes tight shut against the tears and took a deep breath in, letting it out again slowly, practising the relaxation technique Ingrid, his yoga instructor ex-girlfriend, had taught him.  After a couple of minutes he opened his eyes. 
       He supposed that waking up would get easier one day, when he got more used to his situation.  Hopefully that would be soon.
       He wished he knew what time it was.  His watch was still on his wrist, but it wasn’t working, at least not properly.  From what he could tell, it said the time he thought it was, not the time it actually was.  He had asked Oliver about it the day before and he had said the watch was merely an extension of his own self image, not a functioning timepiece any more.  It therefore just went with his own perception of the passage of time.  He wondered if there was any way he could get hold of a clock.  That was, when he could get hold of anything. 
       He decided that was going to be his mission for the day, changing from the incorporeal state he was now in, to the physical.  Having a focus, that was the key to getting through the pain and shock he was still feeling acutely.  He was trying not to think about Trish and his family.  All thinking about them did was make him want to cry.  He’d been the same when his parents had died.  People had kept telling him he should talk about it.  He didn’t see how talking about a life-shattering event made it better.  For him, it just made him even sadder.  Focusing on something else until the raw pain lessened, it had worked before, so he was going to make it work again.
       He sat up and looked around, picking a good candidate.  The chair by the window, that would work.  He remembered holding onto it when he’d first woken as a ghost, so he knew he could.  He stood and walked over to it, swiping a hand at it.  It went straight through.  Two more tries produced the same result.  Closing his eyes, he tried to expel all doubt from his mind, which seemed to have the opposite effect and only made him feel more doubtful.  He opened his eyes and tried again, just in case.  His hand passed through without any resistance whatsoever.  He subjected the chair to his fiercest glare, as if it somehow was to blame. 
       When the chair refused to be cowed, he decided to try a different approach.  He walked away, examining the few other pieces of furniture in the room, drifting into the bathroom and back out again, keeping his mind on anything other than the offending seat. 
       Suddenly, he ran back at the chair and grabbed at it.  It gave no resistance at all and he hurtled through it, stumbling towards, and then through, the glass doors to the balcony.  He yelped as he hit the railing and fell backwards, landing with the upper half of his body in the bedroom and his legs outside on the balcony.
       “Ouch.”
       He rubbed at his hip where he’d landed, musing on how unfair it was that as a ghost he should be able to feel pain.  Then he looked down at his legs on the balcony. 
       “Now that’s interesting.”
       Drawing his legs in and standing back up, he carefully walked through the doors. 
       The idea that he could actually get out onto the small balcony hadn’t even occurred to Denny.  He took a deep breath of the fresh air, closing his eyes and tilting his face up towards the sun.  The warmth felt wonderful and his spirits lifted a little.  Opening his eyes again, he stepped to the railing and leaned forward to look down.  His face immediately hit the invisible enclosure and he pulled his head back, rubbing his forehead where he and the resolutely immovable barrier had collided.  He extended both hands and felt his way around the enclosure.  The unseen wall ran around the balcony just beyond the railing.  He reached up and encountered it again roughly two feet above his head.  He guessed the