Love Me, Love Me Not: An addictive psychological suspense with a twist you won’t see coming

I loved him because he too had a darker side. One I didn’t want him to lock away, because when I was around him the voices inside my own head seemed to still and I was slowly becoming open to the possibility of allowing myself to be happy.

For as long as I could remember I had wanted to do harm, both to myself and others. My stomach was littered with tiny silver scars that were testament to all the nights when I would sit in the shadows and ask the voices to leave me alone. To all the nights when my only release had been to feel the cut of skin, the slow slither of blood as my very essence seeped into the floorboards on which I lay. Because without it I knew my hands couldn’t be trusted not to carry out the twisted imaginings of my mind. Without that release, the voices would not stop.

‘Walk with the wise and become wise. For a companion of fools suffers harm.’ Standing at the edge of the river, Patrick watched the punt make its precarious journey towards the horizon as I sat and stared at his silhouetted profile.

‘Is that a poem?’ I asked.

‘Proverb,’ he said as he came back to me. ‘Seems my Sunday mornings weren’t a total waste of time.’

‘What is it you’re trying to tell me, Patrick?’

‘You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who really gets me.’ He placed his hands either side of my neck, the weight of him against my frantic pulse. ‘You understand that people like us have a duty to give back to the world. To do something with the gifts we’ve been given rather than squandering away our time.’

‘Did you know that the probability of our relationship succeeding is about the same as being struck by lightning?’ I could feel my entire body shaking, certain that if he were to let me go my spine would betray me and I would slip into the river, be taken into its depths and drift out to sea.

‘There’s always an exception to every rule.’

His mouth came down to mine, smothering my nerves, and I decided to give him everything because I thought it was what I wanted.

CHAPTER THREE (#u0d7b47e9-0cd1-5184-b9fb-b883377d868a)

Peanut: To dream of eating a peanut is a sign of trying to uncover a hidden truth

Surrey, eight years ago

Finals were over, the hours poring over textbooks were behind us and the cellars of every student bar had been emptied during weeks of potent celebration. I was due to start work in just over a week and, despite my best attempts to dissuade her, Elle had convinced her parents to give me a proper sendoff at their home. They agreed, both because they knew my mother never would, and also, I suspect, as a thank you of sorts for my supposed good influence on their child. A child who always got what she wanted and loved any excuse to dress up and flaunt her wares at all and sundry.

‘So what’s he like?’ Elle leant towards the mirror that filled an entire wall of her bedroom as she painted a line around her lips.

‘Who?’ I asked, taking a long sip of my drink. Homemade elderflower gin with a squeeze of fresh lime. Distilled by my own hand, ever since Nana first showed me how. The familiarity soothed my troubled mind, if only for a moment.

‘Patrick.’

My insides constricted, an internal warning of what was to come. I should have trusted them.

In less time than it takes a seedling to sprout, we had mapped out and agreed every step of our future together. A two-bed flat within spitting distance of Covent Garden. Owned by his parents but perfect for his desired placement at the London School of Economics where he could continue his research. In return I’d agreed to pay the majority of the bills and we even drew up a rota to avoid any arguments over chores. We had the conversation about our futures, our ambitions, the understanding being we both favoured career over family. We had ironed out all the wrinkles, all the concerns we thought might arise from moving in together. The only anomaly I hadn’t properly accounted for was my best friend.

‘Why do you ask?’

She tilted her head from side to side. ‘I’ve got this picture in my mind of what he’s going to be like.’

‘And?’

‘You.’ A wicked grin. ‘Only male.’

The insult was clear. But I couldn’t find the words to tell her how wrong she was.

‘I can’t believe you have a boyfriend I’ve never even met.’

There was a reason for that, but not one I could share. It was why I’d been so against him coming to the party, protesting the need for him to move into the flat and set up his study just the way he wanted. That he would hate being surrounded by people who didn’t understand him.

That I was terrified of what would happen if he met Elle.

‘Do you like him?’

‘Of course I do. What sort of a question is that?’

Her eyes found mine in the mirror and I had to look away, to try and conceal the truth behind my guilty words.

‘No, I mean like him, like him.’

The flush on my face was as if she had slapped me and I hurried from the room. She followed me in silence, but it was a silence alive with noise, with unspoken, treacherous things.

I pushed my way through the crowd of well-wishers, people who had filled my life without any kind of meaning, but seemed to think they knew me. I wasn’t interested in their congratulations, I just wanted to find him, to shelter him from this cosseted world.

There he was. Shirt untucked and hair curling around the arm of his glasses. He was nodding at something Elle’s brother was saying, fingers used to nursing a pint now gripping the stem of a champagne flute.

She waltzed past me, pushing the air aside and announcing her arrival so that, as his head turned in my direction, he was overcome by the sight of her instead of me.

‘You must be Patrick,’ she said, going in for the kill with a kiss either side of his mouth, one hand resting on his shoulder to keep the gap between them small.

His face was too open, his thoughts and desires laid at her feet, but she was so used to such adoration she didn’t recognise its perfection. I couldn’t look at him; he looked like I felt.

‘He’s not at all what I expected.’ She was sat on the edge of the swimming pool, long limbs stirring the water. I imagined it to be like the tornado that ripped Dorothy from her home, wondered what would await Elle if she were plunged into another world.

‘What did you expect?’ I handed her one of the platefuls of food I’d busied myself collecting from the buffet. Anything to avoid watching him watching her.

‘Not sure. He’s rather sweet.’

Sweet. That was all she could come up with to describe the most enigmatic, talented and breathtaking person I had ever met? The only human in existence who could rival her? But then Patrick’s appeal was not so transparent, not something everyone would be able to understand.

Maybe I didn’t have anything to worry about after all.

‘So, have the two of you ever…?’ She picked up a smoked salmon blini and popped it into her mouth, along with a long sip of champagne.

‘No.’

‘What, not even after a drunken night out?’

I glared at her, annoyed by her assumption that Patrick would only ever be interested in me sexually if he were inebriated.

‘He understands I want to wait until we’re living together rather than simply doing it in a bed that contains the sexual residue of a thousand past students.’ He said it didn’t bother him, but I had seen the way he looked at her, at the longing that stretched over every part of his skin, and realised it meant he wasn’t bothered because it was me. That while I made sense on paper, Elle appealed to a different kind of reasoning.

‘Huh.’ Another morsel passed her lips.

‘Why do you sound so surprised?’

‘I assumed he was either ugly or gay. Why else would he stay in a relationship where he wasn’t getting any?’