Read Anita Blake 18 - Flirt for Free Online

you were ugly and no man would have you.
    Nathaniel kissed the side of my face as Micah kissed my lips. I stayed motionless in their arms, letting the knowledge of that childhood memory wash over me. “Why did I remember that now?” I asked, softly.
    “You were ready to remember,” Nathaniel whispered. “We bring up the pain in pieces so we can look at it in small bites.”
    Jason spoke softly from just behind Nathaniel. “First, you are beautiful and desirable, and that was evil of her. Second, one thing I’ve learned in therapy is that when you feel your most safe, most happy, is when the really painful stuff rears its head.”
    “I remember Nathaniel’s therapist saying that when you started having bad dreams. Why does it have to work that way?” I asked, still held between the other two men.
    “You feel safe enough and you believe you have enough of a support network to look at the really bad stuff, so when your life is going its best, we all have a tendency to dredge up the worst of our pain.”
    I turned in their arms so I could see Jason’s face. “That sucks,” I said.
    He smiled, eyes gentle. “Big-time suck, yes.” He studied my face. “You aren’t going to cry, are you?”
    I thought about it, figuring out how I felt. “No.”
    “It’s okay to cry,” he said.
    I shook my head. “I don’t want to cry.”
    “You never want to cry,” Nathaniel said.
    I couldn’t argue that, so instead I let myself soften in their arms, and kissed first Micah, and then turned so I could lay my cheek against Nathaniel’s face and whisper, “I’ll cry later, at home.”
    “You’ll cry when it finally hits you,” he said.
    “I don’t feel like crying now.”
    “How do you feel?” he asked.
    “You could read my feelings.”
    “You’ve taught me better psychic manners than that,” he said.
    “I came with better manners than that,” Micah said.
    I nodded, and then started to sit back on the bench. They moved back to let me. “I feel sort of hollow, like there’s this empty space inside me that I didn’t know was there. Fragile—which I hate.”
    Jason reached past Nathaniel to pat my thigh, just a friendly touch. “It’s okay, we’re here.”
    I nodded. That was the problem with loving people: it made you weak. It made you need them. It made the thought of not having them the worst thing in the world. I heard Bennington’s words in my head: It’s a terrible thing to lose someone you love. I knew it for truth, because I’d lost my mother to death when I was eight, and my fiancé in college to his mother’s pressure. Come to think of it, that had been because I wasn’t blond and Caucasian enough for his family. They hadn’t wanted their family tree darkened quite that much. Was it any wonder I had a complex about it? It would have been a miracle if I hadn’t.
    For a long time after that first love, I’d protected my heart from all takers; now here I sat in a restaurant with two men I loved, and a third who was one of my best friends. How had I been willing to let so many people get so damn close?
    The waiter was back at the table. He smiled that brilliant smile at me, and I could see that he was looking at me, not Nathaniel. I started to do what I’d done for years when men reacted to me—scowl and give him The Look—and then I realized that I didn’t want to be angry. I smiled at him, let him see that I saw him; I understood he was wasting smiles on me, and I appreciated it. I let myself smile up at him and let the pure happiness fill my face all the way up. The smile wasn’t entirely for the waiter; it was for the men around me, yet it made the waiter smile even wider, his eyes shining with it. It wasn’t a bad thing to share; in fact, it was a pretty nice thing to share, even with someone you didn’t know at all.

MS. NATALIE ZELL sat across from me with her red hair in an artful tangle of swept waves that managed to be short enough not to go past her shoulders but also gave