Page 77 of The Vegas Lie
“For work.”
With her breasts on display, all he had to do now was maintain his distance and keep his tongue in his mouth, which would be easier if she stopped touching them.
She cupped the doughy orbs and gave them a gentle squeeze. “I like my body. I didn’t always. It never looked right. My brother had to talk me out of countless surgeries. He’d say, ‘Raina, if you want to get plastic surgery, if you don’t first fix what’s in here,’” she tapped her temple, “‘then it won’t matter what you do to your body. You’ll never be satisfied.’”
Only a fucked up society and even more fucked up societal expectations could convince a woman like this she was less than. It was one of the most irritating aspects of the species—that need to shame others. That need to tell someone that there was something wrong with them, and there’d been something wrong with them from the day they were born.
“Do you see something wrong?” she asked. “Something I should be concerned ab—”
“God, no.”
But he wouldn’t object to a closer inspection.
“I mean,” he tried and failed to detach his retinas from her areolas, “no, nothing at all. You look healthy from where I’m sitting. From a physician’s standpoint, your skin is,”gorgeous,“smooth and has a healthy glow to it. I don’t see any signs of mole abnormalities or dimpling in your,”mouth-watering,“breasts that might indicate malignancy. But if there’s something specific bothering you, point it out, and I could…”
Touch it.
Kiss it.
Lick it.
“Take a closer look,” he finished.
She fell back on the bed.
Her breasts bounced twice.
“Is that what started everything?” he asked. “Body image?”
“You’re still staring at my breasts.”
“I know.”
She laughed. “To answer your question…no. The first time I learned I was ‘pretty for a dark-skinned girl,’ I was thirteen. It was my Aunt Steffie.”
Steffie could asphyxiate for all he cared.
“Then it was all anyone would talk about. ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that. You’ll spoil your beauty.’ Everything was always tied back to how I looked. Naturally, I became obsessed with being put together—perfect hair, perfect makeup, nails, lashes. If I wasn’t being seen, I didn’t exist.”
Because people held on to compliments and insults, and then they leaned toward which would give them the most attention. If they received both, they became suspended in attachment limbo. One insult or compliment from the right person could shape a person’s life trajectory.
It certainly had been the case for him.
“I continued to mature, got boobs and an ass, and it got worse,” she went on. “One comment was all it took, in college, from a guy I didn’t even care about. ‘Raina, your ass and titties are so nice, I don’t even care that you have a stomach.’”
“So your physique became a new frontier,” he said, his fingers moving along the dark lines along her hip.
“I went on a diet, and with that diet, I developed an unhealthy relationship with food. There were now good foods, bad foods. If I messed around and ate any of the bad foods, I had to get them out of me.”
“Purging?”
“And laxatives. Or I’d take Adderall to suppress my appetite. Sometimes, I wouldn’t eat to avoid feeling guilty about eating the wrong thing.”
“What got you to this point?” He thumbed the dark marks underneath her breasts. “To where you love your body?”
Her warm, living, breathing, beautiful body.
“My blood sugar got dangerously low,” she explained. “My hair fell out. I had no period and a host of nutritional deficiencies. But what sent me to the hospital was when I collapsed in one of my grad school classes. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get air, and I panicked. I thought I was dying.”