Free Heavy Issues by Elle Aycart Page B

hell-bent on getting into her pants, and she had to get some things straight, because the sex he had to offer sure as hell wouldn’t be the well-mannered, prim, and proper kind she was accustomed to. Cole was hardly the under-the-blanket, lights-off kind of guy. He wouldn’t settle for halfway, and Christy needed to tell him what to expect. If that scared him off or repulsed him, good riddance then. At least she would avoid the embarrassment.
    “My house?” he asked.
    She snorted again, this time more nervously. “Yeah, right. Think again.”
    She took him to a quieter corner. Well, the quietest she could find. At least it was far away from the tables. Everyone was watching the fireworks, and as far as she could see, no one was paying them any attention. She paced in front of him for a long while, worrying her lower lip.
    “Christy…”
    “I haven’t had sex for over a year,” she blurted.
    He crossed his arms and looked at her, his expression giving nothing away. “You mean besides with your fiancé, right?”
    She shook her head. “No. And I…ah, I…”
    He kept quiet.
    She opened her mouth and then closed it again, feeling ashamed. How could she tell him about…about it? The craziness, the insanity of it all? The inability to stop? The tons of food shoveled down her throat in an attempt to fill a hole that wasn’t even in her stomach?
    He wasn’t going to understand. She had trouble understanding it. He would look at her with disgust, or worse, make fun of her. He’d ask questions, questions she wasn’t sure she had answers for. And this wasn’t the place to delve into those. There were too many people around. She paced some more.
    “Talk to me, sweetheart,” he said.
    Oh, come on, Christy, give it up already. Just tell the man and be done with it . It wasn’t as if she’d been turning up tricks and smoking crack on Skid Row, LA. Although she’d rather admit to that than to the truth.
    She stopped in front of him and took a deep breath. Alea jacta est.
    “I…I have a problem with food, Cole.”
    He was quiet for several seconds.
    “Do you mean a problem with food as in you eat and then throw up, or as in you starve yourself to death?”
    How cute. Big, tough marine had been watching late-night shows and knew about bulimia and anorexia. Pity it wasn’t as clear-cut as that. “No, I mean a problem as in I can’t stop eating, and before I realize it, I’m five hundred pounds and in need of a crane to be airlifted to get out of home.”
    Silence. Yep, overeating hadn’t made it onto his radar. No big surprise there. When it came to eating disorders, it was just the people starving themselves or hiding a week’s worth of vomit in their closet that had scared public opinion. It still baffled her, though, how most people didn’t see that a 500-pound person eating anything that didn’t move was trying to kill herself as surely as an anorexic.
    She sighed heavily. “Early in life I discovered chocolate bars made things better. That habit of eating for comfort when I was feeling bad, which was pretty much all the time, turned into an obsession, and then an out-of-control compulsion that for many years made my life a living hell. Food was the only tool I had for managing my emotions.” Overeating, undereating, using diuretics, laxatives, diet pills, shots…she’d done it all. Except for throwing up. That she could never bring herself to do. Besides, what she was after was that blissful state of numbness that being stuffed with food brought her to.
    “Although the bouts of bingeing were always followed by short periods of undereating, I was never too successful at restricting my food. Overeating is my thing.”
    His gaze was boring a hole in her. His face was so impenetrable she had no clue what he was thinking.
    She didn’t know how to explain to him about emotional hunger, about the inability to cope without using food to take the edge off. She couldn’t convey the hell her life had been