Free Beautiful Stranger by Ruth Wind Page A

they’d made up as toddlers was gone, but a few code words remained.
    â€œMorrag,” she said and hung up, feeling better. Robert had unnerved her today. Or she’d unnerved herself. Restlessly she opened the fridge, scanned the contents with a frown and realized what she was doing.
    Closing the door, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. In an article on weight loss, she’d read that people, especially women, had programmed themselves to ignore their true impulses in order to please society, and often mistook a myriad number of emotions and impulses for hunger. The recommendation had been to stop and feel, take a minute to pay attention to the body and the emotions.
    What was she really feeling? Physically, there was a restlessness crawling in her legs and up her spine. She wanted to run or scream or jump up and down. Her emotions buzzed and flitted, scurrying around each other like worried birds. Even her thoughts—usually the clearest thing—were whirling.
    She inhaled slowly. What did she really want? An image of Robert, peering down at her as if he might kiss her, flitted over her vision. Then his hands, scarred and beautiful, and his teeth, white and straight, flashing against his lips.
    Marissa chuckled. Well, that was pretty clear. Sex. She wanted to have sex with Robert.
    Duh, as Crystal would say.
    That was step one—figuring out the want. Step two was figuring out the reality. She couldn’t really allow herself to indulge that wish. For one thing, he was obviously ambivalent.
    No, that was his feelings, not hers. Why couldn’t she indulge?
    Reason number one: Crystal, who might be wounded and feel used. Good one, but it didn’t feel authentic. It sounded like the Wizard’s voice in Oz, booming out the obvious answer.
    Sex with Robert. She let the visuals fill her—that hair touching her, his mouth and hers. Oh, yeah. She had a sudden vision of licking his throat and realized the urge was quite a bit stronger than she’d realized.
    And then she tried to imagine herself getting to the naked part. Him, lean and strong and sculpted. Her—oh, yuck—white as a fish and soft and squishy. An exaggerated picture of her flesh spilling sideways from her bones appeared with evil intensity, and Marissa gritted her teeth.
    Oh, no. Not even her imagination was allowed to steal her accomplishment. Her eyes snapped open and she marched into her bedroom, kicking off her shoes, then reached for the zipper on her dress. She pulled it over her head and tossed it aside, unhooked her bra and skimmed off her panties and threw them all on the bed. Tossing her head, squaring her shoulders, she marched to the long mirror she’d purchased when she’d hit the sixty-pound-loss mark, a celebration.
    It was an antique, an oval floor mirror framed incherry. She stepped into the reflection, naked, and dared her imagination to make a mockery of her.
    But there were other eyes looking with her, eyes of all those kids who chanted nasty names, all the men who’d tried not to look at her body even if they liked her, all the selves she’d been when she gazed in sorrow at the blob of herself over the years.
    You were always beautiful.
    The words came to her in Robert’s voice, the very words he’d said that day in her classroom, and they gave her courage to see what was really in the mirror—not what could be or should be or had been. Just what was there now.
    A collarbone, first of all, graceful and almost fragile looking. Arms that had toned up pretty well the past three months. Although they’d never be model slim, they were quite acceptable even in a sleeveless dress.
    Breasts—A+. It had been a great concern that her breasts would be flabby, lifeless, when she lost so much, but they weren’t. She hadn’t actually lost there as much as the rest of her, which she understood was unusual. But at her heaviest, her breasts looked small; now in