Anita Blake 23 - Jason Read Online Free PDF

me lash out again; that was childish, and I wasn’t a child anymore.
    “Can I take this one?” Jason asked.
    “Be my guest,” I said.
    “Enjoying pain with your pleasure is something either you get, or you don’t. If you get it, then you don’t really need it explained, because you know how good it feels, and if you don’t get it, then no amount of talking is going to convince you it makes sense.”
    “Sounds like you’ve practiced that speech,” I said.
    He frowned, and it seemed to dim his light all the way through. “I’ve been trying to explain it to J.J.”
    “Not going well, I take it?”
    “No.”
    “Don’t tell me you can’t explain it to me, that is not an answer,” Envy said.
    “It’s like trying to explain the color red to someone who’s color-blind. You can tell them red is hot, bright, use any word you want, but it won’t really explain to them what the color looks like, it’ll still look sort of gray to them,” I said.
    “That’s not an answer either,” she said.
    Nathaniel said, “You see bondage as an extra, something to add spice in the bedroom, right?”
    She nodded.
    “For some of us it’s not spice, it’s the vegetables and fruit.”
    “What?” she asked.
    He sat forward in his chair, using his free hand to gesture as he spoke, the other hand still in mine. “Think of sex, intercourse, as the meat, but if you eat just meat you’ll get sick and eventually die from complications of a severely imbalanced diet.”
    “Okay, I knew that, but I still don’t see the analogy.”
    “We can all have sex without bondage and enjoy the hell out of it, but if we don’t have the bondage and submission with it, after a while we get sick and depressed. Sex on its own isn’t a complete sex life for us; we need the kink to be happy and healthy, and without it eventually part of us would sort of die inside.”
    She blinked those big blue eyes at him, and then turned to Jason. “Is that how you feel?”
    He nodded.
    “I won’t ask Anita; the little demonstration said yes for her.” She looked at Domino. “Is this how you feel, too?”
    “I think I would be okay without the BDSM. I mean, it’s not a burning need for me, but Anita is almost never satisfied with straight vanilla in the bedroom.”
    “I do straight vanilla intercourse sometimes,” I said.
    He hugged me one-armed and said, “No, you don’t; you think you do, but even your vanilla is more like fudge ripple.”
    I started to get mad about that, and then fought off the urge. My therapist said that the anger had been a coping mechanism since about the time my mother died. The rage had protected me and helped me survive; now I just needed to use it appropriately, and not let it tear my relationships apart like I had for most of my adult life. Old habits are hard to break, but I was trying, and the people I cared about were helping me try harder.
    Nathaniel squeezed my hand; he’d noticed my effort, and my success. I looked at him and he smiled at me, that happy, I’m-proud-of-you smile. It made me smile back.
    “Okay, what was that just now? I felt Anita’s energy, her beast flare, and then it was gone, and now we’ve got some kind of happy moment going on,” Envy asked.
    “I’m learning to control my emotions and my inner beast; you know how that works.”
    She cocked her head to one side just slightly. “This felt different than controlling our other halves. Maybe the anger is what you were controlling, not the beast?”
    See, Envy was smart and insightful, and she learned fast. That was also true of her cousin Dev, and it was one of the reasons they were our lovers. Smart isn’t just sexy; it’s necessary for something this complicated to work.
    “Yeah, exactly,” I said.
    She nodded, more to herself, I think, and then raised her tea and sipped it. She was thinking, you could watch it in her eyes; I liked that.
    “Why didn’t you like Domino telling you that you don’t do straight