Strange Flesh Read Online Free PDF Page A

deserted me these days.
    To say that I have a weakness for women is like saying Ernest Hemingway enjoyed the occasional cocktail.
    After my mother’s death, my father made the disastrous decision to enroll me at an all-boys former military academy in an effort to curtail someof the tantrums brought on by her absence. The education, dispensed by a staff of retired air force officers, was exceptional, but by age eight, I was spying on my friends’ mothers. One of them caught me observing her step out of the shower. She was really kind and understanding about it, and even hugged me once she got her clothes on. But I was never invited back.
    The advent of my interest in computers can be precisely fixed at the instant a low-res image of a nude Victoria Principal rolled off Rory Cullenden’s dot matrix printer when we were in the fourth grade. My hacking skills went critical after I discovered those underground bulletin boards for swapping naughty files. I spent high school knowing that I’d do the computer science course at Stanford.
    So, how did I end up at Harvard? Sonali Mehta. I followed my rival high school’s gorgeous Intel Talent Search winner there. Though she declined all my advances, my grief didn’t last long, since there were any number of distinguished young ladies for me to spend my freshman year mooning over.
    Then I met Blythe Randall.
    I’ve always known that the idea of perfect, all-consuming love is a myth invented by ancient writers in order to move units. And yet acknowledging that left me without an explanation for the unprecedented feelings she aroused in me. After Coles introduced us at the Pudding one night, I felt like I’d discovered an alien species, awe and fear wrangling for control of my brain.
    What was it about her?
    Blythe’s beauty was somehow original. She had a refinement of face and figure that you hadn’t seen a million times on magazine covers. And she used that peerless vessel to radiate goodwill. Not a common sort of gushy niceness, nor the protective shell of polite reserve often found in the insanely rich. She seemed to instantly hold the conviction that you were an interesting person, and even if that wasn’t true, she had the confidence and alchemical grace to make you so. In her presence, people, at least those not prone to jealousy, would just beam with pleasure.
     
    A month after that monumental poker game, her relationship with Coles ended in a pyrotechnic argument in front of the Bat. I’d heard that the subject was her brother.
    For a dismal couple of weeks I didn’t see her at all. Then one night just after winter break, Rex Ainsley and Raffi Consuelo burst into the card room to demand that at least three of us make ourselves presentable for some ladies coming over from Pine Manor, a local women’s college, for a round of Circle of Death. This was a drinking game expected to segue into strip poker and hopefully some kind of orgy-type activity. We were skeptical since these often-promised orgies never really seemed to materialize.
    Ainsley said, “And Coles is coming by for this, so whichever one of you cum dumpsters let in Blythe Randall, you need to get her out of here. Now.”
    “She’s here? Where?” asked Tim Fielding, the dealer.
    “Upstairs, bombed out of her skull, and looking to make trouble. We are her friends, so clearly we’re not going to deal with her. It has to be one of you lot.”
    “You want us to throw her out?” This from a fellow sophomore.
    Ainsley snorted. “I’d like to see you try. That woman could crush your testicles with her mind . No, one of you must use his feminine wiles to lure her nicely out of here, so she doesn’t suspect that her ex-boyfriend is coming over to molest wet-brained goo poodles before a decent mourning period elapses. We Batsmen are classier than that.”
    There were blank looks all around.
    “Jesus, what a bunch of worthless—”
    I was astonished to hear myself say, “I’ll do it.” I flipped over