Micah - By Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,21

other people. Chimera had been the only panwere that I'd ever heard of, someone who could turn into a variety of animals. Before I'd seen him I'd have said it was impossible, but I'd seen him, and had to destroy him. He'd been real and powerful, and a very creative sexual sadist.

I held his face in my hands. "You are a good person, Micah. You are not a monster."

"I used you when we first met, Anita. I saw you as a way to save my leopards. To rescue us all."

"I know," I said. "We talked about it. You asked me what I would have done to save Nathaniel and all the leopards from Chimera. I agreed that I would have done anything, or at least what you did to get me involved. I couldn't fault you on it."

"From the moment you touched me, the plan changed. You changed it. You changed everything. You never looked at me like I was a monster. You were never afraid of me, not in any way."

"You make it sound like someone else was afraid of you."

He sighed again. "I had a high school sweetheart. We weren't exactly engaged, but we had an understanding that once we got our college degrees, we'd marry."

"Sounds good," I said.

He shook his head. "We waited for sex, a year of waiting. We both wanted to be out of high school first, be eighteen. Her older sister had gotten pregnant in high school, and it had wrecked her life, so Becky was careful. I was okay with that. I planned to spend the rest of my life with her, so what was a year or more?"

He spilled me down into his lap so I was sitting across his legs, very ladylike, thank you. "What happened?" I asked, because he seemed to want me to.

"What made her finally break up completely with me was me being a monster. She couldn't love an animal."

I couldn't keep the shock off my face. "Jesus, Micah, that's--"

He nodded. "It was rough, but me being a shapeshifter was the last straw, not the first one."

I frowned a little. "What was the first straw?"

He looked down, and I realized he was embarrassed.

"What?" I asked.

"I was too big."

I opened my mouth and closed it. "You mean you were too well endowed for her?"

He nodded.

I looked at him and tried to decide what to say. Nothing good came to mind. "She didn't like having sex with you?"

"No."

"But--but you're, like, amazing in bed. You're--"

"But you weren't a virgin, and I wasn't eighteen and a virgin, too."

"Oh," I said, and thought about it. Micah was very well endowed. Not just long but wide, which I'd discovered could be a harder problem to deal with than length. There were positions you could do or modify for length. Width you just had to adjust to. I thought about having all that shoved inside for the first time, maybe without enough foreplay. "I guess I can see the problem."

"I hurt her. I didn't mean to, but I did. I got better at it. More foreplay, more--just better."

"There is a learning curve," I said.

He rested his forehead on my shoulder. "But Becky never really enjoyed me inside her. We had sex, but I always had to be so careful of her or she said it hurt."

"You know women have different sizes of vaginas, just like there are different sizes of penises. Maybe she was small inside, and you are not small."

He looked up at me, his cheek resting on my bare arm. "You think so?"

"I do."

He smiled. "You don't have a problem with me, any of me."

I smiled back. "No, and she was just one person. One negative doesn't make it a problem."

"It wasn't just one vote, Anita."

I raised my eyebrows. "What do you mean?"

"I've had dates in college where everything was fine until they saw me, all of me. Then they picked up their clothes and said no way."

I gave him a look. "You're serious."

He nodded.

Another man, I might have accused of bragging, but Micah wasn't bragging. I had a thought. It was almost insightful. "Becky said you hurt her because you were so big, and then you had girls in college who wouldn't even try it. That must have really messed with you."

"It was either a really big plus or a really big minus with women. But most of them, even the ones who said yes, didn't want a standard diet. I was like a novelty." His voice held unhappiness the way it