Page 118 of While I’m Still Here

“Then let me photograph your body. Just as it is. You’re fucking beautiful, Bea. Tomorrow doesn’t change that, I promise you.”

The words are gentle. That's what makes them hurt. Not the body I might have had if I'd lost another two stone. Not the one I was going to finally appreciate when I became thinner, fitter, prettier, braver, whatever fucking qualification I had decided was necessary before I was allowed to stop criticising myself.

This one.

The body that got me here. The body that has been mine the entire time I was waiting to deserve it. I look at the photograph again. Soft stomach. Bare breasts. Stretch marks. The tiny crease beneath the left one. Thirty years of a body I've negotiated with, as though affection were something it needed to earn. “I spent so much time fucking hating it.”

Marcus understands in a way the others can't. He tells me quietly that he did the same before his surgery. He doesn't elaborate, and he doesn't need to. Cancer has the most spectacular fucking timing.

Apparently all it takes to make you desperately love your body is being told part of it has to go. Colin raises the phone again. “Look at me,” he demands.

I do.

Danny says something ridiculous from the bed about Colin's photographic technique, and I laugh before I can stop myself. Colin takes the picture. The shutter catches me halfway through it.

My shoulders are relaxed. My stomach is soft. My breasts are exactly where gravity has put them after thirty years of existing on my chest, one sitting slightly differently from the other. My eyes are crinkled at the corners, and my mouth is open around a laugh, and when Colin turns the phone towards me, I brace myself automatically.

It's so ingrained that I don't even realise I'm doing it. I expect to find the thing that's wrong first. My stomach, probably. Maybe my arms. The stretch marks. The shape of my breasts. The fact that my left nipple has always seemed to be looking approximately three degrees away from wherever the right one has decided we're going.

Something.

There is always something.

Except I look at the photograph and, for once, nothing immediately volunteers for the position.

That's me.

And I like her.

The realisation is so unexpected that my throat tightens before I can do anything about it. “I look…”

The words disappear.

Colin lowers the phone slightly and looks at me, waiting, but I can't finish because I don't know what I was going to say. Beautiful feels too deliberate. Happy isn't true. Normal feels almost insulting when nothing about tonight is normal. I stare at the screen for another few seconds, feeling something painful begin to spread behind my ribs. “I actually fucking like it.”

Colin's face changes. It's tiny, the sort of change I would probably miss in anybody else, but I've known him for twenty-two years, and I know exactly what it looks like when Colin Fletcher is trying not to cry. His lips press together, and his eyes drop briefly to the phone before returning to me, and suddenly I understand that this hurts him too. Not because the photograph is sad. It isn't. That's the fucking problem. I look happy in it. Alive. Completely unaware of the fact that this exact version of my body has less than one night left.

“Good,” he says, and his voice is rough enough that I immediately narrow my eyes.

“Don't cry.”

That makes him laugh under his breath, although his eyes are already shining. “I'm not crying.”

“You're doing the face.”

“What face?”

“Your crying face.”

“I don't have a crying face.”

“You absolutely do. I've known you since you had a bowl cut.”

“And I've known you long enough to know you've got at least six different crying faces, so I wouldn't start.”

I laugh, but it comes out wrong, caught somewhere between amusement and a sob, and Colin's expression softens further. Danny gets up from the bed, comes to stand beside me, close enough that his arm brushes mine, and looks down at the photograph over Colin's shoulder. I watch his face rather than the screen because Danny is terrible at hiding the first thing he feels. The second thing, perhaps. The third, definitely. He can bury those beneath enough sarcasm to suffocate them, but the first always gets through.

His jaw tightens. “Fuck.”