Page 159 of While I’m Still Here

The room narrows to skin and breath and the wet sound of his hand moving. Marcus’s palm slides from my stomach to the underside of my ribs, following the line of my scar without flinching, without treating it like something to be handled carefully. He just touches me. The way he’d touch my waist or my hip or the inside of my thigh.

A man who has seen the inside of a hospital ward and decided my body was still worth wanting.

“How does she feel?” Danny asks, not looking away from my face.

“Like she’s about to come,” Colin says, and there’s a grin in his voice.

“Not yet.” Marcus’s fingers tighten on my ribs. “Not without us.”

I want to argue. I want to tell him he doesn’t get to decide that, but then Colin’s thumb presses down and circles and my orgasm rolls through me like a wave I didn’t see coming.

It’s not violent. It’s slow and deep and it pulls me under, and I hear myself cry out—somewhere between a gasp and a sob—and Danny swallows the sound with his mouth on mine.

When I surface, Colin’s hand has stilled but hasn’t left me.

“That was—” I start, and then can’t finish.

“Yeah,” Danny agrees. “It was.”

Marcus is watching my face with an expression I can’t parse. Something proud and something hungry all at once. “You needed that.”

“I need more.”

The words come out before I can stop them, and for a second I’m afraid I’ve said too much. That I’ve broken the gentle spell of the last hour. But then Danny laughs—low and delighted—and Colin presses his forehead to my hip and Marcus’s hand slides up to cup my jaw.

“Greedy,” Marcus says.

“Shut up.”

“I like it.”

That stops me cold. Marcus doesn’t say things like that. He says careful things, measured things, things with three layers underneath. But this is simple. This is a thumb moving across my cheekbone and a shaved head catching the lamplight and a mouth that’s looking at mine like it’s thinking about closing the distance.

I reach for him first.

He kisses me like he’s been waiting for permission. Slow at first, then heavier, his tongue sliding against mine while Colin strips my knickers down my legs and Danny pulls them the rest of the way off.

Then he’s gone—Marcus, I mean—rolling away for a second to deal with his jeans, and I use the gap to look at Colin.

“You too.”

He doesn’t pretend not to understand. He stands, unhooks his belt, pushes everything down and kicks it aside. His body is broad and familiar and still the same body I’ve been leaning against since we were teenagers. The shaved head makes him look younger somehow. Or maybe it’s the smile.

“Better?” he asks.

“Much.”

Danny’s already naked before I turn back to him. Of course he is. He’s sprawled on his side next to me, propped on one elbow, watching the whole thing like it’s his favourite show.

“You,” I say, pointing at him.

“Me?”

“Get over here.”

He does. Kisses me quick and filthy and then settles against my side, one hand sliding down my hip. And then there are three of them again, three warm bodies, and I have no idea how this is going to work but I know it will.

Colin moves first.