Page 160 of While I’m Still Here

He kneels between my legs and leans down until his mouth finds my chest, kissing the place where my breasts used to be, like he’s paying respects. Then lower. Then the inside of my thigh, teeth scraping lightly, and I gasp and grab Danny’s arm.

“You’re going to have to be quiet,” Marcus says from somewhere near my shoulder.

“Why?”

“Because this is going to take a while.”

He isn’t kidding.

Colin uses his mouth until I’m trembling. Then his fingers again, slower this time, until I beg. Actually beg. And when he finally moves over me—wide shoulders blotting out the lamp, one hand braced beside my head—I look up at him and say, “Yes.”

One word.

He nods, jaw tight, and then he’s inside me.

The stretch is slow. Long. I feel every inch of him in a way I haven’t been able to feel anything in months. His hips settle against mine and he stops, breathing hard, forehead pressed to mine.

“Okay?”

“Better than okay.”

Danny’s hand is on my hairless head, stroking. Marcus has my hand in his and is holding it tight enough to hurt, which is somehow exactly right.

Colin starts to move.

Slow at first. Deep. Every thrust drags a sound out of me that I don’t recognise as my own. Danny whispers something filthy in my ear and I laugh and moan at the same time.

“You’re going to make her come again,” Marcus says.

“Not yet,” Colin grunts.

“Yes. Now.”

It’s not an order. It’s a promise. And Marcus, who never talks in bed, who is always the quiet one, slides his free hand down between our bodies—his hand, his fingers, finding exactly where I need them.

I come with Colin inside me and Marcus’s fingers on me and Danny’s mouth on my neck.

It doesn’t feel like a climax. It feels like being gathered up. Like all the broken pieces from the last six months are being held together by hands that don’t care that I’m not whole.

Colin follows a few thrusts later, head dropping to my shoulder, breath ragged. Danny takes my mouth, and Marcus keeps holding my hand, and for one long, dizzy moment, I forget entirely what I look like.

Later—much later—I lie in the middle of the bed with a shaved head and no breasts and three bald men breathing around me. My scalp is cooling. My thighs are slick. Someone has thrown a sheet over us, but it’s already tangled at my feet.

“I still look like an egg,” I say into the dark.

Danny’s arm tightens around my waist. “A very well-fucked egg.”

Colin snorts.

Marcus says nothing. But his hand finds my cheek in the dark and turns my face toward his, and even though I can’t see him properly, I know he’s smiling.

“Goodnight, Bea,” he says.

“Goodnight.”

And no one reaches for the lamp.

Chapter 27