Page 61

At the same time, Beck's mouth shows up to my ear. “Good girl, getting fucked hard. You know how I like to see you like this, on your knees, getting railed by my friend? When he’s done, it’s my turn, you know. I don’t care how tired you are.”

His dirty words push me over my edge, and I grab the bedsheets under me so tight that my fists hurt. My head bucks and I raise my ass in the air to take more of Elias as I come again.

Three men who each needed to be the one, now taking turns being mine instead. Sharing the thing they used to bid against each other for.

When it’s Beck’s turn, he pushes my knees to my chest and reaches below to open me. A second later, he’s inside, sweating and grinding, drilling me until he comes.

When it's over, when all four of us are a tangle on a mattress on the floor of the least impressive apartment any of these men has ever set foot in, I lie there wrung out and lit up.

And I laugh. The real one, not the careful version I kept on a short leash every time I got near these three, on camera and at the front desk both, because my true laugh was the one thing that could give me away.

It gets out before I can stop it. And this time, it doesn't matter who hears it.

My laugh runs a second too long, the way it does once it gets out.

I wait for the flinch, my old habit, the part of me that spent weeks clamping down on my laugh before anybody could hear it.

But there's nobody left to hide it from.

Elias is the one who moves. He props up on an elbow and looks at me, and the man who says little decides to speak up.

"That laugh," he says. "That's the one."

"The one what?"

"The one that gave you away." His eyes don't leave mine. "First night you ever went live. Couple minutes in, somebody in the chat said something stupid, and you laughed, that exact one before you caught yourself and put the fake voice back on. I'd heard that laugh at the front desk. I knew you in one second flat.”

There it is, from the other side.

All those weeks I spent strangling that laugh to keep myself safe. Guarding it at the desk, swallowing it on camera, treating it like the one crack that could sink me. And it had given me away back in the beginning to the one man quiet enough to be listening. Instead of sinking me, it brought all three of them to my door.

Go figure.

"Who knew a laugh could be so dangerous,” I say.

"It’s the reason I couldn't look away from you," Elias says.

"For the record," Beck says from somewhere down near my knee, eyes shut, "he sounded calm when he shared that he found you. But he was not calm."

"Shut up, Beck," Elias says, without any heat in it.

Theo laughs, and I feel it move through the whole warm tangle of us, three men who used to pay to be near me, now just here. For free. For real.

I lie there and think about the woman who walked into a glass tower every morning and routed their calls and brought their coffee and made dead sure nobody looked at her twice. Careful. Forgettable. That was the point.

And here I am now. Flat on my back with my lipstick long since kissed off, with guys who have finally seen every part of me there is, the receptionist and the camgirl, the careful one and the loud one, Agnes and Diablo, all of it. Not one of them looked away.

That's really all I ever wanted. Not the money. Not even the wanting. Just that. To be every part of myself in one room and have somebody be glad of it.

I got it three times over.

My phone buzzes on the floor. It's Birdie, of course it's all-caps Birdie, asking for a photo of Gerald. Then, HOW ARE YOU. WAIT. IS THIS A THREE-MEN NIGHT? AGNES?

I turn the screen away, which is pointless, because Beck is already reading over my shoulder.

"Tell her we say hi," he says.

"I'm telling her nothing. She told a barista I had cramps in March."