Page 59

And yet.

Beck ducks the light fixture. Theo relocates straight to the one folding chair before anyone else gets it. Elias stands in the middle with his hands at his sides after staring at the crack in the ceiling.

I watch them take it in. The mattress. The hot plate. The boxes. Gerald. Every crappy inch of the place I created for myself when all the money dried up. Honestly, I think I’ve done okay.

Regardless, I brace for a glimmer of pity. A too-kind face. An oh, sweetheart, so this is what you’ve come to. I have gotten that look before and I would bet Gerald on getting it now.

Don’t see it anywhere.

Elias says, "This is the first time I have ever been in a room with you."

And that stops me cold, because he's right. A year of me forty feet from his office. However many weeks of me on his laptop screen. And now with a mattress, a plant, and a bad light fixture, it’s the first time the two of us have ever once stood so close, breathing the same air, with nothing between us.

"I guess so."

Beck crosses the room. It takes him one and a half steps, which is funny but I’m too revved up to laugh. He stops close enough that I have to tip my head back to hold his gaze, but he keeps his hands to himself, at least for a moment. Then this man, who owns every room he walks into, brings one hand toward me slow enough that I could step away if I felt like it. When I don't, he brushes his fingers against the side of my face, his thumb at the corner of my red lips.

I have imagined their hands so many times, I could identify them in the dark, and none of it, not one second of my imagination is anything like the actual touch of Beck's palm along my cheek in the four o'clock light, with the other two guys watching.

"Say it's real," he says quietly. "I've had you a hundred ways in my mind. Say this time is real."

"It's real."

And I go up on my toes, in my own apartment, on my own terms, at a time I picked, and I kiss him.

It is nothing like being behind the webcam. Here, I’ve got this man’s mouth and the rough growl he makes into mine, the one none of his thousands of employees will ever get to hear. My fingers close on the front of a suit I used to hang on a coatrack for a man who barely noticed me, and I wonder if I should tell him to fuck off or remove his clothes.

When I come down off my toes, Theo is on his feet. Elias is running his hand through his hair. Repeatedly.

And here is the fear I never said out loud, the one underneath all the others, that three men who each need to be the one could not stand in a room and share the same woman without the whole thing going tits up.

I look at the three of them looking at me. Beck steps to the side and makes room for the other two. Theo comes in and takes my hand, and Elias finally crosses the last of my little home, and nobody cares whose turn it is or any crap like that.

They sorted it out. Somewhere in the time I spent hating them, these three did the one piece of work I didn’t think they had in them. They decided not to fight over me and decided to have me together.

"So," Theo says, turning my hand over, his thumb settling on my pulse. "You picked the time. You picked the place." He throws me a lazy smile and I try not to faint. "You want to pick the rest of it too? Or do you want us to take it from here?"

Whatever's climbing up my throat right now isn't fear or the old habit of making myself small, and it’s sure not going to be quiet.

"Lights stay on," I say.

Beck's grin goes slow and certain. "Obviously."

Weeks on a webcam taught me plenty about sex, and every bit of it was performance. How to angle so the light catches. How to make a sound that carries to the far side of the internet. How to run three men I couldn't touch, and never once let one of them run me.

I got good at that, but none of it is any use to me now, and I’m fine with that.

There's no camera to play to anymore. No viewer to watch myself in. No fake name to hide behind. Just the guys and someone’s hands at the buttons of my blazer. Theo moves behind me to lift the hair off my neck and put his mouth there. Elias watches the way he once paid a fortune to, except now he's close enough that I can smell his Dial soap.

"Off," Beck says, back at my lips.

I think he means the blazer. Theo's already easing it down my arms. Then it's my shirt, and I get the old Agnes reflex, the urge to fold my arms over myself and vanish.

I brush that shit right to the side.

My bra, skirt, and then panties drop to the floor, in that order, and I pull my shoulders back with a big breath. I want to be seen. So, I stand in the middle of my own apartment and let three men look at all of me at once. Not the mouth. Not the cropped little frame. Me. Every part I spent twenty-eight years trying to hide. I bust out in goose bumps, resist a little shiver, throw my head back, and smile all at the same time.

"Christ," Theo breathes. His hands skim up my bare sides. "Look at you. All of you."