Page 21 of While I’m Still Here

I kiss her again. Slower this time. Letting her know I'm not in a hurry. Letting myself learn the shape of her mouth, the way she sighs when I angle just so.

Her t-shirt rustles as she shifts closer. Then closer still. One of her legs hooks over mine, and now she's half in my lap, and my hand has found its way to her hip without me giving it permission. The fabric is soft from too many washes. It smells like her laundry detergent and something underneath that's just Bea. Skin and sleep and stale perfume.

She tastes it too, I think. The difference. Because her fingers slide into my hair, blunt nails scraping lightly against my scalp, and she makes that sound again. Needier this time.

"Colin."

"Yeah?"

"Touch me."

The words land low in my gut. But I make myself pull back just enough to meet her eyes. "Where?"

She laughs. A single, breathless note. "If I have to tell you, we have bigger problems."

"Cheeky."

"Seven years of foreplay, Colin. I'm not going to orchestrate things for you now."

I let my hand slide from her hip to the bare skin between the hem of her shirt and the waistband of her shorts. Just the pads of my fingers. Just enough to feel the warmth of her, the slight rise of goosebumps following my touch.

She shivers. Her eyelids flutter.

"Still okay?" I ask.

"Yes."

My fingers skate up, palm flattening over her ribs. She's so warm here. So alive. And for one terrible second, I think about the scans and the doctors and the cells dividing where they shouldn't be. But then she tilts her head back, exposing the long line of her throat, and the thinking stops.

I press my mouth to her pulse point. Feel it jumping under my lips. Fast but steady. She's still here. Still with me. Still wearing that ridiculous t-shirt and looking at me like I'm the only thing keeping her tethered to this moment.

"Colin." Her voice cracks. "Please."

"Please what?"

"I don't know. Anything. Everything."

My mouth moves to her collarbone. Her hand tightens in my hair. The other one finds the edge of her shirt, and before I can ask if she's sure, she's pulling it up and over her head in one motion.

The shirt lands somewhere across the room.

And then she's there. Bare from the waist up. Looking at me with her chin lifted, almost defiant, like she's daring me to make this weird.

I don't.

I look at her. Really look. Not as a patient or a diagnosis or a woman who might lose part of this body to surgery in a matter of weeks. I look at her like she's just Beatrice. My Bea. The woman I've wanted for so long that wanting her has become part of my architecture.

"You're beautiful."

"Even with⁠—"

"Especially with."

She shakes her head, but there's a smile threatening at the corner of her mouth. "That makes no sense."

"Doesn't have to."

I lean in and kiss the spot just above her left breast. Then the soft swell of it. Then the place where her heart beats fastest.