Page 240 of What We Bury

“Sister. I was a very popular sleepover guest.”

She huffs a small laugh. He keeps going. Simple plait down her back, nothing fancy, just enough to keep the tangles out by morning. He ties it off and pats her shoulder. “Done. Beautiful.”

Knox appears at the side of the bed. He doesn’t make a production of it—just pulls the blanket back and scoops her up.When he sets her back down, she scoots under without protest, and he tucks the covers around her with those enormous careful hands, the same hands that had held her steady an hour ago, and the juxtaposition of it is enough to make me look away for a second.

“Good?” Knox asks.

“Perfect,” she says. Then she looks around at all of us, her eyes raking over each of us in our various stages of undress. “You’re all staying, right?”

“Obviously,” Milo says, already moving to claim his side.

They arrange themselves around her—Milo on the left edge, Micah beside him, Eli at her back with his arm over her waist. Knox settles at the foot of the bed like a large and entirely comfortable doorstop. I take the right side, and she immediately migrates toward me, her breathing already slowing.

The lamp goes off. The room goes dark.

Somewhere outside, the city keeps doing what cities do. In here, everything has gone still.

I listen to her breathing even out. Feel the exact moment she tips over into sleep—the small release in her muscles, the way her weight shifts. It takes four minutes. I count them.

“Hey, guys?” Milo’s voice is a whisper in the dark. “Did you hear her before? She loves us.”

“Yeah, Milo,” I say, since nobody else is picking up the cue. “She loves us.” The word is still foreign in my mouth, but it’s notunwelcome. There’s a charge in the silence—a thing you can’t un-say, can’t un-hear.

I can’t see faces in the dark, but I can feel the presence of each man in the room. Sage’s leg presses against mine, her toes curled under the blanket and bumping my thigh. Every muscle in her body is loose, spent, and it shouldn’t be possible to radiate so much heat from such a small surface area, but somehow she’s got the entire bed at ninety degrees.

“She loves us,” Milo repeats, softer this time. “Wild.”

Knox grunts, and the sound carries more weight than some people’s entire vocabularies. “In that case, she’s gonna need to get a bigger bed.”

Eli is the first to laugh—a quiet exhale in the dark, the kind that sounds surprised out of him. Then Micah, low and warm. Then me. Even Knox makes a sound in his chest that counts.

Milo shifts deeper into the pillow. “Knox is onto something. I’m thinking ultra-king size, minimum. Custom build. I’ll measure the room.”

“Go to sleep, Milo,” Eli says.

“I’m just saying. As a practical matter?—”

“Milo.”

He’s quiet a beat. Then, “Goodnight, my cum brothers.”

The laughter ratchets up again then fades out slow. And in the quiet after it, something settles that I don’t have a clean word for. Not happiness exactly. Something sturdier than that.

I stare at the ceiling in the dark and let it be what it is.

In that case, she’s gonna need a bigger bed.

Yeah. She is.

SIXTY-SIX

MILO

Iwake up at five. It’s not discipline—after all, discipline is for people whose brains have an off switch. Mine has a dimmer that slides back to full on its own, somewhere between two and four hours after falling asleep.

Which means I’ve been awake for the great philosophical question of the day—how do we calculate exactly how much of last night’s ejaculation was deposited inside Sage?

Approximately three tablespoons, I decide around five-thirty. Four healthy men with full deposits, has to mean at least three to six tablespoons of grade-A artisanal small-batch direct-trade Hangmen DNA is currently distributed across multiple chambers in our girl.