Then his eyes moved to the bed.
He looked at everything with the focused attention he brought to things that mattered. The paddle first — turned over in his hands, tested with one strike against his own palm that made a sound loud enough to travel across the room. He set it down. The collar next, his thumbs pressing into the leather, working over the buckles and the D-ring with the same methodical care he gave everything he decided to take seriously. He attached the chain himself, the clip engaging with a clean mechanical sound, and the length of it dropped forward cool and weighted against my chest.
He wrapped the end of the chain around his fist without pulling on it yet, his eyes on my face, and I felt the tension transmit through the collar the moment the slack disappeared.
He kept his hands on my face a moment longer. “You know what to say if you need to stop.”
“Green, yellow, red.”
“And if you can't speak.”
I held up two fingers.
He nodded once, satisfied, and let me go.
“Stand up,” he said.
I stood then he started walking backward toward the far wall, slow and steady, and I followed the chain because that was what I was supposed to do and because I would have followed him anyway.
The back wall was floor-to-ceiling glass, the neighboring property sitting maybe forty feet away across a low wooden fence. I hadn't thought about it when I'd set everything up — I'd been thinking about him coming through the door and not much else. But standing here now, with the room's warm light falling across both of us, I was acutely aware that the view worked in both directions.
I looked through the glass.
Coach Grant was standing in his window, broad and unhurried, looking directly across forty feet of dark grass at us. He wasn't pretending to be doing something else. He was just there, watching.
Beside him, Jace appeared and he took in the view.
“Rook.” My voice came out considerably quieter than I'd intended.
“I see them,” Rook said from behind me, quiet and steady.
“They can see us.”
“Yeah.” His voice hadn't shifted register at all. “They can.”
His fist tightened on the chain, and through the glass, Coach didn't look away. He stepped behind Jace without hurry and got one hand flat against the middle of Jace's back and walked him forward to the glass. Jace's palms hit the window and stayed there, and from where I was standing I could see the slight bow of his spine as Coach pressed him into position.
Coach looked up and his eyes found Rook's and held.
I felt the moment Rook registered it. The shift behind me was barely anything, a small tightening of his grip on the chain, a fractional change in his breathing, but I felt all of it because I was leaning back into the space where his chest nearly met my shoulder blades and every adjustment he made traveled through me.
Coach's mouth came down on the side of Jace's throat.
He didn't break eye contact while he did it. That was the part that went through me the hardest. His eyes stayed fixed on Rook, and Jace's head tipped sideways against the glass to give him more access while his palms pressed harder against the window.
Behind me, the chain went tighter.
I could feel every beat of my own pulse against the leather. Rook's other hand came to rest at my hip, warm and heavy, and his mouth found the space just below my ear.
“Watch them,” he said quietly. “But remember who you're here for.”
“I know who I'm here for.”
“Say it.”
“You.” My voice came out rough. “I'm here for you.”
“Good.”
