Chapter 27 #2
The train ride back to the coast felt endless. I kept the bag in my lap and stared out the window, watching the city give way to suburbs and then to the open stretches of land that led to the ocean.
By the time I walked into the house, the sun was starting to set and the light coming through the windows had gone golden and soft. Rook was still at practice — I'd timed it that way on purpose — which gave me time to shower and change and decide all over again that yes, I wanted this.
I laid everything out on the bed like artifacts from a ritual I was about to perform. The lace. The leather collar. The cuffs. The paddle. Then I stripped and put it all on slowly, watching myself in the mirror as the pieces came together.
The thong sat low on my hips, barely covering anything. The stockings made my legs look longer, the contrast between delicate lace and my tattoos sharper than I expected.
I looked like someone's fantasy. More than that, I looked like myself — unapologetic and alive and choosing to be wanted.
I heard Rook's car pull into the driveway and my pulse spiked.
I moved to the bedroom and lowered myself to my knees at the foot of the bed, hands resting on my thighs, head bowed, waiting. The room was quiet except for the distant sound of the ocean and the tick of the hallway clock, and I stayed there in the stillness and let myself just be ready.
The front door opened. Footsteps on the stairs, heavier than usual. The bedroom door swung wide.
The silence that followed was complete enough that I could hear my own heartbeat.
“Fucking hell,” Rook breathed.
I looked up and found him frozen in the doorway, still in his practice gear with a thin sweat drying on his skin, staring at me like I'd knocked the air clean out of him.
“Hi,” I said.
He took a slow breath. “What is this?”
“I wanted to surprise you.” I shifted slightly, letting him see the full picture — the collar, the chain laid across the bed, all of it. “I wanted to give you this. Me. All of it.”
He crossed the room in three strides and dropped to his knees in front of me, hands cupping my face. “You don't have to—”
“I know I don't have to. I want to.” I leaned into his touch.
“I spent the afternoon with my dad and it was hard and complicated and it gutted me. But I survived it. And then I came home and all I could think about was you. How much I wanted to be here. How much I wanted to give you something real.”
His thumb traced my jaw. The war behind his eyes was readable even in the low light.
“Tell me what you need,” he said.
“I need you to use me. I need you to make me feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.”
He kissed me hard enough to bruise and I opened for him immediately. When he pulled back we were both breathing harder than the kiss should have warranted.
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.”
Across us, Coach turned Jace around.
Rook's grip on the chain tightened one more degree and then he eased it, slowly, the pressure releasing from my throat in increments until the collar sat neutral again.
“On your knees,” he said.
I went down smooth and immediate, the carpet soft against my shins through the stockings, and the chain fell forward off my collarbone and pooled in the space between us.
The smell of him this close was all sweat and clean skin and the particular scent of the rink that clung to him for hours after practice ended.
His free hand came down and traced the line of my jaw with one knuckle. I turned my face into the touch and pressed my lips to the inside of his wrist without being told.
“Start at the bottom,” he said.
I lowered myself further, bracing one palm on the floor, and brought my face down to the worn leather of his trainer.
The laces were double-knotted the way he always tied them.
The toe was scuffed in a specific place from the way he pushed off during drills.
I knew this shoe. I'd seen it in the entryway a hundred times, lined up next to mine by the door.
I pressed my lips to the laces. I dragged my mouth slowly across the leather of the vamp, the material cool and slightly damp from practice, and the sound Rook made above me was barely there but I felt it in the tension that went through his thigh where my shoulder was pressed against it.
“Yeah,” he said, low. “Keep going.”
I kissed across the top of his foot to the outside seam and back, working slow, learning the shape of the shoe with my mouth the way I'd learned his body with my hands. My tongue traced the stitching along the side.
He stepped back from me without hurry, leaving the chain to pool on the carpet at my knees, and crossed to the corner of the room where the reading chair sat angled toward the windows.
It was a heavy thing, leather and worn wood, the kind of chair that looked like it had been in this house longer than Rook had.
He dragged it across the floor until it sat a few feet back from the window, facing the glass, and then he sat down in it with his legs spread wide and one forearm resting along the armrest.
“Come here,” he said.
I went down onto my hands.
The carpet was warm under my palms and the chain dragged along the floor with me as I moved, the sound of it sliding across the weave a small constant presence under my own breathing. I crossed the distance slow.
When I reached him I stopped between his knees and sat back on my heels and waited.
His hand came down and traced the side of my neck, thumb brushing along the edge of the collar, and then he tipped my chin up with two fingers and looked at me for a long moment.
“Finish what you started,” he said.
I bent and got my mouth back to the shoe I hadn't undone yet.
The laces were tight against my teeth, and I worked them slow, feeling his eyes on the top of my head the whole time.
The knot gave. The tongue of the shoe loosened.
I pulled the laces free and Rook lifted his foot slightly and let me slide the trainer off and set it aside on the floor beside its partner.
I pressed my lips to the arch of his foot through the sock.
“Good,” he said quietly. “Pants next.”
I moved up.