CHAPTER 27 - WATCHING

Theo is sitting at his usual table at The Grind House when I walk in for my shift, and the normalcy of the image – laptop open, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead the way he does when he’s switching between screens – hits me so hard that I have to pause in the doorway and remember how to be a person who doesn’t have a werewolf’s heartbeat echoing in her chest.

“Ivy!” He stands up and hugs me and the contact feels foreign in a way that makes me sad, because Theo’s hugs used to feel like home and now they feel like visiting a country I used to live in where I no longer speak the language.

He pulls back and looks at my face and his expression shifts into something careful and assessing.

“You look different,” he says, and his eyes drop to my high-necked shirt – the third one this week, in September, and I can tell he’s registering the pattern even if he doesn’t know what it means yet.

“Just tired,” I say, and tie my apron on and start my shift, and he watches me from his table the way he always does except today his watching feels like it has a purpose behind it that didn’t used to be there.

During my break he asks about Knox. Not subtly – he says, “That guy who was sitting in the corner booth every day, the one with the motorcycle. Is he your...” and he trails off because he doesn’t know what word to use, and honestly neither do I because “stepbrother” doesn’t cover it and “the werewolf who has been systematically conditioning my body to respond to his voice commands” feels like a lot for a Tuesday afternoon.

“He’s my mom’s fiancé’s son,” I say, which is technically accurate and comprehensively useless.

“He looked at me like he wanted to remove my hands from my body last time I was here.”

“He’s just protective.”

Theo’s jaw does this thing it does when he’s holding back something he thinks I’m not ready to hear, and his eyes drop to my neck again and I watch him catalogue the high collar and the way I keep tugging it up and the marks I can feel hiding underneath it, and something shifts between us that feels like the first crack in a surface that’s been solid since we were fourteen.

“Ivy, if someone is–”

“I’m fine, Theo.” The sharpness in my voice surprises both of us, and he leans back in his chair and nods slowly and I can see him filing this conversation in a mental folder that he’s going to open again later.

He leaves before my shift ends, and I’m wiping down the counter when my phone buzzes in my apron.

Who were you with?

I look up and through the front window of The Grind House and across the street, Knox is sitting on his motorcycle with his helmet resting on the handlebar, and he’s been there long enough that I know he watched Theo walk out and he’s been watching me through the glass for however long it took me to check my phone, and the fact that he’s surveilling me from a public street in broad daylight should alarm me more than it does except that the double heartbeat in my chest thumped harder the second I saw him, and my body responded to the sight of him the way a compass responds to north.

***

That night he doesn’t come at 1:47.

He comes at midnight, earlier than usual, and he doesn’t say “knees” and he doesn’t say “stand up” and he doesn’t say any of the commands that my body has learned to obey on instinct.

He walks to my window and opens the curtains and the streetlight from outside falls across my bed in a yellow stripe, and through the glass I can see the driveway where his motorcycle is parked – the same spot where he sat this afternoon and watched me through The Grind House window.

“Come here,” he says, and I go to him and he turns me around so I’m facing the window and his hands grip my hips and he bends me forward until my palms are flat on the windowsill and my face is inches from the glass and the driveway is directly below me and the spot where his bike was parked is lit up by the streetlight like a stage.

He pushes my shorts down to my knees and I hear his belt unbuckle behind me – that sound from the first-night, the one that I will associate with my knees hitting carpet for hopefully the rest of my life – and his hand slides between my legs from behind and finds me already wet because my body stopped pretending it doesn’t want him every second of every day approximately a week ago.

He pushes inside me and my forehead drops against the cold glass and I can see the driveway below and the parking spot where he sat on his bike and watched me, and the image of him down there looking up at this exact window while I’m pressed against it with him inside me creates a loop of surveillance and possession that makes my pussy clench around him hard enough that he grunts against the back of my neck.

“See that spot on the bike?” His mouth is at my ear and his hips are driving forward in deep strokes that push me against the glass with every thrust. “I sat there for two hours watching through the window while you were smiling at him. Two hours of watching his mouth move while you laughed at whatever boring shit he was saying, and the whole time I could smell you from across the street and I knew you were wet under that apron because you’re always wet when I’m within a hundred feet of you.”

He thrusts harder and my breath fogs the glass and my fingers curl against the windowsill and I can see my own reflection in the dark window – flushed and wrecked with him looming behind me, his golden-flecked eyes catching the streetlight over my shoulder.

“Every time you talk to him,” he says, and his hand wraps around my throat from behind – the collar-grip that my body recognizes as ownership – “this is what happens after.” He drives into me so deep that my toes leave the floor and I gasp against the glass and the sound fogs a circle that expands and contracts with every thrust. “Decide if he’s worth it.”

I cum against the window with the driveway below me and his hand on my throat and his name falling out of my mouth in broken syllables that fog the glass with every exhale, and he follows with his teeth on the bite mark he left on my shoulder, refreshing the bruise, renewing the claim, and the warmth that spreads from the bite floods my system the way it did during the shift and I feel the double heartbeat in my chest thump in unison like a lock clicking into place.

He pulls out and turns me around and his thumb wipes the condensation off my bottom lip the way he always does, and his eyes are grey again but ringed with gold at the edges, and he says it quietly enough that it sounds less like a threat and more like a new law of physics.

“You don’t have friends I don’t know about. Not anymore.”