Chapter 12 #2
Here, if I said a system needed a redesigned return line, Tobias said, “Then redesign it.” If I said the cuttlefish needed more enrichment variety, three suppliers had been contacted by the next morning.
If I said the sea snake enclosure would benefit from a different lighting gradient, he had the current system mapped out and ready for adjustment before lunch.
It was amazing.
And I was happy.
Possibly happier than I’d ever been in my entire life.
Every morning, Ben picked me up. Every evening, I left tired and salt-sticky and fulfilled because finally, I felt like I was doing work that mattered.
That finally, the people around me saw my strengths, not just my weaknesses.
* * *
The past week of work at Tobias’s had passed like a dream.
I spent my days in a private aquarium full of rare, venomous, and ridiculously high-maintenance marine animals.
I had an office nicer than any apartment I’d ever lived in.
My boss occasionally made me breakfast with his own hands and then acted like that was no more significant than refilling printer paper.
His personal assistant drove me to and from work every day because of the continuing “security concerns” that, in hindsight, I still didn’t fully understand.
Today, I’d been in the aquarium wing for the last few hours, deep enough that the outside world had become theoretical. That happened a lot in Tobias’s house. There were windows everywhere in the rest of the place, but none at all in there. Time moved differently there.
I typically tried to take care of the other tanks that were around the house first so that I could lose myself completely in the wing for the second part of the day.
I had been recalibrating the feeding schedule for the cuttlefish after noticing she was more responsive in the late afternoon than she had been in the mornings.
That had led to reviewing the enrichment log, which had led to adjusting the observation notes, which had somehow led to me sitting cross-legged on the floor while I watched her change colors every time I shifted my hand.
By the time I finally checked the time, it was later than I’d meant for it to be.
“Shit,” I whispered, then winced toward the cuttlefish tank like she might be offended by that language.
She pulsed orange and cream.
Probably judgment.
I apologized to her, wished her a good rest of the evening, then gathered my tablet, stood, checked that the feeding tools were cleaned and logged, and headed out toward my office to put things away before finding Ben.
The hallway outside the aquarium wing felt different.
At first, I couldn’t figure out why, but then I heard it.
Rain.
Not soft rain. Not the gentle kind that made the world smell clean and made people say things like we needed this.
This was heavy, violent rain, the kind that struck glass hard enough to sound almost like thrown gravel. Wind dragged against the side of the house in long, low bursts, and somewhere beyond the walls, thunder rolled so deeply through the cliffs that I felt it in my ribs before I heard it properly.
The nearest window faced the ocean, and when I stepped closer, the world beyond it looked completely different than it had that morning.
The water was no longer blue or silver but dark iron, broken open by whitecaps and the hard slash of rain.
Clouds had swallowed the horizon. The cliffside below the house disappeared in bursts of mist and spray.
I pressed my lips together and looked down at my phone. There were weather alerts I had missed, as well as two messages from Ben.
Storm’s getting worse. No rush finishing up.
Come find us in the kitchen when you’re done.
I set my tablet in my office, grabbed my bag, then left my office in pursuit of the kitchen.
I found them in the kitchen where Ben stood near the island with his phone in hand, blond hair a little mussed like he’d been running his fingers through it. Tobias stood opposite him, sleeves rolled up again, one hand resting against the counter while he looked at something on Ben’s screen.
They both looked up when I came in.
“There you are,” Ben said.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize how bad it got.”
“You were in the wing,” Tobias replied, as if that explained everything.
Well, I guess it really did.
I glanced toward the wall of glass beyond the kitchen, where rain blurred the ocean into a moving sheet of gray.
“Is it safe to drive?” I asked.
Ben made a face. “Technically? Maybe. Sensibly? No.”
“Tide roads are flooding,” Tobias added. “The lower coastal route is already partially closed.”
Ben set his phone down. “I can get us through if I have to, but I’d rather not play hero in that.”
“No,” Tobias said.
I shifted my weight, fingers tightening around the strap of my bag. “I can call a rideshare or something if that’s easier.”
Both of them looked at me like my suggestion was absurd.
“No,” Tobias said again.
“Absolutely not,” Ben said, shaking his head. “If I’m not driving you out in this, some random bloke named Darren in a Corolla definitely isn’t.”
“Oh, I guess not…”
“Tobias has plenty of rooms,” Ben continued. “You can stay here tonight.”
My brain caught on that sentence and just… stayed there.
Stay here.
Tonight.
In Tobias’s house.
“Um, no, I don’t want to impose,” I said, because apparently my survival instinct was to reject the most practical solution before anyone could accuse me of wanting too much.
“You are not imposing,” Tobias answered.
“It’s really not a problem,” Ben added. “I’ll be staying too.”
I looked between them, then back toward the glass, where lightning flickered somewhere far out over the water and lit the whole kitchen in a brief, cold flash.
Thunder followed several seconds later, deep and grinding.
“Okay,” I said, quieter than I meant to. “If you’re sure.”
“I am,” Tobias replied.
Ben smiled. “Great. Sleepover sorted.”
I didn’t know what to do with the word sleepover in Tobias Kelly’s kitchen, so I pretended I hadn’t heard it.
Dinner happened after that.
Tobias cooked, moving through the kitchen with that same intense precision he brought to everything else, measuring and cutting and stirring like each action had been considered before he performed it.
Ben sat at the island and chatted like this was normal, like Tobias making dinner for us was just something that happened sometimes.
The food was good too, which was starting to feel unfair. Tobias already had wealth, intelligence, cheekbones, a private aquarium, and an unsettling ability to remember every preference I had ever accidentally confessed. He did not also need to be good at cooking.
But he was.
We ate at the kitchen table while the storm battered the glass and the ocean roared beneath the cliff.
Ben carried most of the conversation, telling a story about a charity dinner where an especially drunk woman had tried to impress Tobias by mispronouncing cephalopod three different ways.
Tobias corrected one detail halfway through, followed by Ben correcting his correction.
All in all, it was a nice meal with pleasant conversation.
Afterward, Ben showed me to a guest room.
There was a king-sized bed, a wall of windows looking out toward the storm-black ocean, a sitting area, a desk, a wall-mounted flatscreen, and an attached bathroom with stone tile and an obscenely huge shower and bath.
“This okay?” Ben asked from the doorway.
I turned to stare at him. “Ben.”
He grinned. “I’ll take that as yes.”
“It’s nicer than my entire apartment.”
“I’ll bet.”
I laughed under my breath, overwhelmed, and looking around like I might find a price tag hanging from something.
“Tobias had this one prepared already,” Ben added.
I looked back at him. “Aren’t they all technically prepared? They at least look like it.”
“That they are,” Ben mused. “This one had been set aside for you though. Just in case. For situations like this.”
“Okay..? That was nice of him.” I wasn’t sure why he was speaking like he was trying to tell me something I didn’t know.
Ben’s grin widened. “Rest up, Cove. Text me if you need anything. Tobias’s room is down the hall, but I wouldn’t recommend texting him unless you want him to appear like a summoned demon.”
“What? Does he do that?”
“Yep,” he chuckled, turning to leave.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, watching the storm through the windows. But after a few minutes, I got up and headed to the bathroom.
The shower situation was a problem.
Not because it wasn’t a nice shower, because it definitely was. It looked like something from a luxury spa where people whispered and drank cucumber water.
But the storm was right there.
Logically, I knew showering during a thunderstorm was only risky under incredibly specific conditions, and the odds of anything happening in a house this modern and heavily engineered were probably microscopic.
Tobias’s estate probably had grounding systems that could survive the wrath of several gods.
Still…
Fear wasn’t always interested in engineering.
So I took the fastest shower of my life.
In, wash, rinse, out.
Every time thunder rolled, my shoulders shot toward my ears, and by the time I stepped onto the bath mat, my heart was beating like I’d done something much more dangerous than clean myself.
I quickly dried off, then just stood there checking if I felt any tingling anywhere. Once I’d concluded that I had not, in fact, been electrocuted, I brushed my teeth and headed back into the bedroom.
On the bed were dark blue pajamas, silky and soft-looking, folded with impossible neatness.
As I dropped the towel from around my waist and pulled the pajamas on, the silky material slid over my skin, light enough that I almost felt naked and covered at the same time.
I stood in front of the mirror for a second, face hot, trying not to notice how the fabric hung on me. It fit perfectly. Of course it did.
Everything Tobias arranged fit perfectly.