Chapter 18 #2
“That’s not what I meant,” I groaned, looking away. “It doesn’t matter. I need the bathroom.”
“Yes, of course,” he said quickly. “I can take you to your office bathroom. If you can walk.”
I laughed under my breath. “If I can walk?”
“If you cannot, I will carry you.”
My eyes snapped to him. “No.”
“I said if.”
“No.”
“Then I will support you.”
“No.”
His mouth tightened, but he did not move. “You should not put weight on that ankle without assistance.”
“I’m not letting you carry me.”
“I understand.”
“I’m not letting you touch me.”
He closed his eyes briefly, not in annoyance, but more something that looked like restraint. “Then Ben can assist you.”
“I don’t want Ben touching me either.”
“I will have Ben bring a crutch,” he said. “Or something close enough to function as one until I can acquire a proper set.”
“I—fine, whatever.”
Tobias looked at me, and I felt the dream again with sudden, nauseating clarity—his hand on the other side of the glass, his eyes full of reverence, the barrier between us cold and transparent and impossible.
This was the barrier.
When I said nothing more, he lowered his gaze to the tray. “Please eat something while I get what you need.”
“Stop saying please like it makes this polite.”
His eyes lifted back to mine. “I am not trying to be polite.”
“What are you trying to be?”
His hand flexed against the doorframe, fingers long and tense, and I wondered if he was thinking about the same dream I was, which was impossible because it had been mine, and then I wondered if there was a camera feed of me sleeping with my hand pressed to the wall.
When he finally spoke, his voice was almost too quiet to carry. “Careful.”
With that, he stepped back, closing the door behind him.
I sat there with my wrapped ankle throbbing, my wrists tender under their bandages, my chest still aching with the memory of water and glass and Tobias looking at me like I was something holy in a tank built to keep me.
Then my stomach growled loudly.
I ate because I was hungry, because I needed strength, because refusing food would not unlock the door, and because spite required energy.
Not because Tobias brought it.
Not because he asked.
Not because some terrible part of me remembered the dream and the worship in his eyes and wanted, against all reason, to understand why this was hurting him too.
* * *
By the time I finished in the bathroom, I was in an even worse mood.
Which was impressive, considering where the bar had started.
Tobias had not found a crutch.
Or, apparently, anything “sufficiently stable” to use as a temporary one, because of course he couldn’t just hand me a damn broom and let me hobble ten feet with my dignity barely intact.
No, everything had to be assessed, judged, and rejected according to whatever internal Tobias Kelly standard existed for acceptable emergency mobility equipment, which meant that after several minutes of waiting and several more minutes of me refusing—vehemently, repeatedly, with increasing creativity—to use the camping toilet in the corner, the final solution had been Tobias assisting me to the bathroom.
Assisting.
That was the word he used.
As if he hadn’t put one arm around my waist and let me grip his forearm while I limped through the hall with all the elegance of a newborn deer recovering from a bar fight.
I hated that I needed him.
I hated that his arm had been steady.
I hated that he hadn’t said a single thing about the way I leaned on him more heavily than I wanted to whenever my ankle sent a sharp burst of pain up my leg.
Most of all, I hated that he had been careful in exactly the right way.
Not too close, not too forceful, not dragging me or rushing me or treating my irritation like something he needed to correct.
He had let me set the pace even though every line of his body seemed strained by the desire to simply lift me into his arms and be done with it.
Then we had reached the bathroom, and somehow the situation had managed to get worse.
Because Tobias had handcuffed me for the bathroom trip.
Technically, one wrist was cuffed to a short length of chain connected to his own hand, which he had explained with the kind of awful calm that made me want to bite him, but the distinction did not matter when I was standing outside my office bathroom staring at polished tile.
“I am not going to run,” I had hissed.
“You ran last night.”
“Because there was a body.”
“Yes,” he’d said, like that did not undermine his point at all.
The argument had gone nowhere, and then Tobias had given me two choices in a voice that was far too level for a conversation about my bodily autonomy.
I could pee standing with more of his assistance, since the cuff situation made closing the door impossible unless I wanted him in there with me.
Or I could sit down, and he would remain outside with the door cracked.
I had stared at him for several seconds, waiting for the universe to reveal that it had a hidden camera and a terrible sense of humor.
It did not.
So I chose sitting, because absolutely no part of me was emotionally prepared to have Tobias Kelly “assist” with anything involving my dick while I was angry, injured, kidnapped, and still wearing yesterday’s mismatched socks.
Now I was at the sink, washing my hands with the door cracked behind me and Tobias standing on the other side like the world’s most unsettling bathroom attendant.
The cuff chain stretched through the gap.
If I ever survived this, I was going to become a hermit.
With no aquariums owned by billionaires, no private security gates, no men with complicated eyes, and absolutely no luxury bathroom surveillance adjacent hostage nonsense.
“You’re quiet,” Tobias said from the other side of the door.
“I am literally in the bathroom.”
“I am aware.”
“Then maybe just shut up?”
He said nothing after that, which should have been satisfying, except I could still feel him there.
Not in a creepy way, exactly, though the circumstances were doing a lot of heavy lifting.
More like his presence had weight, and even a half-open door was not enough to keep it from pressing against the room.
I dried my hands one-handed, awkwardly and with resentment, then glanced at myself in the mirror.
I looked terrible.
Not romantically terrible. Not beautifully fragile in the way people looked in movies after surviving traumatic events.
I looked puffy-eyed, exhausted, and ghastly pale under my freckles.
My hair had dried in weird, uneven waves around my face, and the bandages on my wrists made me look exactly like what I was—someone who had fought hard enough to be restrained.
The sight made the anger flare again.
Good.
Anger was easier than the ache in my chest.
The ache was still there, quieter now but not gone, curled beneath my sternum like a secret I had no interest in examining.
I could still remember the dream too clearly.
The water. The glass. Tobias’s hand pressed to the other side.
The look on his face like I was something holy and trapped and loved in a way that had nowhere safe to go.
I looked away from my reflection.
Nope.
Not doing that.
“I’m done,” I said.
The door opened a little more, and Tobias’s gaze flicked over me immediately, checking my face, my posture, my wrapped ankle, and the way my weight favored the uninjured side.
“You should have told me if standing was painful,” he said.
“It was fine. It’s okay as long as I don’t put my full weight on it.”
His mouth tightened, but he did not argue. Instead, he adjusted the cuff chain with careful fingers and shifted beside me so I could take his forearm again without having to ask.
That was another thing I hated.
He knew how to make it easier for me not to ask.
I considered refusing out of principle, but my ankle gave a warning throb the second I took one experimental step, and I decided principle could go ahead and shit in the bathroom with the rest of my dignity.
I gripped his arm, and Tobias went very still for half a second, like even this much contact had to be absorbed before he could move.
Then he guided me back into the hall.
The house outside my office looked the same as always, which made me feel miserable. Soft light along the baseboards. Cool air carrying the faint smell of saltwater and clean stone.
“What is it?” he asked, so softly that for a moment I wondered if he even meant for me to hear it, or if he had been talking to himself, a rhetorical inquiry addressed to the problem of me—a living equation that resisted solution.
I did not answer. Not at once. I simply stood, staring down the corridor, immobilized by the faintest blue radiance pooling on the cold stone at the far turn.
In that light, the house seemed to exhale in relief, as if it had been waiting all night for someone to notice the breach in its rhythm, and now, at last, the circuit would be closed.
I felt the tug in my chest, an ache so sudden and expansive that I almost gasped.
The fish.
The systems.
The morning checks, the daily rounds, the feeding notes with their careful abbreviations and amendments.
The animals who had no idea, who would never know, that the world beyond their tanks had shifted on its axis, that the hands tending them now belonged to a person who was not permitted to decide if they ever saw the sunlight again.
They would not care. They needed stability, chemistry, clean water, predicable cycles of light and dark, not the emotional turbulence of the thing that stood outside their glass and warred silently with itself.