Chapter 19
Tobias
Nothing was as it had been before, and pretending otherwise would have been an insult to both of us.
Cove no longer moved through the house as though he belonged there by choice.
He no longer entered his office with his bag slipping from one shoulder, easy excitement radiating through his body.
He no longer forgot himself in my presence with the same unguarded ease, no longer turned to me when a thought struck him, no longer looked at me without first remembering that he was meant to be afraid.
But he still looked at the fish.
And that mattered.
It had become our compromise, if such a word could be applied to anything so unequal.
Each morning, after breakfast, after the bathroom, after whatever new argument we had over whether his captivity could be softened enough to stop being considered captivity, which he said it could not, though I continued trying, we would leave the secure room and make our way through the halls toward the aquarium wing.
At first, he had required the cuff.
He still required the cuff.
That was what I told myself, even on mornings when he was too tired or sore to manage more than a slow, resentful limp beside me. The cuff remained because the alternative was risk, and risk had already dragged him to the edge of a cliff once. I would not permit it a second opportunity.
Cove hated the cuff.
He hated it openly, creatively, and without any of the politeness he had once tried to preserve around me.
The first time I fastened it around his wrist, he cursed me out and leveled me with a piercing glare.
The second time, he grunted and huffed and tugged.
The third, he only held out his wrist without looking at me, and that had been worse.
Anger, I could endure.
Quiet compliance disturbed me.
It suggested erosion.
I did not want Cove eroded.
I wanted him adapted, perhaps. Acclimated. Reoriented around the new limitations of his life until he could understand that I was not his enemy, even if I had become his captor.
But not diminished.
Never diminished.
So I gave him the fish.
Not completely, not with the freedom he wanted, but enough that he could breathe easier. Enough that, for a short span each day, he stopped looking like a dead man walking.
He would stand beside the tanks with his cuffed wrist linked to mine, and I would watch him come alive by increments.
The first morning, he had only looked.
He leaned against me more than he wanted to because his ankle still pained him, and he stared at the puffer tank as if the animal had become a friend he had been forbidden to call.
The puffer had rushed the glass the moment Cove entered.
Cove had cried.
Not loudly.
Not in the way he had cried on the cliff or in the room that first night, fractured and frightened beyond language.
This had been quieter, more humiliating to him, I think.
His eyes had filled, his mouth had tightened, and he had looked away quickly, blinking hard as though tears could be dismissed if one refused to acknowledge them.
I did not speak.
That was perhaps the wisest thing I had done that morning.
By the second day, he began asking questions.
By the third, he was muttering under his breath again.
Not as much as before. Not with the full unselfconscious spill of thought that had first drawn me to him.
But enough. Enough that I found myself standing at his side, listening to him talk about feeding responses and environmental enrichment while the cuff chain hung between us like a visible reminder of everything I had broken.
It was not forgiveness.
I was not foolish enough to mistake it for that.
It was survival, perhaps.
Or need.
Or Cove being Cove, unable to stop caring for living things simply because he hated the person who owned them.
I accepted it anyway.
I accepted anything he gave me.
And while the time we spent with the tanks was a balm, a small moment of almost normalcy, the bathroom trips were more complicated.
The shower trips were worse.
By then, I had acquired a proper crutch, which Cove used mostly to prove he did not need my assistance, despite the fact that he moved far slower with it than he would have with his hand on my arm.
I did not point that out. I had learned, painfully and repeatedly, that not every true statement was useful when spoken aloud.
For showers, I removed the cuff.
There was no practical way around it, and even I could recognize that attempting to keep him restrained while he bathed would cross a line too far beyond the one I was already standing on.
Instead, I uncuffed him outside the bathroom attached to his office, let him step inside alone, and kept the door cracked open as a condition of the privilege.
He despised that condition.
I understood why.
The first time, he had stood in the bathroom doorway, his face flushed with anger and humiliation, one hand gripping the edge of the door so tightly that his knuckles went stark white.
“You are not watching me shower,” he had said, gritting his teeth.
“I won’t.”
“Because if I find out you are—”
“I will not watch.”
He had stared at me for a long time, trying to decide whether he believed that, and eventually must have decided either that he did or that arguing would not change anything, because he had stepped inside and pushed the door nearly closed, leaving the required gap between the frame and the edge of the wood.
I had stood outside with my back to the wall, hands clasped tightly enough behind me that my fingers became sore, and listened to the water turn on.
I had intended not to look.
I had meant that when I said it.
The intention had lasted until the third shower.
Perhaps that made me weak, or, perhaps it made me exactly what I was.
The sound of water against tile had filled the office as I stood at Cove’s desk, reviewing the puffer’s feeding log because he’d insisted the prior day that his behavior indicated boredom rather than appetite irregularity, when movement through the crack in the bathroom door caught at the edge of my vision.
I looked before I could help myself.
Not fully.
Not in a way that gave me enough detail to justify the guilt that followed, though guilt was not precisely the word.
It was not moral discomfort—I had little talent for that.
It was the knowledge that Cove had given me one boundary he still believed I might respect, and I had failed it by the smallest possible increment.
Still, I looked.
A flash of pale skin blurred by steam.
The sharp curve of a shoulder.
Copper hair darkened by water and gathered over one side of his delicate neck.
His freckled and lean arm lifted as he rinsed shampoo from his hair, movement fluid and unguarded because he believed, or wanted to believe, that he was alone enough for that.
The sight entered me and rearranged something.
I looked away, but for the rest of that day, I was aware of him in a way I had not been before.
Not merely as a mind I wanted to observe, a creature I wanted to keep, or a presence whose proximity altered the temperature of the house.
I had always found Cove beautiful; that had been obvious from the first morning I saw him, hair adorned with small silver sea creatures, freckles scattered like a map over pale skin.
But beauty had been aesthetic then, collectible, rare.
This was different.
This was lower, warmer.
It moved through me in a slow, unfamiliar current, disorienting precisely because it had no system I understood.
I had never been a man ruled by sexual appetite.
I had seen the way desire made other people foolish, how they bent themselves around bodies, fantasies, chemical imperatives they mistook for destiny. It had always struck me as inconvenient. Useful in others, at times, but rarely admirable.
My own interests had been narrow, precise, and largely untouched by that particular hunger.
Until the shower.
Or perhaps the hunger had always been there, dormant until it found an object worthy of its attention.
That thought unsettled me less than it should have. What truly unsettled me was that I did not know what to do with it.
I wanted to touch him.
Not only to restrain him, or guide him, or steady his injured ankle when he forgot to favor it.
I wanted to touch the damp strands of hair curling against his throat.
I wanted to trace the freckles disappearing beneath his clothes.
I wanted to feel his pulse beneath my thumb without the excuse of checking his injuries.
And because I wanted it, I did not.
Restraint, I had discovered, was easier when the desired outcome remained abstract.
It was another thing entirely to stand beside Cove in the aquarium wing while he leaned close to the glass, cuff chain stretched between us, his voice still rough from disuse and anger as he explained that the morays were not eating poorly; they were simply responding to a shift in feeding time that had disrupted the anticipatory pattern.
“You’re staring,” he said without looking at me.
I had been.
“Yes.”
His eyes flicked toward me then, wary and irritated. “You’re not supposed to admit that.”
“Lying would insult your intelligence.”
He paused, and then the corner of his mouth had twitched.
It was gone almost immediately, swallowed by remembered anger, but I saw it.
I collected that almost-smile and kept it close.
“You’re impossible,” he’d muttered.
“I have been described as difficult.”
“By people who were being polite?”
“By Ben.”
“Then definitely polite.”
I did not smile, but something eased in my chest.