Chapter 19 #2
We stood before the moray system that afternoon, the tank casting wavering light over Cove’s face while he rested his weight on the crutch and kept his cuffed hand low between us.
His ankle had improved enough that he could stand longer, though I monitored every shift of his posture.
He noticed, because he noticed everything eventually, and had started glaring whenever my gaze dropped to his foot.
“I’m fine, Tobias. Stop staring at my feet.”
“You nearly fell off a cliff just days ago.”
“You keep bringing that up as if I did it for fun.”
“You ran toward it.”
“I was panicking because you killed someone.”
“Yes,” I said. “I recall.”
His jaw popped, and for a moment I thought I had ruined the fragile thread of conversation, but then he sighed through his nose and looked back at the tank.
“I hate when you do that.”
“What?”
“Say awful things like they’re normal.”
“They are normal to me.”
“That is not better, Tobias.”
“No,” I admitted. “I suppose it is not.”
Cove looked at me then, longer than he had intended.
I felt the difference. I always did.
His attention had changed over the past few week, not softened exactly, but shifted.
Fear remained, anger remained, and betrayal had not lessened, but something else had begun moving beneath it, something I think he resented too much to name.
He watched me sometimes as if trying to reconcile two incompatible animals sharing the same skin—the man who had frightened him to death and the man who brought him coffee and fussed over his bandages; the killer and the caretaker; the captor and the one who stood silently beside him for half an hour because the puffer made him feel less alone.
I did not know which version he would choose to see when the time came.
Perhaps all of them.
Perhaps that was the only way this could become honest.
His gaze returned to the moray tank.
“I used to free-dive,” he said suddenly, quiet enough that I almost thought I had imagined it.
I turned my head to find him looking forward, his eyes tracking the movement of one moray easing through the rockwork, its body appearing and disappearing through shadow.
“In California?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He shifted the crutch beneath his arm, wincing faintly before smoothing the expression away.
“Not, like, competitively or anything. I just liked it. There were places near home where I could go out early when the water was calm, and everything felt…” He trailed off, searching for the right word with a small frown between his brows.
“Quiet, I guess. But not empty quiet. More like all the noise got filtered into something I could understand.”
I knew better than to speak too quickly.
Cove was offering me something.
Not forgiveness.
Not trust.
Something smaller and perhaps more dangerous because it had emerged before he could fully censor himself.
So I waited.
He continued after a moment, voice lower.
“I haven’t gone since getting to Australia.
Which is stupid, considering, you know, it’s Australia.
But I didn’t have gear at first, and then I was busy, and then I didn’t really know people well enough to go with anyone, and you’re not supposed to free-dive alone.
” His mouth twisted. “At least, you really shouldn’t. ”
“No,” I agreed, uncomfortable at the idea of him doing just that. “You should not.”
He glanced at me. “Don’t sound so intense about it.”
“You just told me you have a history of entering the ocean and voluntarily limiting your access to air.”
“That’s certainly one way to describe free-diving if your goal is to make it sound horrifying.”
“It is accurate.”
He shrugged. “It’s also beautiful.”
I watched him as he said it.
The change was immediate.
Not dramatic, not obvious enough for most people to catch, but there in the slight unfurling of his posture, the shift of focus from the room around him to some memory of water I could not see.
His face altered when he spoke of being beneath the surface.
The lingering fear did not completely disappear, but it stepped back from him for a moment, replaced by that same immersion I had first seen what felt like a lifetime ago.
He was never more himself than when speaking of water.
“What’s beautiful about it?” I asked.
His brows lifted faintly, like he had not expected the question to be sincere. “It feels honest,” he said.
Honest.
Of all the words he could have chosen.
I remained silent.
Cove noticed, and a bitter awareness crossed his face. “I know. Weird word choice right now.”
“No,” I said. “I understand.”
He laughed without humor. “Really? Do you?”
“Yes.”
His eyes moved back to me, skeptical and tired. “Okay. Then explain.”
A test.
Or a challenge.
Perhaps both.
I looked into the tank, watching the moray’s slow passage through stone and shadow.
“Underwater, the body cannot pretend it does not require limits,” I said. “There is no illusion of infinite choice. Breath becomes measurable. Movement has a cost. Panic is punished immediately, and calm becomes necessary rather than ornamental. That seems honest to me.”
Cove glanced at me. “Yeah,” he said, so quietly I nearly missed it. “That’s… actually kind of exactly it.”
The words entered me with disproportionate force.
I had gotten something right.
Not by manipulation. Not by force. Not by arranging the environment until the desired response became inevitable.
I had understood him, and he had admitted it.
“I learned to swim late,” I said quickly, making his head turn back toward me, a look of surprise on his face.
“You?”
“Yes, me.”
“You live in an aquarium mansion on a cliff overlooking the ocean.”
“Well, that came later.”
“Still. I would’ve thought you were one of those rich kids who got thrown into private swim lessons at age three.”
“I was offered lessons,” I said. “I refused them.”
“Why?”
I considered the question.
There were several answers, each true in a different way.
Because I disliked being instructed by strangers.
Because the instructors were loud and imprecise.
Because my parents believed competence was a public performance, and I resented giving them another one to display.
Because I did not trust water then, not when it touched without permission and wound around the body in ways that could not be negotiated with.
“Because I disliked being watched while learning,” I said finally.
“Oh. So when did you learn?” he asked curiously.
“When I was fourteen. Alone, mostly.”
“That sounds unsafe.”
“It was.”
He gave me a look.
A real one—annoyed, disapproving, and familiar.
“Tobias,” he admonished.
My name in his mouth did something to me I did not understand how to contain.
“It was a long time ago,” I said.
“That doesn’t make it less stupid.”
“No.”
“And now you’re all intense about me free-diving.”
“I am intense about many things.”
“No kidding.”
The corner of his mouth moved again, more reluctant this time, but still there. It lasted perhaps two seconds, but I would remember it for far longer.
“Why alone?” he asked, and then seemed to regret the question immediately. His expression shuttered, as though he had forgotten he was angry with me and resented the lapse. “You don’t have to answer that.”
“I know.”
I looked back at the tank because looking at him too directly felt suddenly perilous. Not because he might run. Not because he might cry. But because I wanted him, and I did not yet know what form of wanting could exist in a room with captivity at one end and conversation at the other.
“I learned alone because failure is easier without an audience,” I said.
Cove went quiet, and after a moment, he murmured, “Yeah. I get that.”
Cove understood things he had no business understanding about me, often by accident.
Most people mistook my control for strength, my wealth for power, my stillness for superiority.
Cove, even frightened and furious, saw the cracks because he understood what it meant to be watched too closely while trying not to fail.
Perhaps that was why I had wanted him in my collection from the beginning.
Not because he was easy to keep, but because he could see the tank from both sides of the glass.
“You miss it,” I said.
“Free-diving?”
“Yes.”
He looked into the water again, and the longing on his face was so clear that it pained me.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I do.”
“I can arrange it.”
His head snapped back toward me. “No.”
“I have coastline.”
“That is not the issue.”
“I have equipment.”
“That is also not the issue.”
“I can acquire instructors.”
“I don’t need instructors.”
“Dive partners, then.”
“No,” he said, sharper now, and the softness from moments before vanished beneath the return of alarm. “Fuck… No, Tobias. You don’t get to arrange ocean outings for the person you are currently keeping locked up.”
He was right.
The correction landed with the force of a door closing.
“I apologize.”
Cove looked startled by how quickly I said it.
Then suspicious.
Then tired.
“Don’t make it sound so easy.”
“It is not easy.”
“Then why do you keep doing it?”
“Apologizing?”
“No.” He lifted his cuffed wrist a fraction, the chain swaying between us. “This. Acting like we can have normal conversations and then casually offering me pieces of the world while keeping the rest of it locked away.”
I followed the chain’s movement. There were no marks beneath the cuff anymore. I had checked obsessively, to the point that Cove had snapped at me about it several times. Still, the metal looked obscene against his skin.
“Because I don’t know how to do this correctly,” I confessed.
“That’s not an excuse.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You keep saying things that sound like excuses and then agreeing with me when I call them out.”
“I am not attempting to excuse myself.”
“Then what are you doing?”
I looked at him.
His hair was loose around his face because he had refused to let me braid it and refused to let Ben bring him any of the clips from his bag. The cuff connected us. The tanks surrounded us. The house held him because I had decided it must.
And despite all of that, he had asked.
Not why did you kill him? Not when will you let me go?
But what are you doing?
“I am trying to keep you,” I said quietly before cringing at how it sounded. “That came out incorrectly.”
“No,” he said. “I think it came out exactly right.”
“Cove—”
“You’re trying to keep me.”
“Yes,” I said, because lying would be worse and honesty, however brutal, had become the only remaining thread I could offer. “But not as an object.”
He laughed, hollow and disbelieving. “You have got to be kidding.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“You handcuffed me to you so I could look at fish.”
“I can’t risk you running away again.”
“Sure, sure. And you’re telling me this isn’t objectifying?”
“I am telling you that the word is insufficient.”
His eyes narrowed. “That is the most Tobias answer you could’ve possibly given.”
“I want you alive,” I said. “I want you safe. I want you here. I want you to stop looking at me as though I am going to kill you when killing you has never been, and will never be, a possibility I am capable of even considering.”
His throat moved.
I did not step closer.
I wanted to.
I did not.
“And I want,” I continued, each word requiring more control than the last, “to find a way for you to exist in this house without any restraints.”
Cove stared at me for a long time before saying, “I was.”
The words were quiet.
No anger this time.
That made them worse.
I had no answer.
Silence was the only honest response I had left.
Cove looked away first, back to the tank, back to the animals he loved with a purity that made my own wanting look all the more monstrous by contrast.
After a while, he said, “The morays need their feeding schedule shifted back by twenty minutes.”
The conversation had been closed.
Not resolved.
Closed.
I accepted that too.
“Very well,” I said.
He sighed, but there was no real heat in it.
“Don’t say it like that.”
“How should I say it?”
“Like a normal person.”
“I have been informed I am not one.”
“Try anyway.”
I looked at him, at the stubborn line of his mouth and the lingering wetness in his eyes he would never admit to, and felt a yearning so strong that it physically hurt me to not take him into my arms.
“Okay.”
“Good,” Cove muttered.
And for the next twenty minutes, while Cove explained the adjustment he wanted made and why Ben was undeserving of caring for his animals, I stood beside him, desire moving under my skin like a new and dangerous current, and listened as though listening might become, if done perfectly enough, a form of repentance.