Chapter 22
Cove
In the weeks after Tobias murdered a man and then kidnapped me, the strangest change was not even in my own behavior, but in his.
He had always been a difficult person to figure out, but something about the act—about what came after—seemed to have jarred loose a component of him that now threatened to breach the surface.
It was almost as if he wanted to be liked.
Not in any normal sense. Normal was a category Tobias had always failed to qualify for, even before he’d become, for all intents and purposes, my jailer. But there were moments, often in the long stretches of enforced proximity that constituted my days in the aquarium wing, when he started talking.
Really talking.
He had been initiating conversations more often, not just asking about the tanks or whether I needed anything, but offering pieces of himself in return. Odd but interesting pieces, usually.
Tobias pieces.
I’d learned that he’d created his first popular app at the age of twenty-two, and that he’d gotten his first aquatic animal when he was nine—a mantis shrimp. I wasn’t sure if giving a nine-year-old a mantis shrimp as his first pet said more about his parents or him.
Possibly both.
He’d never learned how to ride a bike, but he could operate a small aircraft if need be. He avoided eating bananas because of the stringy bits on the inside of the peel. And he had refused LASIK surgery because he just preferred wearing glasses.
He’d also made a point of questioning me about home, and about American culture in general.
Some of his questions required me to really think before answering them, to ask myself my own questions.
I’d started to enjoy those. And then there were the others.
Why do you put cheese on everything? What is the deal with “pumpkin spice”?
The effect was cumulative. I began to suspect he was collecting data for some purpose, but I could never tell if the purpose was to torment me, to amuse himself, or to actually understand. Probably some combination of all three.
I missed the point, often, with humans. Especially humans who were actively trying to manipulate me. So it was hard to say when, exactly, I realized that Tobias’s strategy was not about manipulating me in the traditional sense, but about getting me to see him.
There was a hunger in the way he sought my approval and interest that made me queasy.
It was like he thought every small piece might be enough to compensate for the enormous, unfixable breach of trust at the core of our relationship.
That was not how breaches worked. I knew that.
But he kept offering these pieces up, and I kept taking them, and eventually I started to feel like it was my responsibility to acknowledge the gesture, if not the intention.
On the days when I allowed myself to be honest, my resentment became something else—a kind of longing, not for freedom, but for a world where this would be uncomplicated. I tried to hate myself for it, but mostly I just hated that Tobias made it impossible to hate him properly.
It was almost worse when the details were normal.
Not normal normal, obviously, because nothing about Tobias explaining that bananas were texturally offensive with the same gravity someone else might use to discuss tax fraud was truly normal.
But they were human details, irritatingly specific little pieces of him that made it harder to keep him in the neat mental category of killer holding me captive, which was where I preferred him for… reasons.
Of course, just as I started thinking that all of his human pieces potentially could add up to one whole person, he would say something so strange that the entire conversation slammed sideways and left me gaping for purchase.
The Puff Daddy incident was a perfect example.
I was watching the puffer perform his daily routine of following my finger along the glass. Tobias stood beside me, close enough that I could feel his attention more than his body, which had also become a problem lately because his attention had somehow gained temperature.
“There you are,” I murmured, letting my fingertip drift slowly along the outside of the tank. “There’s my Puff Daddy.”
The puffer fluttered after the movement, round and ridiculous and absolutely fucking perfect.
Tobias was silent for several seconds, then said, “I find that a strange nickname.”
I glanced over briefly before returning my attention to the cutest ball of fish known to man. “I know. You’ve made it clear.”
He looked back at the tank, his brows drawn together in faint concentration. “Why do you call him Daddy?”
My finger stopped on the glass.
The puffer bumped his little face toward it like he was also invested in the answer.
I turned my head very slowly. “What?”
Tobias looked at me with perfect seriousness, which, as usual, made the entire thing worse. “You call him Puff Daddy,” he said. “I understand the first half, as he is a pufferfish. The second half is less clear.”
I stared at him. “Tobias.”
“Yes?”
“Please tell me you know who Puff Daddy is.”
“I know now that it is apparently a name associated with a person.”
“Oh, my God.”
“I researched it.”
“Of course you did.”
“But that does not answer my question.”
I looked back at the puffer, who was now hovering near the glass with a face that, if I were being generous, could be called curious, but if I were being accurate, looked like he wanted me to explain why I had stopped entertaining him.
“It’s just a nickname,” I said. “It’s a pun. A cultural reference. A very stupid one, admittedly, but still. It’s just something I came up with on my first day working here, and it stuck.”
“The cultural reference does not fully eliminate the other implication.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What other implication?”
Tobias’s gaze shifted to mine, and for once, there was something almost cautious in his expression. Which should have been my warning to shut up and move on.
Unfortunately, I was me.
“Tobias,” I said slowly, “what exactly are you asking me?”
“I have learned that Daddy can be sexual terminology.”
My face went so hot it was a miracle the glass in front of me did not fog over. “I’m sorry,” I sputtered. “You’ve learned?”
“Yes.”
“Like recently?”
“Yes.”
“From where?” I asked, picturing Tobias on some hookup app and a horde of twinks in his inbox addressing him as Daddy.
He paused. “It doesn’t matter. I was only attempting to clarify whether you were using the term in a sexual context.”
“For the fish?”
“When said plainly, I understand the improbability.”
“You understand the—Tobias.” I turned toward him fully, the cuff chain giving a little metallic clink between us. “No. I am not calling the pufferfish Daddy in a sexual context.”
“Right. Good.”
“Good?”
“Yes. That would be concerning.”
I stared at him for another second, a laugh trying to crawl up my throat. I tried to stop it, but it came out anyway, small and startled and stupid.
Tobias went very still.
I immediately regretted it, not because laughing was wrong, but because of the way he looked at me when it happened.
“You’re impossible,” I muttered, swiveling to stare at the tank instead of at him.
“I asked a reasonable clarifying question.”
“You asked if I was sexually attracted to a pufferfish.”
“I did not phrase it that way.”
“That’s exactly what you meant.”
He blinked. “It really wasn’t.”
I snorted. “Sure.”
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. There were other incursions—unexpected, like a foot kicking in the door of our conversation.
One morning, he wanted to know whether I preferred praise served bluntly or if explicit admiration made me cringe.
Another time, he asked point-blank about my sexuality and looked almost pleased when I admitted I didn’t care about my partner’s gender.
Then he studied me with mock-academic intensity, quizzing whether the word “precious” bothered me because of its sound or because of the context he’d used it.
So yes, Tobias was acting weird. But the strangest part was that it no longer set off warning bells.
Sometimes it was absurd, sometimes it made my skin crawl, and sometimes it felt like he was just fumbling toward a part of me he’d never sought to understand before, and each question knotted a new ache in my chest.
He’d never been casual about anything. If he needed to master a filtration system, he’d devour every diagram until he could argue with experts.
If he wanted to decode my routines, he’d watch my movements then memorize them.
And when he tried to get to know me, he lobbed questions so direct that I teetered on the edge of panic.
Now he was trying to, apparently, understand desire.
Or sex.
Or whatever word you pinned to that thrum in my throat.
I had thought being wanted by him would feel like another kind of danger, and it did, but it was a type of danger I had a track record with.
Being wanted by Tobias felt like watching something lethal move behind glass, and feeling the all-consuming urge to bypass the glass just to exist in close proximity to something so captivating, despite the danger it posed to you.
It felt like the dream I kept pretending I had forgotten.
The underwater one.
The one where I was inside a tank, and Tobias stood outside it with his hand pressed to the glass, looking at me like he was captivated by me.
It kept coming back at inconvenient times, especially when I would catch his reflection in the glass of a tank, and my stomach would drop because dream-Tobias and real-Tobias overlapped too closely for comfort.
Real Tobias was worse.
Real Tobias had hands.
Real Tobias had a voice.
Real Tobias could leave me speechless.
One afternoon, Tobias stood beside me in front of the cuttlefish’s aquarium.
“That,” I said softly, “is exactly why she needed the new enrichment.”