He snorted. “Someone might almost think you give a fuck.”
“I do,” I said. “I keep trying to tell you. I don’t want this to be miserable for you. Training is just… hard.”
“I don’t get it, man,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if I was encouraged by the conversation or not. “You’re still rich as fuck, right? Why couldn’t you have just… found someone who wants to be here?”
I laughed, bitter and harsh, and gestured to my face. “Do you really need to ask that question?”
“Yeah, but… People are superficial.” He didn’t look at me when he said it. “They probably wouldn’t care if you waved a lot of money around.”
“You’re right,” I told him. “That’s the problem. They wouldn’t care.”
He fell silent, but he got up, moving to the dog bed and sitting back down. “Why me?” he asked, finally getting around to the question I’d been waiting for.
“It wasn’t you in particular,” I said. “I asked for someone like you. Just… the luck of the draw, I guess.”
“Yeah,” he drawled. “I’m so fucking lucky.”
I sighed. There had been a moment in there when I’d felt like I’d been making progress, but we had gone and broken it. Now here we were, back to this, and the pang felt sharper than ever. The loneliness was eating away at me, and seeing him there — so close, yet so far — only made it worse.
“It’s time for exercise,” I said instead of trying to continue the conversation. I headed back to the boxes, digging out the knee pads I’d bought. I’d tried to think ofeverything, just for him… or someone like him, who was equally scared and angry.
He eyed the pads, shaking his head. “I don’t get you,” he said. “You’re like… this kinda nice guy, then you go and do all this pervy stuff.”
“Join the club,” I muttered. I didn’t understand it either. All I knew was that… “I want a companion,” I said abruptly. “Not a slave. I don’t want you to hate me. I want…”
“You want what you can’t have,” he said as I trailed off.
I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. But I don’t have much choice but to try. The alternatives aren’t any better.” I met his eyes. “I could leave you down here and just keep you fed and give you water for the rest of your life. I could sell you into the trade that snatched you up.”
He shuddered, shaking his head quickly.
“This is the least of the evils,” I said softly. “You’ll understand that eventually.”
“Yeah, well. It doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“No,” I agreed. “And it doesn’t mean I have to like that you aren’t here by choice, either. But these are the cards we’ve been dealt, and all we can do is play them.”
19
Ryder
This was seriously fucking with my head.
How was I supposed to deal with all of this? I kept going back to what I knew about him and what he’d done before the accident — then to what he’d done to me. It just didn’t make sense. Had the fire really damaged him that much? Had it screwed him up so badly he really thought this was the only way he’d ever get a… acompanion?
Christ, it sounded like a horror movie gone bad: villain really just wants to be loved.
But it also sounded more and more like the truth. I couldn’t say I understood his methods in the fucking slightest — or that I liked them at all — but it was starting to be harder to hate him.
“Anyway,” he said after the awkward silence passed, “let’s get these on you before you exercise.” He sounded half-hearted.
“Can I not today?” I tried.
He sighed. “You have to get used to crawling, and I havethe knee pads for you. C’mon, Toby. Just a little bit, my good boy.”
Usually I’d have snapped that I wasn’t his good boy, but I was realizing the things I ordinarily said weren’t going to have an impact at all on a man who was this delusional. We’d already more than established that he wasn’t going to give up on this and that there wasn’t fuck-all I could do about it.
Which left us here.
