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.
