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.
