His brows drew together. “Then what changed?”
“Everything changes every five seconds, Tobias. I imagine that’s how most kidnappings are.”
“I—You are right,” he answered.
“I swear to God, if you agree with me one more time while continuing to do the thing I’m criticizing, I’m going to lose my ever-loving mind.”
His gaze held mine. “I don’t know how to fix this without risking losing you.”
“You already lost me.”
“No,” he said.
The quiet certainty in his voice made my chest hurt.
I turned back to him. “You don’t get to decide that.”
“No,” he agreed. “But I can refuse to accept it.”
I closed my eyes for a second, breathing through the mess of anger and fear and unwanted heat that had become my entire nervous system. When I opened them, Tobias was still watching me, but he had put more distance between us.
Not much, but enough that I knew it was deliberate.
“You’re doing it again,” I said.
“What?”
“Trying to be careful.”
“Would you prefer I not be?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” I pressed the heel of my uncuffed hand against my forehead. “That’s the problem. I don’t know what I want from you, except that I want to go home, and apparently that’s the only thing I can’t have.”
He said nothing because there was nothing good for him to say.
21
Tobias
I noticed when Cove began noticing me.
I had become fluent in the smallest details of him after half a year of studying him; the minute shifts of his posture, the direction of his attention, the places his eyes went when he did not intend them to. It’d started, of course, back at his old workplace, before even our first conversation. Slowly, through the process of getting closer to him, inviting him here, and then having him here, it’d become a second language to me.
Confining him may have caused a hiccup in our evolving relationship, but it provided me with a wealth of new reactions and new emotions to examine.
At first, his awareness of me had been entirely defensive as he watched my movements for any sign of impending attack, the distance between his body and mine, and searched my eyes for answers to his impossible questions.
Now, however, there were moments when his gaze changed.
I saw it when I uncuffed him, and his eyes flicked down to my fingers before he pulled his wrist back. I saw it when I stood near him in the aquarium wing, and he leaned toward the warmth of my body before remembering to resent it. I saw it most clearly after his showers, when he stepped out of his office bathroom, damp heat clinging to him, hair darkened, sounding slightly petulant when I kept my gaze from wandering.
He first noticed my restraint.
Then he noticed the reason for it.
The first time his breath changed, I thought I had imagined it. I replayed the moment later and determined I had not.
There were still arguments, silences, and stretches where Cove curled in on himself inside his unfortunate concrete prison and refused to speak to me except to ask for water, a bathroom break, or time with the tanks. There were still mornings when he looked at me as though he wished his hatred were strong enough to make me disappear.
