I leaned closer.
The appeal unfolded with sudden, startling clarity.
Not the toy itself, but the response.
The capacity to give sensation while watching it move through someone else. The ability to learn, to adjust, to hold another person at the edge of what they could bear and then decide whether to soften or intensify based entirely on what their body asks for.
A service, perhaps.
A study, yes.
A devotion, absolutely.
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.
Notnormalnormal, 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 ofkiller 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.”
