“For the fish?”
“When said plainly, I understand the improbability.”
“You understand the—Tobias.” I turned toward him fully, the cuff chain giving a little metallic clink between us. “No. I am not calling the pufferfish Daddy in a sexual context.”
“Right. Good.”
“Good?”
“Yes. That would be concerning.”
I stared at him for another second, a laugh trying to crawl up my throat. I tried to stop it, but it came out anyway, small and startled and stupid.
Tobias went very still.
I immediately regretted it, not because laughing was wrong, but because of the way he looked at me when it happened.
“You’re impossible,” I muttered, swiveling to stare at the tank instead of at him.
“I asked a reasonable clarifying question.”
“You asked if I was sexually attracted to a pufferfish.”
“I did not phrase it that way.”
“That’s exactly what you meant.”
He blinked. “It really wasn’t.”
I snorted. “Sure.”
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. There were other incursions—unexpected, like a foot kicking in the door of our conversation.
One morning, he wanted to know whether I preferred praise served bluntly or if explicit admiration made me cringe. Another time, he asked point-blank about my sexuality and looked almost pleased when I admitted I didn’t care about my partner’s gender. Then he studied me with mock-academic intensity, quizzing whether the word “precious”bothered me because of its sound or because of the context he’d used it.
So yes, Tobias was acting weird. But the strangest part was that it no longer set off warning bells. Sometimes it was absurd, sometimes it made my skin crawl, and sometimes it felt like he was just fumbling toward a part of me he’d never sought to understand before, and each question knotted a new ache in my chest.
He’d never been casual about anything. If he needed to master a filtration system, he’d devour every diagram until he could argue with experts. If he wanted to decode my routines, he’d watch my movements then memorize them. And when he tried to get to know me, he lobbed questions so direct that I teetered on the edge of panic.
Now he was trying to, apparently, understand desire.
Or sex.
Or whatever word you pinned to that thrum in my throat.
I had thought being wanted by him would feel like another kind of danger, and it did, but it was a type of danger I had a track record with.
Being wanted by Tobias felt like watching something lethal move behind glass, and feeling the all-consuming urge to bypass the glass just to exist in close proximity to something so captivating, despite the danger it posed to you.
It felt like the dream I kept pretending I had forgotten.
The underwater one.
The one where I was inside a tank, and Tobias stood outside it with his hand pressed to the glass, looking at me like he was captivated by me.
It kept coming back at inconvenient times, especially when I would catch his reflection in the glass of a tank, and my stomach would drop because dream-Tobias and real-Tobias overlapped too closely for comfort.
Real Tobias was worse.
