Tobias looked up, hope flickering across his face before he carefully extinguished it. “If I agree to that, I’d need you to wear an ankle monitor. With that, I’d feel comfortable with you moving throughout the house.”
“You’d really let me work again? Just like… before?”
He nodded. “Unrestricted access to all tanks, just like before. Day shifts, same as before. Remote monitoring on your laptop or in your office.” Tobias exhaled. “I know it’s not the same, but… it would be normal. Or as close as we get.”
“Fine,” I said, so fast the word surprised even me. “Yes. I want… I want that.”
Some emotion twisted across Tobias’s face. He looked away, as if ashamed of how much hope he’d let show. “Sunday morning. I’ll come get you. We’ll start then.”
After he left, I did not sleep. The food and wine sat in my belly like a warm stone, and I paced, not laps now but from bed to table and back, gnawing on every stray detail. The words spun, a kaleidoscope of hope and revulsion. I went over it again and again in my mind. An unknown amount of time later, maybe hours, maybe minutes, I convinced myself that he’d offered me the deal of a lifetime.
It wasn’t as if he was asking to fuck me or have me on hand for blowjobs. He just wanted to touch me. He wanted to use toys to pleasure me.
All he wanted was permission to please me.
It was a new horror to realize how selfish that sounded, even as I rehearsed it in my head to make it sound like consent. Maybe it was. Maybe this time, I’d get to be wanted, and not for my labor or my body as a rung in someone else’s career, or as a point of leverage over me. Maybe for the first time, being wanted was all that was on offer.
I wasn’t sure the distinction mattered, not in the long run. But I clung to it with desperation.
I counted the days again, waiting for Sunday, this time not in notches but in a simmering stewpot of anticipation and dread. Ben visited me twice, once to replenish snacks, clothes, and toiletries, and once with a set of measuring tape for the ankle monitor fitting. He was professional but not cold, and I sensed his discomfort like a tuning fork sympathetically vibrating with my own. If he judged, he didn’t say it.
Ben was, in many ways, the closest thing I had to a friend in the house, which was a horror in itself. He administered the fitting with great care, like tending a wound, apologizing for every pinch of the flexible tape against my skin. The device itself, packed in sleek white cardboard, looked less like a shackle than I’d imagined—compact, smooth, silicone where it met the flesh. Its blinking blue LED felt, perversely, more like reassurance than condemnation.
Ben explained its functions in a voice stripped of inflection—GPS, heart rate, painless vibrations for notifications. At intervals, the device would require me to stand still while it authenticated my vitals, a small biometric proof-of-life.
I stared at the thing, then at Ben. “Is this really necessary?”
Ben zipped the tape measure closed with a flick.
“It is,” he said. “He’d have gone for something more restrictive, but I talked him down.”
“You make it sound like you saved my life,” I said, not sure if it was a joke or a plea.
Ben’s lips twisted. “Maybe I did,” he said.
He met my eyes for a second, then looked away, packing up the tailoring kit with rigid, precise movements. “You know he’s never had anyone like you here before. Not even close.”
“What does that even mean at this point? Someone like me? A good caretaker, a victim of kidnapping, someone he wants to “play” with? There’s like a million different options.”
Ben chuckled before saying, “Honestly, all the above. I meant more along the lines of someone he’s so obsessed with, but the others work too. Did you know you’re the only aquarist he hasn’t ended up killing?”
“Wha—What am I supposed to do with that information?!” I snapped, and the involuntary quaver in my voice shamed me.
Ben shrugged, gathering the used strips of tape, the empty snack wrappers. “Don’t do anything with it. But remember he’s learning. He’s not as in control as he thinks he is.” He paused. “In regards to romance, I mean. Not the murder stuff.”
“Fuck off.”
That night I didn’t bother with the cot. I dragged the blankets and pillows over to the corner and made a nest, curling up with the monitor still boxed at my side. I put my ear to the concrete, listening for the ocean.
I didn’t hear it, but that didn’t stop my lips from softly quirking up.
It didn’t matter if I couldn’t hear it now, because tomorrow, I’d both see and hear it. I would be free to stare at it for hours on end if I so wanted.
23
Cove
Sunday morning arrived with a tentative knock. I was awake already, had been for hours, but I lay still, refusing to answer until the knock returned, a little louder this time.
