I should have stiffened.
I did, at first.
My hands hovered awkwardly between us, caught against my own knees, while his hold tightened—not trapping, not crushing, but complete enough that I could feel the tremor move through him.
Tobias was trembling.
Barely.
But he was.
That did something awful to me.
Something soft and wounded and furious all at once.
“Tobias,” I whispered, though I didn’t know if I meant it as a question or a warning.
His hand slid into my hair.
“I am so proud of you,” he said against my temple, voice rougher than I had ever heard it. “You did so well.”
My eyes burned from how conflicted that praise made me feel, and yet, I still wanted to lean into it.
He pulled back just enough to look at me.
His eyes were dark, almost black in the aquarium light, and the emotion in them was too much. Too naked. Too immense. Not the detached focus from earlier, not the clinical interest, not even the hunger I had started catching in him over the past few days. This was deeper than that.
This was the thing underneath everything.
The thing that had been there since before I had a name for it.
His thumb grazed my cheek.
I realized I was crying only when he wiped away a tear.
“Don’t,” I tried to say, but the word had no strength behind it.
He heard the protest anyway.
I knew he did.
For one fragile second, he paused, then his gaze dropped to my mouth, and my heart stuttered.
“Tobias—”
He kissed me.
Softly.
Not hard. Not punishing. Not like the man who had just ended someone’s life upstairs and then came down to collect me. His mouth touched mine with a restraint that felt almost painful, warm and careful and devastatingly gentle, as though he wereafraid that anything more would break me or frighten me back behind my own eyes.
I sat there with his hand in my hair and his mouth on mine, surrounded by water and blue light and the aftermath of something I could not think about without falling apart.
Then he kissed me again, a little deeper this time, still soft but less uncertain, his breath catching when my lips moved beneath his by instinct or confusion or something much worse. My hands found his shirt without permission from the rest of me, fingers curling into the fabric as if I needed an anchor.
He made a sound.
Quiet.
