“I suppose,” I grumbled, drawing out the word like a petulant child.
Ben handed me my bag with a wink and carried the rest inside. I expected Tobias to shadow me, but instead, he let me lead, content to trail behind as if amused by the spectacle of me attempting independence.
The interior of the house was spare and elegant, with massive windows facing the sand and surf, floors of pale timber, with no rug or couch cushion out of place. There were no visible family photos, no clutter, but a wall-sized photograph of a diver floating in an abyss of ultramarine. The diver’s body was both dissolving and lucid, soft-edged with motion blur, swimming up or down or nowhere in particular—suspended in the white noise of the deep. I paused in front of it, unconsciously reaching for the diver’s trailing hand. I could almost feel the cold even through the wall.
Tobias’s presence was suddenly behind me, arms wrapping around my middle as his chin dropped onto my shoulder.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
There was something in the way he asked, not seeking my approval so much as seeking proof of alignment, a way to confirm that whatever inside me responded to the open water was the same thing that answered him.
“Yeah,” I said, barely above a whisper. “It’s…” Gravitational, I wanted to say, but that would have made it too personal. “Beautiful.”
Tobias’s hands didn’t just rest; they gathered around my ribs, the way you’d grip the shell of something fragile before lowering it into the water. I heard my own breathing over the surf, shallow and not quite even.
“You can go in the water tomorrow, first thing,” he murmured, still with his face just behind my ear. “If you’d like to go down to the shore tonight, though, maybe we can bring our dinner with us.”
“That sounds nice,” I murmured.
Out the window, the sky went from gold to blue, and it occurred to me that this was the first time, maybe ever, that I had been somewhere with Tobias that was not explicitly about containment. Not about keeping me, but maybe about keeping me with him.
The three of us meandered down to the shore that night, the air briny and cool, the horizon bleeding out into blackness while the surf came and went.
Ben had brought us sandwiches and soup in a battered thermos and even brought a tartan blanket I suspected had never been used, let alone touched sand. He laid it down for us with a kind of quiet ceremony, then disappeared with a well-timed “I’ll leave you two to it,” which sounded casual but was almost certainly meant to remind us both that he was always nearby.
I sat at the very edge of the blanket, letting my feet bury into the sand. The wind had picked up as the sky faded, bringing the scent of eucalyptus and fermentation from some pile of seaweed further down the beach. At first, I ate in silence, half-listening to Tobias’s even breathing beside me, wondering if he’d ever get cold or if he was the kind of person who thrived on being barely alive in adverse conditions, like lichen or cockroaches.
Eventually, I asked, “Will you come into the water with me tomorrow?”
He looked at me as if he’d genuinely never thought of it. “If you want me to,” he said, the words slow and heavy, their meaning so plain it was almost embarrassing. “I’m not much of a swimmer, but I would.”
I kicked sand with my heel. “You don’t— I’m not saying you have to. I just. It might be nice.”
“It would be,” he said, and his hand found my ankle, thumb tracing over the bone as if memorizing where it protruded. “I’ve never been swimming with anyone, actually.”
“Seriously?”
“I was not a social child, Cove.”
“And now you are…” I trailed off, not sure how to finish it. A grownup? A billionaire? A mad scientist who kidnapped his favorite aquarium intern?
He filled in for me. “Now I am the same, but with better means. And you.”
I opened my mouth to say something stupid, but nothing made it past my teeth. The whole world felt too quiet, too malleable. Sand, air, ocean, and sky—I wanted to merge with all of it at once, but instead I just sat there, letting Tobias’s thumb work slow, small circles over my ankle. It was the kind of touch that could lull you to sleep or make you confess murder, depending on the direction.
He finished his soup and set the thermos aside, shifting onto his hip so he could face me better. The blanket wasn’t really sized for two, so our knees brushed, and our shoulders hovered a centimeter apart. His glasses were slightly fogged at the corners, and his hair ruffled by the salt wind. He looked unlike anyone else and at the same time like he was always exactly where he belonged.
I wanted to ask him if he thought he would ever get bored of this, of me, of the way I couldn’t help being a little bit raw and a little bit new each time he looked at me like that.
Some other time I might have, but right now I just let my shoulder drift and press into his, and he let it happen, leaning back on one hand and letting the other rest on my knee.
It was such a gentle kind of contact that it didn’t feel like possession or even a hint of it. It felt like gravity, or like the way deep water pressed its presence around you without ever touching you directly. I let it hold me there, propping my weight against him. In the dark, we must have looked like a pair of washed-up objects on the sand—a figurehead and the wreck.
Tobias gazed out over the water, but I could tell his attention was on me, his thumb rising and falling in the gap between my ankle. I didn’t know what he wanted, exactly, except maybe to obliterate the space between us atom by atom, until there was nothing left but touch and the suggestion of it.
“Can I… kiss you?” I managed, which was the last thing I expected to say. My voice was so thin I almost didn’t recognize it.
Tobias’s throat worked, and for a second, he just stared at me. Then he nodded, or maybe his head just dipped with the force of whatever was in him, and I leaned in and kissed him, putting my hands on his jaw. He kissed back with the kind of care you give to something you’re terrified of breaking.
