I laughed quietly, the sound of it freezing Tobias in place. “No, I don’t think I do.”
As he watched me laugh, there was a tiny easing in his shoulders, so subtle I might have imagined it if I hadn’t spent weeks learning the language of his stillness.
The moment was broken when Ben appeared in the doorway carrying two paper bags and a drink tray. “Lunch has arrived,” he announced, looking between us with instantaneous, curious interest. “Did I interrupt something?”
“No,” I said too quickly.
“Yes,” Tobias said at the same time.
I turned to stare at him.
Tobias looked back at me with perfect calm. “We were discussing Cove’s dislike of Vegemite.”
Ben’s mouth twitched. “Ah. Very intimate.”
My face went hot. “It was not intimate.”
Maybe it was stupid, but standing there in Tobias’s kitchen with Ben unpacking lunch and Tobias watching me with less distance in his posture than there had been that morning, something in me calmed.
A boundary had been crossed, and then named, and then respected.
That mattered.
So did the fact that I was still here.
And that he was still trying.
And I was too.
After that day, things eased faster.
Tobias began coming to my office again, though he knocked every time. The first time, the knock was so formal it almost startled me, three precise taps against the frame as if he were announcing himself before entering a courtroom. I told him he didn’t have to knock like he was visiting a head of state.
He said, “You asked me not to enter private spaces without permission.”
Which made me stop teasing him for about half a second before I said, “My office is a workspace. You can knock normally.”
The next time, he knocked once, but way too hard, resulting in me laughing so abruptly I almost spilled cold brew on my lap.
His expression suggested he had no idea why that was funny, but after a moment, his mouth moved in a way that might have been the beginning of a smile.
By the end of the week, he had found the correct knock.
It was now two quick raps, not too soft, and not too loud.
And I found myself listening for it.
That was probably dangerous, but not everything dangerous felt bad anymore. Some things were dangerous the way deep water was dangerous—beautiful, consuming, impossible to enter without understanding that it could change the shape of you if you stayed in it long enough.
Tobias was like that.
And I was learning, little by little, how to swim.
14
Cove
It was approximately twenty minutes after Ben dropped me off that night when I realized I didn’t have my phone.
