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Better because Adrien treated the whole thing like it was nothing. Worse because my body now knew what his hands felt like.

I’m not sure what to think about the fact that the first two times my dick has been touched by another person, it was to help me pee.

Afterward, he brushed my teeth, and I spent the entire two minutes staring at the broad black shirt across his chest while he gently moved the brush over my teeth, his other hand cupping my jaw to keep me steady, and wondering why my heart was beating as though something important was happening.

He washed my face too. With two fingers, he tipped my chin and worked a warm cloth over my forehead, then down the bridge of my nose, then along the curve of my jaw. He was thorough about it. He got into the crease beside my nose, and under the lower lashes, where sleep and tears collect and dry.

There was nothing sexual about it.

I know that.

People wash faces.

Parents wash faces.

Caretakers probably wash faces all the time.

Still, after he was finished, when he told me, “Such a pretty boy,” I nearly swallowed my own tongue.

He laughed, but it wasn’t mean, which didn’t help my confusion at all.

I still can’t tell whether he was teasing me because he knew it made me blush or whether he talks that way to everybody.

Maybe Adrien calls everyone sweetheart.

Maybe he tells random grocery-store clerks they’re good when they hand him the correct change, and they go home wondering about him too.

Maybe the bartender at whatever scary rich-people bar he goes to gets called “pretty boy” whenever Adrien wants another drink, and it means nothing.

I don’t know anything about the way a forty-year-old man like him behaves when he actually likes somebody.

That thought has been bothering me all morning.

Not that he likes me. Because he doesn’t. I don’t even know why I keep thinking about it.

Maybe because Adrien keeps looking at me for too long, and sometimes I catch it.

Sometimes his eyes drop to my lips.

At least, I think they do. It happens fast. A flicker, gone before I can be sure what I saw. Then his face goes back to its usual flat expression, and I’m left replaying the half-second on my own, wondering what I did wrong in a previous life to deserve this particular torture. Maybe he’s checking for dehydration again. Looking for chapping, dryness, or the pale, cracked skin around the mouth of someone who doesn’t drink enough water. He’d do that. He checks everything else.

That seems more realistic.

Adrien is forty.

I’m nineteen.

That’s a twenty-one-year difference.

That’s more years than I’ve been alive, which sounds ridiculous when I think of it that way. He was already grown when I was born. An entire adult lifetime separates us.

And Adrien has probably had relationships—a lot of them, too.

Maybe not always relationships-relationships, because something about him seems too solitary for that, but I bet he’s been with lots of people. Not in a bad way, just… He seems experienced. He’s probably had tons of men… or women?

I don’t actually know what Adrien likes.

I haven’t asked.