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“I don’t care.”

“But—”

“Kammie. I do not care.” He slides one arm around my back.

I squirm away again. “N-no, it’s gross.”

“No, it isn’t.”

I stare at him through swollen eyes. The room is too bright. Everything smells like me.

“It washes off, sweetheart. Nothing happened here that soap and clean sheets won’t fix.”

His other arm slides under my knees, and this time I don’t fight him. I can’t. My legs have given up, just like everything else did.

Adrien lifts me straight off the bed, then sits down on the floor and settles me across his lap, one arm wrapped firmly around my waist.

I immediately try to push up off him. “No, I’m going to get it all over your pants.”

He tightens his hold and pulls me back down against him. “Stay.”

“I—”

“Stay, sweetheart.”

My body gives up before my mind does, and I collapse into him. A sob rises from somewhere deep and ugly, wet and shaking, and I feel it travel through both of us where we’re pressed together.

Adrien’s hand moves over the back of my head, slow and steady, like he has all the time in the world to comfort me.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper again, sniffling.

“No.”

“I ruined the bed.”

“First of all, I don’t give a single fuck about the bed.”

“But—”

“I care that you were sitting here needing me, and I wasn’t here.”

I freeze. Even my breathing stops for a second. Nobody has ever said anything like that to me. Not once. Not ever, in nineteen years of being someone’s problem to manage or ignore or punish.

His hand keeps moving through my hair like nothing happened. Like he didn’t just rearrange something inside me without knowing it.

“I should have checked on you,” he says.

I blink at him, not following. “What?” I ask through my tears.

“This is my fault.”

“No, I—”

“It is.” His voice hardens, but the anger is turned inward. “I left you cuffed to a fucking bed without thinking through the obvious fact that you couldn’t get to the bathroom alone.”

I stare at his shirt. There’s a small loose thread near the collar where he must have caught it on something sharp once. My finger finds it.

“You f-forgot?” The question slips out small—smaller than I mean it to be—like a note passed under a door, hoping nobody reads it aloud.