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Someone just for me, who wants to take care of me forever and ever and ever.

I let myself go limp against his chest, nose pressed into the hollow of his throat. He’s so warm. His heart beats solid and steady beneath my cheek. I want to crawl inside his ribcage and stay there, safe and hidden, for as long as he’ll let me.

After a while, I become aware of my own breathing, shaky and unsteady, and the way my body is still trembling. Daddy makes a low sound, not quite a laugh, more like a purr of satisfaction.

“You’re perfect,” he says again. I believe him now, or at least, I want to. I want to so badly it hurts. “Was it good?”

I nod, unable to speak, my tongue all thick and clumsy. He kisses my ear, my temple, my jaw, one after the other, never stopping with the soft, constant affection.

“There you go,” he says, like I’m a fussy baby he’s just soothed to sleep. “That’s my good boy. So beautiful when you come for me.”

I don’t know how to reply, so I just hang on to him, clutching his shoulders, letting myself be held. The shame I expected—well, it’s there, but it’s buried under a thick blanket of exhaustion and joy. I feel cracked open, like there’s space inside me for something new.

A new life, I think.

15

Adrien

Kamden falls asleep on me.

Not gradually, either.

One second he’s trembling in my arms, breathing little broken breaths against the side of my throat while his fingers stay curled weakly into my shoulders, and the next the tension simply leaves him. His body goes heavy in that unmistakable way sleeping bodies do, every muscle surrendering at once as though someone cut the strings holding him upright.

I feel the exact moment it happens.

His cheek slides lower against my chest, his grip loosens, and then there is nothing except the warm weight of him sprawled over me, his breath damp against my skin, and the quiet, exhausted little sound he makes when I shift one hand higher along his spine.

For a long time, I don’t move.

I should. There is plenty to do.

Kamden needs to be cleaned, the bed in his room needs to be stripped and the sheets washed, my own sheets now need attention for entirely different reasons, and somewhere beneath all of that is the unpleasant fact that I have spent the last several hours making a sequence of decisions no sane man could possibly describe as restrained.

But I sit there anyway, one hand spread across the small of his back, the other buried in his hair.

Fuck.

This boy is going to ruin me.

I’ve spent too many years around men trying to manufacture reactions they thought a dominant wanted to see, too many nights watching submissives perform softness without actually falling into it.

Kamden wasn’t performing.

By the end, he barely knew where the fuck he was.

His mind had gone somewhere deep and quiet—littlespace, subspace, or maybe some messy overlap between the two. Whatever name eventually fits him, he went there without knowing there was anywhere to go.

And I followed him.

That’s the problem—not that I recognized it, but that I kept pushing after I did.

My hand stills in his hair.

He had spent God knows how long trapped in that room earlier, bladder hurting, convinced I had abandoned him, until his body betrayed him and dragged half his childhood back into the present. By the time I found him, he was sobbing so hard he could barely breathe.

A responsible man would have gotten him clean, fed him, held him innocently until the panic passed, then put him to sleep.