ASHLEY
"You can do it, Ash," I mutter to myself, gripping the towel and kneeling beside Beckett on the bed.
Their room isn’t spacious—half the floor’s taken up by sneakers and old textbooks, a jacket draped over a chair like someone meant to clean and didn’t.
I dip the towel into the bowl of water I found in the bathroom—lukewarm now, not that it matters—and wring it out with shaking hands. I press the cloth to his forehead, and he groans—a low, wrecked sound that twists somewhere in my stomach. His lips part. Cracked, flushed, feverish. I can’t look at them without remembering what they did. What I let them do. What I told him not to mean.
I swallow and drag the towel lower, down the side of his neck, across the collar of his shirt where the fabric sticks to his chest. His skin’s to
