This chapter examines the complexities of care, intimacy, and boundary-setting in engaged research through two situated narratives drawn from collaborative work with refugee communities in the Netherlands and the United States. Reflecting on experiences of burnout, emotional boundary transgressions, conflict, and rupture, the authors argue that research relationships are both shaped by trust, reciprocity, and mutual care, but also by discord, ambiguity, and the possibility of harm. Rather than romanticizing engaged scholarship, the chapter foregrounds the emotional and embodied labor involved in co-creative research and explores how challenging dynamics influence knowledge production, collaboration, and ethical decision-making. Bringing their experiences into critical juxtaposition, the authors show how boundaries in engaged research are relational, porous, and constantly negotiated across shifting personal, professional, and institutional roles. Drawing on feminist ethics of care, vulnerability, and relational autonomy, the chapter conceptualizes boundaries as forms of care: for oneself, for collaborators, for communities, and for the sustainability of research itself. It highlights how loosened or transgressed boundaries can compromise the ability to offer and receive care. Ultimately, it is a call for a non-idealized understanding of care in engaged scholarship: one that acknowledges conflict, emotional risk, and interdependency as integral to ethical and sustainable engaged research practices.