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The folded corner looked exhausted, soft from my thumb, a tiny paper confession I had made at two in the morning while pretending I cared about character development.

My face went hot before I even read the scene.

His ink waited beneath the sentence like it owned the damn thing.

He guessed. I pay attention.

The book slipped lower in my lap.

My mouth went dry.

The fictional monster had been safe because he stayed inside the book. This one had climbed inside the book after him, dragged him out by the throat, and taken his place.

I touched the margin.

“You’re not supposed to do it better!” I whisper-yelled. I should have thrown the book across the room. Instead, I read the annotations again.

Then again.

Because the fantasy had started writing back.

And God help me, I wanted his next line.

“Okay,” I whispered, slowly closing the book over one finger. “Let’s play a game, then.”

I forced myself to breathe through the hot panic crawling up my throat and stood, taking the book with me. I crossed to the kitchen, picked up one of the roses from the glass, and held it between two fingers.

The petals brushed my knuckles, soft and velvety.

I set the rose on the counter, then grabbed a receipt from my bag and a pen from the junk cup by the sink. My hand shook as I wrote, which pissed me off, so I pressed harder.

WHO ARE YOU?

Simple. Direct. Slightly less pathetic than “please stop breaking into my apartment because I am two bad decisions away from developing a crush.”

I folded the receipt once and slid it under the rose stem.

“There,” I said, steadier now. “Your turn.”

I lifted my chin. “That is how this works, right? You stalk. I investigate. You leave creepy little love tokens. I decide whether you are romance-genre creepy or crime-scene creepy. We establish boundaries. Nobody else ends up dangling from a streetlight because someone hurt my feelings at work.”

I paced in front of the sofa and stared at the book still sitting there, open, judging me, and I felt my face heat up again, because of course my body chose this moment to remember his voice, the way he said Little Flower.

“Little Flower,” I whispered, then made a face. “Ew.”

My stomach flipped anyway.

“Okay,” I said again, louder, because anger helped. “New boundary. No pet names.”

I went back to the folded note and added to it:

ALSO PET NAMES ARE ABSOLUTELY BANNED.

I plopped down on my sofa, the book shifting beside my thigh, and I stared at the page like it was going to apologize for being accurate, because the heroine in the story did the same thing I was doing right now: pacing and checking locks and trying to pretend she didn’t feel the thrill of being the center of someone’s attention.

I turned it, despite myself.

My eyes scanned the lines, and my brain did a gross little pivot, because reading was the only place I knew how to feel scared without drowning. The words framed my fear, gave it rules, gave it a shape.