But then—oh God, this was the embarrassing part—she’d asked him to stay again. She’d crawled into her cool, perfect bed and curled onto her side and asked him if he’d heard from Sally about the kittens, and he’d shown her his phone, three videos of the newly named Quincy and Francis happily exploring a cat tree and a small scratching post, and then she’d gotten sleepy again, real sleepy, talking-nonsense sleepy, and she’d said, “Sit right there for a minute,” and pointed to her mattress, and then she’d held his phone close to her face and watched the videos again, maybe even twice, feeling a little wistful about her stupid late-developing cat allergy, but not wistful enough, she guessed, to keep from falling asleep again.

It was still pitch dark, so maybe it hadn’t been all that long, but judging by how rested she felt, and judging by how dry her hair was, she’d been out for a while. She even had a mean crick in her neck, which was weird, because her pillows were usually. . .

Oh no. Oh no no no.

She was not sleeping on her pillow.

She was sleeping on Will Sterling’s lap.

Her cheek on his thigh, rising and falling slightly from the long, even breaths that suggested Will had fallen asleep, too, sitting up in the same position she last remembered seeing him in, his back against her headboard, one of his feet still on the floor.

She gently—so, so gently—pulled her cheek away, and with mortifying clarity realized that it was damp.

Because she’d drooled on him.

Please don’t wake up, she thought.

“Hey,” he said, his voice low and rough, because of course she’d fall asleep on the lightest sleeper alive.

Please don’t notice your leg, she thought.

He unfolded his crossed arms and set a hand on his drooled-upon thigh, and Nora put her face in her hands and groaned.

He chuckled. “Hey, now. Two nights ago a kitten crawled out of a hamper, peed on my torso, and screamed in my face. This is nothing.” He shifted, rolled his neck. “How’re you feeling?”

That was nice, how he did that. How he moved right on, from the humiliating thing. Probably she ought to take back what she’d said about his bedside manner. On the scale of things, the I’ve seen worse approach worked pretty well, actually.

She sniffed tentatively, relieved to find it was, for the first time in three days, possible to get some air through her nose. “Pretty good, compared to . . . yesterday? Is now . . . tomorrow?”