“Hello?” I press the phone hard into my ear, suddenly and inexplicably breathless.

“Ryan? Are you on a run or something? I can call back—”

“No, no.” I take a deep breath, praying I can get my shit together. “I was focused. You surprised me is all.” The little lie slips easily off my tongue as I remind myself for the hundredth time in the past hour that boundaries are my friend.

“Sure. Anyway, I’m calling about Scarlett.”

“Is she okay?” I ask a little too quickly.

“Yes,” Trina says slowly. Suspiciously. “She mentioned you’ve had her revisions for a week or so now, and she hasn’t heard from you. She didn’t say so directly, but I think she’s a little nervous. She’s not used to not having…immediate feedback.” There’s definitely laughter in her voice there, and I imagine her bright red lips twisting into an indecent grin.

“Does she want immediate feedback?” The words tumble out of me before I can think better of it. And to make matters worse, I match Trina’s innuendo. I cringe and toss my glasses onto my desk so I can rub at my temples as if that would take all the double meaning out of the conversation.

She snorts. “No. Like I said, she’s nervous. I told her I’d check in.”

“Right. Of course.” I blink my eyes open, the words on my screen blurry without my glasses. “Tell her she has nothing to worry about. I finished my first pass, and her revisions are spot on. My second has been slower because of some other projects I needed to finish up”—another lie—“but I should have it finished soon. Maybe another couple of weeks.”

“Great.” There’s a scraping sound as if Trina is shifting her phone to her other ear, then a car door opening and closing in the background. “She’s started drafting her next book, so this will give her time to make some headway on that.”

At that, another image overtakes the one I had of Scarlett and me tangled in sheets and pages and each other. This one is of her at her desk, sitting cross-legged on her computer chair, her face too close to her monitor and dark circles under her eyes.

“I needed seven thousand words today to stay on track, and I only got thirty-five hundred.” Her voice was weak and small. She didn’t bother looking up from her monitor as she clacked away at her keyboard, then cursed silently and deleted whatever she had just written.

I wiped the bleariness out of my eyes with the back of my hand. “Beautiful, it’s four in the morning. Have you slept at all?”

“I’ll sleep when I finish.”

“When you finish it’ll be tomorrow, with a new word-count goal. Come to bed, just for a few hours.”