Sarah could feel her cheeks flushing as she giggled the laugh of a younger, smaller woman. She wondered how many secrets like that there were in the writing world, and if there was anyone or anything in publishing that Will didn’t know. She was also wondering if this was entirely a professional meeting, or whether it was something more like a date. Oh, sure, said a voice in her head, the one that sounded a lot like her father. Because what Will Presser’s been waiting for his whole life is a forty-one-year-old with buck teeth who’s still practically a virgin. Sarah had, in fact, had sex in her life. Just not much of it, and what she’d had had not been good. She’d been with only two men, and neither one had been an actual boyfriend (one of them, humiliatingly, would only see her between the hours of midnight and 6:00 a.m., sneaking into her dorm, probably after he’d been out with someone else, and sneaking back out before the sun came up). Sarah had never been married, never even lived with a man. As sure of herself as she felt behind the keyboard, moving her invented people through their invented lives, that was how insecure she felt with a real, live man in the actual world.

At some point—a point that coincided with the pair of them finishing a second bottle of sake and Will, without consulting her, ordering a third—the evening started to get soft around the edges. Sarah could remember Will saying Every single one of your books should have hit the list, and cringed as she remembered telling him I’ll do anything. Anything you tell me. Her voice had sounded high and girlish, incongruous, coming from her broad-shouldered frame, as she’d made those vows, as she’d promised to put herself, and her career, entirely in his hands.

She wasn’t surprised when he’d suggested going back to his place for a nightcap. She’d let him steer her out of the restaurant and into the car waiting at the curb. She could feel the heat coming off him, with his shoulder brushing against hers in the backseat; could smell his cologne, a little musky, a little smoky, like something charred. The thought of sophisticated Will Presser smelling like a Weber grill the day after the Fourth of July made her giggle. Will laughed with her, as if he knew what she was thinking and was in on the joke.

Sarah had wiped her eyes “I’ll do anything,” she’d blurted again, and then had felt her face get hot as she realized how that sounded.

Will’s hand was a warm weight on her forearm; his raspy-sexy voice comforting and certain. “I know,” he’d said, very softly. “I know you will.”