Page 61 of Problematic

She opened the book.

Chapter 10

Liv

What the fuck is wrong with me?

Out of all the books I own, out of all the normal, safe, socially acceptable paperbacks, this is the one I picked, this is the one my hand reached for like a magnet, like my brain saw the word stalker and went, yes, perfect, that’s the one, read that right now while your actual life is actively spiraling.

Maybe it was self-comfort.

Maybe if I read a story where the stalker was romantic and obsessed and weirdly protective, I could convince myself mine fit the genre too, like the universe was acting out a trope, not committing a crime.

I flipped the book open.

It didn’t take long for my face to heat, like my body was trying to distract me from the fact that I was reading about a man watching a woman sleep while I had an unknown man leaving roses on my doorstep.

“Jesus,” I muttered, rubbing my forehead with the heel of my hand.

I should have picked something wholesome.

Something with a bakery.

Something where the biggest danger was a miscommunication, a third act breakup, or a surprise pregnancy.

Instead, I was sitting here like, okay, hypothetical scenario, if a psycho stalker is obsessed with you, is he at least going to buy you groceries and kill your enemies and make sure your locks work, or is he going to turn you into a headline? I was living my own stalker romance, and that was either really hot or really fucked.

I forced a laugh. “Okay, Liv,” I whispered to myself, as if talking to myself made this less insane, “maybe he’s romantic.”

I looked down at the page again.

The heroine in the book wasn’t panicking.

She was . . . curious.

She was scared, sure, but she was also reading the signs and thinking, okay, what kind of man does this, what does he want, what does it mean. That should have made me feel better, because I could relate to her brain doing backflips to make sense of terror.

I could be a bad bitch like that, right?

Not a fucking chance.

But . . . curious.

That word sat in my head like a live wire because fear made sense, fear was expected, fear was the logical response when someone acted like they owned you, but admitting my own curiosity made me feel filthy.

I swallowed and turned the page anyway.

The heroine did the same thing I was doing, telling herself she wanted answers, telling herself she needed proof, telling herself she was in control, and the lines blurred for a second, because my eyes kept flicking up toward my door like I expected a man to appear in the frame of it.

Nothing happened.

Still, my muscles didn’t relax.

My phone sat on the coffee table face down. I forced myself to breathe, slow and quiet, and tried to focus on the page, on the familiar comfort of ink and plot and rules, except the scene I’d opened to wasn’t comforting at all—it was the heroine realizing that the man watching her wasn’t there to hurt her, that he was there because he couldn’t stop, because he’d decided she belonged to him.

My face heated again.

“Okay,” I whispered, voice rough with embarrassment and adrenaline, “this isn’t helping.”