Page 89 of Problematic

His tab sat directly next to it.

Running isn’t the interesting part. It’s all about the anticipation of being caught.

My fingers tightened on the book. I turned another tab fast, because obviously the solution to being emotionally attacked by marginalia was more marginalia.

Mistakes were made.

The scene was intimate. Okay, it was obscene and deliciously explicit. Fuck, I loved this author.

It had bodies tangled, limbs everywhere, the heroine bent in a position that made my spine ache just reading about it, and the fictional man acting like gravity, anatomy, and common sense had all agreed to take the night off.

In the margin, his handwriting appeared beside the most complicated paragraph.

Is this even physically possible?

I barked out a laugh before I could stop it.

Then I saw the second note beneath it.

After some mental gymnastics, yes. Yes, it is.

I laughed harder.

Then slapped a hand over my mouth, because laughing at my stalker’s sex-scene commentary felt like self-sabotage. I stared at the page again. The heroine’s leg was absolutely not where a leg normally went unless she had trained with circus demons or removed several bones for convenience. I tilted the book sideways.

“No,” I said. “Wait.”

I tilted it back.

My face heated. “Oh, nope.” I turned the page. The next tab was pure nonsense.

The fictional man had the heroine pinned with one hand, cupped her face with another, and somehow also held a knife and braced himself against the wall.

I paused.

Frowned.

Read it again.

“Wait.”

His annotation sat in the margin like he had been waiting for me to reach it.

How many hands does this man have? I count three.

A second note waited beneath it.

I have notified the editor.

I lost it.

A laugh tore out of me so fast I nearly dropped the book. I clapped a hand over my mouth, shoulders shaking, eyes watering, because, of all the things my stalker could have written in the margins of an unreleased stalker romance, apparently a line edit about hand continuity made the cut.

I wiped under one eye. “Murderous stalkers should not have beta reader energy.”

I turned one more tab.

This one was near the middle. The heroine was angry at the stalker for knowing too much. He told her he paid attention because no one else did. My chest tightened before I reached the annotation.