All He Asks 1 Read Online Free Page A

today.
    Erik is always intense, but his thoughts are seldom with me. He’s always thinking about his books.
    But today, he’s present. Today, his eyes are on me, and he’s thinking about me, and those thoughts have cast a shadow over his features that look like the dangerous approach of a thunderstorm.
    I’m afraid.
    I’m excited.
    I really, seriously can’t breathe.
    So I take his sweater from him, resisting the urge to bury my face in it, and step into the entryway. I hang the sweater neatly on a hook beside his winter jacket. I pulled that coat out of storage on my last visit—Maine winters have a way of appearing in a hurry, and I wanted Erik to be prepared.
    He follows me into the entryway.
    “What seems to be the problem with your story?” I ask, busying my hands with the folds of the sweater. The question takes the conversation away from the frightening prospect of intimacy of names, the intimacy of standing too close to Erik Duke, and into much more familiar territory. Books are my job. I can do books. “Is it the main character? The plot?”
    “I don’t want to talk about it until you’ve read through the draft.” Erik is holding the chapter from the kitchen.
    I reach out to take it. My hands close on the page. He doesn’t release his grip, so we are connected by the pages, and electricity flows between our fingertips through the words that he has written.
    “You didn’t send me your latest story,” he says.
    As strange and surreal as it is to work for someone like Erik Duke in the first place, the most surreal part is that he is interested in developing my skill as an artist as well.
    Every few weeks, Erik instructs me to write a short story for him. He will read it, critique it, edit my rewrites.
    He doesn’t want me to write his books, the way that Sylvia wants me to write hers.
    Erik wants me to write my own.
    My giddiness lifts to a heated buzz. He’s noticed that I haven’t turned in his last “assignment.” He doesn’t just read what I give him; he cares that I’m taking the time to write at all.
    “I’ve been working on Ms. Stone’s books too much to have time for anything else,” I confess. “I was almost done helping with her next book, and she decided to make…significant editorial changes.” She deleted my entire draft and practically spit on the keyboard.
    “You need to stop working on her books. They’re commercial. Vapid. They’re holding you back.”
    I don’t disagree, yet the criticism stings. I take pride in ghostwriting Sylvia Stone books. Aside from Erik’s strange workshops, they are my only creative outlet.
    “It’s my job,” I say gently. I try to tug the pages toward me. I’m afraid that if I release them, I will be relinquishing the opportunity to slip into Erik’s mind.  
    Instead, Erik Duke uses my grip to pull me closer to him. Just one shuffling step.
    His narrow eyes are not quite brown, not quite blue. They are the color of Lake Symphony when the sun sets behind the clouds, when there is no wind to blow the algae away, when the mud between the reeds is at its murkiest. Anything could be hiding within those depths.
    “Christine,” he says again.
    This time, he is not testing the sound of the name. He is breaking ground on something frightening.
    The doorbell chimes.
    I have never heard it before, so the sound gushes ice over my nerves. The bell is akin to a warning klaxon. My hand slips from the pages, I take a step back, and my heart remembers how to beat.
    The doorbell chimes again.
    Erik presses a button on the monitor beside his door, which reveals security video on a monitor that was previously dark. Even through the grainy starkness of the black and white image, I recognize the car that had pulled up behind me at Sylvia Stone’s house.
    Raoul Chance must have left mere minutes after me in order to catch up so quickly.
    The realization leaves me trembling.
    My publishing company’s new editor followed me to Erik Duke’s house.
    “Who