Aubergine St. Valentine, Queen of Romance, contemplated the necessity of deadlines. Students had deadlines, but you outgrew the obnoxious term paper deadlines, end of term deadlines, end of summer vacation deadlines. Writers had deadlines, did she have deadlines! Women had deadlines, all of them bad—puberty, menopause, death.

The major problem with deadlines was as they approached they took more and more time and you made more and more stupid decisions—any decision that wasn't incorporated in the deadline. Why has she ever given the go to the literacy video project? Grown ups reading baby books. A money sink worse than any home remodeling job, sailboat sailing. It could all be laid at the feet of the leonine bane of her existence, his handsome self, Sean. He could charm her into thinking his way with the flutter of a wink, the crook of a smile. And unlike the flu and the other couple dozen ailments that were arrested with an early shot at the doctor's office, there was no preventative cure for her. If there was, she surely would have said no at the first mention of the video.