Page 58 of Hot Mic

Sienna slumped back in her chair behind a massive white quartz desk, staring blankly at three widescreen monitors packed with real-time logistics data. She was wearing a charcoal suit, her hair tied up in a neat bun, looking every bit the high-powered consultant people paid obscene money to listen to.

On paper, she had her life completely back on track.

She worked brutal twelve-hour days. She ate the same salad at quarter past one every single day. Her reputation in corporate risk analysis was back to being bulletproof, and nobody in this entire glass tower knew or cared about polygraphs or podcasts.

She’d fixed it. She was back in her comfort zone.

Sienna clicked on a cell in her spreadsheet, lazily tapping out a formula to update supply chain risk.

She paused, her hands freezing over the keyboard. Her thumb drifted up to brush against her bottom lip, an absent-minded gesture, as if her fingers were trying to recall the exact shape and pressure of a kiss.

She turned to stare out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the city skyline. God, it was quiet.

Without really letting herself think about what she was doing, Sienna opened a new tab and went straight to the subreddit for Head vs Heart.

People still posted on it daily. Comments picked through every second of the audio, dissecting the pauses and arguing over Karen’s truth index readouts like post-match stats.

As she scrolled down the feed, a post caught her eye—someone had linked an article published only days ago, one she hadn’t seen yet.

The Death of Workplace Boundaries: How Violet Audio Turned a Workplace Rivalry Into Clickbait.

Sienna felt her stomach drop as her eyes skimmed the blockquote beneath the headline:

Hooking your own presenters to a lie detector isn’t bold content; it’s the complete collapse of workplace boundaries. Yet three hundred thousand of us stayed tuned in.

For fuck’s sake. This was all she needed. An article to stir up interest again. Why couldn’t it just be allowed to die?

But it would die, eventually. It wasn’t that bloody interesting. She was fine. She was in control. She’d built a nice, safe wall around herself in her new office, and it was doing its job. Everything was back as it should be. She was back as she should be.

No mess. No scuffed leather jacket tossed over the back of the seat. No wild blonde hair, no mischievous grin, and no deep, sexy voice tearing into her for being an overly neurotic control freak.

It was better.

Sienna sighed and went back to her spreadsheet. She told herself she was happy to be a risk analyst again, that she loved the peace. That she wasn’t drowning in it.

Forty-Nine

‘Three, two, one... and we’re live with The Midnight Scramble.’

The red light on the cheap plastic box above the door flickered to life. Robin leaned into the foam-stripped microphone, adjusting the volume on a mixing board that was held together with gaffer tape and hope.

‘Welcome back, night owls,’ Robin purred. ‘We’re taking your calls if you need advice on your love life. We’ve got Steve from Berkshire on the line. Hi Steve.’

She hit the cue button for line one.

‘Hey Robin,’ a guy’s voice crackled through the monitors. ‘So, I’ve been seeing this girl for three weeks, right? She’s really cool and everything, and we really get on. But her dad died recently, and I guess it shook her up, and she’s talking about travelling, and she asked me to go with her to Australia for three months. I’m not sure if that’s my cup of tea, but she says I need more excitement in my life. Should I do it? I mean, I like her, and we’ve got amazing chemistry. But I don’t know if she’s too much.’

Robin’s hand froze over the fader.

The studio was tiny, tucked away in the basement of a community radio station in Deptford. It was good, old-fashioned FM radio—impossible to track in terms of real-time listener numbers, relying on quarterly estimates. As a result, Robin didn’t know, nor did she care, if anyone was actually listening.

The disastrous day of the polygraph episode, Dora Jenks had called her while she was still sitting on her sofa at home, smugly informing her that she was being put on formal warning for walking off set. Robin hadn’t even hesitated. She’d snapped back, ‘Fuck it, let’s skip straight to a firing, because I’m never coming into that building again after the way I’ve been treated.’

She’d spent months unemployed after that, floating in limbo until this graveyard-shift romantic advice gig came along. It wasn’t queer; just generic, straight romantic advice that Robin found relentlessly dull. But at least she was working.

Sienna hadn’t gone back to the network either. Word on the grapevine was that Sienna was stuck in professional exile, completely unable to take another podcasting job due to the non-compete clause that was in all their contracts. But Robin happened to have a friend who did media law, and she pointed out that FM radio didn’t count as a podcast, leaving Robin free to land a late-night relationship slot on commercial radio while the old show rotted in legal limbo.

Robin didn’t know what Sienna was doing now. She couldn’t bring herself to Google her. She didn’t want to see some announcement that she was getting married or something.