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‘But you like her,’ Sienna insisted.

‘No. Not like that,’ Robin told her.

Sienna turned to face her properly in the narrow space. ‘You do.’

‘I don’t,’ Robin told her.

‘I don’t buy it,’ Sienna said. ‘You looked so… On your date. Sparks everywhere.’

‘No spark. Not with her,’ Robin said, flying perilously close to the wind. Because Sienna didn’t want Claire. And she wouldn’t say why. Robin prayed she knew the reason. That she wasn’t just seeing what she wanted to see.

And the mics were off. Whatever happened next was between them only.

‘Not with her?’ Sienna asked nervously.

Robin looked at Sienna’s mouth for a second. Then she stepped forward, grabbed the lapels of Sienna’s blazer, and kissed her directly on the mouth.

Sienna made a small, muffled sound of surprise against Robin’s mouth, freezing for half a second. Then she sighed and kissed her back ardently.

Thirty-Seven

Sienna was utterly lost in the kiss. It was everything she’d spent weeks aggressively telling herself she didn’t need, but when Robin’s lips met hers, the fight had died instantly.

Robin pressed her back until her spine hit the corridor wall, her mouth hot and firm against Sienna’s. One of Robin’s thumbs hooked into Sienna’s belt loop, tugging hard enough to kill the space between them. Sienna leaned right into it, opening her mouth and tasting her until Robin let out a short, quiet groan. It was messy, heavy, and way too good.

Then Sienna’s brain clicked back on like a fluorescent light in an office.

She doesn’t care about you. She made fun of you. She thinks you’re a joke.

She jammed her palms against Robin’s chest and pushed lightly. Robin backed up immediately.

‘No,’ Sienna said, her heart hammering. ‘No. We can’t.’

Robin stood there with her mouth slightly open, eyes wide, looking dazed. Sienna didn’t give her a chance to work out what to say. She stepped sideways and bolted back out into the main room.

She sat down hard in her chair at the table, her legs shaking slightly. That was when she felt the hard, cornered edge of the plastic pack pressing into the small of her back.

But it was paused. It was okay.

She reached down to hit play again and saw seconds ticking forward on the small display. She hadn’t hit the pause button at all. It had been recording the entire time.

Sienna felt a wave of ice roll down her neck. She glued her eyes to her empty water glass and forced her chest to move up and down at a normal, casual pace.

A moment later, Valeska and Claire drifted back over from the bar. They were both holding two drinks apiece, their cheeks a bit pink, trying very hard to look offhand while explicitly avoiding each other’s eyes.

‘We cut out the middleman,’ Claire said—putting her glasses down, one for her, one for Sienna—with a slightly too-bright smile. ‘Everything alright here?’

‘Fine,’ Sienna said. ‘You left your mics.’

Claire and Valeska flushed anew, making excuses about physical discomfort as they quickly put them back in place.

Robin came back to the table about twenty seconds later, fiddling with her bodypack to unpause it. She pulled her chair out with a brutal wooden scrape against the floorboards, dropped into it, and reached straight for the breadbasket without a word. She didn’t look at Sienna.

The waiter arrived at long last. It was going to be a long meal.

Thirty-Eight

Robin sat back in her studio chair, staring at the black mesh of her microphone as if her life depended on it. In actuality, it was only her silly heart.