“Sorry,” he says in a scratchy voice that makes my hand wobble against his mouth and my heart do something similar inside my chest. “God, that’s phenomenal.”

He goes for the chocolate again, his tongue slicking the pads of my fingers. Breathe. I can do this. I can feed Dominic Yun a truffle without losing my shit.

Except every time we make contact, I imagine us up against that wall again, him inching closer and closer until there’s no space between our bodies. And the various other ways he’d use his tongue and his teeth, how he might savor a girl the way he savors this piece of chocolate.

I hope Nathaniel knows this place is dangerous. We may be in a darkened restaurant designed to get people in the mood to ravage each other, but this is our job. I cannot have these kinds of feelings at work.

Finally, it’s his turn to—ugh—feed me. I’m convinced it won’t be as disconcerting as the sensation of his teeth on my skin, but he reaches my closed mouth a second before I’m ready, before I’ve had the chance to process what’s happening. He nudges my lips apart with one gentle finger before slipping me a bite of the most decadent piece of chocolate I’ve ever tasted.

“Good?” Dominic says, and suddenly he sounds much closer than just across the table.

No. This truffle is downright indecent. It’s not good, the way my teeth scrape his fingers. It’s not good, the sweetness of chocolate and the salt of his skin. It’s not good, the way I have to press my thighs together to guard against the sensation building there and demanding relief.

This is not foreplay. It’s work.

We might be tricking our listeners, and now the darkness and proximity are tricking me, morphing my annoyance with him into some kind of deranged attraction.

“Great,” I manage, and it’s really not good, the way I crave chocolate the rest of the week.

Twitter

Saffron Shaw () @saff_shaw

    happy friday, loves!!! today’s #saffrec is a podcast called @TheExTalk!

    they only have a few episodes out but the hosts are so so charming and REAL! give em a listen so they can make more, k?

Replies: 247 RTs: 9.2K Likes: 16K

14

The Apple Podcasts Top 100.

We slide into spot number ninety-seven on Friday afternoon, after Saffron Shaw’s tweet, and we ride that high all weekend. The tweet gets picked up by the Mary Sue, by Vulture, by NPR’s own pop culture podcast. My follower count jumps to three thousand, to five thousand, to eight thousand. I lose the ability to keep up with my notifications, and at one point, #shayminic might be trending.

It’s wild.

Monday is basically a wash. Kent brings in donuts at nine, pops a bottle of champagne at ten, and takes us out to a long lunch at eleven thirty. We don’t get much work done after that.

The whole time, my mind is spinning. From the shock of our sudden fame and the pressure to sustain it, yes, but there’s something underneath. The station is treating Dominic like a hero, which would normally make me roll my eyes. But he did help make this happen—I have to give him credit for that. Leading up to episode 1, I figured I’d be most anxious about my voice. And while I probably won’t ever love listening to myself, I thought our lie would be easy. We were storytelling.

Except when listener tweets make it so clear they buy every detail of our fake relationship and well-crafted breakup, I can’t help wondering which side of this my dad would be on. People have so quickly become invested in this story that isn’t real, regardless of how Kent pitched it to the board of directors.

And yet there was Dominic, purveyor of Truth in Journalism, basking in the attention and letting Kent buy him another beer.

“Going down?”

He shows up in front of the elevator just as I’m waiting for it. Oddly, this hasn’t happened since the show began. I’ve always needed to rush home to walk Steve, while Dominic seems content to stay late.

“Actually, I’ve been meaning to pay the AI golf club startup on the sixth floor a visit,” I tell him. “They seem like good people.”

“Never pegged you as the golfing type.”

“I’m a complex and layered human being.”

That earns me a smirk. “You know, I’m hating this much less than I thought I would.”

“You’re not hating your nearly ten thousand followers?”

“Don’t be bitter because you’re only at nine thousand.”

“Nine thousand five hundred.”

And I’m sure we’ll both be flooded with sponsorship opportunities soon. Still, I’ve had to limit looking at my mentions, since some people don’t exactly respect the boundaries between our private and professional lives. Sure, the show blurs the two, and the images of famous movie breakup scenes one listener posted with my and Dominic’s faces photoshopped onto the actors’ bodies were entertaining. Yes, I retweeted it.

But some comments have strayed a little past PG-13. I was flattered by it at first—strangers finding me attractive is certainly an ego boost—but it stopped feeling innocent when someone tweeted at me asking if Dominic’s circumcised. Then someone asked Dominic to rate my performance in bed. And those were some of the tamer ones.

I have enough unsavory thoughts on my own without the internet making it worse.