The studio lights were hot enough to cook ramen on my face.
I sat on what the production assistant had cheerfully called a "love seat," which was really just a fancy term for "a couch designed to make you sit uncomfortably close to another person while millions watched." The leather squeaked every time I shifted, and the audience of about two hundred people packed into the bleachers watched us like we were exotic animals at a zoo.
Cel pressed against my side, her thigh touching mine from hip to knee. The producers had positioned us this way deliberately. I could feel it in the way the cameras angled, the way Sterling Weaver kept glancing at our proximity with that shit-eating grin he probably practiced in the mirror.
