The studio lights had barely cooled before Mila was already reaching for her bra clasp.
She'd held it together for the entire eleven o'clock segment. Forty-three minutes of smiling through headlines about political scandals, a feel-good story about a dog who could paint, and a weather report she'd had to deliver while her phone silently lit up in her lap with the single most devastating text she had ever received.
"I think we should see other people. You're great but I just don't feel it anymore. Sorry."
Sorry. After eight months. Via text. While she was live on air.
Mila had read it during the commercial break between the political segment and the dog story, and then she had looked directly into the camera and smiled and said, "And in lighter news tonight…" like her chest wasn't caving in.
That was professionalism. That was training. That was years of broadcast school teaching her to keep her face neutral while the world burned behind her eyes.
But the segment was over now.
The little red light on her laptop camera had gone dark. The producer's voice had said "And we're clear, good show Mila" in her earpiece before the line clicked off. She'd pulled out the earpiece, closed the broadcasting software, and now she was alone in her bedroom studio setup, at midnight, freshly dumped, still in full makeup, and vibrating with the kind of emotional devastation that could only be soothed by two things: ice cream or orgasms.
She was out of ice cream.
Which is how Mila Reyes, weekend anchor for Channel 4 City News, ended up reaching into her nightstand drawer for the silicone companion she had impulsively named Gerald during last month's late-night online shopping spiral.
She was not proud of this. She really wasn't.
But eight months. Eight months of practically begging Daniel to show some enthusiasm in the bedroom, eight months of initiating and being met with "I'm tired" or "maybe tomorrow," eight months of wondering if something was wrong with her, and the man couldn't even break up with her to her face?!
Sometimes a woman has to make the right decisions.
And she should have made proper use of Gerald earlier.
Now, she was going to.
Mila unclipped her bra, tossed it somewhere behind her monitor, and shimmied out of her work skirt without even getting up from her desk chair. The blazer was already draped over the back. Below the desk, she'd been wearing pajama shorts the entire broadcast because nobody could see below her waist on camera anyway.
The perks of working from home.
She leaned back in her chair, still in her anchor makeup and earrings, her hair still pinned in the sleek style the audience knew her for, and decided that Gerald was about to earn his twenty-six dollar price tag.
Her bedroom was dark except for the glow of her laptop screen, which displayed the closed broadcasting software dashboard. The ring light was off. The camera light was off. The door was locked. Her roommate Priya was out with friends and wouldn't be home till two at the earliest.
Nobody was watching.
And Gerald, it turned out, was significantly more attentive than Daniel had ever been.
Within minutes, the tension that had been coiled in her chest since that text message started to loosen. Her head tipped back against the chair. Her breathing changed. The humiliation and the hurt and the anger blurred into something warm and building, and for the first time in what felt like months, her body was actually responding to something other than disappointment.
Her eyes drifted shut. Her lips parted. One hand gripped the armrest of her desk chair while the other worked beneath the hem of her pajama shorts, and the soft sounds that escaped her mouth were not sounds that any news anchor should ever make within ten feet of broadcast equipment.
She didn't hear the notification chime from her laptop.
Or the second one.
Or the third.
It wasn't until her phone began buzzing violently on the desk that the haze started to crack. It was like a flood, an endless cascade of vibrations that made the phone skitter across the surface of the table like a living thing.
Her eyes opened, half-lidded and annoyed. She reached for the phone with her free hand, squinting at the screen.
Thirty-seven messages. Forty-one. Forty-six. The number was climbing in real time.
Priya: MILA PICK UP THE PHONE RIGHT NOW!
Priya: YOUR CAMERA IS STILL ON
Priya: THE STREAM IS STILL LIVE MILA
Priya: EVERYONE CAN SEE YOU
Mila's blood turned to ice.
Her gaze snapped to the laptop screen.
The broadcasting software she had closed, THAT SHE HAD DEFINIETALY CLOSED, displayed a small, pulsing red dot in the top left corner of the screen. Beneath it, in text that seemed to glow with malicious clarity:
LIVE — 1.4M VIEWERS
The camera she'd been told was off hadn't been off.
The camera was, in fact, pointed directly at her. At her flushed face, her disheveled anchor hair, her unbuttoned blouse hanging open, and her hand frozen mid-act beneath shorts that hid absolutely nothing from the angle the webcam captured.
Gerald was still busy vibrating.
And the one point four million viewers were still growing in number.
The live chat was scrolling so fast it was a blur. She caught fragments as her eyes darted across the screen in spiralling horror.
"IS THAT THE CHANNEL 4 GIRL???"
"YOOOOO"
"somebody clip this lmaooo"
"this can't be real"
"is that the ultradragonxxr?"
"no, it's the monsterdragonx"
"tf are you diiots talking about?"
"komodo dragon??"
"She's literally still going 😭😭😭"
She was not still going. She had stopped. She had stopped so hard that every muscle in her body had locked into place, including her lungs, which had apparently forgotten how to function.
Gerald fell from between her thighs and hit the floor with a soft, damning thud. It turned on the floor, still vibrating.
The sound unfroze her.
Mila lunged for the laptop. Her knee slammed into the underside of the desk. Her chair shot backward on its wheels and crashed into the opposite wall. She slapped the laptop shut with both hands so hard the screen cracked down the middle, but it didn't matter because the damage was already done, the stream had been running for…
She checked the dashboard timer seared into her eyes.
Six minutes.
The entire time.
"No," she whispered, her voice cracking. "No, no, no, no, no—"
Her phone was still buzzing. It hadn't stopped. It would never stop.
She grabbed it with shaking hands.
Her mother was calling.
Her mother was calling at midnight on a Tuesday, which meant her mother had either seen it or someone had already told her, and both options made Mila want to crawl into the earth and decompose.
She declined the call. Another one came in immediately. Her boss.
She declined that one too.
The texts were coming too fast to read. Friends, coworkers, numbers she didn't even recognize. Her social media notifications had become a single unbroken vibration. Somewhere in the flood of notifications, she caught a screenshot someone had sent her.
It was her own face, in the middle of herself masturbating, plastered across a Bwitter thread that already had twelve thousand retweets.
Mila's hands went numb.
The phone slipped from her fingers.
Her chest seized and a sharp, crushing pressure stole the air from her lungs. Her panic had turned into something else and Mila immedeatly knew that there was a problem.
It was as if a fist had closed around her heart and squeezed.
She tried to breathe. Her vision blurred at the edges, darkening inward like a vignette. The room tilted.
'This isn't happening. This isn't—'
Her knees buckled and she collapsed to the floor next to Gerald, which was a detail she would have found deeply offensive if she had been conscious enough to process it.
But she wasn't.
The last thing Mila Reyes registered before everything went black was the sound of her phone, still buzzing, and still flooding with messages from a world that had just watched her most private moment on live television.
And then there was nothing.