Page 51 of The Midnight Frequency

Tess shrugged.

“He wants to go low; I’ll take it to hell. I’m very comfortable there. Doesn’t that take the edge right off?” she asked when I took another long sip.

“It does. Why did I give these up again?”

“Something about crutches. I don’t know. I wasn’t listening.”

“Gee, thanks,” I grumbled. We made our way back to my office, where I all but melted into my chair.

“Girl, denying yourself anything that brings you a moment of peace when you are the only thing keeping this ship afloat and not on fire is so unnecessary.”

“It could become a vice.”

“Soda? Soda can become a vice? Let’s not moralize food—or drinks—here. You like it. It’s not bad for you in moderation. Enjoy it. So, what are you doing?”

“Refreshing the comments on Silas’s show’s page.”

“Why?”

“It’s kind of a pet project. The Powers That Be aren’t loving his ratings. But please don’t spread that around. I’m trying to fix it.”

“How?”

“By having Silas stop cutting off all his callers.”

“What he needs is that chick to call back in.” My stomach flipped. “Those two were electric.”

“The comments agree with you.”

Unfortunately.

I hoped a show or two with Silas being a kind listener would be enough to make listeners interested in more than some silly on-air feud.

The ratings were pretty solid.

But judging by the comments, that was only because people were tuning in to see if ‘Madison’ called back again. They would get sick of listening eventually and turn their attention somewhere else. There was an oldies countdown on a rival station that was surprisingly stiff competition for Silas’s listeners.

“What’s that one say?” Tess asked when a new comment popped up.

He’s being kind of boring tonight. Maybe that’s why Madison isn’t calling in.

Boring.

That was my doing then.

Give it time, someone commented under that. He was getting short-tempered with that last caller.

He had been.

In his defense, the caller had been a woman who was in a throuple with her minotaur boyfriend and a sentient labyrinth that kept rearranging itself so she couldn’t get back to the minotaur.

Even the usually carefully contained Silas paused, made a choked sound, then tried to compose himself enough to answer.

She insisted the labyrinth simply loved her too much to share.

He argued that a hedgerow was not a love interest.

“I don’t know how he kept from asking the real questions,” Tess said. “Like… how is she intimate with a labyrinth? Because without specifics, I’m imagining thick branches. And the horrendous UTIs that would come from that.”