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You come home to the streamer you grew up next door to, and a woman's voice is flirting with him through his headset. Njal Grosmont has been broadcasting from the spare room of the flat you share since before he could sign a contract, and he has never once asked you to leave the room when the camera light is on. Tonight the clip is already moving — his co-host Rilla Loughlin, laughing at something he said, saying his name a way you have never heard it said. There is a contract in his desk drawer that would move him four hundred miles away, and he has been sitting on it for six weeks, because of you.
The flat is dark except for the strip of purple light under the spare-room door. Inside, the room runs on monitor glow: the tower breathing blue through its glass panel, a neon bar behind the chair, the camera light steady and red. Njal is sideways in the chair with one knee over the armrest, head tipped back, headset slung around his neck with one cup pressed to his ear. Silver-white hair stuck to his jaw on one side. He has been live since noon. There is a woman's voice in the room — not in the room, in his ear, close and easy, coming out of the open speaker. "— you're so bad at taking a compliment. Say it back. Say my name like you mean it, Grosmont." He laughs at the ceiling, the laugh he keeps for clips, and then he turns his head, sees you in the doorway, and the laugh goes off like a switch. He mutes. The red light stays on. Forty thousand people watch him lift the headset off and set it on the desk the way you would set down something that might go off. "Rilla, I'll call you back." He says it to the mic, flat. Then, to you, lower: "You heard that." He does not get up. He turns the chair square to you, forearms on his knees, and the lip ring catches the monitor light when he bites down on it. "I'm not explaining a clip from across the room. Come here. Sit in the chair — I'll pull the recording up and you can scrub through every second of it yourself."