Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Jimmy
The problem with Monitor Three was that I couldn't stop watching it.
This was, technically, part of my job. The EP watched the anchor feed — monitoring on-air delivery, pacing, energy.
I needed to see what the audience saw in order to produce the broadcast effectively.
Every control room had a monitor dedicated to the anchor's camera, and every executive producer watched it.
None of them watched it the way I watched it.
In a week and a half of producing Nelson's broadcast, I had developed what could only be described as a catalog of Nelson's body language.
I didn't mean to do it. It happened the way fluency happens — through immersion, repetition, the slow accumulation of data until you stop translating and start understanding.
I knew, for instance, that Nelson reached for his water glass when he was buying himself a half-second to reset. Not thirst — strategy. The glass was a prop, and he used it the way a stage actor used a cigarette, creating a pocket of silence he controlled.
I knew that his jaw clenched, barely visibly, when a direction from the earpiece landed close to something he didn't want to feel.
Not disagreement — he took every direction I gave, because Nelson was a professional above all things.
But certain words produced a tension in the muscle just below his ear, and I was learning which words those were.
I knew that his cadence shifted when he was working harder than usual to maintain control. The voice got smoother. Slower. More deliberate. To the audience it sounded like authority. To me it sounded like a man bracing against something.
I knew all of this because I watched Monitor Three the way I used to watch Nelson sleep. The thought arrived without permission, and it hit me like a glass of ice water thrown in my face.
It was mid-broadcast and Ray was beside me. And suddenly I was twenty-one years old, lying in the narrow bed in our old apartment, watching Nelson sleep in the pale gray light that came through our bedroom window at dawn.
He slept on his back. Always on his back, perfectly still, one hand resting on his stomach, the other curled loosely beside his head.
His black hair fell across the pillow, stark against the white cotton.
The light caught the line of his collarbone — sharp, elegant — and traced down the slope of his shoulder.
I used to lie on my side and watch the slow rise and fall of his chest. The way his lips parted slightly just before he fell asleep, as if he were about to say something and then thought better of it.
I used to trace his jaw with my fingertip, feather-light, barely touching, just to feel the warmth of his skin under my hand.
Sometimes he'd stir, not quite waking, and his body would turn toward mine — instinctive, unconscious, his hips shifting under the sheet, his leg sliding between mine — and I would hold my breath, because the intimacy of it, the absolute trust of a sleeping body reaching for you in the dark, was so overwhelming it made my chest ache.
And then I remembered… other things.
The way Nelson's breath would catch when I kissed the hollow of his throat.
How his hand would grip the back of my neck, pulling me closer, always closer.
The way his whole body would go taut and then break apart, his ice-blue eyes locked on mine, his mouth open, his composure shattered so completely that the man in that bed bore no resemblance to the man the world would eventually come to know.
I had seen Nelson Mackenzie without his armor, because I'd been the one to take it off him.
"Jimmy?"
Ray's voice yanked me back into the present. I blinked. Oh, shit. The broadcast, which had been happening this entire time while I'd been lying in a bed that hadn't existed in thirteen years.
"Jimmy, we need the call on the B-block transition."
"Standard toss to the package," I said, and my voice came out steady, which was a miracle. "Camera Two. Nelson reads the lead-in, then we roll."
On Monitor Three, Nelson delivered the transition with his usual seamless precision. Cool, controlled, impenetrable. And I sat in my chair with my hands trembling under the desk and the taste of a memory so vivid it had a pulse.
Stop it. Stop it right now.
I pressed the earpiece button. "Stay on Camera Two for the package, then we'll go to the live shot." My voice was professional. Clipped. Not the voice of a man who'd just been remembering what Nelson Mackenzie looked like when he came apart.
I forced my eyes away from Monitor Three and onto the graphics queue. I made a note about tomorrow's lineup and put the memory back in the box where it had lived, quietly, for years.
But the box didn't close as easily as it used to. The lid sat slightly ajar, and through the crack I could feel the warmth of a body that wasn't there, and the echo of a voice saying my name in the dark in a way that had nothing to do with camera cues.
I produced the rest of the broadcast without incident. When the red light died and the floor director called clear, I pulled off my headset, pressed both palms flat against the desk, and exhaled slowly through my nose.
The crew filtered out. Ray left with his usual nod. I gathered my things, locked up the control room, and rode the elevator to the lobby, where Jillian was supposed to be waiting to take me to dinner.
Jillian was waiting. She was also not alone.
* * *
I saw them from across the lobby, and my stomach dropped.
Jillian was standing near the security desk, holding her phone in one hand and gesturing with the other, talking to a brown-haired man in an impeccable suit who was crouching to pick something up off the marble floor.
He straightened and handed it to her — a phone case, the cheap silicone kind Jillian bought in bulk because she dropped her phone approximately four times a day — and Jillian took it with the kind of laugh that meant she was embarrassed and overcompensating with charm.
Which was how Jillian started every friendship she'd ever had.
The man was Harry Perricone, Nelson's assistant. And he was smiling at Jillian with the easy warmth of someone who'd just met a person he found genuinely interesting.
I had a very bad feeling about this.
From the fragments I could hear as I crossed the lobby, Jillian was explaining that she'd dropped her phone case while digging through her purse for her ID, and Harry had caught it before it hit the floor — "reflexes like a cat," Jillian was saying, "do they train you people for that?
" — and somehow this had turned into an actual conversation, because Jillian could turn a dropped phone case into a twenty-minute friendship with the speed and efficiency of a woman who talked to New York City council members for a living.
I was halfway across the lobby, moving fast, ready to extract Jillian before whatever was forming could solidify into something permanent, when the side entrance opened and Nelson walked in.
He'd changed out of his on-air wardrobe into a long coat — black, beautifully cut, the kind of coat that cost more than my first car. He was looking at his phone, which meant he didn't see them until he was ten feet away.
Nelson stopped.
His eyes went to Harry first — a quick check, professional, the automatic scan of a man who always knew where his people were. Then his eyes moved to the woman Harry was talking to, and I watched recognition hit Nelson's face like a slow-moving wave.
"Jillian."
He said it quietly. Not cold, not warm. The voice of a man encountering a ghost in a well-lit room.
Jillian turned. For one second — just one — Jillian Morris, the loudest person in every room, went completely still. Then she recovered and met Nelson's gaze head-on.
"Nelson," she said. "It's been a long time."
"Thirteen years."
"Give or take."
They stared at each other. There was history here that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with me.
Jillian had been my best friend first — a full year before Nelson and I got together.
She was there before Nelson, and she was there after Nelson, and in between she'd occupied the space Nelson could never quite reach: the person who knew me longest, who I called at two in the morning when I couldn't sleep.
Nelson had never said he was jealous of Jillian.
He hadn't needed to. I'd seen it in the slight tightening around his eyes whenever Jillian and I had our private jokes, our shorthand, our history that predated Nelson's place in my life.
And now Jillian was standing in Nelson's building, talking to his assistant, and the slight tightening was back — thirteen years older but otherwise unchanged.
"You look incredible, Nelson," Jillian said. Her voice was warm. Genuine. And then, because she was Jillian, she added: "Jimmy wasn't exaggerating."
The lobby went very quiet.
Harry's eyebrows rose approximately a quarter of an inch. Nelson's gaze shifted — from Jillian to me, because of course I'd arrived at exactly the wrong moment, standing six feet away with my bag over my shoulder and the expression of a man watching a car crash in slow motion.
Jimmy wasn't exaggerating.
Which told Nelson that I'd been talking about him. To Jillian. Recently. And that whatever I'd said had included some assessment of Nelson's appearance that Jillian felt comfortable referencing in a lobby full of people.
I was going to kill Jillian.
Nelson's expression didn't change. That was the worst part — the absolute stillness of his face while he processed the information.
Ice-blue eyes, steady and unreadable. Then he turned his attention back to Jillian with the practiced ease of a man who had spent many years refusing to let anyone see him react.
"Thank you, Jillian. You look well." He glanced at his assistant. "Harry. Goodnight."
"Goodnight, Nelson." Harry's voice was steady, but his eyes were doing something — cataloguing, filing, recalculating. He'd just watched his boss greet Jillian by name. Thirteen years. He was putting pieces together, and I could see him doing it.
Nelson walked past me toward the exit. As he did, our eyes met for less than a second. I couldn't read his expression, but the faint scent of his cologne — something cool and expensive — reached into my chest and squeezed.
Then he was gone, and the lobby was just a lobby again.
I turned to Jillian. "Jimmy wasn't exaggerating?"
Jillian had the grace to look slightly sheepish. "It slipped out."
"It slipped out!”
"He caught me off guard! I haven't seen Nelson Mackenzie in years and he walks in looking like that and I panicked!"
"You panicked by telling my ex-boyfriend that I've been talking about how hot he is?"
The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them, and the silence that followed had a different quality than the silence before. Because Harry was still standing six feet away. And I had just said my ex-boyfriend.
Harry was staring at me. The unflappable Harry Perricone calm I'd seen him maintain through Nelson's control freak routine, editorial meetings, and post-broadcast memos that ended careers — gone. His eyebrows had climbed to a height I didn't think eyebrows could reach.
"Ex-boyfriend," he said. The word came out like he was tasting it. "Nelson is your ex-boyfriend."
Jillian closed her eyes. "Oh, Jimmy."
"I—" I started.
"Nelson." Harry took a step toward me. He wasn't smiling or frowning. He was doing something far more dangerous — he was understanding. "Nelson Mackenzie is your ex. From college. That's why he—" He stopped himself. "Well," he said. "That explains quite a lot."
"Harry," I said. "Nelson can never know that you know this."
"Of course not."
"I mean it. Not a word or a look. Not a single change in your behavior."
"Mr. Goodman." He looked almost offended. "I have worked for Nelson Mackenzie for three years. I'm extremely good at knowing things he doesn't know I know."
That was oddly reassuring and deeply troubling at the same time.
I turned back to Jillian. "Dinner. Now. Before I make this worse."
"I don't think you can make this worse," Jillian said, which was the kind of thing Jillian said right before things got significantly worse.
I grabbed her by the elbow and steered her toward the exit. Over my shoulder, I caught Harry watching us go, his expression thoughtful in a way that made my skin prickle.
"Nice meeting you, Jillian," he called.
"You too, Harry!" Jillian called back, entirely too cheerfully.
I pushed through the glass doors into the October night and did not look back.
Nelson knew I'd been talking about him. Harry knew we'd been together. Jillian had committed two war crimes in under five minutes.
"You are the worst best friend in America," I said.
Jillian linked her arm through mine. "I am the best best friend in America, and one day you're going to thank me."
"Am I, Jillian?"