Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Nelson
Every Wednesday at noon, I lay face-down on a heated table in the spa on the third floor of my building and let a woman named Katya put her hands on me.
This was the only hour of my week in which another human being touched my body.
I'd been coming to Katya for two years. She was Russian, in her fifties, built like a woman who could carry a refrigerator up a flight of stairs, and she had a policy of absolute silence during sessions.
This was the primary reason I'd chosen her.
No small talk, no idle conversation. Just the sound of the ventilation system and the low, impersonal hum of whatever playlist the spa piped through its speakers.
Katya's hands were excellent for working the tension out of muscles that had been clenched all week.
It was the closest thing I had to a ritual of surrender. For one hour, I wasn't Nelson Mackenzie, anchor for the Beacon Broadcasting Company. I was a body on a table with my face in a padded ring, and the only thing required of me was stillness.
Today, stillness was proving difficult.
Katya's thumbs dug into the knot between my shoulder blades — the one that lived there permanently — and I closed my eyes and tried to empty my mind.
That's our show. Toss to the overnight desk.
Jimmy's voice. In my ear. Last night, after two hours and thirteen minutes of the most extraordinary live television I'd ever been part of.
Eight words. A standard production call.
And the sound of it — low, slightly hoarse from two hours of nonstop talking, ragged at the edges in a way Jimmy's voice only got when he was spent — had embedded itself somewhere in my nervous system and refused to leave.
Katya moved to my lower back. Her hands were strong, impersonal, clinical.
This was a professional touching a client.
There was nothing intimate about it. And yet my body, which had spent the last twelve hours replaying Jimmy's voice on a loop, couldn't seem to tell the difference between hands that meant nothing and a voice that meant everything.
I pressed my face deeper into the padded ring.
Stay with me, Nelson.
He'd said that during the Chicago coverage.
A perfectly professional direction that meant don't toss to the correspondent yet, I need another ten seconds.
That was all it meant. That was all it could mean, in a control room full of people, during a breaking news broadcast, with millions of viewers watching.
My body did not care what it meant in context. My body heard stay with me in Jimmy's voice and went somewhere else entirely.
Katya's hands moved down to my legs. She worked the muscles of my calves with firm, rhythmic pressure, and I concentrated on the sensation — the physical reality of knuckles against muscle, the warmth of the heated table, the neutral scent of massage oil — and I tried, with the full force of emotional discipline, to stop hearing Jimmy's voice in my head.
It didn't work. Jimmy's voice had taken up residence somewhere between my brainstem and my spine, and no amount of Swedish deep-tissue work was going to evict it.
Katya moved back to my shoulders. The silence held.
The playlist murmured. My body was warm and loose and betraying me in ways I was grateful the padded table concealed, and I was thinking about the look through the glass wall — Jimmy's face in the blue light, his eyes meeting mine, the raw, startled softness I'd seen there and the answering crack in my own chest — when Katya spoke.
"You covered the explosion last night."
My eyes opened. Katya did not speak during sessions. That was the rule.
"In Chicago," she continued, her thumbs still working. "I watched. Very frightening. You were very good."
The compliment landed on my back like an icy fist. I didn't want to talk about Chicago, or the broadcast. Thinking about the broadcast meant thinking about the voice in my ear, and thinking about the voice in my ear while lying face-down on a table with someone's hands on my body was a combination I could not afford.
"Thank you, Katya," I said. The words came out with just enough frost to remind us both of the arrangement. Professional distance. Silence. No discussion of what happened outside this room.
Katya's hands paused for a fraction of a second — the pause of a woman recognizing she'd crossed a line — and then resumed their work without another word. Silence returned.
I shut my eyes, pressed my face into the ring, and instructed myself, firmly and specifically, to stop thinking about Jimmy Goodman's voice.
* * *
The earpiece went in at 6:55, and my shoulders were already climbing toward my ears.
I'd spent the afternoon reviewing Jimmy's lineup — strong, as always, annoyingly free of serious flaws — and sitting through the editorial meeting, where Jimmy had presented the Chicago follow-up coverage with the controlled authority of a man who had covered bombings in places the rest of the room couldn't find on a map.
He'd booked a former FBI counterterrorism director for the A-block interview.
He'd sourced a second whistleblower for a B-block package on federal building security protocols.
The C-block was a human piece — families of the injured, handled with restraint and genuine editorial sensitivity.
I'd found nothing to cut. Nothing to question. Nothing to seize on as evidence that Jimmy Goodman was anything less than the best EP this show had had in years.
This was becoming a pattern I didn't know how to break.
The countdown began. The theme music rolled. The red light ignited.
"Good evening. I'm Nelson Mackenzie. Tonight, new developments in the Chicago federal building explosions. The FBI has confirmed that both devices were placed deliberately, and a joint task force has been assembled to lead the investigation."
I hit the pivot. "In a press briefing this afternoon, the lead investigator described the explosions as 'a coordinated and targeted act,' and confirmed that surveillance footage from the building's fourteenth floor is now in the hands of federal analysts.
With me now is Gilman McNeil, former director of counterterrorism. "
The A-block interview ran long because the man was excellent — articulate, specific, willing to say things on camera that former officials rarely said. Jimmy didn't cut him off. He trusted the material, and trusted me to manage the conversation.
That was the thing about Jimmy's producing that was hardest to fight.
He gave me room to work. Every EP before him had either hovered or retreated — micromanaging every breath or disappearing into the background and leaving me to carry the broadcast alone.
Jimmy did neither. He was present in my ear, constant, guiding — and then, at precisely the right moment, he stepped back and let me work.
It was like being held by someone who knew exactly when to let go.
Damn it. I didn't want to think about Jimmy's producing in terms of being held. I did not want that metaphor anywhere near my conscious mind. I buried it and moved on.
The B-block package ran. It was excellent. I reached for my water glass.
"Easy, Nelson." Jimmy's voice came through the earpiece as the package neared its end. "Let it breathe. You've got plenty of room on the back end."
Easy, Nelson. Let it breathe.
The words settled against the skin of my inner ear like warm fingertips.
Jimmy's voice had dropped half a register — the way it did when he was focused, when he was in the zone and his natural speaking voice came through instead of the clipped professional tone he wore like armor.
This was the voice underneath. Softer. Lower. Intimate.
The heat started at my collarbone and moved down, a warmth that spread across my chest and continued south with the steady inevitability of water finding its level.
I felt it in my stomach first, a tightening, and then lower, and then — with the same appalling swiftness as that other night— I was hardening against the front of my trousers, and there was not one thing I could do about it.
I was aroused.
I was sitting behind an anchor desk on live television and I was turned on because Jimmy Goodman had said easy, Nelson, let it breathe in a voice my body could not distinguish from the voice that used to say my name in the dark.
The package ended. I turned to Camera Two. My face did not change, and my voice didn't waver. I delivered the transition to the C-block with the practiced authority of a man who was not, at this moment, experiencing a physical crisis below the anchor desk that no one in America could know about.
"Stay with me on this one, Nelson. Don't pull back. Let the families tell the story."
Stay with me. Don't pull back.
My thighs went rigid under the desk, the wool of my trousers dragging tight across me with every fractional shift of my weight.
The pressure was insistent, specific, and completely immune to the fact that I was on live television.
My body was responding to Jimmy's voice with a directness that bypassed every defense I'd ever built, and there was nothing I could do except sit perfectly still and deliver the news.
The C-block interview was with a woman whose husband had been on the fourteenth floor.
She was trembling, her eyes bloodshot. I asked the questions Jimmy had prepped with the gentleness the moment required, and the audience heard compassion from their anchor.
The audience was not wrong — I felt compassion, genuine compassion, for this woman and her husband — but running underneath it, like a second current beneath still water, was the ache that Jimmy's voice had started and my body refused to end.
I reached for the water glass. My hand was steady. I took a sip. The water was cold and it did nothing.
The interview ended. I tossed to Marla for a segment on the congressional response.
She took over, and for ninety seconds, my earpiece was quiet.
Jimmy was talking to the graphics team, or coordinating with the overnight desk, or doing any one of the hundred things an EP did during a broadcast. He was not talking to me.
The silence in my ear was worse than his voice. Because in the silence, my body didn't calm down. It sat in the heat Jimmy had created and waited for him to come back, the way a body waits for a lover to return to bed — alert, primed, and aching.
"You're up in thirty, Nelson. Bring it home. You've been extraordinary tonight."
Extraordinary.
The word landed in my ear and detonated.
Not because it was unprofessional — it wasn't. EPs complimented anchors.
It happened. But Jimmy had said it in that low, warm register, and he'd said you've been extraordinary, not the show's been extraordinary.
He'd aimed it at me. Personally. And my body, which had been running hot for twenty minutes, took the compliment and turned it into something that pulsed.
I delivered the close. I held for three. The red light died.
I couldn't move.
Marla glanced at me. "Mackenzie? You alright?"
"Fine." The word came out clipped. I reached for the water glass, and this time my hand shook — just enough that a drop slid down the outside of the glass and landed on the desk. I set it down too quickly. The glass hit the surface with a sound louder than it should have been.
Seven inches from the edge, I hoped. I didn't trust myself to check.
Marla watched me a moment, her eyebrows raised.
Then she unclipped her mic and walked off the set.
I sat alone behind the desk in the dark studio with my jaw tight and my hands flat on the surface and my composure held in place by nothing but professionalism and fury — and by the plain necessity of staying seated until my body consented to let me stand.
Through the glass wall, the control room was a blur of blue light and movement.
Jimmy was in there, removing his headset.
He'd spent the last hour inside my ear, and whether he knew what he'd done to me or not, the result was the same.
I was sitting behind my own anchor desk, in my own studio, in the building I'd commanded for years, undone.
On set. After a broadcast. Because of a voice in an earpiece.
When I finally trusted myself, I stood and smoothed down my jacket. Without another glance at the control room, I walked off the set with the measured precision of a man who was not falling apart. Somehow, I made it to my dressing room.
After locking the door I stood in front of the mirror and stared at myself. Charcoal jacket. Black hair. Blue eyes. The face of a man who was always in control.
But I didn't control this. I didn't control a single damned thing about what was happening to me.
The man responsible for it was on the other side of a glass wall, and he was going to be there tomorrow night, and every night after that.
The damned earpiece was going to go in at 6:55, and his voice was going to arrive inside me, and my body was going to respond.
"Fuck me."
There wasn't a memo I could write, no meeting I could call, no amount of ice cold enough to stop what Jimmy Goodman was doing to me without ever laying a hand on my skin.
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the mirror and closed my eyes.
"This has to stop."