Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Jimmy
I watched the playback three times.
This was not unusual. Every good EP reviewed the previous night's broadcast. You watched for pacing issues, technical glitches, editorial gaps — the things you missed in the heat of live production that became visible in the cold light of the next morning.
I'd been doing it for weeks, sitting in the control room with coffee and a notepad, running through the show segment by segment.
But this morning, something felt off.
I had the anchor feed isolated on Monitor Three — full screen, no graphics, just Nelson behind the desk for the entire hour.
I started at the top of the A-block and let it play.
He was flawless, as always. Clean delivery.
Perfect pacing. The counterterrorism interview was masterful — controlled, probing, the work of a man who understood that the best questions are the ones that create space for the answer.
I watched his hands as he listened to the analyst's response.
Long fingers, still, resting on the desk with deliberate poise.
I watched the line of his jaw as he pivoted to the follow-up — sharp, precise, the geometry of a face that had been gifted by genetics and then refined by a decade of studio lighting into something almost unfairly beautiful.
I watched the way he held his shoulders — set, straight, carrying the broadcast the way a column carries a roof.
My face felt warm. I pressed my palms against the EP desk and shifted in my chair.
I rewound to the B-block transition and forced myself to watch with clinical eyes. The package ended. Nelson turned to Camera Two. His delivery was smooth, authoritative, exactly what the moment called for. Very professional. I made a mental note about the transition timing and moved on.
Then the C-block started, and Nelson's voice dropped into a register that I felt at the base of my stomach.
It was the interview with the woman whose husband had been on the fourteenth floor.
Nelson's voice went softer — not weaker, never weaker, but layered with something raw that I'd never heard in his broadcast delivery before.
A tenderness. Controlled, yes, because Nelson controlled everything, but present in a way that made the man on screen seem less like a news anchor and more like a person who felt things deeply and had spent years pretending he didn't.
My breath had gone shallow. I noticed this the way you notice your own heartbeat — suddenly, with alarm.
I was sitting in an empty control room, watching a replay, and my body was responding to Nelson Mackenzie's voice on a monitor as though he were sitting next to me.
As though he were whispering in my ear instead of the other way around.
I paused the playback and pressed both hands against my face.
This was not professional. This wasn't what an EP did during morning review.
An EP did not sit in the blue glow of a control room getting flushed and short of breath because his anchor's voice on a recording made him feel like he was twenty-one again, lying in a narrow bed, listening to Nelson talk in the dark about the award-winning journalists they were going to become.
I took a deep breath and hit play again. I would get through this review like a professional, or I'd quit my job and go back to eating ramen in my miserable little studio. Those were the options.
The broadcast continued. And that's when I saw it.
It was during my earpiece direction at the end of the B-block. I heard my own voice come through the control room speakers—
"Easy, Nelson. Let it breathe."
—and on screen, something happened. It was subtle. A civilian would have missed it completely. But I'd spent three weeks building an involuntary catalog of Nelson's physical tells, and the catalog was screaming at me.
Nelson's chin lifted. A fraction of an inch.
His shoulders softened by a degree. His jaw tightened, and his weight shifted — a small, careful redistribution, the movement of a man adjusting himself and hoping the desk hid it.
And at the base of his throat, just above the collar of his charcoal jacket, a flush of color bloomed against skin that was usually cool and pale.
I rewound. Played it again. Watched the same five seconds three times.
The flush was real. It appeared at the exact moment my voice came through his earpiece. Not before. Not during the interview, not during the package, not during any other moment of the broadcast. It appeared when I said easy, Nelson.
I sat back in my chair and stared at the frozen image.
Was Nelson reacting to my voice?
I rewound further. Found the moment during the Chicago coverage where I'd said stay with me, Nelson.
The same thing happened.
The micro-pause before he took the direction. The half-degree shift in his cadence on the next line of copy. And his hand — barely visible at the bottom of the frame — moving toward the water glass with a speed that wasn't quite casual.
I found the close, where I'd said you've been extraordinary tonight. Nelson's breath caught. On the raw anchor feed, blown up full screen, I could see it — a tiny hitch in his chest, a skip in the rhythm of a man whose breathing was otherwise metronomic.
Every single time my voice came through his earpiece, Nelson's body did something. Something small, something he almost certainly thought no one could see.
But I could see it. Because I was the one person in the world who'd learned to read Nelson Mackenzie's body, and the things I was reading on this monitor were not professional responses to editorial direction.
I closed the playback and the screen went dark. My reflection stared back at me from the dead monitor — auburn hair, green eyes, an expression that looked like a man who'd just discovered something he wasn't ready to know.
My hands were trembling. And low in my body, in the quiet of the empty control room, I could feel the evidence that this discovery was not, in any way, unwelcome.
"What the hell?" I muttered. "This can't be happening."
* * *
I called Jillian from the sidewalk, because I couldn't stay in that building one more second.
I'd walked out the side entrance and gotten half a block before my legs decided that was far enough, and now I was standing in the recessed doorway of a shuttered bodega on Tenth Avenue with my phone pressed to my ear and my forehead pressed to the cool metal of the security gate, looking, I was certain, like a man having a small public breakdown. Which I was.
"Something happened," I groaned.
"Define something."
"I was reviewing last night's broadcast. The playback. Watching it back for editorial notes, the way I do every day."
"Okay."
"And I—" I turned and put my back against the gate.
"I got turned on, Jillian. Jesus. Watching Nelson on a monitor in an empty control room.
Like some kind of — I don't even know. It's completely unprofessional.
Hell, it's fucking insane. I'm reviewing a broadcast and I'm sitting there getting flushed and short of breath because Nelson's voice on a recording did something to me that I can't—"
"Jimmy."
"What."
"Breathe."
I took a breath. It came out shaky.
"That's not all," I said. "While I was watching, I noticed something.
Nelson's body. On the monitor. Every time I gave him a direction through the earpiece — every time my voice was in his ear — his body reacted.
A flush on his throat. A change in his breathing.
His hand going to the water glass too fast. Small things, things nobody would notice unless they were looking for them.
But I was looking, and Jillian, it happens every time.
Every single time I speak into his earpiece, Nelson's body responds. "
Silence.
"Jillian?"
"I'm here. I'm just — processing." A pause. "Are you telling me that Nelson Mackenzie is physically reacting to your voice? On live television?"
"That's what I'm telling you."
"And you're physically reacting to him. While watching the playback."
"Yes."
"So both of you are—"
"Jillian, please don't finish that sentence."
She finished it anyway, because she was Jillian. "Both of you are getting hot and bothered because of each other, which is very complicated and — oh hell, Jimmy." Jillian took a deep breath. "Neither of you has said a word about it, right?"
"God, no!"
Jillian was quiet for a moment. "Jimmy. I have to ask you something, and I need you to be straight with me. No deflecting, no 'I'm just recognizing Nelson's professional excellence.'"
I knew what was coming and pressed the phone harder against my ear.
"After all these years, are you still attracted to Nelson?"
"Yes," it spilled out. "God help me, yes. I'm attracted to my anchor, who is also my ex, who I left thirteen years ago, who hates me, and whose body apparently reacts to the sound of my voice on live television. This is my fucking life now."
"Well," Jillian said. "At least you're finally being honest with yourself."
"I'm being honest in a bodega doorway on Tenth Avenue. This is not how I pictured personal growth."
Jillian laughed — a real laugh, warm and surprised. "Okay. So what are you going to do about it?"
"Nothing. I'm going to do absolutely nothing. I'm going to go back into that building tonight and produce the broadcast and keep my voice professional and not think about the fact that—"
"That Nelson gets hot and bothered when you talk in his ear?"
"Jillian."
"That your voice apparently does things to his body that—"
"JILLIAN!"
"I'm just saying, Jimmy. You can't un-know this.
You've seen it on your little monitor thingy, and now you know what your voice does to him.
Nelson's going to be sitting behind that desk tonight with that earpiece in, and you're going to open your mouth and give a direction, and both of you are going to know exactly what's happening, even if neither of you says a word about it. "
Jillian was annoyingly, devastatingly right.
I couldn't un-know what I'd seen on the playback.
I couldn't un-feel what my body had done in response.
Tonight I would sit in the EP chair and speak into Nelson's earpiece with the full knowledge that my voice was doing something to him, and that he was doing something to me.
And damn it, I'd have to produce the broadcast anyway.
"What if I made it worse?" I said quietly. "What if I've been — without realizing it — what if the way I've been talking to him in the earpiece is part of why his body's reacting? What if I've been doing something with my voice that I didn't know I was doing?"
Jillian was quiet for a long moment. "Do you think you have been?"
I thought about it. Really thought about it, with the honest brutality I'd applied to every story I'd ever investigated.
"I don't know," I said. "I've been telling myself it's just producing.
That the way I talk to him is just — how I produce.
But I don't talk to Ray that way. I don't talk to the graphics team that way.
When I'm on the earpiece with Nelson, something in my voice—" I stopped.
"I don't know if I'm doing it on purpose or if my voice is doing it naturally. And I don't know which one is worse."
"Neither one is worse, Jimmy. It just means you're human. And that you're attracted to the man you work with — which, newsflash, you have been since sophomore year."
I looked up Tenth Avenue, at the traffic and the crosswalk and the ordinary river of people who were not, at this moment, coming apart in a bodega doorway. A bus sighed past. Somewhere a horn blared and gave up.
"What am I going to do tonight, Jillian?"
"You're going to go in there and do your job.
Jimmy Goodman is going to produce the best broadcast on cable news.
And you're going to pay attention — really pay attention — to what happens between you and Nelson through that earpiece.
Because whatever this is, it's not going away.
And sooner or later, one of you is going to have to say something about it. "
"It's not going to be me," I blurted.
"Famous last words."