Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Jimmy
Harry appeared at the control room door with the expression of a man delivering grim news.
"Mr. Goodman," he said. "Nelson would like to see you in his dressing room."
The control room was nearly empty. Ray had left ten minutes ago with his usual nod.
The overnight crew was settling in at the far end of the desk, headsets on, paying no attention to me.
I was sitting in the EP chair with my notepad and the quiet, nauseating certainty that the broadcast I'd just produced had been the worst of my tenure.
Not editorially. Editorially, the show was strong. The Pinnacle follow-up was airtight, and the senator interview had been sharp.
But the voice I'd put in Nelson's ear tonight — flat, clinical, deliberately stripped of everything I'd been unconsciously putting into it for three weeks — had turned the broadcast into something stiff and mechanical, and I'd felt it from the other side of the glass.
Nelson's delivery had been precise but rigid.
The warmth that had been building in his on-air presence, the texture that had been driving the ratings up — I'd taken it away tonight by pulling back my voice, and the show had suffered.
Nelson had noticed, and now he was summoning me to his dressing room.
I stared at Harry. He was leaning against the door frame with his arms folded, watching me with the careful neutrality of a man who knew more than he was saying. His face gave away nothing.
"When?" I asked, though I already knew the answer.
"Now."
I set down my notepad and stood.
"Harry."
"Yes?"
"How angry is he?"
He considered this for a moment, as if weighing the diplomatic options. Then he shrugged. "He's Nelson."
Which told me everything.
* * *
The walk from the control room to Nelson's dressing room wasn't long.
Through the newsroom, past the glass wall and the dark studio where the anchor desk sat under switched-off lights, down the hallway with its beige walls and framed publicity photos of anchors past and present.
Forty seconds, maybe. A minute if you walked slowly.
I slowed to a crawl.
The building was emptying out. The post-broadcast energy — the low hum of a machine powering down, the scattered voices of crew heading for the elevators — was fading, leaving behind the hollow quiet that settled over the Beacon building every night after the broadcast. A janitor was pushing a cart past the edit bays.
Somewhere a phone was ringing and no one was answering it.
The studio was a cavern of shadows — cameras draped, lights off, the anchor desk barely visible in the dark. I'd been inside his ear for over an hour, delivering directions with the emotional warmth of a dial tone, and now I was walking toward him to explain why.
Except I wasn't sure I could explain it. How did you tell someone I pulled back my voice because I discovered it was doing things to your body, and it was doing things to mine, and I got scared?
You didn't. Not in a workplace, and definitely not with your ex. And this situation was so tangled that you couldn't find the end of any thread without pulling on six others.
I reached the hallway. Nelson's door was closed, and the light underneath it was on.
I stood there for five seconds. Ten. Long enough to count my own heartbeats, which were coming faster than they should have for a man who'd survived shelling in Aleppo and gunfire in Juárez. War zones were simple. There were sides, objectives, cover. Places to hide from the bullets.
There was no cover here.
I knocked, and after a long beat Nelson's voice rang out.
"Come in."
My hand froze on the doorknob. "You can do this," I muttered. Then I opened the door and stepped inside.
Nelson was standing in the center of the room.
He hadn't changed out of his broadcast wardrobe — he'd been waiting, not getting ready to leave. The dressing room was immaculate around him — cool grays, clean surfaces, nothing personal, the vanity mirror reflecting us both from across the room. Two men. One door. No witnesses.
I closed the door behind me.
Nelson's arms were crossed over his chest. His jaw was set and his ice-blue eyes were locked on me with an intensity I'd seen directed at politicians, interview subjects, and crew members who had failed him.
But never, in all the years I'd known him, at me.
Not like this. He looked like a man preparing to go to war.
"Tonight's broadcast was the worst we've produced since you started," he stated.
No preamble. No greeting. Just the verdict, delivered with surgical precision.
"The content was strong," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "The Pinnacle package was airtight. The senator interview—"
"I'm not talking about the content."
"Then what are you talking about?"
"You know what I'm talking about."
Of course I did. But saying it would mean acknowledging what had been happening in the earpiece, and it would mean admitting that tonight's broadcast was flat because I'd deliberately stripped something away.
Admitting that would mean confronting the question of what that something was, and I wasn't ready for that confrontation.
Nelson uncrossed his arms and took a step toward me. Just one. But the room was small, and the step closed the distance enough that I could smell his cologne — that cool, expensive scent that had reached into my chest in the lobby weeks ago and hadn't let go.
"Something changed tonight," he said. His voice was quieter now.
Controlled, but with barely disguised effort.
"Your voice was different. For three weeks, your voice has been—" Nelson stopped.
I watched him choose his next words with the same precision he chose his on-air language.
"Your voice has been something. And tonight it wasn't. I want to know why. "
"I was being professional."
"Don't." The word was sharp. "Don't tell me you were being professional. What you were before was also professional. What you were tonight was something else entirely."
He was right. I didn't have a defense, because the truth was that I'd been scared of what my voice was doing to him and scared of what watching him respond was doing to me.
Scared was not a word I used often.
Silence settled between us. The kind of silence that has weight — that presses against your skin and dares you to fill it. The ventilation system hummed. Somewhere in the building a door closed, distant and muffled.
Nelson was looking at me, and something in his face was changing. His jaw was still set, but the muscles around his eyes were loosening. His breathing had shifted — deeper, less controlled. Nelson looked like a man trying very hard to hold something together and running out of strength to do it.
"Why did you leave me?"
The question came out of nowhere. Nelson's voice was barely above a whisper. He didn't look like a celebrity anchor or an icy news machine or any of the things the world called him. Nelson looked like a man in pain.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I closed it, then tried again.
"I was scared," I mumbled, averting my eyes.
"Scared of what?"
"Of losing you." The words felt like pulling shrapnel out of my own chest. "You'd just gotten your break at Beacon, and you were so happy, Nelson.
So sure of yourself. And I looked at you and thought — Nelson's going to the top.
He's going to be brilliant, and he's going to leave me behind without ever meaning to.
I was a kid for Christ's sake." I forced myself to meet his gaze.
"You had everything figured out. You knew exactly who you were going to be.
And I didn't have a job, or a plan, or the first idea how to stand next to a man who was about to become somebody.
I was so terrified you'd outgrow me that I left first."
Nelson's face was very still.
"I told myself it was about principles." My voice cracked.
"I told myself Beacon was a corporate machine, that you were selling out and I was standing up for real journalism, whatever that is.
And some of it was true — I did believe it, at the time.
But underneath all of it, Nelson, underneath the note and the righteous bullshit, I was just a scared kid who was too proud to say he was afraid of being left behind. "
A tear slid down Nelson's cheek. A single tear. It tracked down the flawless skin that hair and makeup had perfected hours ago, and he didn't wipe it away. He didn't move at all. He just stood there and let it fall.
I couldn't stop myself.
I crossed the three feet between us and took his hand.
Nelson stiffened. Every muscle in his body locked at once. His fingers were cold in mine, but he didn't pull away. He just stood there, rigid, and I held on.
"I'm sorry," I breathed. "Nelson, I'm so sorry. I should've talked to you instead of walking out, and leaving the way I did was so damned wrong. I'm sorry for all of it."
His hand trembled in mine. A small tremor, deep, the kind of shaking that starts in the bones. He still hadn't pulled away.
"You left me, Jimmy," he whispered. "I came home and the apartment was half empty and I didn't understand."
"I know."
"For weeks I kept my phone charged and next to me, waiting for a call. A text. Anything." Nelson's voice trembled.
"I know." My eyes were burning. "I told you not to call me because I knew if I heard your voice I'd come back. And I was too proud and too stupid to let myself return to you."
Something broke in Nelson's face. Not dramatically — quietly, a slow fracture spreading outward from a single point. His jaw loosened. His shoulders dropped. And his fingers, which had been cold and rigid in mine, slowly, ever so slowly, closed around my hand.
I pulled him into me.
He resisted for a half-second — I felt it in his shoulders, the tension fighting the pull — and then he folded.
Nelson put his face against my shoulder and let me wrap my arms around him, and the sound he made was so small and so broken that it cracked open something in me I didn't know was still sealed shut.
I held him the way I should have held him years ago — tight, present, not going anywhere.
Fine tremors shook Nelson's body, the aftershocks of a wall coming down.
His hands found my back, gripping the fabric of my blazer, and for a long moment we just stood there in the immaculate dressing room, holding each other.
"I'm sorry," I whispered into his hair. One more time. Because it needed to be said with my arms around him, not from across a room. "I'm so sorry, Nelson."
He pulled back. Not far — just enough to see my face. His eyes were red, his composure gone. He looked nothing like the man on television and everything like the man I'd loved at twenty-two.
He looked into my eyes, then down at my mouth, and I felt his hand slide to the back of my head.
Nelson kissed me.
His lips were warm and trembling, and the kiss wasn't urgent or desperate or any of the things I might have expected.
It was careful. Almost tentative. His mouth moved against mine slowly, as if he were relearning something he used to know by heart, and the hesitation in it — the way he kept almost pulling back and then not pulling back — made my chest ache.
I kissed him back. My hand came up to his jaw, my thumb tracing the track the tear had left on his cheek, and he made a sound against my mouth — a small, involuntary sound, halfway between relief and grief — and I felt it reverberate through my entire body.
We pulled apart. An inch. Our foreheads touching.
His breath was warm and unsteady against my lips.
Nelson's eyes were open. So were mine. We looked at each other from an inch away, and I could see every color in his irises — the ice blue streaked with silver, the ring of darker blue at the edges — and I thought: I know those eyes.
I've always known those eyes. Even when I couldn't see them, I knew them.
"Jimmy," Nelson whispered. "What are we doing?"