Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Nelson
What Are We Doing?
I’d asked the question with my forehead still pressed against his, my lips still wet, and the silence that followed should have been my chance to step back. To smooth my jacket, find my voice, and become the man who always had the next line ready.
Jimmy’s thumb traced the tear track on my cheek one more time. Slow. Deliberate. Like he was memorizing the path of it.
I kissed him again.
Not like before. The first kiss had been tentative—a question asked with my mouth because I didn’t have the words.
This one was the answer. I pulled him into me by the front of his shirt and kissed him like I’d been drowning and he was the surface.
Jimmy gasped against my mouth, his hands fisting in the lapels of my jacket, and something inside my chest broke open and I let it.
Jimmy pushed me backward. My shoulders hit the wall beside the door.
The framed Beacon logo rattled on its hook, and my mic pack dug into my hip.
But I didn’t care about any of it, because his mouth was on my neck, on the spot just below my ear that he’d found all those years ago—the spot no one else had ever located.
His teeth grazed the skin there, and a sound tore out of me that I’d never made in this room.
That I’d never made in this building—low and desperate, my hips bucking toward him instinctively.
Jimmy’s hands slid under my jacket, pushing it off my shoulders. The fabric caught on my elbows, and he made a frustrated noise. I shrugged it the rest of the way off, and it landed somewhere behind him. I didn’t watch it fall, because his fingers were already on the buttons of my shirt.
He undid the top button, and I swear I stopped breathing.
Second button. Jimmy’s knuckles brushed my collarbone, then dipped lower, dragging down the center of my chest. His touch was slow, deliberate, like he was unwrapping something precious.
Third button. My pulse hammered in my throat, and I knew he could see it. Jimmy had always been able to read me like a breaking story—every tell, every micro-expression, every crack in the facade.
He parted the fabric and looked at me, and his expression undid something I’d spent so many years building.
It wasn’t hunger. I’d been looked at with hunger—by men in bars, by dates across restaurant tables, by the beautiful, forgettable men I’d taken home and felt nothing for. Hunger I could handle. Hunger was simple.
Jimmy looked at me like I was someone he recognized.
Like he was seeing through every layer I’d constructed since he left—the anchor, the man who controlled every room—straight down to the twenty-two-year-old who’d come home to a half-empty apartment and learned that loving things also meant losing them.
My eyes burned. I blinked hard. Damn it, I wasn’t going to cry again.
“Hey.” Jimmy’s voice was barely a whisper. His hand came up to my jaw. “Stay with me.”
I turned my face into his palm and pressed my lips against it. I felt his fingers tremble.
The ease of it was what shattered me. I had undressed men in this city with steady hands and a detached precision I told myself was confidence and knew, somewhere underneath, was absence.
My body going through the motions. Every time, I’d lie in their beds afterward and stare at their ceilings and feel absolutely nothing.
Then I’d get dressed in the dark and leave before they woke, telling myself this was perfectly fine.
That this was enough. Not everyone needed more.
Jimmy’s hands were shaking now, working the last buttons of my shirt, and mine were shaking too. The fact that we were both trembling—that neither of us was steady—cracked something open inside me that I couldn’t close again.
I reached for him. Found the hem of his shirt where it had come untucked and pulled it up and over his head in one motion.
He lifted his arms to let me, and the sight of his bare skin in the low light of my dressing room made my knees buckle.
Actually buckle. I locked them and pretended it hadn’t happened, but from the look in his green eyes, he’d caught it.
He unbuckled his belt, worked his slacks open, and a moment later they were on the floor, kicked aside. My eyes devoured him.
Freckles. Across his shoulders, his chest, the tops of his arms. A whole galaxy of them that I used to trace with my fingertip on Sunday mornings while he pretended to study. I’d mapped them once. I knew them by heart, without looking, so deeply memorized they lived in my soul.
“You’re staring,” he whispered.
“Yes.” I didn’t look away. “I am.”
I caught his wrist and pulled him with me, away from the wall.
Toward the vanity. My vanity, with its rigid rows of grooming supplies, the script binder, a crystal water glass, and the ceramic mug with the network logo—every item arranged in the exact order I placed them every single day.
Because order was control, and control was survival.
I swept my arm across the surface and sent all of it crashing to the floor.
The crystal glass shattered. A comb skittered under the chair. The script binder hit the tile with a flat, heavy slap. Jimmy’s eyes went wide and dark. He stared at the wreckage, then looked at me, and I saw the exact moment he stopped being careful.
“Sit,” I said.
He sat on the cleared vanity. I stepped between his knees, and his legs wrapped around me instantly, pulling me in. The heat of him against me through the last thin layer of fabric tore a moan out of my throat that I couldn’t have stopped if my life depended on it.
I kissed him. Deeply. Both hands cradling his face, thumbs tracing his cheekbones.
Jimmy’s hands found my waist, my ribs, the waistband at the small of my back—and he pressed his mouth to my bare shoulder, teeth sinking in just enough to sting.
I made another sound I didn’t recognize, raw and pleading.
I had spent years in this room. Sitting in this chair.
Looking in this mirror. Becoming Nelson Mackenzie for the camera—composed, controlled, untouchable.
The mirror behind Jimmy now showed me a man with his shirt hanging open, his hair falling loose over his forehead, his head tipped back while another man’s mouth moved down his chest.
Jimmy lifted his head. His pupils were blown, his breathing ragged, his auburn hair a wreck. “The couch,” he said against my mouth. “Please.”
We stumbled toward it, shedding the last barriers between us. His hand caught in his own waistband, and he laughed—a breathless, startled sound—and I kissed the laugh right off his mouth. I toed off my shoes and stepped out of the rest of my clothes, then pulled him down onto the cushions.
Skin against skin. The full length of his body against mine.
I had to close my eyes and just breathe. Just exist inside it without analyzing it. Without filing it away in the place where I stored things that could hurt me.
Jimmy propped himself on one elbow and looked down at me. Traced my lower lip with his thumb. “Hi.”
Something between a laugh and a sob caught in my throat. “Hi.”
He kissed me softly. Once. Then his hand slid down my body—my neck, my collarbone, over my stomach, lower—slow, deliberate, watching my face with those green eyes, reading every response the way he read a live feed. Gathering information. Following the thread. Letting the story build.
His hand closed around my shaft, and I stopped breathing. He stroked me slowly, his mouth at my throat murmuring my name like it was the only word he knew. Every point of contact was a place I’d gone numb years ago and forgotten was capable of feeling anything at all.
My back arched off the leather, and every thought I’d ever had about maintaining control left my body in a single sharp exhale.
I’d been perfectly composed for thirteen years.
In this room. Behind the anchor desk. In front of those cameras.
I’d taught myself to hold still when everything inside me was screaming, to deliver a perfect line while my world was falling apart, to feel nothing, because feeling things was what got you left behind.
I felt everything.
His name came out of me wrecked, raw, and completely without permission.
“Jimmy—fuck, Jimmy—”
His forehead dropped against mine, and he whispered something I couldn’t quite hear over the sound of my own heartbeat. I didn’t need to hear it. I felt it in the way his breath hitched, in the way his fingers tightened around me, in the way his body trembled against mine.
I came undone in his hand, my release crashing over me in waves so intense I saw stars. My vision blurred, and I clung to him like he was the only solid thing in the world. Jimmy held me through it, his face pressed to my temple, his breath ragged against my skin.
When I could breathe again, I rolled him onto his back before I could lose my nerve. My hands were unsteady, but I didn’t try to hide it. I was done hiding.
I kissed his throat, the hollow at the base of it, the freckle on his left collarbone that I’d kissed a thousand times in another life.
He arched into me, his breath hitching, and I learned his body again—the places that made him gasp, the places that made him go quiet, the way his hips moved when he was close to the edge.
My mouth trailed lower, down his chest, over his stomach, and I took my time the way I used to. Until his fingers tangled in my hair, until his breath came in sharp, uneven gasps, until he was saying please in a voice that had nothing left of the professional in it.
I remembered all of it. Thirteen years, and my hands and my mouth still knew the map.
Jimmy came undone with one hand knotted in my hair and the other gripping the arm of the sofa so hard his knuckles went white.
“Oh, God, Nelson! Jesus…”
I held him through it with a ferocity that frightened me, because I recognized it for what it was.
Not want. Not lust. Not even need.
Mine. He was mine. Jimmy had always been mine. And I’d spent thirteen years pretending the space he left behind was a room I’d chosen to keep empty.
* * *
The quiet settled over us like a held breath.
I stared at the ceiling. Jimmy’s head rested on my shoulder, his auburn hair spilling across my skin, his fingers drawing absent circles on my collarbone—the same lazy pattern he used to trace when neither of us had anywhere to be. The gesture was so familiar it hurt.
I should say something. I was Nelson Mackenzie, and I always had the next line. The pivot. The perfectly calibrated sentence that kept the world at the exact distance I required.
I opened my mouth and nothing came.
Our breathing had slowed. Our hearts hadn’t. I felt his pulse against my ribs—rapid, reckless, matching my own.
My throat tightened. I pressed my lips together and willed myself not to break. Not now. Not while I could still feel him everywhere, while his body was warm and heavy against mine, while the room still smelled like both of us.
Jimmy lifted his head. His eyes were careful and open and terrified all at once. I braced for whatever he was about to say. What does this mean? Where do we go? I still love you. Any of those would have split me down the middle.
He sat up. Pulled the throw blanket from the arm of the sofa and wrapped it around his shoulders. His hands were steady, and his jaw was set.
Jimmy looked at the far wall. At the mess of shattered glass and scattered grooming supplies on the floor. At my charcoal jacket crumpled by the door, and my shoes lying on their sides where I’d toed them off.
But he didn’t look at me when he spoke.
“This can never happen again.”
The words landed like a closed fist against a bruise. My chest cracked along a fault line I didn’t know existed. I pulled in a breath.
“Of course not,” I said. My voice came out perfectly even.
Jimmy flinched. Barely. Just a flicker at the corner of his mouth that anyone else would have missed. But I caught it. I caught everything about this man. That was the whole problem.
He stood. Let the blanket fall from his shoulders.
Began collecting his clothes from the floor.
I watched him in the mirror as Jimmy pulled his shirt over his head.
Stepped into his shoes. Ran his fingers through his hair in a way that made it look like he’d just come in from the wind rather than off a leather sofa in his ex-lover’s dressing room.
He paused at the door. His hand rested on the handle.
Jimmy didn’t turn around.
The door clicked shut behind him.