Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Jimmy
I made it three blocks before my hands started shaking.
I'd meant to walk to the subway, but I blew past the entrance without seeing it and just kept going, up Eighth Avenue in the cold, my collar turned up against a wind that couldn't touch the heat still coming off my skin.
My hands were jammed in my pockets and they were shaking anyway.
I pulled one out and looked at it under a streetlight like it belonged to someone else.
I could still smell Nelson.
On my hands and my shirt. In my hair. Nelson's cologne was all over me. Every time the wind shifted it came off my own collar and hit me, and I'd lose the thread of whatever I was telling myself.
This can never happen again.
I'd said it with my jaw set and my voice perfectly controlled, and I'd meant it. After all, I was a professional. Nelson was my anchor. We had a show to produce and a working relationship to maintain and a thirteen-year history that had already detonated once and didn't need a second explosion.
So why were my hands still shaking?
A bus hissed past, threw up a sheet of gutter water, and I stepped back too late, soaking one shoe.
Somewhere near 23rd Street I finally stopped, under the awning of a closed deli, and made myself breathe.
The phone in my pocket said 10:47. The broadcast had ended at 8:00.
That meant more than two hours had passed since I'd walked into Nelson's dressing room for a confrontation about a flat broadcast, and somehow I'd ended up on his couch with my face in his neck saying his name like it was the only word I knew.
What did you do, Jimmy?
My phone rang.
The screen lit up: RUFUS JACKSON. My landlord.
Seventy-three years old, retired MTA, owner of two Inwood buildings and one enormous orange cat named Chairman Meow.
Rufus had let me slide on rent twice in the past two years without ever making me feel small about it, which in my experience made him the kindest man in Manhattan.
"Hey, Rufus."
"Jimmy, I know it's late." His voice was warm and gravelly, the way it always was, like he was perpetually on the verge of offering you a plate of something.
"But I got a young man who does research up at Columbia, wants to see the studio tonight.
Crazy schedule, and I told him I'd ask. I know you're out in six weeks and I want it rented quick. "
Six weeks. My lease was up in six weeks, and I’d done exactly nothing about finding a new place.
The Beacon salary had been hitting my account for a month now, a direct deposit so comically larger than anything I'd ever earned that I'd checked my banking app three times after the first one, convinced there'd been a clerical error.
"Of course, Rufus. I'm not home yet anyway."
"You're a peach. In and out in twenty minutes. Won't touch a thing."
I hung up and stared down the wet avenue.
A young man from Columbia was going to walk through my four hundred square feet of cinder-block bookshelves and secondhand everything and decide whether it was worth what I paid for it, and I was standing under a deli awning with the scent of a man I'd just slept with still on my skin.
I called Jillian.
She picked up on the second ring. "It's a weeknight, James. This better be good."
"Can I buy you a drink?"
A pause. Jillian Morris could read a silence the way other people read a headline. I heard the calibration happening — the rapid assessment of tone, timing, and the fact that I was calling at eleven p.m. offering to buy rather than split.
"Where?"
"You pick."
"The Ear Inn. Twenty minutes. Don't make me wait, I'm putting on real pants for this."
She hung up without saying goodbye, which meant she was already looking for the pants.
* * *
The Ear Inn was the kind of downtown bar that had been standing since before anyone drinking in it was born — a low crooked room in one of the oldest houses left in the city, dark wood, tin ceiling, framed photos of sailors and longshoremen and regulars long dead.
It didn't try to impress anybody, which was exactly why it did.
A month ago, I'd have thought twice about the tab.
I turned that thought over as I slid into a scarred table near the back and ordered a bourbon — top shelf, neat, without doing the mental math I'd been doing for years.
No quick calculation of how many days until payday, no silent downgrade to the well option while pretending I preferred it.
I just ordered what I wanted, and when the bartender set it in front of me, I didn't flinch at the price.
I needed to find an apartment. A real one. Something with a bedroom that wasn't also the kitchen. The lease was up in six weeks, Rufus was already showing the place, and for the first time in years I could look at listings without sorting by lowest price first.
The thought should have felt like a victory. Tonight it just felt like one more thing I didn't have the bandwidth to process.
Jillian arrived in nineteen minutes, which meant she'd sprinted for the train.
She dropped into the chair across from me in a City Hall staffer's version of pajamas — a Columbia sweatshirt over dress pants, hair piled on top of her head, reading glasses still perched on her nose.
She glanced at my bourbon, then stared at my face and my hair, which I hadn't checked in a mirror since leaving Nelson's dressing room and which I suspected was telling a story I hadn't authorized.
"Order me whatever you're having," she said. "And then tell me everything."
"Nothing happened."
Jillian took off her glasses and set them on the table with the deliberate care of a woman preparing to cross-examine a witness.
"James Goodman. You called me at eleven p.m. on a weeknight.
You are drinking top-shelf bourbon downtown, which a month ago would have required you to sell a kidney.
Your hair looks like you stuck your head out of a cab window at seventy miles an hour, and you have a mark on your neck that I am generously choosing not to identify.
So I'm going to ask you one more time, and I want you to think very carefully before you answer. " She leaned in. "What happened?"
I took a long sip of bourbon. It burned all the way down, which was useful, because it gave me something to focus on besides the memory of Nelson's hands in my hair.
"Um, I need to find a new apartment because my lease is up,” I mumbled. “Oh, and I might have slept with Nelson."
Jillian's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. For a woman who talked for a living — who had once filibustered a Thanksgiving dinner for forty-five minutes on the subject of subway-platform etiquette — the silence was remarkable.
"You." She pointed at me. "Slept with Nelson." She pointed vaguely uptown. "Nelson Mackenzie. Your anchor. Your ex-boyfriend anchor. The man you left thirteen years ago via a scrawled note."
"Thank you for the recap, Jillian, I was there."
"Where? I mean, where did this happen?"
"His dressing room."
Jillian picked up my bourbon and drank from it. I didn't stop her. She set the glass down, pressed both palms flat on the table, and looked at me with an expression that was half horror and half something I didn't want to name because it looked dangerously close to delight.
"In the building. You slept with your anchor in the building where you both work."
"The building was mostly empty," I shrugged, trying to downplay it.
"Oh, well, if it was mostly empty." Jillian flagged down the bartender without looking away from me. "I need my own glass of whatever this is. Immediately. Do not make me wait." The bartender, who had clearly served bossy divas before, moved with impressive speed.
Jillian's bourbon arrived. She drank half of it in one go, set it down, and straightened her spine in a way I recognized from years of friendship.
This was Jillian shifting from gossip mode to operational mode.
The difference was subtle but critical: gossip Jillian wanted details.
Operational Jillian was about to tell me things I didn't want to hear.
"Okay." She held up a hand. "First of all. You cannot sleep with your coworker."
"I know."
"You especially cannot sleep with your coworker when your coworker is the star of the show you produce."
"I know, Jillian."
"And you especially cannot sleep with your coworker when your coworker is your ex-boyfriend who you left in a spectacular fashion that I have heard about roughly nine hundred times from both you and—"
"What?" Who the hell had Jillian been talking to?
Jillian waved this away like a gnat. "The point is, this is the trifecta of bad decisions.
It's a workplace violation wrapped in an emotional landmine wrapped in thirteen years of unresolved baggage. Jimmy, you are a Peabody Award–winning journalist. You’ve survived actual gunfire.
You do not need me to tell you that this is—"
"A terrible idea. I know. Which is why I told him it can never happen again."
Jillian studied me. The operational assessment continued — I could practically see the gears turning, the data being sorted, the conclusions being drawn with the ruthless efficiency of a woman whose day job involved managing information for New York City government.
"How was it?" she asked, biting her lower lip.
"Jillian."
"I'm gathering intelligence. Answer the question."
I stared at the amber in my glass. Swirled it. The low light caught the liquid, throwing warm shadows across the table, and I thought about Nelson's dressing room, the dim light, the shattered glass and grooming supplies on the tile floor, the sound he'd made when…
"That bad, huh?" Jillian said softly.
"The opposite." My voice came out quieter than I intended. "It was—" I searched for a word that would be honest without being revealing and couldn't find one, so I just shook my head.
Jillian was quiet for a moment. A real moment, not a dramatic pause.
She wrapped both hands around her glass and stared at me the way she'd stared at me sophmore year at Columbia, when I'd told her I thought I was falling for a guy in the journalism program — with a gentleness she would deny possessing if you ever mentioned it publicly.
"It can't happen again, Jimmy."
"I just said that."
"You said the words, but I'm not convinced you believe them.
" She took a measured sip of bourbon. "You just started the best-paying job of your life and you are finally — finally — out of financial survival mode.
Jimmy, you can afford a real apartment and probably a therapist, which, by the way, you desperately need.
If this thing with Nelson blows up at work, you lose the job, the salary, and the first stability you've had in years. "
Every word landed. Jillian had a gift for saying the exact thing you already knew but hadn't been willing to say to yourself.
"It won't happen again," I muttered.
Jillian held my gaze for a long time. Then she finished her bourbon, set the glass down, and pointed at me with one perfectly manicured finger.
"You are a world-class journalist and an absolutely catastrophic decision-maker when it comes to Nelson Mackenzie, and I say that with genuine love."
"Noted."
"I don't believe you."
"Also noted."
Jillian signaled for the check. I reached for my wallet — my wallet, which now contained a debit card attached to an account with an actual balance — and put the drinks on my tab without flinching. Jillian watched me do it.
"Look at you," she breathed. "Buying rounds downtown."
I signed the receipt. The number didn't sting. A month ago it would have kept me up all night.
Outside, a light rain had started to fall, and the cobblestones on Spring Street gleamed under the streetlights like they'd been polished. Jillian pulled her hood up and gave me a hug that was tighter and longer than usual.
"Find a new apartment," she said into my shoulder. "Get a therapist. Do not sleep with your anchor."
"In that order?"
"In any order, as long as all three happen." She pulled back and held me at arm's length, studying my face. "Call me tomorrow. I mean it."
She headed off toward the Canal Street station, and I watched her go — Jillian Morris, five foot two in bare feet, louder than anyone in any room, the only person in my life who'd known me before and after Nelson and loved me through both versions.
I stood on the wet corner and didn't move for a while. The rain tapped on the awning above me and my phone said 12:14 a.m.
I pulled it out. Dark screen. No notifications.
I put it back in my pocket and started walking toward the train, and my four hundred square feet of cinder blocks and secondhand furniture uptown.
"It won't happen again," I muttered. Then a tiny voice in the back of my head said: If it isn't going to happen again, why can I still feel Nelson's hands on my skin?