Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Nelson
Brad noticed before he even plugged in the blow dryer.
"Honey." He stood in the doorway of my dressing room with his kit bag over one shoulder and a venti something in his free hand, surveying the vanity like a crime scene investigator.
The surface was bare. No grooming supplies in their graduated row.
No crystal water glass, no script binder propped against the mirror.
Just a clean, empty surface with a long scratch running diagonally across it that hadn't been there yesterday.
"Where is everything?"
"I reorganized."
"You reorganized." Brad set his bag down and ran one finger along the scratch. His immaculately shaped eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. "With what? A baseball bat?"
"There are replacement supplies in the top drawer. I had Harry buy them this morning."
Brad opened the drawer, peered inside, and made a sound that was half gasp, half prayer. "You replaced your entire makeup kit. Nelson, what happened in here?"
Jimmy's legs wrapped around me, and the crystal glass shattered on the tile. His mouth moved down my chest and—
"Nothing happened. Let’s get started, we're behind schedule."
Brad studied me for one more moment — he had the instincts of a gossip columnist trapped in the body of a hair and makeup artist, which arguably made him more dangerous than either — then shrugged and draped the cape over my shoulders with a flourish.
"Fine. Keep your secrets." He began pulling products from the drawer, arranging them on the vanity. "So. Speaking of drama. Kyle's mother called me again last night."
I closed my eyes as his fingers worked through my hair.
This was the routine. Brad talked and I listened.
The sound of someone else's chaos had always been oddly soothing — a reminder that other people's lives were messy too, that somewhere out in Jersey a woman named Deborah was making her adult son's boyfriend's life a living hell and it had absolutely nothing to do with me.
"She wants to host Thanksgiving," Brad continued, styling my hair with the practiced speed of a man who'd beautified cable news anchors for decades.
"Which, fine, except she also wants to invite Pastor Rick, who she knows has opinions about Kyle and me, and when I said maybe that's not the most welcoming environment, she said — and I quote — 'Well, Bradley, the Lord's table has room for everyone.
' The Lord's table. Bitch, please. It's a folding table from Costco. "
Under normal circumstances I'd have had a response. Something dry. Something that made Brad cackle and tell me I was his favorite client, which he told every client, but in my case I suspected he meant it.
Today I could barely track the story, because every time I looked at the vanity all I saw was Jimmy sitting on it, my hands on his face, his legs pulling me in.
The dressing room door opened. Harry walked in carrying a leather folio, a coffee, and a container from the restaurant on Ninth he ordered from without asking, because he'd long ago memorized my preferences down to the dressing on the side.
"Rundown, coffee, lunch." He set each item on my desk and then stood there a beat too long, his brown eyes sweeping the room with the quiet thoroughness of a man who noticed everything and said almost nothing.
Brad caught it, of course.
"Oh, don't bother, Harry. He reorganized." Brad made air quotes and rolled his eyes.
Harry's gaze landed on the scratch across the vanity. Then on me. His expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes shifted — a slight rearrangement, like a puzzle piece clicking into place.
"I see," he said, which meant he saw entirely too much.
"The rundown, Harry."
He opened the folio with crisp efficiency.
"Lead package is the Senate vote on the infrastructure bill.
Second block is the factory closure in Ohio.
Third block—" He paused. A pause from Harry was unusual.
A pause from Harry while making eye contact was unprecedented.
"Mr. Goodman has assigned the Ukrainian ambassador interview to Marla. "
My hand stilled on the coffee cup.
The Ukrainian interview was mine. I'd requested it specifically, because Ambassador Kovalenko was notoriously difficult and I was one of the few anchors in the business who could handle his evasions without losing the audience.
It was a prestige segment, the kind that generated clips and commentary, and Jimmy knew that. Jimmy knew I wanted it.
And he'd given it to Marla.
I took a sip of coffee. Set it down. The cup landed on the vanity exactly where the crystal glass used to sit, seven inches from the edge, and the coincidence hit me.
Was this payback?
Jimmy, who'd walked out of this room last night saying it could never happen again, had reassigned my interview to my co-anchor.
It was a legitimate editorial call — Marla was more than capable, the segment would be fine — but the timing was a knife between my ribs.
He was putting distance between us. Professionally.
Publicly. Making sure I understood that whatever had happened between us had not earned me special treatment.
Or he was punishing me.
"Nelson?" Harry was watching me with that steady, searching look. Brad had gone suspiciously quiet, which meant he was listening with the intensity of a man who'd be texting his boyfriend about this within the hour.
"Fine." The word came out clipped. Professional. Perfect. "Marla can have the interview. Tell Mr. Goodman I'll need an updated copy for the third block by five."
Mr. Goodman. The name felt like glass in my mouth.
Harry nodded and closed the folio. He didn't leave.
"Was there something else?"
"No, sir."
I held his gaze until he slowly turned and walked out. Brad waited until the door clicked shut, then met my eyes in the mirror with an expression of naked curiosity.
"Don't," I said.
"I didn't say a word."
"You're thinking them very loudly."
Brad pressed his lips together, suppressing something that wanted badly to be a grin, and went back to my hair.
Somewhere down the hall, the studio was being lit for the broadcast, and in the control room on the other side of the glass wall, a man with auburn hair and green eyes was building a show he'd rearranged to keep me at arm's length.
I stared at myself in the mirror. Navy blazer. Black hair. Blue eyes. Camera-ready. Controlled.
No one could see the bruise Jimmy's teeth had left on my shoulder beneath the fabric.
No one needed to.
The earpiece went in at 6:55.
I'd worn this thing five nights a week for years.
It was routine — plastic and foam, snug against my ear canal, the physical tether between anchor desk and control room.
I'd never thought about the intimacy of it.
Someone else's voice inside your head, closer than a whisper, bypassing every wall you'd built because it didn't go through walls. It went through you.
Tonight I thought about it.
I thought about it as I settled into my chair and smoothed my script pages and arranged the water glass at the proper distance from the edge.
The floor director called final positions and the studio lights shifted from rehearsal warmth to broadcast white.
Then the countdown started, the red light blinked on, and millions of people tuned in to watch a man who was holding himself together with nothing but muscle memory and spite.
"Stand by. Sixty seconds."
Jimmy's voice.
It hit me low in the stomach and spread outward like a lit match dropped in dry grass. He was trying to be flat. I could hear the effort — the clipped consonants, the measured tone, the deliberate absence of the warmth that had been building for weeks. He was trying to give me nothing.
But his voice cracked on seconds. Just barely. A hairline fracture that no one in the control room would have caught. I caught it. I caught everything about this man. That was the whole problem.
The red light went solid. I looked into the camera and delivered the opening.
"Good evening. I'm Nelson Mackenzie. Tonight, the Senate prepares for a landmark vote on infrastructure as the White House signals a last-minute change in strategy—"
The words came out clean. Thirteen years of broadcast discipline held the line. My face was composed, my cadence steady, and absolutely no one watching from home could have known that the voice in my earpiece belonged to the man who'd had his hands and mouth on me last night.
"Camera Two. Take it slow on the intro."
Take it slow. Jimmy's voice dropped half a register on slow, and my mind went straight to his hand sliding down my body — my neck, my collarbone, over my stomach — deliberately, watching my face, reading me—
I swallowed. Transitioned to the infrastructure package. My delivery was fine. Professional. Maybe a fraction too quick, compensating for the heat climbing up the back of my neck.
Second block. The Ohio factory closure. I was reading the intro to the labor correspondent's package when Jimmy came back in my ear.
"Nelson, I need you to go deeper on this one."
Go deeper. His hand working me over, my back arching off the leather—
The word landed low and my vision blurred for half a second. I blinked. Refocused. Delivered the question to the correspondent with a precision that cost me more effort than anything I'd done on camera in years.
And then — a beat of dead air in the earpiece. One second. Maybe two. An eternity in live television.
Jimmy had heard himself. He'd heard what he'd said and how he'd said it, and the dead air was him freezing, the same way I was freezing, both of us trapped in the realization that the language of producing and the language of what we'd done to each other were now permanently tangled, and there was no safe word left.
I reached for the water glass. My hand was steady. My body was not.
The broadcast continued. I pivoted to a segment on pharmaceutical pricing, reading the tease for the next block with the smooth authority of a man in complete command.
None of it was true.
"Stay with me through the break. Ninety seconds."
Stay with me.
Heat flooded my chest, poured downward, and I pressed my knees together under the desk hard enough that my jaw ached.
It didn’t help, because my cock was swollen to the point of being painful.
Marla glanced at me. I stared at the camera and counted backward from ten the way I'd taught myself to do in my first year of anchoring, when the nerves were bad — except the nerves had never felt like this.
The break ended. Marla took the lead on the ambassador interview — my interview, the one Jimmy had taken from me — and I sat beside her with my hands folded on the desk and my face arranged in engaged professionalism while Jimmy directed her questions from the control room.
"Sit tight, Nelson. Let Marla run with this."
Sit.
One word. One syllable. A perfectly ordinary production direction any EP would give a co-anchor during someone else's segment.
Except I had said that word to Jimmy last night. Standing in front of the cleared vanity with grooming supplies shattered on the floor and his eyes wide and dark. Sit. And he had sat. And I had stepped between his knees and—
Color rose in my cheeks. I felt it happen — a flush that started at my throat and climbed, visible, undeniable, on a face that millions of people were watching in high definition.
I was blushing.
Nelson Mackenzie was blushing on live television during a segment about the war in Ukraine, and there was not a single thing I could do about it. Because the man responsible for it was in my ear. I couldn't respond or explain, and ripping the earpiece out wasn't an option.
Marla, to her credit, didn't react. She asked the ambassador about peace negotiations with the steady authority of a woman who'd been on television since before I was born. So I sat beside her, praying the flush would fade, and gripped my pen under the desk hard enough to leave marks in my palm.
The earpiece went quiet. Jimmy had stopped talking.
The silence was worse. Because in the silence I could hear him breathing.
Shallow. Uneven. He'd heard it too. He'd said sit and heard the echo of my dressing room, and now he was breathing the way he'd breathed when I'd stepped between his knees and—
I delivered the close. I held for the standard three-count. The red light died.
I sat behind my desk and didn't move. Marla unclipped her mic, gave me a long look — something between concern and a question she was choosing not to ask — and walked off set. The crew filtered out. Ray called something to a technician about a lighting cue.
Through the glass wall, the control room was dimming. Jimmy was in the EP chair, headset around his neck, staring at a monitor. He was making a point of not looking at me with such intensity that the not-looking was louder than eye contact would have been.
After my erection finally relaxed, I unclipped my mic. Stood. Smoothed my blazer. Walked off set with the measured precision of a man who was not falling apart. I made it to my dressing room, closed the door, and stood in front of the mirror.
Flushed cheeks. Dilated pupils. A bruise hidden under navy fabric. A scratch on the vanity.
The earpiece was still in.
I reached up, pulled it out, slowly, and held it in my palm. The most intimate object in my life. The thing that put Jimmy's voice inside my head every night, closer than a lover, closer than a thought.
I set it on the vanity. Right in the center of the scratch.
How was I supposed to do this five nights a week, every week, for the rest of my contract, when the sound of his voice made my body remember everything my mind was trying to forget?