Chapter 24 #3
I was gripping the console so hard my knuckles were white. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and kept producing.
The broadcast extended past nine. Past nine-thirty. At ten, the overnight team filtered in and I began handing off segments — carefully, reluctantly.
Nelson delivered the close at 10:15.
"The presidency has changed hands tonight under extraordinary circumstances.
The institutions held. The process worked.
And for the first time, the man sitting in the Oval Office will be an openly gay American.
Tomorrow, as it always does, the work of government continues.
I'm Nelson Mackenzie. Thank you and goodnight. "
The red light died.
The control room let go. Producers slumped. Someone clapped Ray on the back. Lisa lifted her head, mascara streaked, and nobody said a word about it.
Through the glass, Nelson sat behind his desk. Hands flat on the surface. Eyes closed. Breathing deep, slow breaths — the kind you took when you'd held yourself together for hours and could finally stop.
I pulled off my headset. Stood on stiff legs. Walked out of the control room and down the hall, not to my office but to the studio, where the lights were dimming and the crew was breaking down and Nelson was still sitting behind the desk.
He opened his eyes when he heard me.
"That was—" I started.
"We were—" he started.
We both stopped. The studio was nearly empty. A technician coiled cable in the corner. The breaking-news banner was frozen on the monitors, white on red, the biggest story of the year reduced to a graphic nobody was watching.
"Your office," Nelson said quietly. "Not here."
* * *
My office was small, cluttered, and nothing like Nelson's dressing room.
Metal desk buried under rundowns. Peabody Award bookends propping up dog-eared reference books. A window onto an air shaft. A secondhand couch I'd salvaged from the props department my first week because the chairs in this building were designed by someone who hated spines.
Nelson walked in, closed the door, and the room shrank.
He was still in his broadcast clothes, his hair still camera-ready, and he was standing in my space, surrounded by my mess. Nelson Mackenzie didn't come to other people's offices. He summoned people to his. And here he was, standing between my cluttered desk and my secondhand couch. Voluntarily.
"Three hours," he said. Hoarse from the broadcast. "Three hours and I didn't lose a beat." He looked at me. "Do you know why?"
"Because you're the best anchor in cable news."
"Because you were in my ear." No embellishment.
The same way he'd delivered facts all night.
"Every time I needed information, you had it.
Every time I needed a bridge, you built it.
Every time I needed to breathe, you gave me room.
" His voice caught. He pressed his lips together and stared at the ceiling.
"I have never had a producer who could do what you did tonight. "
I leaned against my desk. My hands were trembling.
"You went off-script on the grand jury attribution," I said.
"Your version had a dangling modifier."
I stared at him. He stared at me. And then — after three hours of the most intense broadcast of our careers, after a presidential resignation and a swearing-in and the first openly gay man to ever hold the office — Nelson's mouth twitched.
I laughed. A real laugh, exhausted and startled, and his mouth twitched again and then he was laughing too, both of us laughing at a dangling modifier while history played on screens we couldn't see anymore.
The laughter faded, and the room got quiet. Four feet of charged air between us.
"Jimmy." Barely a whisper. The hoarseness made it rough. The roughness made it intimate.
"Nelson, we said—"
"I know what we said."
He crossed the four feet. We were nearly the same height, and it put his mouth right there, a breath from mine. In the dressing room I'd been the one to move first, to back him into the wall. Here he was the one closing the distance — walking into my office, my space, my mess, and choosing it.
He cupped my face in both hands. Cool palms. Trembling fingers.
Nelson kissed me.
Slow. Gentle. Nothing like the dressing room.
This was a man telling me something with his mouth because the words weren't enough.
That something had shifted. That whatever we'd agreed to was no longer operative.
That the voice in his ear and the man in front of me were the same person, and he was finished pretending otherwise.
I kissed him back. My hands found his waist. His thumbs traced my cheekbones. The office was small and messy and nothing was where it should be, and Nelson Mackenzie was kissing me in it like it was the only room in the world.
We pulled apart. His forehead dropped against mine.
"This can't never happen again," he whispered.
I pulled back just enough to see his face. Bright eyes. Terrified and certain at the same time.
"What did you just say?"
Nelson swallowed. "You heard me."