Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Nelson
The second his mouth crashed into mine, the adrenaline hit like a match to gasoline. Three hours of holding the world together—three hours of his voice in my ear, his words in my head, his presence the only thing keeping me anchored—and now it all had somewhere to go.
I shoved Jimmy backward. His hips hit the edge of his desk, and a stack of rundowns slid to the floor. Neither of us gave a damn. I pressed him against the wood, my hands gripping his waist hard enough to bruise, and kissed him like I was trying to crawl inside him.
This wasn’t like the dressing room.
The dressing room had been grief and desperation, the breaking of something we’d held too long.
This was triumph. This was two men who’d just rewritten history together, who’d operated as a single unit through a crisis that would define their careers.
The rush of it was still in our veins, and it was transforming, turning into something feral and hungry and inevitable.
Jimmy’s fingers fumbled with the buttons of my shirt, his breath hot against my neck. “Fuck—Nelson—”
“Lock the door,” I growled against his mouth.
He reached behind me without breaking the kiss, his arm trembling as he turned the deadbolt. The click was obscenely loud in the small office, like a starting gun.
Jimmy yanked his shirt over his head in one motion, no hesitation, no restraint.
The man in front of me wasn’t the careful EP who’d sworn this could never happen again.
This was the man who’d produced a presidential resignation in real time, who’d held an entire control room together by sheer force of will.
His skin was flushed, his chest heaving, and he was vibrating with the same manic energy that had kept me locked behind that anchor desk for three hours.
I ran my hands up his sides, feeling the heat of him, the way his muscles jumped under my touch.
Freckles dusted his shoulders, his collarbone, the tops of his arms—constellations I’d memorized a lifetime ago.
I bent my head and pressed my mouth to the cluster just below his throat, and Jimmy shivered, his fingers tangling in my hair hard enough to sting.
“The couch,” I said.
Jimmy laughed, breathless. “The couch is terrible.”
“I don’t care.”
We crashed onto it together, the frame groaning under our weight.
It would’ve been funny if I’d been capable of laughter.
I wasn’t. The only thing I was capable of was getting closer—skin against skin, the full length of his body pressed against mine.
When our chests met, bare and sweaty, I made a sound so raw it startled me.
Jimmy pushed me onto my back, his knee wedging between my thighs, his weight pinning me to the cushions. His face was feral, his green eyes dark with desire. “You were incredible tonight,” he said, voice rough. “Do you have any idea what it was like watching you from that control room?”
“Show me.”
His mouth crashed onto mine again, possessively, his tongue sliding against mine like he was trying to consume me.
Then he was moving lower—teeth grazing my throat, my collarbone, my chest—and I arched off the couch so hard the frame creaked.
My hands fisted in his hair, my breath coming in ragged gasps.
I wasn’t trying to be quiet. I hadn’t made sounds like this in years.
Jimmy’s hand slid down my stomach, his fingers working my belt open with a deftness that told me he’d been thinking about this—not just tonight, but during the broadcast, while he was feeding me lines and holding me steady.
He’d been producing the show and wanting me at the same time, the way I’d been anchoring the show and wanting him, and the duality of it—professional and carnal, simultaneous and inseparable—made my hips lift, helping him drag my pants down.
He stripped me bare on that secondhand couch, in that cluttered office, with the Peabody bookends watching from the shelf like silent judges.
The absurdity of it—Nelson Mackenzie, undone, in this room, on this furniture—would’ve been hilarious if Jimmy’s mouth hadn’t chosen that exact moment to travel lower.
His breath was hot against my skin. My stomach. My hip. I was trembling, aching, already on the edge, and when his mouth finally closed over me, I grabbed the arm of the couch and my whole body went taut like a wire pulled to breaking.
Jimmy was relentless. He took his time, then abandoned all patience, his mouth and hand working my cock together until the pressure built past anything I could hold back. I was gone—arching, shaking, one hand knotted in his hair, the other white-knuckled on the couch frame.
“Jimmy—God—” His name tore out of me as I came, my body seizing, then releasing in wave after wave, and he held on through all of it, slowing down only when I was too wrecked to take any more and pushed him back.
Jimmy crawled up my body, his mouth finding mine. The taste of what he’d done was still on his lips, and the rawness of it cracked my chest wide open. His green eyes locked onto mine—me, only me—and I flipped him, pinning him to the couch with a breathless oof.
I didn’t have patience left. No finesse. I knelt over him, my hands on his thighs, and stared at him—bare, flushed, breathing hard, wrecked and wanting—and he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
“Nelson.” My name in his mouth was rough, desperate. “Please.”
I gave him everything.
I put my mouth on the tip of his cock, my hand working the base, and learned his body the way I’d once known it by heart—the places that made him gasp, the ones that made him go silent, the exact rhythm that made his hips lift off the cushions to chase more.
He started saying my name like a prayer, broken syllables that climbed louder with every stroke—“Right there—God, Nelson, don’t—don’t stop—”
I didn’t stop.
His thighs went rigid on either side of me. His hand fisted in my hair, pulling hard enough to hurt, and then he was coming apart, his whole body convulsing, his voice shaking the room.
I held onto him through every pulse of it, my mouth and hand working him until he was practically boneless, sagging into the cushions. His breath came in ragged gasps, his fingers loosening in my hair, and I stayed with him as his breathing slowed, as the world settled back into place.
I should’ve felt exposed.
Undressed in someone else’s office. In the building where I’d built my career. On a couch that probably cost less than my shoes.
But Jimmy was draped over me like a blanket, his breath warm against my skin, and I felt safe.
The word surfaced without permission, simple and enormous, and I let it stay.
Jimmy’s fingers traced lazy circles on my collarbone—the same pattern he’d drawn on my skin a lifetime ago. I caught his hand and pressed my lips to his knuckles, and he exhaled against my shoulder, his body trembling.
“We just had sex in my office,” he murmured.
“Yes.”
“On a cheap couch I swiped from the props room.”
“It shows.”
He laughed, quiet and exhausted, his body shaking against mine. I smiled into his hair and held him tighter. The moment was so warm, so ordinary, so far from anything I’d let myself have in years that my throat ached.
The quiet stretched. Jimmy’s breathing slowed. His fingers stilled on my skin.
Then he spoke.
“You were right, you know.” His voice was barely audible. “What you said that night in the control room. About me changing my voice.”
I waited.
“I was doing it on purpose. Not at first. At first it was just—instinct. I fell into producing you the way I used to talk to you, and the show improved. I told myself it was just good producing.” He pressed his forehead harder against my shoulder.
“But it wasn’t. I knew what I was doing.
And when I realized what it was doing to you, I pulled back, and the pulling back was—”
“A confession,” I finished.
“Yeah.” His voice cracked. “Like I realized we had unfinished business, or…”
I stared at the water-stained ceiling, at the industrial nothingness of it, so different from my dressing room, my apartment, the curated spaces I’d built to keep the world out.
“Jimmy.”
“Hmm.”
“You left me because I wanted this.” The words came out steady. “You left me because I took a job at a cable news network. Because I wanted the anchor desk and the studio and the bright lights. You wrote me a note that said you couldn’t watch me become someone you didn’t recognize.”
Jimmy went very still against me.
“And now here you are.”
The words hung in the air. I felt Jimmy’s breath stop against my skin.
“Now you’re the one cashing the big network paycheck, Jimmy.
You’re the one who took the cable news job.
And every day you sit in a control room producing the exact kind of show you told me was beneath real journalism.
” I wasn’t angry. The anger had burned off somewhere between the dressing room and tonight, and what was left was just the truth.
“You became the thing you left me for wanting to be.”
Jimmy pulled away. Sat up. The throw blanket slipped, and he caught it against his chest, holding it there like a shield. The gesture was so familiar—so like the dressing room, when he’d reached for cover, pulled inward—that something twisted in my stomach.
But he didn’t leave.
He sat on the terrible couch, his bare shoulders above the blanket, his auburn hair a disaster, his green eyes full of something I’d never seen in them before.
Not defiance. Not deflection.
Recognition.
“You’re right,” he said. His voice cracked. “I became exactly what I judged you for. And I didn’t even have the decency to do it as well as you did.”
Something broke open between us.
Not like the dressing room—violent, desperate. This was quieter. A wall collapsing inward, brick by brick, and on the other side was just two men looking at each other honestly for the first time.
“I owe you more than an apology,” Jimmy said.
Tears ran down his face. “I owe you an accounting. For every year I spent telling myself I was better than you for walking away. For every time I watched your clips online and told myself you’d sold out when the truth was you were doing excellent work and I was too proud to admit it. ”
I reached for his hand. Our fingers interlaced—skin still warm, still damp—and I held on.
“I built an entire life out of not needing you,” I breathed. “An apartment nobody lives in. A closet full of armor. A reputation designed to keep every person on earth at arm’s length.” I looked at our joined hands. “It worked. I didn’t need anyone. I also didn’t feel anything for years.”
Jimmy’s grip tightened on my fingers.
“We were both wrong,” he whispered. “I was wrong to leave. You were wrong to stop letting anyone in. We built our whole lives around a fight we had at twenty-two, and neither of us ever checked to see if the other person had changed.”
“You changed.”
“So did you.”
Jimmy leaned into me. I wrapped my arm around his bare shoulders and pulled him close. He settled against my side with the familiarity of a man who had been fitting into this exact space since he was twenty years old.
“So what do we do now?” he asked.