Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jimmy
The first thing I saw was his shoulder.
Bare, with the deep purple bruise where I'd bitten him, just below the curve of his collarbone.
The throw blanket had slipped sometime in the night and was bunched around his waist, and Nelson was sleeping naked on my secondhand couch with his head pillowed on my shoulder and his hair a complete disaster.
I held very still.
The light coming through the window was the particular early gray that hadn't decided yet whether to become morning.
My phone was somewhere on the floor in the wreckage of my clothes, and I would have guessed it was just past five if I had to.
The building wouldn't really start filling up for another hour.
The control room was running, the way it always was — there was always somebody in cable news at five in the morning — but my floor, the EP suite, was as close to empty as it ever got.
I let myself look at him.
Not the way I'd looked at him through the glass wall for weeks.
Not the careful, professional, only-when-he-couldn't-see-me looking I'd been training myself to do.
Just looking. He was on his side, one arm folded under his head, the other draped across my stomach.
His black hair was falling across his forehead in a way that I couldn't stop staring at.
There was a faint crease in his cheek from the seam of the cushion.
His mouth was slightly parted. He breathed in and out, slowly, and I watched his shoulder rise and fall and my chest did something I had no name for.
I realized I was smiling.
Not a small, polite, social smile. The kind of smile you don't perform.
The kind that arrives on its own and sits on your face like it lives there, like it's telling you something true about where you are.
I felt it spread across my mouth and into my cheeks and behind my eyes, and I didn't try to stop it.
This was what I'd given up at twenty-two.
I didn't have a clean word for it. It wasn't peace, exactly.
Nor was it safety, although it was related.
It was the very specific feeling of waking up next to the person you were supposed to be waking up next to and knowing, without thinking about it, that the geometry of the world was correct.
That something that had been sitting at a wrong angle for a very long time had finally been set right.
I'd had a whole life. I'd been shot at in countries my mother couldn't find on a map, and stood on a stage in an uncomfortable suit and accepted a Peabody.
I'd slept with people, dated some of them, and I'd built a career other people in my field had spent their whole lives trying to build.
None of it had even felt like the same category of thing as this.
I couldn't believe I'd ever written the damned note to Nelson.
I can't watch you become someone I don't recognize.
God, I'd been a stupid kid.
Nelson made a small sound. It was a soft exhalation, the kind of noise people make surfacing from a dream.
His hand on my stomach twitched and then settled, fingers splayed against my skin.
His eyelashes fluttered. He blinked, slowly, and his blue eyes focused on me from six inches away, and I watched him remember where he was.
His face softened. The corner of his mouth lifted and a crease that had been on his forehead in sleep smoothed out, and he looked at me like I was something he was still deciding whether he'd actually woken up to or invented in a dream.
"You're staring," he muttered.
"Yes." My voice came out rougher than I expected. "I am."
"For how long?"
"A while."
He closed his eyes again and pressed his face against my shoulder. "Creep."
I laughed — a stupid, full, helpless laugh that startled both of us. Nelson's mouth pressed into a smile against my collarbone and I felt his smile more than I saw it, and that did something to me that I couldn't have named under oath.
"What time is it?" he mumbled.
"Early. Five-something."
"Mm." He didn't move. "I should go."
"You should."
Neither of us moved.
A minute passed. Maybe two. Nelson's fingers, the ones splayed on my stomach, drew a small, absent circle.
The same lazy pattern he used to draw on me years ago, when neither of us had anywhere to be and our tiny apartment was full of cheap furniture, the radiator was clanking, and we believed everything good lasted forever because we had no evidence yet that it didn't.
I had to close my eyes for a second.
"I'll make coffee," I said, when I could.
"Your coffee is terrible."
"My coffee is famously terrible."
"It's an embarrassment to journalism."
"And yet you're going to drink it."
"And yet I am."
I extracted myself carefully from the couch, retrieved the throw blanket from where it had slipped, and tucked it over him. He watched me, eyes half-open, with the expression of a man who had not been tucked into anything in a very long time. I shuffled to the Keurig on the credenza, naked.
The Keurig made its terrible asthmatic noises.
I rinsed two mugs in the small sink and watched my reflection ghost in the window over it.
My hair was a catastrophe and my mouth was swollen.
There was a mark on my throat that was definitely going to need camouflage today.
I looked, by every objective measure, terrible.
I had never seen myself look better.
I brought the mugs back to the couch. Nelson had pulled the blanket up to his shoulders and arranged himself into something approximating dignity, which on Nelson was a Nelson-specific feat — his hair was still wrecked and he looked, for the first time in the years I'd been quietly Googling him monthly, like a person and not like a brand. He accepted the mug. Sniffed it.
"Christ, Jimmy."
"I warned you."
"This is offensive."
"Drink it."
He drank it. Made a face. Drank more.
I sat down beside him on the couch, the blanket between us doing nothing useful, and he leaned into my shoulder and I leaned into him and we drank terrible coffee in the gray light of my office and I didn't say a word because I was afraid the wrong word would break it.
He set his mug down on the floor.
"Jimmy."
"Yeah."
"I really do have to go." He tilted his face up toward mine. "Before this place fills up."
"I know."
He kissed me. Slow, unhurried, with his hand on my jaw and his mouth tasting of bad coffee and sleep, and I kissed him back like a man who had years to make up for, because I did.
He pulled back. Pressed his forehead against mine.
"I'll see you in a few hours," he said.
"You will."
"Don't look at me through the glass like that today. I'll lose composure on air."
"No promises."
He laughed — a real, low laugh — and then he stood.
The blanket dropped, and Nelson collected his clothes from various corners of my office with the same patient efficiency he used to gather facts at a press briefing.
Trousers. Shirt. The undershirt he'd apparently flung over the Peabody bookend last night, which was either accidental or his single funniest joke.
Shoes. He dressed with his back to me and I watched the line of his shoulder blades and the place where my teeth had marked him, and I thought — that man, the one America watches, has my mark on his shoulder.
Nelson's going to walk past security in the lobby in the same suit he wore last night, and he doesn't give a damn.
He turned around. Fully dressed. Hair finger-combed into something that would pass at a distance. The composed, untouchable man the world knew, with one detail that didn't fit — his mouth, still soft.
"Goodbye, Jimmy."
"Goodbye, Nelson."
He crossed the office. Hand on the doorknob. He paused, looked back at me on the couch with two empty coffee mugs on the floor, and something passed across his face that I couldn't read. Then he opened the door, looked both ways down the hall, and was gone.
The door clicked shut.
I sat on the couch in the silence he left behind and pressed my palms against my eyes.
How had I gotten here? It was only a few weeks ago that I was eating ramen in my crappy studio uptown, trying to convince myself that a network paycheck wouldn't kill my soul.
And now Nelson Mackenzie had just kissed me in my office at five in the morning and told me he'd see me in a few hours and meant it.
I didn't deserve this. That was the thought I couldn't quite shake. I'd walked away from him once and built a life out of being right about it, and now he was letting me back in like the door had never been locked. My chest was full of a feeling I refused to name because naming it felt like a jinx.
Can this last?
The question arrived on its own, unwelcome, and I shoved it down the way I'd been shoving things down for years. There was no reason to think it couldn't last. We were two grown men who had survived worse than each other. Whatever I'd been afraid of at twenty-two had nothing to do with this.
Seriously, will this last?