Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
Nelson
I hadn’t expected Bruce to look quite so pleased with himself in the half-second after firing me.
It was just a flicker — across his cheekbones, at the corner of his mouth — the look of a mediocre man who'd just discovered, midair, that he could fly.
He hadn't planned to fire me. He'd intended to negotiate, or to stall, or to do whatever a man like Bruce did when a man like me arrived at his desk before he'd finished his croissant. Then I had verbally demolished him, and somewhere in the shame and the sweating, he’d reached into a drawer he had not previously known he owned and pulled out the only thing in his entire career he'd ever done quickly.
He had fired me. And he was, for one shimmering second, proud of it.
I let him have the second. I let him have it because soon that second was going to be the worst thing he had ever done, and I wanted Bruce to know — later, in the small, bad hours of the small, bad nights — that I'd let him have it on purpose.
Behind me, I could feel Jimmy not breathing.
"Bruce," I said, suppressing a smile.
"Nelson—"
"You're going to want to call security."
He blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"You just terminated your highest-rated anchor in a room where the only other witness is a man you also just terminated.
You haven't handed me a letter, or informed HR, or the legal department.
The only thing you've done is open your mouth in front of two people who know exactly what you said and exactly when.
So unless you would prefer me to walk out of this office, take an elevator down to that newsroom, and sit at my desk tonight pretending none of this happened — which I would, Bruce, with great pleasure — you are going to want to call security. "
I leaned in, my voice dropping into that low, authoritative register that had carried the country through multiple elections and a pandemic. "Now, please. We have plans this morning."
Bruce’s hand fumbled toward the phone. It took him three tries to hit the right extension.
"Send security to my office to, um, escort Nelson and Jimmy out of the building," he told Maggie. He hung up before she could ask anything.
"You think you're going to just walk out of here," Bruce said, his voice gaining a thin, reedy confidence.
"You actually think the network is going to fall apart without you.
You're a control freak, Nelson. You tell me — the VP of Programming — what fonts the chyrons use.
You've vetoed producers, guests, segments… "
"And you have enjoyed the highest-rated cable news show in the country, thanks to me." I crossed my arms.
"I’m going to dance, Nelson. I'm going to walk into Lauren's office and we're going to drink champagne. Before noon. I’ve been waiting—"
"Bruce," I held up a hand. "Stop."
The door opened. Two guards. Maggie was visible in the hallway, her face a mask of horror.
"Mr. Mackenzie. Mr. Goodman." The taller guard spoke with a grim politeness.. "If you'll both come with us, please."
I turned to Jimmy. His chin was up, but his color was wrong — that translucent white he went when the adrenaline was bottoming out, every freckle standing up like rust on a white sheet.
His eyes were on Bruce, and they were doing that thing they do when he is deciding whether to file a report or throw a punch.
I reached for him, sliding my arm fully around his shoulders. His hand came up to the small of my back.
I looked at Bruce. He was, now, very pale. He'd assumed the firing was the end. He hadn't considered that I might want it on the record — witnessed and photographed by every cell phone in the building — that Nelson Mackenzie was being escorted out with his arm around the man he loved.
"Bruce," I allowed a slow smile to spread across my face.
"What?" he muttered.
"Thank you."
I didn't wait for him to ask why. I led Jimmy out.
* * *
I’d walked through the newsroom of the Beacon Broadcasting Company at every hour of every day of my adult life. I knew the route the way you know the route through your own kitchen at three in the morning.
I'd never walked through it with my arm around another man and two security guards behind me.
The buzz of conversation stopped. It stopped in patches, the way a room stops breathing when a fight breaks out.
By the time we were halfway across the floor, the newsroom had gone the particular kind of quiet that only happens in the first three seconds of breaking news, before the producers remember to start running.
Jimmy was still under my arm — chin up, jaw tight. Anger held him upright. I held him tighter, feeling the tremor in his ribs.
Marla St. John was standing at the rundown board. She lifted her coffee in a small, formal salute.
"Mackenzie," she said.
"St. John."
She didn't say anything else. She didn't have to. I saw the tally being done in her head — the phone calls she was already planning, the sources she'd start working before the elevator doors closed behind us. Marla was going to be very useful to me.
No. To us.
* * *
The cab crawled up Tenth Avenue at twenty miles an hour. Jimmy's hand was in mine the moment the car door shut behind us. He drew breath to speak, and I lifted my free hand, laying a fingertip against his lips.
I shook my head, once. Three mirrors. The radio. An open ear in the front seat.
He nodded against my fingertip and squeezed my hand instead.
* * *
The door to my apartment closed, and the rest of the world finally went away.
Jimmy made a sound — a jagged, broken exhale — and turned, putting his hands flat on my chest. Green eyes full of tears. Shaking.
"Nelson—"
"I know."
"How could you? You spent your whole career building that desk, and you just let him—"
"I didn't walk away from anything, Jimmy. I walked toward something." I took his wrists. "Sit down."
"No."
"Sit down anyway."
I led him to the sofa. Then I got on my knees in front of him, a position I would not, three months ago, have been physically capable of holding. I’d built a career on never being below anyone's eye line.
"I made a phone call last night to Everett Royce," I stated.
He went still. The name hit home — the former editor of the New York Ledger.
The man who'd resigned because of the billionaire owner who killed unflattering stories about the wealthy one percent.
Royce had spent years sending me three-line emails: I have the capital.
You have the audience. Whatever you build in the middle is yours.
"You're saying yes," he whispered.
"To whatever you and I decide it is. A YouTube channel, a Substack, a nightly live stream that goes out at the same hour my old one did. Everett doesn't care about the shape. He wants journalism with integrity, and he wants the lights to be on. We'd own it. No advertisers, no board, no Bruce."
"The non-competes—"
"Voided. Fired for cause. I had Everett's lawyer on the phone twice last night while you slept."
"I hardly slept, and…"
"Jimmy, listen." I took his hands in mine.
"The network is going to call you. They'll offer you a severance so large it'll make your head spin, in exchange for an NDA that will bury everything that happened today.
Don't sign it. The day you sign that paper is the day you can never work on the story we're about to tell. "
He nodded slowly, a single tear tracking down his nose. I lifted his hands and kissed his knuckles.
"Jimmy," my voice cracked.
"Nelson?"
"I've spent every day since you walked back into my life pretending we could compartmentalize this. But I can't. I haven't been able to compartmentalize you since the first second you were in my earpiece."
I pressed his palms together. "I built that anchor desk to be the safest place I could put myself.
I thought if I stayed behind the glass and the script, nothing could touch me.
Then you walked back into my life and it stopped being safe.
I was terrified. I've only ever done things I was certain I could win.
Everett was asking me to walk off a cliff, and I couldn't see the bottom. I couldn't see who would be there."
I looked up at him, really looked at him.
"And then I realized you were already there. You've been the one standing at the bottom the whole time. And with you there… there is no edge I won't walk off. There is no career I won't burn to the ground for the chance to build a new one with you."
I let the architecture of the last thirteen years finally collapse. The walls made of anger and loneliness, which held up the roof of my ambitions.
"I love you."
Jimmy's mouth dropped open.
"I've loved you the entire time." I swiped at my eyes.
"Jimmy, I loved you when you left, and the pain was unbearable.
I loved you through every year I spent trying to prove you were wrong to leave.
I loved you on the day you walked back into my control room, and I loved you in every sentence I've ever spoken, because you're the silent pulse behind all of them. "
Jimmy's face broke open. He wasn't just crying; he was nodding, a frantic, desperate relief.
I rose from my knees, my joints protesting, but I didn't care. I closed the final inch of air between us and took his face in my hands. My thumbs traced the sharp line of his cheekbones, feeling the tremor he'd been hiding since we walked out of Bruce's office.
Then, I kissed him.
This wasn't the panicked, stolen friction of the dressing room or the quiet desperation of his office.
This was daylight, in my home, where the air didn't smell like studio floor-wax and ozone.
There were no monitors to watch, no countdown clocks ticking in the corner of my vision, and no glass between us.
He tasted like the terrifying, beautiful haze of the future.
Jimmy didn't just kiss me back; he broke.
The professional composure he'd always worn like armor simply evaporated.
He let out a sob against my mouth — a jagged, private sound that he would never have allowed anyone else to hear — and his hands came up to grasp my wrists, his grip almost bruising.
He was coming undone in my arms, the executive producer finally letting go of the controls, and the sight of it — the raw, unedited reality of him — stripped away the last of my own defenses.
I felt my own eyes burn, my breath hitching in a way that would have been professional suicide on air. I was Nelson Mackenzie, the man who didn't flinch. But as I held him, I realized I was tired of being a statue. I wanted to be human again.
When I finally pulled back just an inch, his forehead dropped against mine. We were both breathing hard, as if we'd just run the length of Central Park.
"Nelson," he whispered, his voice a wreck.
"Mm."
"I love you too. God, I love you so much."
"Thank the stars above," I breathed, closing my eyes and just feeling the heat of him. "I've known since the first morning you were in my earpiece, Jimmy. I was just too much of a coward to admit that the voice in my head was the only one I ever wanted to hear."
He laughed — a wet, broken sound that ended in another sob — and he buried his face in the crook of my neck, his hands moving to the back of my head, pulling me closer as if he were trying to merge our heartbeats.
"We're going to be okay," he murmured into my skin. "Even if we're starting from zero. Even if we're the only ones watching."
"We aren't starting from zero," I said, pulling back to look him in the eye, my voice regaining its iron.
This was the lead story. This was the only headline that mattered.
"We're starting from the truth. For the first time in our careers, Jimmy, we don't have to spin anything, or be beholden to corporate suits who don't give a damn about the truth. "
I kissed the bridge of his nose, then the corner of his trembling mouth.
"So. Build a network with me. Not a corporation, not a brand.
A home for the truth. Stand next to me in front of a camera for the rest of our working lives, and then come home with me afterward.
Every night. The same kitchen. The same bed.
No more 'segments' of our lives, Jimmy. Just us. All of it. Live and unscripted."
I pressed my forehead harder against his, my hands sliding down to lock behind his waist.
"They think they broke us, Jimmy, but they just let us off the leash." I pulled back just enough to look into his eyes — no monitors, no scripts, just the raw, unedited truth of him. "I'm ready for it to be just you and me. No filters. Are you ready to see what happens next?"