Page 28 of Making It Live!

The numbers were up, and the show was better.Jimmy Goodman was winning, and he was doing it in the only way I couldn't counter — by being brilliant.

I drank the coffee and stared at the printout.I thought about the moment during the B-block when I'd looked at the control room and seen him there, leaning forward in the blue light, his auburn hair catching the glow of the monitor.

I thought about how my body had turned toward him before my brain could stop it, the way a compass turns toward north — not because it decides to, but because that's simply the direction it's built to face.

I set down the coffee, picked up the printout, read the numbers one more time, and placed it face-down on my desk.

Then I turned off the lights and went home to an apartment that was beautiful and empty.After a glass of red wine, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, and I did not think about Jimmy Goodman.

I did not think about him for hours.

ChapterTwelve

Jimmy

The problem with Monitor Three was that I couldn't stop watching it.

This was, technically, part of my job.The EP watched the anchor feed — monitoring on-air delivery, pacing, energy.I needed to see what the audience saw in order to produce the broadcast effectively.Every control room had a monitor dedicated to the anchor's camera, and every executive producer watched it.

None of them watched it the way I watched it.

In a week and a half of producing Nelson's broadcast, I had developed what could only be described as a catalog of Nelson's body language.I didn't mean to do it.It happened the way fluency happens — through immersion, repetition, the slow accumulation of data until you stop translating and start understanding.

I knew, for instance, that Nelson reached for his water glass when he was buying himself a half-second to reset.Not thirst — strategy.The glass was a prop, and he used it the way a stage actor used a cigarette, creating a pocket of silence he controlled.

I knew that his jaw clenched, barely visibly, when a direction from the earpiece landed close to something he didn't want to feel.Not disagreement — he took every direction I gave, because Nelson was a professional above all things.But certain words produced a tension in the muscle just below his ear, and I was learning which words those were.

I knew that his cadence shifted when he was working harder than usual to maintain control.The voice got smoother.Slower.More deliberate.To the audience it sounded like authority.To me it sounded like a man bracing against something.

I knew all of this because I watched Monitor Three the way I used to watch Nelson sleep.The thought arrived without permission, and it hit me like a glass of ice water thrown in my face.

It was mid-broadcast and Ray was beside me.And suddenly I was twenty-one years old, lying in the narrow bed in our old apartment, watching Nelson sleep in the pale gray light that came through our bedroom window at dawn.

He slept on his back.Always on his back, perfectly still, one hand resting on his stomach, the other curled loosely beside his head.His black hair fell across the pillow, stark against the white cotton.The light caught the line of his collarbone — sharp, elegant — and traced down the slope of his shoulder.I used to lie on my side and watch the slow rise and fall of his chest.The way his lips parted slightly just before he fell asleep, as if he were about to say something and then thought better of it.

I used to trace his jaw with my fingertip, feather-light, barely touching, just to feel the warmth of his skin under my hand.Sometimes he'd stir, not quite waking, and his body would turn toward mine — instinctive, unconscious, his hips shifting under the sheet, his leg sliding between mine — and I would hold my breath, because the intimacy of it, the absolute trust of a sleeping body reaching for you in the dark, was so overwhelming it made my chest ache.

And then I remembered… other things.

The way Nelson's breath would catch when I kissed the hollow of his throat.How his hand would grip the back of my neck, pulling me closer, always closer.The way his whole body would go taut and then break apart, his ice-blue eyes locked on mine, his mouth open, his composure shattered so completely that the man in that bed bore no resemblance to the man the world would eventually come to know.

I had seen Nelson Mackenzie without his armor, because I'd been the one to take it off him.

"Jimmy?"

Ray's voice yanked me back into the present.I blinked.Oh, shit.The broadcast, which had been happening this entire time while I'd been lying in a bed that hadn't existed in thirteen years.

"Jimmy, we need the call on the B-block transition."

"Standard toss to the package," I said, and my voice came out steady, which was a miracle."Camera Two.Nelson reads the lead-in, then we roll."

On Monitor Three, Nelson delivered the transition with his usual seamless precision.Cool, controlled, impenetrable.And I sat in my chair with my hands trembling under the desk and the taste of a memory so vivid it had a pulse.

Stop it.Stop it right now.

I pressed the earpiece button."Stay on Camera Two for the package, then we'll go to the live shot."My voice was professional.Clipped.Not the voice of a man who'd just been remembering what Nelson Mackenzie looked like when he came apart.

I forced my eyes away from Monitor Three and onto the graphics queue.I made a note about tomorrow's lineup and put the memory back in the box where it had lived, quietly, for years.