Page 38 of Making It Live!

ChapterSixteen

Jimmy

Iwatched the playback three times.

This was not unusual.Every good EP reviewed the previous night's broadcast.You watched for pacing issues, technical glitches, editorial gaps — the things you missed in the heat of live production that became visible in the cold light of the next morning.I'd been doing it for weeks, sitting in the control room with coffee and a notepad, running through the show segment by segment.

But this morning, something felt off.

I had the anchor feed isolated on Monitor Three — full screen, no graphics, just Nelson behind the desk for the entire hour.I started at the top of the A-block and let it play.He was flawless, as always.Clean delivery.Perfect pacing.The counterterrorism interview was masterful — controlled, probing, the work of a man who understood that the best questions are the ones that create space for the answer.

I watched his hands as he listened to the analyst's response.Long fingers, still, resting on the desk with deliberate poise.I watched the line of his jaw as he pivoted to the follow-up — sharp, precise, the geometry of a face that had been gifted by genetics and then refined by a decade of studio lighting into something almost unfairly beautiful.I watched the way he held his shoulders — set, straight, carrying the broadcast the way a column carries a roof.My face felt warm.I pressed my palms against the EP desk and shifted in my chair.

I rewound to the B-block transition and forced myself to watch with clinical eyes.The package ended.Nelson turned to Camera Two.His delivery was smooth, authoritative, exactly what the moment called for.Very professional.I made a mental note about the transition timing and moved on.

Then the C-block started, and Nelson's voice dropped into a register that I felt at the base of my stomach.

It was the interview with the woman whose husband had been on the fourteenth floor.Nelson's voice went softer — not weaker, never weaker, but layered with something raw that I'd never heard in his broadcast delivery before.A tenderness.Controlled, yes, because Nelson controlled everything, but present in a way that made the man on screen seem less like a news anchor and more like a person who felt things deeply and had spent years pretending he didn't.

My breath had gone shallow.I noticed this the way you notice your own heartbeat — suddenly, with alarm.I was sitting in an empty control room, watching a replay, and my body was responding to Nelson Mackenzie's voice on a monitor as though he were sitting next to me.As though he were whispering in my ear instead of the other way around.

I paused the playback and pressed both hands against my face.

This was not professional.This wasn't what an EP did during morning review.An EP did not sit in the blue glow of a control room getting flushed and short of breath because his anchor's voice on a recording made him feel like he was twenty-one again, lying in a narrow bed, listening to Nelson talk in the dark about the award-winning journalists they were going to become.

I took a deep breath and hit play again.I would get through this review like a professional, or I'd quit my job and go back to eating ramen in my miserable little studio.Those were the options.

The broadcast continued.And that's when I saw it.

It was during my earpiece direction at the end of the B-block.I heard my own voice come through the control room speakers—

"Easy, Nelson.Let it breathe."

—and on screen, something happened.It was subtle.A civilian would have missed it completely.But I'd spent three weeks building an involuntary catalog of Nelson's physical tells, and the catalog was screaming at me.

Nelson's chin lifted.A fraction of an inch.His shoulders softened by a degree.His jaw tightened, and his weight shifted — a small, careful redistribution, the movement of a man adjusting himself and hoping the desk hid it.And at the base of his throat, just above the collar of his charcoal jacket, a flush of color bloomed against skin that was usually cool and pale.

I rewound.Played it again.Watched the same five seconds three times.

The flush was real.It appeared at the exact moment my voice came through his earpiece.Not before.Not during the interview, not during the package, not during any other moment of the broadcast.It appeared when I saideasy, Nelson.

I sat back in my chair and stared at the frozen image.

Was Nelson reacting to my voice?

I rewound further.Found the moment during the Chicago coverage where I'd saidstay with me, Nelson.

The same thing happened.

The micro-pause before he took the direction.The half-degree shift in his cadence on the next line of copy.And his hand — barely visible at the bottom of the frame — moving toward the water glass with a speed that wasn't quite casual.

I found the close, where I'd said you've been extraordinary tonight.Nelson's breath caught.On the raw anchor feed, blown up full screen, I could see it — a tiny hitch in his chest, a skip in the rhythm of a man whose breathing was otherwise metronomic.

Every single time my voice came through his earpiece, Nelson's body did something.Something small, something he almost certainly thought no one could see.

But I could see it.Because I was the one person in the world who'd learned to read Nelson Mackenzie's body, and the things I was reading on this monitor were not professional responses to editorial direction.

I closed the playback and the screen went dark.My reflection stared back at me from the dead monitor — auburn hair, green eyes, an expression that looked like a man who'd just discovered something he wasn't ready to know.