Page 45 of Making It Live!

Silence settled between us.The kind of silence that has weight — that presses against your skin and dares you to fill it.The ventilation system hummed.Somewhere in the building a door closed, distant and muffled.

Nelson was looking at me, and something in his face was changing.His jaw was still set, but the muscles around his eyes were loosening.His breathing had shifted — deeper, less controlled.Nelson looked like a man trying very hard to hold something together and running out of strength to do it.

"Why did you leave me?"

The question came out of nowhere.Nelson's voice was barely above a whisper.He didn't look like a celebrity anchor or an icy news machine or any of the things the world called him.Nelson looked like a man in pain.

I opened my mouth.Nothing came out.I closed it, then tried again.

"I was scared," I mumbled, averting my eyes.

"Scared of what?"

"Of losing you."The words felt like pulling shrapnel out of my own chest."You'd just gotten your break at Beacon, and you were so happy, Nelson.So sure of yourself.And I looked at you and thought — Nelson's going to the top.He's going to be brilliant, and he's going to leave me behind without ever meaning to.I was a kid for Christ's sake."I forced myself to meet his gaze."You had everything figured out.You knew exactly who you were going to be.And I didn't have a job, or a plan, or the first idea how to stand next to a man who was about to become somebody.I was so terrified you'd outgrow me that I left first."

Nelson's face was very still.

"I told myself it was about principles."My voice cracked."I told myself Beacon was a corporate machine, that you were selling out and I was standing up for real journalism, whatever that is.And some of it was true — I did believe it, at the time.But underneath all of it, Nelson, underneath the note and the righteous bullshit, I was just a scared kid who was too proud to say he was afraid of being left behind."

A tear slid down Nelson's cheek.A single tear.It tracked down the flawless skin that hair and makeup had perfected hours ago, and he didn't wipe it away.He didn't move at all.He just stood there and let it fall.

I couldn't stop myself.

I crossed the three feet between us and took his hand.

Nelson stiffened.Every muscle in his body locked at once.His fingers were cold in mine, but he didn't pull away.He just stood there, rigid, and I held on.

"I'm sorry," I breathed."Nelson, I'm so sorry.I should've talked to you instead of walking out, and leaving the way I did was so damned wrong.I'm sorry for all of it."

His hand trembled in mine.A small tremor, deep, the kind of shaking that starts in the bones.He still hadn't pulled away.

"You left me, Jimmy," he whispered."I came home and the apartment was half empty and I didn't understand."

"I know."

"For weeks I kept my phone charged and next to me, waiting for a call.A text.Anything."Nelson's voice trembled.

"I know."My eyes were burning."I told you not to call me because I knew if I heard your voice I'd come back.And I was too proud and too stupid to let myself return to you."

Something broke in Nelson's face.Not dramatically — quietly, a slow fracture spreading outward from a single point.His jaw loosened.His shoulders dropped.And his fingers, which had been cold and rigid in mine, slowly, ever so slowly, closed around my hand.

I pulled him into me.

He resisted for a half-second — I felt it in his shoulders, the tension fighting the pull — and then he folded.Nelson put his face against my shoulder and let me wrap my arms around him, and the sound he made was so small and so broken that it cracked open something in me I didn't know was still sealed shut.

I held him the way I should have held him years ago — tight, present, not going anywhere.Fine tremors shook Nelson's body, the aftershocks of a wall coming down.His hands found my back, gripping the fabric of my blazer, and for a long moment we just stood there in the immaculate dressing room, holding each other.

"I'm sorry," I whispered into his hair.One more time.Because it needed to be said with my arms around him, not from across a room."I'm so sorry, Nelson."

He pulled back.Not far — just enough to see my face.His eyes were red, his composure gone.He looked nothing like the man on television and everything like the man I'd loved at twenty-two.

He looked into my eyes, then down at my mouth, and I felt his hand slide to the back of my head.

Nelson kissed me.

His lips were warm and trembling, and the kiss wasn't urgent or desperate or any of the things I might have expected.It was careful.Almost tentative.His mouth moved against mine slowly, as if he were relearning something he used to know by heart, and the hesitation in it — the way he kept almost pulling back and then not pulling back — made my chest ache.

I kissed him back.My hand came up to his jaw, my thumb tracing the track the tear had left on his cheek, and he made a sound against my mouth — a small, involuntary sound, halfway between relief and grief — and I felt it reverberate through my entire body.