Page 46 of Making It Live!

We pulled apart.An inch.Our foreheads touching.His breath was warm and unsteady against my lips.Nelson's eyes were open.So were mine.We looked at each other from an inch away, and I could see every color in his irises — the ice blue streaked with silver, the ring of darker blue at the edges — and I thought: I know those eyes.I've always known those eyes.Even when I couldn't see them, I knew them.

"Jimmy," Nelson whispered."What are we doing?"

ChapterNineteen

Nelson

What Are We Doing?

I’d asked the question with my forehead still pressed against his, my lips still wet, and the silence that followed should have been my chance to step back.To smooth my jacket, find my voice, and become the man who always had the next line ready.

Jimmy’s thumb traced the tear track on my cheek one more time.Slow.Deliberate.Like he was memorizing the path of it.

I kissed him again.

Not like before.The first kiss had been tentative—a question asked with my mouth because I didn’t have the words.This one was the answer.I pulled him into me by the front of his shirt and kissed him like I’d been drowning and he was the surface.Jimmy gasped against my mouth, his hands fisting in the lapels of my jacket, and something inside my chest broke open and I let it.

Jimmy pushed me backward.My shoulders hit the wall beside the door.The framed Beacon logo rattled on its hook, and my mic pack dug into my hip.But I didn’t care about any of it, because his mouth was on my neck, on the spot just below my ear that he’d found all those years ago—the spot no one else had ever located.His teeth grazed the skin there, and a sound tore out of me that I’d never made in this room.That I’d never made in this building—low and desperate, my hips bucking toward him instinctively.

Jimmy’s hands slid under my jacket, pushing it off my shoulders.The fabric caught on my elbows, and he made a frustrated noise.I shrugged it the rest of the way off, and it landed somewhere behind him.I didn’t watch it fall, because his fingers were already on the buttons of my shirt.

He undid the top button, and I swear I stopped breathing.

Second button.Jimmy’s knuckles brushed my collarbone, then dipped lower, dragging down the center of my chest.His touch was slow, deliberate, like he was unwrapping something precious.

Third button.My pulse hammered in my throat, and I knew he could see it.Jimmy had always been able to read me like a breaking story—every tell, every micro-expression, every crack in the facade.

He parted the fabric and looked at me, and his expression undid something I’d spent so many years building.

It wasn’t hunger.I’d been looked at with hunger—by men in bars, by dates across restaurant tables, by the beautiful, forgettable men I’d taken home and felt nothing for.Hunger I could handle.Hunger was simple.

Jimmy looked at me like I was someone he recognized.Like he was seeing through every layer I’d constructed since he left—the anchor, the man who controlled every room—straight down to the twenty-two-year-old who’d come home to a half-empty apartment and learned that loving things also meant losing them.

My eyes burned.I blinked hard.Damn it, I wasn’t going to cry again.

“Hey.”Jimmy’s voice was barely a whisper.His hand came up to my jaw.“Stay with me.”

I turned my face into his palm and pressed my lips against it.I felt his fingers tremble.

The ease of it was what shattered me.I had undressed men in this city with steady hands and a detached precision I told myself was confidence and knew, somewhere underneath, was absence.My body going through the motions.Every time, I’d lie in their beds afterward and stare at their ceilings and feel absolutely nothing.Then I’d get dressed in the dark and leave before they woke, telling myself this was perfectly fine.That this was enough.Not everyone needed more.

Jimmy’s hands were shaking now, working the last buttons of my shirt, and mine were shaking too.The fact that we were both trembling—that neither of us was steady—cracked something open inside me that I couldn’t close again.

I reached for him.Found the hem of his shirt where it had come untucked and pulled it up and over his head in one motion.He lifted his arms to let me, and the sight of his bare skin in the low light of my dressing room made my knees buckle.Actually buckle.I locked them and pretended it hadn’t happened, but from the look in his green eyes, he’d caught it.

He unbuckled his belt, worked his slacks open, and a moment later they were on the floor, kicked aside.My eyes devoured him.

Freckles.Across his shoulders, his chest, the tops of his arms.A whole galaxy of them that I used to trace with my fingertip on Sunday mornings while he pretended to study.I’d mapped them once.I knew them by heart, without looking, so deeply memorized they lived in my soul.

“You’re staring,” he whispered.

“Yes.”I didn’t look away.“I am.”

I caught his wrist and pulled him with me, away from the wall.Toward the vanity.My vanity, with its rigid rows of grooming supplies, the script binder, a crystal water glass, and the ceramic mug with the network logo—every item arranged in the exact order I placed them every single day.Because order was control, and control was survival.

I swept my arm across the surface and sent all of it crashing to the floor.

The crystal glass shattered.A comb skittered under the chair.The script binder hit the tile with a flat, heavy slap.Jimmy’s eyes went wide and dark.He stared at the wreckage, then looked at me, and I saw the exact moment he stopped being careful.