Page 53 of Making It Live!

The earpiece went in at 6:55.

I'd worn this thing five nights a week for years.It was routine — plastic and foam, snug against my ear canal, the physical tether between anchor desk and control room.I'd never thought about the intimacy of it.Someone else's voice inside your head, closer than a whisper, bypassing every wall you'd built because it didn't go through walls.It went through you.

Tonight I thought about it.

I thought about it as I settled into my chair and smoothed my script pages and arranged the water glass at the proper distance from the edge.The floor director called final positions and the studio lights shifted from rehearsal warmth to broadcast white.Then the countdown started, the red light blinked on, and millions of people tuned in to watch a man who was holding himself together with nothing but muscle memory and spite.

"Stand by.Sixty seconds."

Jimmy's voice.

It hit me low in the stomach and spread outward like a lit match dropped in dry grass.He was trying to be flat.I could hear the effort — the clipped consonants, the measured tone, the deliberate absence of the warmth that had been building for weeks.He was trying to give me nothing.

But his voice cracked on seconds.Just barely.A hairline fracture that no one in the control room would have caught.I caught it.I caught everything about this man.That was the whole problem.

The red light went solid.I looked into the camera and delivered the opening.

"Good evening.I'm Nelson Mackenzie.Tonight, the Senate prepares for a landmark vote on infrastructure as the White House signals a last-minute change in strategy—"

The words came out clean.Thirteen years of broadcast discipline held the line.My face was composed, my cadence steady, and absolutely no one watching from home could have known that the voice in my earpiece belonged to the man who'd had his hands and mouth on me last night.

"Camera Two.Take it slow on the intro."

Take it slow.Jimmy's voice dropped half a register on slow, and my mind went straight to his hand sliding down my body — my neck, my collarbone, over my stomach — deliberately, watching my face, reading me—

I swallowed.Transitioned to the infrastructure package.My delivery was fine.Professional.Maybe a fraction too quick, compensating for the heat climbing up the back of my neck.

Second block.The Ohio factory closure.I was reading the intro to the labor correspondent's package when Jimmy came back in my ear.

"Nelson, I need you to go deeper on this one."

Go deeper.His hand working me over, my back arching off the leather—

The word landed low and my vision blurred for half a second.I blinked.Refocused.Delivered the question to the correspondent with a precision that cost me more effort than anything I'd done on camera in years.

And then — a beat of dead air in the earpiece.One second.Maybe two.An eternity in live television.

Jimmy had heard himself.He'd heard what he'd said and how he'd said it, and the dead air was him freezing, the same way I was freezing, both of us trapped in the realization that the language of producing and the language of what we'd done to each other were now permanently tangled, and there was no safe word left.

I reached for the water glass.My hand was steady.My body was not.

The broadcast continued.I pivoted to a segment on pharmaceutical pricing, reading the tease for the next block with the smooth authority of a man in complete command.

None of it was true.

"Stay with me through the break.Ninety seconds."

Stay with me.

Heat flooded my chest, poured downward, and I pressed my knees together under the desk hard enough that my jaw ached.It didn’t help, because my cock was swollen to the point of being painful.Marla glanced at me.I stared at the camera and counted backward from ten the way I'd taught myself to do in my first year of anchoring, when the nerves were bad — except the nerves had never felt like this.

The break ended.Marla took the lead on the ambassador interview — my interview, the one Jimmy had taken from me — and I sat beside her with my hands folded on the desk and my face arranged in engaged professionalism while Jimmy directed her questions from the control room.

"Sit tight, Nelson.Let Marla run with this."

Sit.

One word.One syllable.A perfectly ordinary production direction any EP would give a co-anchor during someone else's segment.