Page 66 of Making It Live!

But he didn’t leave.

He sat on the terrible couch, his bare shoulders above the blanket, his auburn hair a disaster, his green eyes full of something I’d never seen in them before.

Not defiance.Not deflection.

Recognition.

“You’re right,” he said.His voice cracked.“I became exactly what I judged you for.And I didn’t even have the decency to do it as well as you did.”

Something broke open between us.

Not like the dressing room—violent, desperate.This was quieter.A wall collapsing inward, brick by brick, and on the other side was just two men looking at each other honestly for the first time.

“I owe you more than an apology,” Jimmy said.Tears ran down his face.“I owe you an accounting.For every year I spent telling myself I was better than you for walking away.For every time I watched your clips online and told myself you’d sold out when the truth was you were doing excellent work and I was too proud to admit it.”

I reached for his hand.Our fingers interlaced—skin still warm, still damp—and I held on.

“I built an entire life out of not needing you,” I breathed.“An apartment nobody lives in.A closet full of armor.A reputation designed to keep every person on earth at arm’s length.”I looked at our joined hands.“It worked.I didn’t need anyone.I also didn’t feel anything for years.”

Jimmy’s grip tightened on my fingers.

“We were both wrong,” he whispered.“I was wrong to leave.You were wrong to stop letting anyone in.We built our whole lives around a fight we had at twenty-two, and neither of us ever checked to see if the other person had changed.”

“You changed.”

“So did you.”

Jimmy leaned into me.I wrapped my arm around his bare shoulders and pulled him close.He settled against my side with the familiarity of a man who had been fitting into this exact space since he was twenty years old.

“So what do we do now?”he asked.

ChapterTwenty-Six

Jimmy

The first thing I saw was his shoulder.

Bare, with the deep purple bruise where I'd bitten him, just below the curve of his collarbone.The throw blanket had slipped sometime in the night and was bunched around his waist, and Nelson was sleeping naked on my secondhand couch with his head pillowed on my shoulder and his hair a complete disaster.

I held very still.

The light coming through the window was the particular early gray that hadn't decided yet whether to become morning.My phone was somewhere on the floor in the wreckage of my clothes, and I would have guessed it was just past five if I had to.The building wouldn't really start filling up for another hour.The control room was running, the way it always was — there was always somebody in cable news at five in the morning — but my floor, the EP suite, was as close to empty as it ever got.

I let myself look at him.

Not the way I'd looked at him through the glass wall for weeks.Not the careful, professional, only-when-he-couldn't-see-me looking I'd been training myself to do.Just looking.He was on his side, one arm folded under his head, the other draped across my stomach.His black hair was falling across his forehead in a way that I couldn't stop staring at.There was a faint crease in his cheek from the seam of the cushion.His mouth was slightly parted.He breathed in and out, slowly, and I watched his shoulder rise and fall and my chest did something I had no name for.

I realized I was smiling.

Not a small, polite, social smile.The kind of smile you don't perform.The kind that arrives on its own and sits on your face like it lives there, like it's telling you something true about where you are.I felt it spread across my mouth and into my cheeks and behind my eyes, and I didn't try to stop it.

This was what I'd given up at twenty-two.

I didn't have a clean word for it.It wasn't peace, exactly.Nor was it safety, although it was related.It was the very specific feeling of waking up next to the person you were supposed to be waking up next to and knowing, without thinking about it, that the geometry of the world was correct.That something that had been sitting at a wrong angle for a very long time had finally been set right.

I'd had a whole life.I'd been shot at in countries my mother couldn't find on a map, and stood on a stage in an uncomfortable suit and accepted a Peabody.I'd slept with people, dated some of them, and I'd built a career other people in my field had spent their whole lives trying to build.None of it had even felt like the same category of thing as this.

I couldn't believe I'd ever written the damned note to Nelson.