Marla glanced at me from her chair."You look tense, Mackenzie."
"I'm not tense."
"Your shoulders are up near your ears."
I forced my shoulders down.Marla returned to her phone.She didn't say anything else, but the corner of her mouth did something I chose not to interpret.
The countdown began.The theme music rolled, then the red light ignited.
"Good evening.I'm Nelson Mackenzie, and this is Beacon News Tonight.We begin with a developing story on Capitol Hill, where the Senate Commerce Committee spent nearly six hours today grilling the CEOs of three of the nation's largest technology companies over allegations of anticompetitive practices, consumer data violations, and what one senator called 'a systemic failure of corporate accountability.'"
I hit the pivot without a breath."At the center of today's hearing: a whistleblower report alleging that Nexus Technologies, the parent company of three of the most widely used social media platforms in the country, deliberately suppressed internal research showing its algorithms were driving misinformation to younger users at rates far exceeding what the company disclosed to regulators."
This was the kind of story that rewarded an anchor who could synthesize complexity on the fly — dense, fast-moving, layered with legal and political implications the audience needed delivered in language they could hold on to.It was one of my best skills.I could take a six-hour hearing and distill it into ninety seconds of clarity without losing a single essential fact.
Tonight I would do that, and I wouldn't think about the voice in my ear.
"Toss to the package, Nelson.Clean four seconds on the turn."Jimmy's voice arrived the way it always arrived — low, precise, faintly clipped — and it landed in a place that had nothing to do with my brain.
I felt it at the base of my skull first.A warmth that spread downward, tracing the back of my neck, pooling low in my gut and then lower, a slow heavy heat settling behind my fly.My body's response to Jimmy's voice had graduated from recognition to something else over the past two weeks, something I didn't have a clinical name for and refused to give a poetic one.It was physical.Involuntary.And tonight it was not going to be ignored.
I delivered the toss.Four seconds.Clean.
The package ran.I took a breath and realized my breathing had changed — shorter, shallower, high in my chest.I corrected it the way I'd been correcting it all week, pulling air deep into my lungs and releasing it slowly through my nose.The audience couldn't see me breathe.But Jimmy could see me on his monitor, and if my chest was moving differently, he might notice.
Jimmy wasn't exaggerating.
The words surfaced again, unbidden.He'd been talking about how I looked.To Jillian.And now Jimmy was in my ear, and the knowledge that he thought about me — combined with the feel of his voice arriving inside me — sent another pulse of heat downward, and I felt myself begin to respond in a way that no amount of discipline was going to talk me out of.
No.Not here.Not now.
The package ended.I turned to Camera Two.
"Stay on the wide shot for the panel intro.You've got three guests.Give each one a beat."Jimmy murmured in my ear, and the murmur did me in.My body committed an act of open mutiny.I hardened against the front of my trousers and the sudden, intense restriction of my underwear was excruciating.Every micro-shift of my hips on the leather chair caused the rough, heavy wool of my suit pants to press directly against my erection.I couldn't move, couldn't adjust.
I gave each guest their beat.My voice remained steady on the air, but beneath the desk, my knuckles were white.I gripped the thick, polished edge of the anchor desk so hard my fingernails dug into the wood, my forearm muscles straining beneath my sleeves.I was thirty-five years old, the most-watched anchor in American cable news, and I was sitting behind an Emmy-winning desk with an erection so hard it was a physical ache.
My teeth were clenched so tightly my jaw began to throb.
The panel ran.I moderated it like a machine, but the sensory overload was blinding.The studio lights seemed too bright, the air too cold, the contrast of my burning, throbbing lower half too intense.
"Tighten up the close on this segment.We're running hot."
Running hot.
The technical phrase felt like a deliberate provocation.Spoken in Jimmy's low register, the words landed like a hand sliding down my stomach.My body answered with a throb so violent I had to swallow a groan, my throat clicking on a dry breath.I knew—with a certainty that bordered on despair—that Jimmy was watching my monitor, watching the pulse jump in my neck, knowing exactly what his voice was doing to me.
Was he was doing this on purpose?
We moved into the C-block.I tried everything.I recited tax figures in my head.I stared at the climate scientist on the screen.Tried focusing on the freezing draft hitting the back of my wet collar.Slowly, grudgingly, the agonizing tension in my trousers began to ease.I let out a ginger breath, my shoulders relaxing a fraction of an inch.
And then, during the final segment, Jimmy’s voice slid back into my ear.
"Nelson.Thirty seconds.Take it home."
My name.Spoken with the soft, devastating intimacy of a confession whispered in a dark bed.
The progress I'd made evaporated in a single heartbeat.The heat surged back, rushing to my groin with such force it felt like a physical blow.The fabric of my trousers caught against me again, a friction so agonizingly sharp my breath caught on air.