Easy, Nelson.Let it breathe.
The words settled against the skin of my inner ear like warm fingertips.Jimmy's voice had dropped half a register — the way it did when he was focused, when he was in the zone and his natural speaking voice came through instead of the clipped professional tone he wore like armor.This was the voice underneath.Softer.Lower.Intimate.
The heat started at my collarbone and moved down, a warmth that spread across my chest and continued south with the steady inevitability of water finding its level.I felt it in my stomach first, a tightening, and then lower, and then — with the same appalling swiftness as that other night— I was hardening against the front of my trousers, and there was not one thing I could do about it.
I was aroused.
I was sitting behind an anchor desk on live television and I was turned on because Jimmy Goodman had saideasy, Nelson, let it breathein a voice my body could not distinguish from the voice that used to say my name in the dark.
The package ended.I turned to Camera Two.My face did not change, and my voice didn't waver.I delivered the transition to the C-block with the practiced authority of a man who was not, at this moment, experiencing a physical crisis below the anchor desk that no one in America could know about.
"Stay with me on this one, Nelson.Don't pull back.Let the families tell the story."
Stay with me.Don't pull back.
My thighs went rigid under the desk, the wool of my trousers dragging tight across me with every fractional shift of my weight.The pressure was insistent, specific, and completely immune to the fact that I was on live television.My body was responding to Jimmy's voice with a directness that bypassed every defense I'd ever built, and there was nothing I could do except sit perfectly still and deliver the news.
The C-block interview was with a woman whose husband had been on the fourteenth floor.She was trembling, her eyes bloodshot.I asked the questions Jimmy had prepped with the gentleness the moment required, and the audience heard compassion from their anchor.The audience was not wrong — I felt compassion, genuine compassion, for this woman and her husband — but running underneath it, like a second current beneath still water, was the ache that Jimmy's voice had started and my body refused to end.
I reached for the water glass.My hand was steady.I took a sip.The water was cold and it did nothing.
The interview ended.I tossed to Marla for a segment on the congressional response.She took over, and for ninety seconds, my earpiece was quiet.Jimmy was talking to the graphics team, or coordinating with the overnight desk, or doing any one of the hundred things an EP did during a broadcast.He was not talking to me.
The silence in my ear was worse than his voice.Because in the silence, my body didn't calm down.It sat in the heat Jimmy had created and waited for him to come back, the way a body waits for a lover to return to bed — alert, primed, and aching.
"You're up in thirty, Nelson.Bring it home.You've been extraordinary tonight."
Extraordinary.
The word landed in my ear and detonated.Not because it was unprofessional — it wasn't.EPs complimented anchors.It happened.But Jimmy had said it in that low, warm register, and he'd said you've been extraordinary, not the show's been extraordinary.He'd aimed it at me.Personally.And my body, which had been running hot for twenty minutes, took the compliment and turned it into something that pulsed.
I delivered the close.I held for three.The red light died.
I couldn't move.
Marla glanced at me."Mackenzie?You alright?"
"Fine."The word came out clipped.I reached for the water glass, and this time my hand shook — just enough that a drop slid down the outside of the glass and landed on the desk.I set it down too quickly.The glass hit the surface with a sound louder than it should have been.
Seven inches from the edge, I hoped.I didn't trust myself to check.
Marla watched me a moment, her eyebrows raised.Then she unclipped her mic and walked off the set.I sat alone behind the desk in the dark studio with my jaw tight and my hands flat on the surface and my composure held in place by nothing but professionalism and fury — and by the plain necessity of staying seated until my body consented to let me stand.
Through the glass wall, the control room was a blur of blue light and movement.Jimmy was in there, removing his headset.He'd spent the last hour inside my ear, and whether he knew what he'd done to me or not, the result was the same.I was sitting behind my own anchor desk, in my own studio, in the building I'd commanded for years, undone.On set.After a broadcast.Because of a voice in an earpiece.
When I finally trusted myself, I stood and smoothed down my jacket.Without another glance at the control room, I walked off the set with the measured precision of a man who was not falling apart.Somehow, I made it to my dressing room.
After locking the door I stood in front of the mirror and stared at myself.Charcoal jacket.Black hair.Blue eyes.The face of a man who was always in control.
But I didn't control this.I didn't control a single damned thing about what was happening to me.The man responsible for it was on the other side of a glass wall, and he was going to be there tomorrow night, and every night after that.The damned earpiece was going to go in at 6:55, and his voice was going to arrive inside me, and my body was going to respond.
"Fuck me."
There wasn't a memo I could write, no meeting I could call, no amount of ice cold enough to stop what Jimmy Goodman was doing to me without ever laying a hand on my skin.
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the mirror and closed my eyes.
"This has to stop."