I stared at the ceiling.Jimmy’s head rested on my shoulder, his auburn hair spilling across my skin, his fingers drawing absent circles on my collarbone—the same lazy pattern he used to trace when neither of us had anywhere to be.The gesture was so familiar it hurt.
I should say something.I was Nelson Mackenzie, and I always had the next line.The pivot.The perfectly calibrated sentence that kept the world at the exact distance I required.
I opened my mouth and nothing came.
Our breathing had slowed.Our hearts hadn’t.I felt his pulse against my ribs—rapid, reckless, matching my own.
My throat tightened.I pressed my lips together and willed myself not to break.Not now.Not while I could still feel him everywhere, while his body was warm and heavy against mine, while the room still smelled like both of us.
Jimmy lifted his head.His eyes were careful and open and terrified all at once.I braced for whatever he was about to say.What does this mean?Where do we go?I still love you.Any of those would have split me down the middle.
He sat up.Pulled the throw blanket from the arm of the sofa and wrapped it around his shoulders.His hands were steady, and his jaw was set.
Jimmy looked at the far wall.At the mess of shattered glass and scattered grooming supplies on the floor.At my charcoal jacket crumpled by the door, and my shoes lying on their sides where I’d toed them off.
But he didn’t look at me when he spoke.
“This can never happen again.”
The words landed like a closed fist against a bruise.My chest cracked along a fault line I didn’t know existed.I pulled in a breath.
“Of course not,” I said.My voice came out perfectly even.
Jimmy flinched.Barely.Just a flicker at the corner of his mouth that anyone else would have missed.But I caught it.I caught everything about this man.That was the whole problem.
He stood.Let the blanket fall from his shoulders.Began collecting his clothes from the floor.I watched him in the mirror as Jimmy pulled his shirt over his head.Stepped into his shoes.Ran his fingers through his hair in a way that made it look like he’d just come in from the wind rather than off a leather sofa in his ex-lover’s dressing room.
He paused at the door.His hand rested on the handle.
Jimmy didn’t turn around.
The door clicked shut behind him.
ChapterTwenty
Jimmy
Imade it three blocks before my hands started shaking.
I'd meant to walk to the subway, but I blew past the entrance without seeing it and just kept going, up Eighth Avenue in the cold, my collar turned up against a wind that couldn't touch the heat still coming off my skin.My hands were jammed in my pockets and they were shaking anyway.I pulled one out and looked at it under a streetlight like it belonged to someone else.
I could still smell Nelson.
On my hands and my shirt.In my hair.Nelson's cologne was all over me.Every time the wind shifted it came off my own collar and hit me, and I'd lose the thread of whatever I was telling myself.
This can never happen again.
I'd said it with my jaw set and my voice perfectly controlled, and I'd meant it.After all, I was a professional.Nelson was my anchor.We had a show to produce and a working relationship to maintain and a thirteen-year history that had already detonated once and didn't need a second explosion.
So why were my hands still shaking?
A bus hissed past, threw up a sheet of gutter water, and I stepped back too late, soaking one shoe.Somewhere near 23rd Street I finally stopped, under the awning of a closed deli, and made myself breathe.The phone in my pocket said 10:47.The broadcast had ended at 8:00.That meant more than two hours had passed since I'd walked into Nelson's dressing room for a confrontation about a flat broadcast, and somehow I'd ended up on his couch with my face in his neck saying his name like it was the only word I knew.
What did you do, Jimmy?
My phone rang.
The screen lit up: RUFUS JACKSON.My landlord.Seventy-three years old, retired MTA, owner of two Inwood buildings and one enormous orange cat named Chairman Meow.Rufus had let me slide on rent twice in the past two years without ever making me feel small about it, which in my experience made him the kindest man in Manhattan.