Page 54 of Making It Live!

Except I had said that word to Jimmy last night.Standing in front of the cleared vanity with grooming supplies shattered on the floor and his eyes wide and dark.Sit.And he had sat.And I had stepped between his knees and—

Color rose in my cheeks.I felt it happen — a flush that started at my throat and climbed, visible, undeniable, on a face that millions of people were watching in high definition.

I was blushing.

Nelson Mackenzie was blushing on live television during a segment about the war in Ukraine, and there was not a single thing I could do about it.Because the man responsible for it was in my ear.I couldn't respond or explain, and ripping the earpiece out wasn't an option.

Marla, to her credit, didn't react.She asked the ambassador about peace negotiations with the steady authority of a woman who'd been on television since before I was born.So I sat beside her, praying the flush would fade, and gripped my pen under the desk hard enough to leave marks in my palm.

The earpiece went quiet.Jimmy had stopped talking.

The silence was worse.Because in the silence I could hear him breathing.

Shallow.Uneven.He'd heard it too.He'd said sit and heard the echo of my dressing room, and now he was breathing the way he'd breathed when I'd stepped between his knees and—

I delivered the close.I held for the standard three-count.The red light died.

I sat behind my desk and didn't move.Marla unclipped her mic, gave me a long look — something between concern and a question she was choosing not to ask — and walked off set.The crew filtered out.Ray called something to a technician about a lighting cue.

Through the glass wall, the control room was dimming.Jimmy was in the EP chair, headset around his neck, staring at a monitor.He was making a point of not looking at me with such intensity that the not-looking was louder than eye contact would have been.

After my erection finally relaxed, I unclipped my mic.Stood.Smoothed my blazer.Walked off set with the measured precision of a man who was not falling apart.I made it to my dressing room, closed the door, and stood in front of the mirror.

Flushed cheeks.Dilated pupils.A bruise hidden under navy fabric.A scratch on the vanity.

The earpiece was still in.

I reached up, pulled it out, slowly, and held it in my palm.The most intimate object in my life.The thing that put Jimmy's voice inside my head every night, closer than a lover, closer than a thought.

I set it on the vanity.Right in the center of the scratch.

How was I supposed to do this five nights a week, every week, for the rest of my contract, when the sound of his voice made my body remember everything my mind was trying to forget?

ChapterTwenty-Two

Jimmy

Bruce reached for his tie before I'd even sat down.

He pinched the fabric between thumb and forefinger, adjusted it a millimeter to the left, and released.The tie was dove gray and didn't need adjusting.It hadn't needed adjusting the first time, or the second, or the third.But his fingers went back to it as he placed the ratings printout on the desk between us, and again as he opened his mouth to speak.

"It's not catastrophic," he said, in the tone of a man describing a catastrophe."We're still winning the time slot.Still ahead of MSNOW by a comfortable margin.But the trend line—" He tapped the printout.His fingers drifted back to the tie."Three nights in a row, Jimmy.A two-point dip across the key demo.That's not noise.That's a pattern."

I looked at the numbers.He was right.The last three broadcasts — the three since I'd walked out of Nelson's dressing room and told him it could never happen again — had shown a steady, undeniable softening.Not a collapse.Not even close.But in cable news, a two-point dip over three nights was a flashing yellow light, and Bruce Coleman had built his entire career on the principle that yellow lights were just red lights that hadn't finished changing.

"The content has been strong," I said.Because it had.The editorial work was as sharp as ever.The packages were tight.The booking was solid.The problem wasn't the show.

The problem was that I'd spent three nights giving Nelson flat, clinical direction through the earpiece — stripped of warmth, stripped of rhythm, stripped of every instinct I'd developed about how to produce this particular anchor — because the alternative was letting my voice do the thing it naturally did with him, and I knew exactly where that led.

Getting naked in Nelson's dressing room.

"The content is fine," Bruce agreed.His hand went to the tie again."The issue is Nelson."

My stomach dropped."What about him?"

"He's—" He searched for the word, discarding options I could practically see cycling across his face."He's technically flawless and emotionally absent.Which, look, that was his default before you started.Nelson's always been the precision anchor, not the warmth anchor.But you changed something.You unlocked something in his delivery that the audience responded to.The numbers showed it.And now—"

He gestured at the printout.