"Drink it."
He drank it.Made a face.Drank more.
I sat down beside him on the couch, the blanket between us doing nothing useful, and he leaned into my shoulder and I leaned into him and we drank terrible coffee in the gray light of my office and I didn't say a word because I was afraid the wrong word would break it.
He set his mug down on the floor.
"Jimmy."
"Yeah."
"I really do have to go."He tilted his face up toward mine."Before this place fills up."
"I know."
He kissed me.Slow, unhurried, with his hand on my jaw and his mouth tasting of bad coffee and sleep, and I kissed him back like a man who had years to make up for, because I did.
He pulled back.Pressed his forehead against mine.
"I'll see you in a few hours," he said.
"You will."
"Don't look at me through the glass like that today.I'll lose composure on air."
"No promises."
He laughed — a real, low laugh — and then he stood.The blanket dropped, and Nelson collected his clothes from various corners of my office with the same patient efficiency he used to gather facts at a press briefing.Trousers.Shirt.The undershirt he'd apparently flung over the Peabody bookend last night, which was either accidental or his single funniest joke.Shoes.He dressed with his back to me and I watched the line of his shoulder blades and the place where my teeth had marked him, and I thought — that man, the one America watches, has my mark on his shoulder.Nelson's going to walk past security in the lobby in the same suit he wore last night, and he doesn't give a damn.
He turned around.Fully dressed.Hair finger-combed into something that would pass at a distance.The composed, untouchable man the world knew, with one detail that didn't fit — his mouth, still soft.
"Goodbye, Jimmy."
"Goodbye, Nelson."
He crossed the office.Hand on the doorknob.He paused, looked back at me on the couch with two empty coffee mugs on the floor, and something passed across his face that I couldn't read.Then he opened the door, looked both ways down the hall, and was gone.
The door clicked shut.
I sat on the couch in the silence he left behind and pressed my palms against my eyes.
How had I gotten here?It was only a few weeks ago that I was eating ramen in my crappy studio uptown, trying to convince myself that a network paycheck wouldn't kill my soul.And now Nelson Mackenzie had just kissed me in my office at five in the morning and told me he'd see me in a few hours and meant it.
I didn't deserve this.That was the thought I couldn't quite shake.I'd walked away from him once and built a life out of being right about it, and now he was letting me back in like the door had never been locked.My chest was full of a feeling I refused to name because naming it felt like a jinx.
Can this last?
The question arrived on its own, unwelcome, and I shoved it down the way I'd been shoving things down for years.There was no reason to think it couldn't last.We were two grown men who had survived worse than each other.Whatever I'd been afraid of at twenty-two had nothing to do with this.
Seriously, will this last?
ChapterTwenty-Seven
Nelson
Nine days.
I'd been counting, which was a clinical symptom of a condition I didn't care to name.I was a man who dealt in metrics — ratings shares, demographic leans, the precise duration of a commercial break — but I’d never been the kind of person who counted "good days."Counting implies a finite supply.It suggests that you are walking a tightrope and waiting for the inevitable gust of wind that sends you back into the canyon.