"You're saying yes," he whispered.
"To whatever you and I decide it is.A YouTube channel, a Substack, a nightly live stream that goes out at the same hour my old one did.Everett doesn't care about the shape.He wants journalism with integrity, and he wants the lights to be on.We'd own it.No advertisers, no board, no Bruce."
"The non-competes—"
"Voided.Fired for cause.I had Everett's lawyer on the phone twice last night while you slept."
"I hardly slept, and…"
"Jimmy, listen."I took his hands in mine."The network is going to call you.They'll offer you a severance so large it'll make your head spin, in exchange for an NDA that will bury everything that happened today.Don't sign it.The day you sign that paper is the day you can never work on the story we're about to tell."
He nodded slowly, a single tear tracking down his nose.I lifted his hands and kissed his knuckles.
"Jimmy," my voice cracked.
"Nelson?"
"I've spent every day since you walked back into my life pretending we could compartmentalize this.But I can't.I haven't been able to compartmentalize you since the first second you were in my earpiece."
I pressed his palms together."I built that anchor desk to be the safest place I could put myself.I thought if I stayed behind the glass and the script, nothing could touch me.Then you walked back into my life and it stopped being safe.I was terrified.I've only ever done things I was certain I could win.Everett was asking me to walk off a cliff, and I couldn't see the bottom.I couldn't see who would be there."
I looked up at him, really looked at him.
"And then I realized you were already there.You've been the one standing at the bottom the whole time.And with you there… there is no edge I won't walk off.There is no career I won't burn to the ground for the chance to build a new one with you."
I let the architecture of the last thirteen years finally collapse.The walls made of anger and loneliness, which held up the roof of my ambitions.
"I love you."
Jimmy's mouth dropped open.
"I've loved you the entire time."I swiped at my eyes."Jimmy, I loved you when you left, and the pain was unbearable.I loved you through every year I spent trying to prove you were wrong to leave.I loved you on the day you walked back into my control room, and I loved you in every sentence I've ever spoken, because you're the silent pulse behind all of them."
Jimmy's face broke open.He wasn't just crying; he was nodding, a frantic, desperate relief.
I rose from my knees, my joints protesting, but I didn't care.I closed the final inch of air between us and took his face in my hands.My thumbs traced the sharp line of his cheekbones, feeling the tremor he'd been hiding since we walked out of Bruce's office.
Then, I kissed him.
This wasn't the panicked, stolen friction of the dressing room or the quiet desperation of his office.This was daylight, in my home, where the air didn't smell like studio floor-wax and ozone.There were no monitors to watch, no countdown clocks ticking in the corner of my vision, and no glass between us.He tasted like the terrifying, beautiful haze of the future.
Jimmy didn't just kiss me back; he broke.
The professional composure he'd always worn like armor simply evaporated.He let out a sob against my mouth — a jagged, private sound that he would never have allowed anyone else to hear — and his hands came up to grasp my wrists, his grip almost bruising.He was coming undone in my arms, the executive producer finally letting go of the controls, and the sight of it — the raw, unedited reality of him — stripped away the last of my own defenses.
I felt my own eyes burn, my breath hitching in a way that would have been professional suicide on air.I was Nelson Mackenzie, the man who didn't flinch.But as I held him, I realized I was tired of being a statue.I wanted to be human again.
When I finally pulled back just an inch, his forehead dropped against mine.We were both breathing hard, as if we'd just run the length of Central Park.
"Nelson," he whispered, his voice a wreck.
"Mm."
"I love you too.God, I love you so much."
"Thank the stars above," I breathed, closing my eyes and just feeling the heat of him."I've known since the first morning you were in my earpiece, Jimmy.I was just too much of a coward to admit that the voice in my head was the only one I ever wanted to hear."
He laughed — a wet, broken sound that ended in another sob — and he buried his face in the crook of my neck, his hands moving to the back of my head, pulling me closer as if he were trying to merge our heartbeats.