Chapter 2
“Julian’s ghost isn’t angry, sweetheart,” Bryce murmured, slipping that pet name over the airwaves with practiced, dangerous tenderness. The studio line’s digital monitor spiked with live chat reactions—thousands of comments scrolling at lightning speed, swooning over the raw intimacy—but Bryce kept his eyes locked on the audio visualizer. “Because Julian knew how much I loved him. When love is that deep, the person who leaves doesn't want you to starve in the cold. He wants you to find someone to hold your hand in the dark. Someone like you.”
A long pause hung over the frequency. In the silence, the subtle tape hiss of the broadcast felt heavy, thick with unspoken yearning.
“Do you really think so?” Miles asked, his voice so close Bryce could almost feel the phantom warmth of a mouth brushing the shell of his ear. “If Julian were sitting here right now, listening to you take care of me... would he forgive you for moving on? For loving someone else over his memory?”
“He wouldn’t have to forgive me,” Bryce answered, leaning closer, his chest pressing against the console edge. “He would understand. Julian knew I was made to protect the people I cherish. I couldn't save him from the water, Miles. The current was too strong. The ice was too thick. But I can save you. That’s my promise to him, and it’s my promise to you.”
“You always have the right words,” Miles whispered. There was an intoxicating, honeyed reverence in the boy's delivery that stroked every corner of Bryce’s pride. “Sometimes I sit on the floor by my radiator and press my headphones against my ears until my temples hurt. Just to feel like you’re in the room with me. Like you’re holding me down so I don’t float away.”
“I want to be in the room with you,” Bryce confessed. It was an unscripted slip, an admission that sent Teresa’s eyebrows shooting toward her hairline through the control room glass, but Bryce didn’t care. The possessive fire in his gut had been stoking for weeks.
Eighty-four nights of anonymous calls. Eighty-four nights of Miles refusing to give a real surname, refusing to turn on video during the pre-screenings, citing severe facial trauma and agoraphobia from his accident. Miles only communicated through the secure, scrambled routing line he had somehow arranged through a third-party server, allowing Grafton FM only his voice.
Bryce had respected it at first—a patient, magnanimous saint humoring a traumatized lover. But now? The mystery was becoming an agonizing ache. He wanted Miles. He wanted to wipe away the boy's survivor's guilt with his own hands, to strip away the reclusive shell, to kiss that bruised mouth until Miles forgot the sound of spinning tires entirely.
“Don’t say that on the air,” Miles breathed, sounding flustered, the gentle lilt of his laugh dipping into that shy, breathless cadence that made Bryce want to break down doors. “Your producers will cut my line.”
“Let them try,” Bryce murmured. “This is Grafton’s flagship hour. I dictate who stays on the air. And you stay. Always.”
“You’re so certain of yourself, Bryce. So completely in control.” Miles shifted again, and this time, there was a strange, melodic rhythmic tapping in the background—three neat clicks, like the tip of a silver pen against a lacquered wooden desk. Julian used to do that when he was editing sound files. The realization grazed Bryce's subconscious, fleeting and unmooring, before Miles’s voice pulled him back under. “I wish I had your certainty. That night on Blackwood Ridge... when you saw Julian’s car go off... were you terrified?”
Bryce paused, letting the silence build for dramatic weight. He had performed this monologue fifty times on national television, but with Miles, he liked to add darker, more intimate brushstrokes.
“I was paralyzed,” Bryce said, his tone thick with sorrowful gravity. “The sound of the guardrail splintering... it was like a bone snapping. I ran to the edge. The mud was giving way under my boots. I screamed for him. But the drop was thirty feet down into the reservoir cove. By the time I slid down the embankment, the sedan was already on its roof, half-submerged in that black, freezing mud.”
“And you went into the water,” Miles prompted. It wasn’t an interrogation; his voice was soft, pillowy, like a lover inviting a bedtime confession. “You didn't hesitate.”
“I went straight in,” Bryce said, shutting his eyes, painting the heroic canvas he had rehearsed to perfection. “The cold took my breath away instantly. It felt like needles piercing every square inch of my skin. I reached for the door handle. I tried to pull it open, but the pressure... the hydraulic pressure of the lake kept it sealed. I pounded on the glass until my hands bled, Miles. I could see the silhouette of his head through the murky green window. I begged him to push. But he wasn’t moving.”
“He was already unconscious,” Miles whispered sympathetically. “From the impact.”
“Yes,” Bryce choked out, summoning that masterclass catch in his throat that had once won him a Peabody nomination for his memoir broadcast. “He was unconscious. And then the rear axle gave way under the silt shelf, and the car slipped backward into the deep trench. The water closed over the roof. I dove twice more, blind in the blackness, until the hypothermia almost stopped my heart. When the emergency divers pulled me out an hour later, they had to pry my fingers off the dock pilings.”
Bryce opened his eyes, wiping a genuine tear from the corner of his lash. He was brilliant at this. He was the undisputed master of his own tragic mythos.
Across the wire, Miles was quiet. The silence wasn’t cold; it was suffocatingly intimate, like two lovers lying chest-to-chest in the dark after an exhausting storm.
“You’re a hero, Bryce,” Miles said at last. The compliment was delivered with such exquisite, feather-light gentleness that Bryce’s entire body relaxed, a wave of vindication washing over his nerves. “A tragic, beautiful hero. Julian was so lucky to be loved by someone who tried so hard to pull him out.”
“I couldn’t save him,” Bryce whispered, leaning in, offering the bait of his vulnerability. “Which is why I have to save you. You understand that, don’t you? That’s why you called me.”
“Maybe,” Miles murmured. The pen-tapping stopped. “Or maybe I called because I wanted to know what it felt like to be held by the man who survived.”
“You don’t have to wonder anymore,” Bryce said, his heart hammering against his ribs in an intoxicating swell of romantic triumph. “We’re past the halfway mark of the hour, Miles. But I’m not letting you hang up at the chime. Stay on the line through the commercial break. We have things to talk about. Real things. Outside this studio.”
Teresa was violently tapping her wristwatch through the glass, signaling the top-of-the-hour syndication break, but Bryce ignored her completely. His eyes were fixed on the green LED of Line 7, burning steady and bright in the dim control console.
“Things like what, Bryce?” Miles’s voice was teasing now, an intoxicating blend of demure submission and subtle provocation that made Bryce’s blood simmer.
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