Heavy Hitter, page 1
Dedication
For you, this time. Thanks for sticking around.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One: Lacey
Chapter Two: Jimmy
Chapter Three: Lacey
Chapter Four: Jimmy
Chapter Five: Lacey
Chapter Six: Jimmy
Chapter Seven: Lacey
Chapter Eight: Jimmy
Chapter Nine: Lacey
Chapter Ten: Jimmy
Chapter Eleven: Lacey
Chapter Twelve: Jimmy
Chapter Thirteen: Lacey
Chapter Fourteen: Jimmy
Chapter Fifteen: Lacey
Chapter Sixteen: Jimmy
Chapter Seventeen: Lacey
Chapter Eighteen: Jimmy
Chapter Nineteen: Lacey
Chapter Twenty: Jimmy
Chapter Twenty-One: Lacey
Chapter Twenty-Two: Jimmy
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Katie Cotugno
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
Lacey
LACEY IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE TWO GLORIOUSLY UNSCHEDULED days in New York after MetLife Stadium, only then her mom flies into JFK unannounced with the idea that they should get dinner at Balthazar and go see Moulin Rouge on Broadway, which means Lacey actually has one gloriously unscheduled day in New York after MetLife Stadium. Still, she thinks, snapping a picture for Instagram out the window of her hotel suite, the city already humming fifty floors beneath her: It’s better than nothing.
“You want me to set anything up for today?” Claire asks, once she’s settled Lacey’s mom in the car to the airport and come back upstairs for their morning meeting. Claire has been Lacey’s assistant for six years and four albums, an erstwhile engineering major with a septum piercing and a mind like a Swiss watch. “Reservations or anything?”
Lacey hesitates. What she really wants to do while she’s in town is sneak into Henrietta Lang’s gig at Irving Plaza, to close her eyes and throw her arms in the air and lose herself in the weird, moody folk-rock she’s had in her headphones on obsessive repeat the last few months. She could tell Claire that, obviously, and Claire would arrange it in roughly two and a half seconds. But Lacey knows if she does it the whole night is automatically going to be about her and not about Henrietta Lang, and whether she’s pulling focus from a less-established artist, and how corny it is the way she’s always trying to make New York into her whole personality, and does everyone remember how she started talking about how much she loved experimental jazz all the time right after she started dating Toby? Suddenly Lacey feels overwhelmed by the Discourse, even though it’s only eight a.m.
Also, she isn’t really cool enough to just drop into a Henrietta Lang show. She doesn’t know exactly what she’d wear.
In the end she sends flowers and a good-luck card to the venue and spends most of the day in the cloistered quiet of the spa downstairs at the Mandarin, listening to pan flute renditions of eighties love themes while her bodyguard Javi waits patiently outside. “I’m so sorry,” the masseuse says, once Lacey has put her bra back on and stepped into her terry cloth slippers. “I could lose my job for this, but I’m such an enormous fan. Would you mind—?”
“Oh!” Lacey says, hitching the sash of her robe a little tighter around her waist and leaning in for a selfie. “Um, of course.”
Matilda texts as she’s heading back upstairs in the elevator. How was your Big New York Day? she asks, alongside a flood of apple and taxicab emojis. Still on for a late dinner?
Yes! Lacey writes back, although even an early dinner for Matilda is like ten p.m. and Lacey generally tries not to eat after seven thirty. Still: she did say she was going to have a Big New York Day, which at the very least probably means she ought to leave the hotel. Definitely.
She texts Claire, who sends over hair and makeup. The whole floor is sealed, just Lacey’s people, though the dancers had sixty hours off and will meet her tomorrow afternoon in Toronto. Back downstairs Lacey blinks in the flashing lights of the cameras as she waves to the scrum of fans clustered behind the barriers outside the building. “Have you guys been out here all day?” she asks as disbelievingly as possible, though of course she knows they have been. They’ve been here since she arrived in the city nearly a week ago; they’ve been here, more or less, for ten years. A few of them have started bringing their own daughters, little girls with pigtails and SECOND-GEN LACEY LEAGUE T-shirts. “I’m going to order you some pizzas.”
Matilda is waiting at Via Carota, her curly blond hair sticking up in every direction and her wire-rimmed glasses huge on her heart-shaped face. “There you are, you absolute vision!” she crows, flashing a nasty look at anyone who dares to glance over at them. Matilda just called it off with the guy she was seeing, an impishly unwashed Irish singer who plays the bodhran, so now she hates every man indiscriminately and most women for good measure. Lacey knows from experience that this will endure for roughly as long as it takes for some mustachioed Icelandic playwright to catch her eye from across a crowded room.
They debrief the breakup over grilled artichokes and cacio e pepe, a green salad with a sharp, bracing vinaigrette. Matilda is talking animatedly about the weird sex stuff Eoghan was into when Lacey’s phone starts to buzz on the table—her mom back in Cincinnati. Lacey bites her lip. She tries to pick up whenever her mom calls, but they literally just saw each other this morning; her mom slept over in her hotel room last night, the wine-and-perfume scent of her familiar and a little bit suffocating. Lacey tossed and turned until the light turned gray in the gap between the blackout curtains, some animal instinct deep inside her vigilantly attuned to the possibility of a threat.
“What about you, dove?” Matilda asks now, peering at her curiously across the table. Matilda is from England so everything she says sounds sophisticated and a little imperious. “Have you talked to your Saturday Night Bastard?”
Lacey clears her throat. “To Toby?” she asks, taking a sip of her water and tucking her phone facedown underneath her thigh, where it continues to buzz like a coin-operated bed. “I have not.”
Matilda tuts. “The baby looks like a tiny goblin, doesn’t it.”
“You’re terrible,” Lacey chides through a laugh, though she has privately, in her lowest moments, thought basically the same thing. “The baby looks like a baby. None of this is the baby’s fault.”
“You should send them an extremely fucked-up little gift,” Matilda advises, reaching for her wine. “A crocheted jumper embroidered with your likeness. Or a note saying how flattered you are by the offer to be its godmother, and how delighted you are to accept.”
Lacey laughs again, but she’s relieved when the waiter comes over to see how they’re enjoying everything. She doesn’t want to talk about this anymore. There isn’t really that much to say. She lived with Toby for almost two years, and then it turned out he had both a secret cocaine addiction and a secret relationship, and also that his secret girlfriend was pregnant with his secret baby, and now Lacey is on an international tour singing a bunch of wildly popular love songs she wrote as she lay in their bed beside him.
So: nothing that unusual, really. Just, like, normal girl stuff.
“Tell me about work,” she says to Matilda, once they’re alone again. “When does filming start back up?”
Matilda claps her manicured hands together, launching into a convoluted story about two of her castmates who can no longer be in the same room together following an undisclosed incident at a SAG dinner in West Hollywood. Lacey lets her mind wander. She feels restless all of a sudden, a panicky Sunday-night kind of feeling, even though it’s the middle of the week. It was just a short break, but she wanted to accomplish something with it, to do something memorable or independent or creatively inspiring, and instead she had an Ayurvedic scalp treatment and watched 4 New York in bed. She’s not complaining, obviously—one thing about Lacey is that she knows better than to ever, ever complain—but she’s disappointed in herself, in her own lack of bravery. She could have figured out something to wear.
She’s startled out of her thoughts by the insistent buzz of her phone underneath her. Lacey reaches down and flips it over, glancing quickly at the screen. Where are you? her mom wants to know. Call me.
Then, a moment later: It’s an emergency.
Lacey feels the iron pulse of her own heart at the back of her mouth. “Hold that thought,” she tells Matilda, smiling as calmly as possible and hurrying off to the bathroom, already dialing. “Mom,” she says, once she’s shut herself inside and locked the door, “are you okay?”
“There you are,” her mom says pleasantly. “Are you out?”
Lacey shuts her eyes, just briefly, leaning back against the sink in irritation and relief. “I’m at dinner,” she says. “What’s the emergency?”
“What?”
“You said there was an emergency, Mom.”
“Oh,” her mom says. “Did I? No, I just got back to the house and I hate all my furniture. Do you still have the name of the decorator who did your place in Nashville?”
Lacey grits her teeth so hard she feels it in her neck. “Sure,” she says. “I’ll text you her contact info in the morning.”
“Who are you with?”
“Just Matilda.”
“Oh, I love Matilda!” her mom exclaims, though they’ve never actually met each other. Lacey finds it’s best to spend time with her mom one-on-one. “Tell her I said hello.”
Back at the table Matilda is taking video of the bustling restaurant, brow furrowed in concentration like Martin Scorsese with an iPhone Pro. “One more drink?” she asks. “There’s a place near Hudson Yards that’s supposed to be fun.”
Lacey hesitates. She’s got a flight out first thing tomorrow morning, the first of six shows over two weekends in Toronto tomorrow night. She should go back to the hotel, do her hour of potions, chug her dutiful liter of water, and go to sleep with the white noise machine humming on the nightstand beside her.
“One more drink,” she agrees, and tucks her phone back into her purse.
Outside the restaurant a small crowd has gathered: a few photographers she recognizes and a trio of girls in TEAM LACEY T-shirts, plus some curious tourists lured by the promise of a celebrity sighting. Lacey glances up over their heads at the tops of the buildings and thinks of Henrietta Lang stepping onstage a few blocks from here, her red hair long and wild and her voice like a flamethrower in the darkness. The night isn’t over yet, Lacey decides, feeling suddenly impetuous. There’s still time for something to happen.
“A spinning wheel,” she announces, raising her voice so Matilda can hear her over the sounds of the screaming, flashbulbs still exploding all around them. “That’s what I’m going to send.”
Chapter Two
Jimmy
THEY GET THEIR ASSES HANDED TO THEM AT YANKEE STADIUM IN a truly spectacular fashion, and by the time they get back to the hotel after the game all Jimmy wants is a burger from room service and never to talk to anyone again for the rest of his natural life, but Tuck catches him in the lobby and reminds him that Rose is in town with some friends tonight. “Come on, man,” Tuck says when Jimmy tries to beg off. “It makes her think I’m cool and popular when I get the whole team to come out.”
“You are unequivocally neither one of those things,” Jimmy promises, tapping his key card as they step into the elevator. Then he looks at Tuck’s hopeful face and sighs. “Text me when you pick a place.”
In the end it’s almost half the team piling into a motorcade of Ubers headed downtown: Tuck and Jonesy and a bunch of the guys from the outfield, plus a couple of the new call-ups whose names Jimmy keeps forgetting, kids so young they still have acne dotted all along their greasy hairlines. He swears they look more like babies every single year. “That’s because you’re a bag of fuckin’ bones, you grizzled bastard,” Tuck says whenever he mentions it. Jimmy guesses he’s got a point.
The bar—club, whatever—is on the top floor of a fancy hotel, high ceilings and an enormous roof deck that looks out over the water, a view of the Hudson River that might make a certain kind of person feel sentimental about New York. Jimmy’s drinking a beer and listening idly as Jonesy and Tito insult each other’s mothers when suddenly Tuck elbows him in the ribs.
“Shit,” Tuck says, motioning toward the corner. “Isn’t that—”
Jimmy follows his gaze to a cordoned-off VIP area—the team is also in a VIP area, allegedly, but all at once Jimmy understands that theirs isn’t the real one, that there’s another area within the VIP area that’s for actual celebrities. There’s a curtain, lush green and thick-looking, but it isn’t quite closed all the way.
“Oh, fuck me,” Ray says, popping up in his seat like a prairie dog. “Is that Lacey Logan?”
It is in fact Lacey Logan, Jimmy sees now, seated on a low couch with her long legs crossed demurely at the ankles. She’s with the other girl she’s with all the time, the actress from the survivalist thing on HBO, the one with the face that’s kind of mean. “Stars,” Jimmy concedes, taking a swig of his beer. “They’re just like us.”
“They are nothing like us,” Tuck corrects, gazing longingly in the post-apocalyptic pirate queen’s direction.
“Isn’t your literal fiancée supposed to be meeting us here any minute?” Jimmy asks him. Tuck scratches his eyebrow with his middle finger instead of answering.
Jimmy smirks, glancing over at the curtain one more time before turning his attention back to the guys, pulling Tito into a different conversation before things with Jonesy get too heated and they all wind up getting their asses kicked out onto Tenth Avenue. Rose arrives with a gaggle of her girlfriends, tufted and patterned and boring as a suite of expensive furniture, and they order another round of drinks. They went to dinner in the Meatpacking District before they got here, but pretty soon Jimmy is hungry again; he wonders if there’s a food menu at this place, though he already knows that if there is it’s going to be full of raw fish and various gourmet foams. He’s about to order buffalo chicken sliders to his hotel room and call a car to take him back uptown when Ray gets unsteadily to his feet. “I’m going to go say hello,” he announces.
Jimmy looks up at him, confused. “To who?” Then, as it dawns on him: “To Lacey Logan? Oh, buddy.” Jimmy shakes his head. “Please don’t.”
“Why not?” Ray asks, looking wounded. Ray is twenty-one, maybe twenty-two at the outside, dressed in jeans and an oversized polo shirt; he was wearing an Orioles cap when they got here, but the bouncer downstairs made him take it off before they got in the elevator, and his hair is a little bit matted. “We’re both Very Important Persons, right?”
“The opacity of that curtain suggests otherwise,” Tuck points out.
Ray ignores him. “She’s from the Midwest,” he goes on, with the authority of a seasoned Wikipedian. “I’m also from the Midwest.” Then, like he’s trying to convince them: “She’s on the rebound, my dudes.”
Jimmy thinks he heard something about that, actually: Lacey Logan breaking up with some skinny nice-guy comedian from SNL his ex-wife Rachel used to like. The guy was on coke, or the guy was cheating? Maybe both. Jimmy is about to ask Ray for the details, if only to try and distract him into sitting back down and drinking a glass of water until his blood alcohol level dips beneath the legal limit, but the kid is already trotting off across the club like Tom Cruise gunning it down the runway in an F-14, all aviators and flight jacket. Jimmy can practically hear the theme music playing in his head.
“Well?” Tuck says expectantly.
Jimmy looks back. “Well what?”
“You’re his captain, Jimmy. As far as that young man is concerned, you are his father. You need to go and save him from himself before he winds up in jail.”
“You get him,” Jimmy counters stubbornly. He didn’t want to come out tonight in the first place, and this is why. Well, not this, specifically, he didn’t portend this exact clusterfuck, but he’s over the late nights and the paparazzi, the whole who’s-fucking-who scene of it. He’s too old.
“They’re going to send him to Rikers Island, Jimmy. You ever read about Rikers Island?”
“They’re not gonna—” he starts, but Tuck just keeps on looking at him, and finally Jimmy rolls his eyes and gets up off the couch, his knees cracking loudly in protest. He jams his hands into his pockets and ambles over to the curtain, where by some miracle Ray has not yet been forcibly removed by a bouncer twice his size and tossed out the window onto a passing trash barge. “Ray, buddy,” he says, swinging an arm around the kid’s skinny shoulders, “your team needs you. For, uh. Top secret sports stuff.” He nods at the women on the sofa, holding up one conciliatory hand. “Ladies.”
The blonde nods back, but the brunette—and the brunette, make no mistake, is Lacey Logan—narrows her eyes in his direction, pointing with one short vermilion fingernail. “Jimmy Hodges, right?”
“Uh.” That startles him. “Yeah.”
She nods, unfolding herself from the sofa and offering a hand. “Lacey Logan.”
Jimmy clears his throat. “Nice to meet you.”
“You too.” She’s got a firm handshake, businesslike. She’s taller than he would have thought she was—not as tall as him, but close to it—and slightly gawky-looking, like a very lovely ostrich. Her hair is twisted into a long, complicated-looking ponytail over one shoulder. “This is my friend Matilda.”
Jimmy nods, patting the kid on the back. “This is Ray.”
“Oh, now,” Matilda says Britishly, sounding like Dame Maggie Smith in that show about the rich people in the castle. It occurs to Jimmy to wonder if her accent is even real. “Ray, we have met.”
