Heavy Hitter, page 3
Something in Jimmy’s expression shorts out briefly, like he suspects she’s full of shit and finds it vaguely disappointing, but he doesn’t know her well enough to call her on it. “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” is all he says, getting to his feet and nodding in the direction of the restrooms. “I’ll be right back.”
Lacey sits at the bar for another moment once he’s gone, sipping her drink and wondering why she feels so sad all of a sudden. Something about the idea of him retiring is faintly heartbreaking—she’s going to miss him, she realizes with a sharp flash of clarity, which is a deeply deranged emotion to be having, since they only met an hour ago and he’s in the bathroom of this bar at this very moment—but that isn’t the only reason. It’s that she had the chance to be brave just now, same as she did with the Henrietta Lang show, and she whiffed it. It’s that she could have said or done something to surprise herself, and instead she wasted her chance.
Lacey glances over at Javi, who’s pretending to watch ESPN on the TV mounted in the corner.
Then she slips off her barstool as casually as she can.
The bathrooms are in a dim little hallway lined with fake Art Deco posters of European travel destinations. Lacey leans back against the wall to wait, tucking her hands neatly behind her back and squinting at a crude rendering of the Eiffel Tower. Toby did a couple of dates in Paris last year, after his tour through England and Ireland, but the jokes didn’t really translate and he was in a bad mood the entire ti—
The door opens. Jimmy steps out, then stops short when he sees her, his eyes widening. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
He jerks his thumb back toward the bathroom. “Are you—?”
“No.”
“Then what—”
“What do you think?”
She watches as Jimmy processes that, his gaze turning a full shade darker. “Okay.” He takes a step closer, then another, crowding her a little, his body huge in the tiny hallway. Lacey needs to lift her chin to look him in the eye. “You realize this isn’t going to do a single fuckin’ thing for your career,” he warns her softly, his face so close their lips are almost touching. He smells like restaurant-supply hand soap and underneath that like cologne.
Lacey shakes her head. “Fuck you,” she tells him primly, then grabs the front of his shirt with both hands and slams her mouth up against his.
Chapter Four
Jimmy
JIMMY LETS OUT A QUIET OOF AS HE CATCHES HER WEIGHT, STUMBLING backward into the tiny bathroom and kicking the door shut behind them. Lacey fists her hands in his hair. She’s an entirely different kind of kisser than he would have thought, nipping at his bottom lip and sliding her clever tongue into his mouth, her strong arms muscled tight around his neck. She tastes like cranberries and lime.
“Okay, hang on, hang on,” she gasps at last, wriggling until he sets her down on the tile. “Didn’t you literally just say your back is messed up? I’m going to hurt you.”
“You’re definitely not,” he tells her calmly, grinning against her brightly painted mouth. “Anyway, fuck my back. I’m retiring.”
“You’re retiring,” Lacey agrees solemnly, and kisses him again.
Jimmy works his knee between her thighs as he presses her up against the door, taking quick stock of his surroundings. The bathroom is a single-shooter, decently clean, with a tiny votive candle flickering on the edge of the sink next to the EMPLOYEES MUST WASH sign; still, it is very much a public toilet, and even if she is the one who picked the venue, he’s definitely not about to consummate this thing in the john of a drinking establishment so pathologically nondescript it might as well be called Bar.
Not that he thinks they’re going to consummate—
At least, he’s definitely not expecting—
Jimmy growls, a sharp zip of pain at the crook of his neck startling him out of his head. “Did you just bite me?” he asks incredulously.
“Um,” she says, lifting her head and looking at him a little sheepishly. Fuck, but she’s a beautiful girl. Jimmy knew that, obviously, but there’s something different about noticing it in the specific and not the generic way he knows most famous women are beautiful. Her mouth is a little too wide for her face. “No?”
Jimmy grins. “Lacey Logan,” he mutters—biting her back, just gently, all along the elegant cliff of her jaw. “Who fuckin’ knew.”
It goes on like that for a while, Jimmy cupping her ass and Lacey hitching a leg up like she’s trying to climb him, her fingertips sliding down into the collar of his undershirt. Jimmy palms a breast through her dress. He wants to do more than that, wants to peel down the cups of her bra and lick her nipples, wants to see her, but the dress is expensive and tight, the fabric thick and a little bit shiny with no give to it at all. Jimmy doesn’t know who designed this dress, but they can go screw themselves, truly. It’s got, like, three layers and a corset. It sucks. “What the fuck,” he mutters finally, still fumbling for a zipper and not finding one. Lacey throws her head back and laughs.
“Shh,” he chides quietly, giving up and dropping to his knees on the extremely questionable tile. Lacey’s eyes go gratifyingly wide.
“I’m wearing Spanx right now,” she warns him. “I mean, I don’t know what you’re planning to—but—”
Jimmy nods seriously. “Please believe me when I tell you from the bottom of my heart that I do not give a shit,” he promises, and slides the palms of his hands up her thighs.
In the end he does actually give a little bit of a shit, but only because the thing is also so difficult to get off, the high waist of it covering her stomach and rib cage. Jimmy peels it carefully down her body, rucking up her skirt and rubbing his face against the lower part of her belly. She smells private, like baby powder and a little bit like sweat. “Isn’t that so fucking uncomfortable?” he asks, using his index finger to trace the angry red line the seam of it left against her hip.
Lacey peers down at him, fixing him with an arch expression. “Actually, I love it,” she deadpans pleasantly. “I sleep in it now.”
Jimmy winces. “Point taken.” He ducks his head, then hesitates at the last possible second, glancing back up at her in the dim light of the bathroom. “Is this—?” he asks. It feels important to get affirmative consent. “I mean, do you want me to—?”
“Yes,” she hisses. “Of course I—I followed you to the bathroom, James.” She makes a face. “Do people call you that, even?”
Jimmy shakes his head. “No,” he says with a smile. “Nobody.”
“I’m going to,” she decides.
“Uh-huh,” he mutters, grabbing one smooth knee and slinging it over his shoulder, reaching up to cup her with one hand. “You can do whatever you want.”
Lacey grins again, that same luminous smile that momentarily undid him when they were sitting out there at the bar. “I know.”
It’s the quietest sex he’s ever had. Lacey hums softly, gripping the edge of the sink and tilting her hips against him, letting out the occasional sigh. Jimmy shifts his weight on the tile, trying to ignore the sharp twinge in his knees. He has no idea if it isn’t working for her or she’s like this all the time or she’s going over her tour choreography, but at the very least he wants to make sure he has her undivided attention, so he slides two fingers inside her and curls them, pressing with the heel of his hand.
Lacey almost kicks his face clean off. “Oh,” she gasps, her shocked gaze finding his in the half dark. “Oh my god.”
Well, thank fuck. “There you are,” he says, trying not to sound too openly relieved. “Hi.”
“You told me to be quiet!”
Jimmy grins into the crease of her thigh. “So be quiet.”
“So don’t do everything you can possibly think of to make me—” Lacey starts, but then he twists his fingers one more time and all of a sudden she’s arching sharply against him, her chin dropping back again to expose the long, graceful line of her throat. Jimmy hums his quiet encouragement into her skin.
“Oh my god,” she repeats a long moment later, clutching at his shoulders. Her legs are shaking a little as he sets her foot back down on the tile, unsteady in her ridiculous red shoes. “Oh my god, okay, come up here.”
Jimmy gets to his feet, trying not to wince too visibly at the way his knees are singing. Lacey stamps another kiss against his mouth. “That was—”
“Uh-huh.”
Lacey laughs a little hysterically. “I never do this,” she mutters, dropping her head and burying her face in his chest for a moment. “I never do this.”
“Mm-hmm.” He smooths a hand over her hair, squeezing the back of her neck a little. Her skin is burning hot against his palm. “Me either.”
“Fuck you.”
“You know, I gotta say, you’ve got a real trash mouth for such a pristine individual,” he scolds, thinking they’re still playing, but when she pulls back to look at him, her eyes are huge and panicky.
“I mean it,” she says, stepping backward so quickly she bumps into the sink. “I’m serious, this can’t—”
Right away, Jimmy puts his hands up. “Okay,” he says, “yeah. Sorry, I didn’t—”
“No, it’s just, I’ve never—” She breaks off. Her hair is frizzing up a bit, just around her hairline. Her cheeks are flushed bright red. “I don’t—”
“What?” Jimmy scans her face, searching. He has no idea what just happened here. “Are you a virgin?”
Lacey huffs. “Fuck you,” she says again, snatching her titanium underwear up off the edge of the sink and stepping nimbly back into them. “I’m thirty-two years old.”
Jimmy blinks. “Really?”
“Yeah,” she says, pausing to look up at him. “Why, is that a problem?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head quickly. “No, that’s great, actually, I was—”
“I’m not a virgin,” she interrupts. “But I’m also not like you.”
Jimmy scowls, surprised by how stung he feels by that particular assessment. “What am I like, exactly?” he asks, though it’s not like he doesn’t know what she’s getting at. And sure, there was a time before he was married—and, okay, also after he got divorced—that he had a little bit of a reputation for sleeping around, but—
“You can’t tell anyone about this,” Lacey says instead of answering. “I mean it. And I meant it when I said I don’t do this kind of thing. You can’t—what I’m trying to say is—”
“Who do you imagine I’m going to be falling all over myself to tell?” he snaps, then immediately feels like a dick about it. On the one hand he’s insulted, to be so brutally appraised by a pop singer who undoubtedly owns a small and annoying dog and captions her Instagram photos with phrases like all the feels. But on the other, she looks so worked up about it. She looks . . . afraid. “Lacey,” he says gently. “I get it. I’m not going to tell anyone. All right?”
Lacey nods. “Okay.” She looks like she believes him, then like she doesn’t, then like she does again. “Thank you.” She produces a slim tube of bright red lipstick from a tiny bag he didn’t notice until right this moment, slicking it onto her mouth so fast and so expertly he’s not even sure he sees her do it at all. “Do you want to go out first, or should I?”
Jimmy thinks about that for a moment. He guesses it doesn’t really matter, at this point. He guesses it would be dumb to think it did. “Go ahead,” he tells her, nudging her toward the exit, then stands there with his hands in his pockets as the door snicks shut behind her.
Chapter Five
Lacey
SHE WAKES UP WITH A GASP AT SIX THIRTY, HER HEART POUNDING.
Lacey gropes for her phone on the nightstand, fumbling it with clumsy hands and dropping it with a thud on the hotel carpet. Holy shit, what was she thinking? Anyone could have taken pictures. Anyone could have seen. Lacey hasn’t been that careless in years. She’s never been that careless, if she’s being honest with herself; on her grave, it will probably say, Here Lies Lacey Logan! She cared A LOT. Is this what drunk people feel like the morning after a bender? Does her mom feel like this all the time?
Lacey fishes the phone off the floor and forces herself to search Lacey Logan + Jimmy Hodges, her whole body going soft with relief when the only thing that comes up is a photo of her singing the national anthem at an Orioles game seven years ago. Lacey flops back onto the mattress, waiting for her breathing to slow before reaching up for her water bottle. She didn’t drink the whole thing before bed and she can feel it now, the stale, recycled dryness of the hotel in her skin and her sinuses. The insides of her thighs feel raw underneath her pajama shorts, and it takes her a second to realize it’s from the scrape of Jimmy’s beard.
Lacey opens a new search window. Jimmy Hodges + girlfriends, she types, then clicks on a slideshow from Entertainment Tonight. It’s old stuff, mostly, from before he was married: three moderately famous actresses, one singer who died a few years later in a car accident. Two Victoria’s Secret models. One Olympic gymnast. They probably had very athletic sex, Lacey thinks with a bizarre, inappropriate stab of jealousy, then sucks down the rest of her water even though it makes her feel a little sloshy.
His ex-wife wasn’t famous, she notes. His ex-wife was a schoolteacher from Aberdeen. Lacey doesn’t know why that’s interesting to her, but it is.
Her phone dings just as she’s about to try and find something more recent, and Lacey startles, dropping it onto the mattress one more time. Morning! Claire’s texted from her room next door, just like she does every day at precisely seven a.m. Let me know when you’re ready for coffee.
I’m up! Lacey texts back, then chews her bottom lip for a moment. Also, would you mind setting up a call with Maddie for sometime this morning?
The typing bubble appears, then disappears, then appears again. Lacey knows Claire wants to ask what the call is for, and also knows that she isn’t going to. ofc! Claire assures her. Will do.
Lacey showers and pulls on a tank and leggings, slips a lightweight hoodie on overtop. When she looks in the mirror she can see that her mouth is still a little bit swollen from last night, smudged around the edges; she touches her lips with her fingertips, just gently, shivering at the memory of Jimmy’s warm tongue rasping against hers. She’s embarrassed by the way she ran out of the bar—she was flustered enough when she came back from the bathroom that Javi asked, just once and very quietly, if everything was okay—and a little guilty about the things she said to Jimmy as she was leaving, even if the Entertainment Tonight slideshow does seem to confirm her general impression of him as a person who probably messes around with women in public places every day of the week. She was rattled by her own desire, the sudden, starving intensity of it. She was rattled by how badly she didn’t want to stop.
It doesn’t matter, Lacey tells herself as Claire knocks on the door that separates her suite from Lacey’s. It’s not like she’s ever going to see him again. It’s a thing that happened, that’s all; she’ll talk to Maddie, they’ll address it, and then everyone will move on. Lacey knows how to control a story. Lacey is, and has always been, the one in charge.
“How was your night?” Claire asks, handing her the latte and pulling up the schedule on her iPad.
“Good,” Lacey promises, and settles in to hear about her day.
They have to be at Teterboro at nine for the flight to Toronto, and Maddie FaceTimes from LA while they’re still in the tunnel, the connection a little stuttery and slow. “Hey there!” Maddie says, immaculately dressed and seated in her office even though it’s barely five a.m. in California. Maddie took Lacey with her when she started her own PR firm eleven years ago, back before either one of them was nearly this successful. Lacey likes to think it paid off for them both. “How was New York?”
“It was great,” Lacey says automatically, and they do another few minutes of what Lacey always thinks of as gals-in-business chitchat before finally she takes a deep breath, tucking one leg underneath her. “So, this definitely isn’t a big deal,” she begins, “but I did want to get out in front of it just in case.”
“Sure thing,” Maddie says brightly, though Lacey catches the flicker of trepidation on her face in the moment before she can school it coolly away. None of them ever like to let Lacey see them lose their composure. “Hit me.”
Lacey explains it as casually as she can—making a jokey, madcap adventure of it, playing up the goofiness of the thing with the mozzarella sticks. If Javi, sitting quietly next to Chris in the front seat of the SUV, has anything to contribute by way of clarifying details, Lacey knows he would never volunteer them in a million years. “Anyway,” she finishes breezily, “if you hear something in the next couple of days about me and Jimmy Hodges from the Orioles going to some random bar in the West Village, that’s why.”
“What bar?” Maddie asks, making a note.
“I have no idea,” Lacey says honestly, which leads to ten excruciating minutes of Claire pulling up the websites of various places until finally Maddie tells her not to worry about it and sets her pen down on her desk.
“Okay,” she says, her voice perfectly even. “Did anything happen between you guys I need to know about?”
Lacey hesitates for the barest fraction of a second. She knows, she knows Maddie can only do her job if Lacey is 100 percent honest with her. Maddie was Lacey’s first call when she found out about Toby and the coke, her first call when she found out about Toby and Audriana; Maddie is one of exactly four people on Lacey’s payroll who know the whole truth about Lacey’s mom. Lacey trusts Maddie completely, and she’s fully aware that the correct thing to do is to come clean, or at least clean-ish, to say she and Jimmy kissed or whatever and have Claire call the lawyers about drawing up an NDA.
But then she thinks of the way he rubbed along her hip bone with the thumb of his free hand while she worked through her long, shuddering orgasm. She thinks of his giant shoulders. She thinks of the sound of his laugh. Maybe Jimmy does that kind of thing all the time, with all kinds of people, but Lacey doesn’t. And it’s something she doesn’t want to share.
