Heavy Hitter, page 6
“That’s cool,” Lacey says, as if this is new information to her, which it is not. She searched a couple of days ago to see if he’d done a house tour anywhere, but didn’t come up with anything useful. She wanted to be able to imagine him in context, to picture his giant body filling the space. “How was the flight?”
They talk for a long time, Lacey heading upstairs and putting him on speaker while she does her going-to-bed routine. Jimmy tells her about his teammates and a poker game they’ve had going on and off since 2016, about his plans for his day off tomorrow, which include a visit to the acupuncturist and breakfast at his usual spot. “What about you?” he asks. “Glad to have a break?”
“Oh, yeah!” she says brightly, then can’t quite maintain it. “I mean, kind of.”
“Only kind of?”
“I don’t know,” Lacey admits, leaning close to the mirror and inspecting her skin for various spots and imperfections. “I guess sometimes I look forward to the time off, but then when I have it I don’t always know how to fill it.”
“Could always take up knitting again.”
“Careful,” she warns him. “You’ll wind up with an ugly scarf.”
“Come to think of it, my neck has been a little cold.”
Lacey laughs, but then he doesn’t say anything else, and even though she knows the trick of staying quiet so the other person will talk more and likes to think it doesn’t work on her, all of a sudden she’s telling him about Cora and her text leak and how empty her cavernous house feels, how lonely it is in LA. “I’m not one of those girls that doesn’t like other girls,” she says, flipping her head down and brushing her hair out. It feels important that he understands this. “I love girls! In fact, I love girls so much that there’s a significant faction of the internet that thinks I secretly date them. But I haven’t had a real best friend—like, an active-duty best friend—in years.”
“Active-duty friend,” Jimmy repeats. “I like that. What about whatshername, though? The one you were with in New York?”
“Matilda?” Lacey says, righting herself again and heading into the bedroom to change into her pajamas. “I mean, Matilda is great. Matilda is wonderful, in a King George III sort of way.” Matilda is, Lacey is nearly 100 percent certain, the source of this morning’s blind item on the Sinclair, but she doesn’t want to say that out loud and scare Jimmy off. After all, the gossip could have come from anywhere. It could have been about anyone, and even if Lacey knows, of course, that it is emphatically not, well, there’s no point in drawing unnecessary attention at this time to the reality of what it’s like to be linked to her in any remotely romantic context. “You just kind of have to assume that anything you say to her is public property, you know what I mean?”
“Sure,” Jimmy says. “I can see that.”
“I’m not complaining,” she says quickly. It feels important that he understand this, too. “It’s just kind of like—what am I supposed to do, you know? Go join a pickleball league for single women in their thirties?”
“You could,” Jimmy tells her. “Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in America.”
“My schedule kind of precludes activities,” she reminds him. “I’m also not very good at sports. So then I’m just that weird girl on the pickleball team with sporadic attendance and a paparazzi presence who nobody likes.”
“I don’t think that’s what would happen.”
“You don’t?”
“Nah,” he says. “You’re likable.”
Oh, that makes her smile. “I am?”
“I like you.”
“I like you, too,” Lacey admits, then clears her throat. She wants to ask him if he keeps thinking about it the same way she does, the other night in the bathroom of the bar in New York City. She wants to ask if he shivers every time he remembers what they did. “Anyway,” she says, curling up on the velvet chaise in the corner of her bedroom and pulling a faux-fur throw blanket into her lap, “this makes me sound like a sad sack. Let’s talk about you instead. Do you have family in Baltimore?”
“Not really,” Jimmy tells her. “My folks are in Utica, where I grew up. And my brother passed away a while back, so.”
“Yeah.” This isn’t new information, either, though Lacey couldn’t find anything online where he talked about it publicly. She knows he gives a portion of his salary to a sober-housing nonprofit every year. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “That really sucks.”
“It does,” Jimmy agrees. “But anyway, it’s just me here.”
“In your bach pad?” she teases. “Where everything is made of marble and stainless steel?”
“And concrete, yeah.”
“Even the bed?”
“Nah,” he says, and it’s not so much that he misses a beat as it is that his voice changes ever so slightly, getting kind of low and private and wry. “Bed’s regular.”
“That where you are now?”
“Not yet,” he says. “Getting there.” He does pause then, just for a second, like he’s deciding something. “You?”
“Not yet.” She gets up off the chaise and pads across the room, flipping the covers back and sitting down on the edge of the mattress. “There,” she tells him, aiming for flirtatious and not quite hitting it. “Now I’m in bed.”
“You are, huh.”
“I am.”
“All right,” he says. There’s some rustling, what might or might not be the whoosh of fabric. “Me too.”
“How about that,” she says as she wriggles down underneath the covers. She feels the same way she felt as she walked across the bar the other night, half thrilled and half telling herself she isn’t actually doing anything. “Is this the part where you ask me what I’m wearing?”
Jimmy isn’t laughing. “Do you want me to ask what you’re wearing?”
“I mean.” Lacey puts a palm on her sternum, stroking a thumb along her collarbone. It isn’t lost on her, how cautious he’s being. The way he’s letting her be the one to come to him. It’s not what she might have expected from a person who touched her with such confidence, though to be fair she did insult him and run out of the bar immediately after he did it, so she guesses she can’t exactly blame him for not being sure how she’s going to react. Yes, she thinks as hard as she can, hoping he’ll hear it in the ether. I want you to. “You can try.”
Jimmy swallows; Lacey can hear his throat click. “What are you wearing?” he asks.
“Pajamas,” she tells him honestly. She slides her hand down the center of her rib cage to her stomach, rucking her shirt up and dipping a thumb into her navel. She can feel her heart slamming away inside her ribs. “Joggers and a tank top.”
“What color?”
“Black.” Lacey slips her fingertips under the waistband of the sweatpants, tracing along the jut of her hip bone. She’s never had phone sex before; it feels like a relic from the distant past, like key parties or porn theaters. Not that they’re about to have phone sex, necessarily. Or, more accurately, not that Lacey wants to be the only one who is hoping that’s what might be about to occur. “Um. What are you wearing?”
“Boxers,” he says. “They’re black, too.”
“Is that it?”
“That is it.”
Lacey frowns. “Wait, like, actual boxer shorts, or—”
“They’re boxer briefs, Lacey, Jesus.”
“Well, I’m just asking!” she all but shrieks, struggling upright. “Fuck me for trying to get the full picture, I guess.”
Jimmy laughs, but not meanly. “Is that what you’re trying to do?”
“Yeah,” she confesses. This is happening, then, the two of them on this phone call; all at once it feels silly to try to act like it’s not. “I am.”
“Yeah.” Jimmy blows out a breath. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he tells her quietly. “Ever since the other night. I can’t stop thinking about you.”
“Same,” Lacey gasps. Oh, it’s such an enormous relief to hear him say it. “Like. Constantly. All the time.”
“What do you think about?”
“Your hands,” she says immediately. “Your arms.” She swallows. “How I wanted to take you back to my hotel room.”
“And then what?”
“You know what.”
“I do,” he agrees, “but I want to hear you say it.”
“Say what, exactly?” Lacey fires back before she can stop herself, feeling brave and wild alone here in the dark. “That I wanted you to fuck me?”
“I—” Jimmy makes a low sound, not quite a cough. “Yeah, sweetheart,” he admits. “That’s about it.”
“Well,” she says, pleased with herself. Her whole body feels like it’s on fire. “That’s what I wanted.”
“That’s what I wanted, too.”
“Do you still want to?”
“Of course I do.”
“How bad?”
“Bad.”
“Good.” Lacey forces herself to breathe normally. She never talked to Toby like this. Or maybe, like, once in all the time they were together, on his birthday or something. But he’s got an unshakable quality to him, Jimmy Hodges, a fundamental unshockability that makes her want to take him by surprise. It’s the same reason she suggested the two of them leave the club the other night: because she knew he wasn’t expecting her to do it in a million years, and she wanted to see the look on his face when she asked him.
“Are you—I mean,” Lacey says, then tries again. “Like, right now, are you—”
“Yeah,” Jimmy confesses. It sounds like he’s forcing himself to breathe normally, too. “I am.”
Right away she pictures it: his bare chest and the trail of dark hair underneath his navel, his hand wrapped tight around himself. Lacey has never in her entire life been able to fathom why a person would ever want to receive a picture of a guy’s junk via text message, but she sort of understands it right this second. Not enough to ask for one, to be clear. But, like. Just for a second, she can imagine the appeal. “Okay,” she says, sliding her hand down inside her underwear, her own skin smooth and warm beneath her palm. “Me too.”
Jimmy groans. “How?”
Lacey squeezes her eyes shut. “However you tell me to.”
“Oh, fuck.” He laughs again, disbelieving. He sounds so sincere. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
There’s a pause, then: “Okay, sweetheart,” he says softly. “Here’s what you’re going to do.”
He’s specific, Jimmy Hodges. He takes his time. It’s a trip, the thrill of following his directions as scrupulously as she can: slipping out of her clothes until she’s naked under the covers, cupping her breasts with both hands. “How’s that?” he asks as she reaches between her legs and rubs with two fingers, his voice all grit and gravel three thousand miles away. “That working for you over there?”
“It’s working,” Lacey gasps—bucking up into her own touch, chasing the build of it. “It’s good.”
“Good,” Jimmy echoes. “I think the real thing would be better, but we’ll make do.”
“Tell me,” Lacey manages, “what the real thing would be like.”
That surprises him; she can hear it. “You are something else, you know that?” he asks quietly, but then he tells her that, too: how he’d lay her out on his mattress and lick her all over, all the ways he’d fuck her until she came. She’s worried he’s going to expect her to return the favor—she feels shy suddenly, same as she felt the other night in the bathroom, how she can’t quite believe the things he makes her want to do—but all at once Jimmy sucks in a breath on the other end of the phone. “Lacey, honey,” he says, and his voice is so urgent. “Are you close?”
Lacey slides her fingers inside herself, curling them the same way he did the other night in the bathroom. “Yeah,” she manages, her hips coming clean up off the bed. “I’m close.”
“That’s a girl,” he says. “You gonna let me hear you?”
And—yes, actually. She is. Lacey keens as the feeling of it bursts inside her, waves and waves of warm, syrupy pleasure radiating out all over her body. Jimmy growls into her ear, low and vulnerable; fuck, but Lacey wants to see his face.
“Was that—” she asks when she can talk again. “I mean, did you just—”
“Yeah,” he says with a sheepish-sounding laugh. “Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.” Lacey collapses back against the pillows. She’s exhausted all of a sudden, satisfied and wrung-out and sleepy. She wishes she could curl up next to him, that she could tuck herself close against his chest. That was another thing she kept thinking about after the night they met: the size and the sturdiness of him, like here was a person she wouldn’t need to make herself smaller in order to be with. Like here was a person who could handle the bigness of who she is. “Stay on the phone?” she asks, tucking it between her face and the pillow even though she knows that’s a one-way ticket to Breakoutville and she’s going to regret it in the morning. “Just for a couple of minutes, I mean.”
She’s embarrassed as soon as she asks it—it feels needy somehow, too forward, even though they literally just got each other off—but Jimmy only hums his assent. “Sure,” he tells her, like maybe he’s here in her bed beside her and not clear on the other side of the country. “I’ll stay for as long as you want.”
Chapter Eight
Jimmy
TWO WEEKS PASS LIKE THAT, AUGUST SEEPING SLOWLY INTO SEPTEMBER. Jimmy works out. He plays baseball. And on the nights Lacey Logan is allowed to talk on the telephone, he lies in his bed in whatever anonymous four-star Bonvoy property he’s currently calling home and tells her, in precise, exacting detail, all the things he would like to do to her, given the time and opportunity. He tells her all the things he wants her to do to herself.
It’s not all filthy. They talk about other stuff, too: their Sweetgreen orders and Bruce Springsteen’s best albums and what Bruce Springsteen’s Sweetgreen order might be, if he has one. The games they liked to play when they were kids. One night they watch Bull Durham on cable together in mostly complete silence in their separate hotel rooms, the hiss of her sheets faintly audible on the other end of the line. It’s Jimmy’s favorite part of the day, talking to her. He’s dated plenty of women, but he hasn’t liked just shooting the shit with somebody so much since Rachel. He’s never been so interested in what a person might say.
“So here’s a question,” Lacey posits, late at night on the Monday of Labor Day weekend. “What’s the deal with your ex-wife?”
“What’s the deal with her?” Jimmy repeats, laughing a little nervously. He’s lying in bed watching a Friends rerun on mute, the picked-over remains of a room service club sandwich on a tray on the dresser across the room. They played a one o’clock against the White Sox and won. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.” He can hear her rustling around in her hotel room, the going-to-bed noises he’s started to recognize the last couple of weeks. “Like, why did you get divorced?”
Jimmy snorts; he can’t help it. It’s interesting, how blunt she is. He would have thought she was the kind of girl who would beat endlessly around the bush, who would obfuscate indefinitely, but instead she is generally, disarmingly, direct. “A lot of reasons.”
“Was one of them that you were a bad husband?”
“That was the main one, yes.”
“Did you cheat on her?”
“I did not,” he says truthfully, “but I got pretty close a few times.”
“Gross.”
“Yeah, well.” Jimmy shrugs into the pillows. “I was gross. We were fighting a lot by that point, not that I’m making excuses.”
“Fighting about what?”
“All kinds of stuff,” he hedges, which is true, though the big one was what Rachel described to the therapist as Jimmy’s continued refusal to pursue emotional availability or grapple in any real way with his grief over what happened to his brother. “About my schedule, about kids—”
“She didn’t want them, or you didn’t want them?”
She didn’t. “Neither one of us should have been having them at that point anyway,” Jimmy says instead of answering. “And it’s a good thing we didn’t, in the end, because I failed with great aplomb at couples therapy and we split inside a year.”
“Do you still talk?”
“Nah.” Jimmy clears his throat, swallowing down a stale-coffee mouthful of guilt. “Not for a long time.” It’s not that he doesn’t want to. It’s not that he hasn’t tried. He did Al-Anon a few years ago—or started it, anyway, stalling out spectacularly somewhere around the fourth step and deciding the whole thing wasn’t actually for him after all. He needed to reach out to Rachel, he knew—needed to tell her she’d always deserved better, that he was sorry for how it went—but he never quite managed to pick up the phone and do it. He keeps telling himself he’s going to. He keeps telling himself he still could.
“What about you?” he asks now, shaking out his aching hands before tucking one arm back behind his head. “You still talk to your many famous exes?”
“Uh-uh. Hang on a second there, buddy,” Lacey says. “If anything, you’ve got more famous exes than me.”
“Did you go looking?” The thought of it makes him smile.
“Of course I went looking,” she tells him, sounding utterly unselfconscious. “I needed to make sure you hadn’t been with anyone I truly hate.”
“Have I?” Jimmy asks, not uninterested in her answer.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Lacey shoots back. “And anyway, no. Generally I don’t talk to any of my exes anymore.”
“You write songs about them instead.”
He’s still joking around, but Lacey doesn’t laugh. “Wow,” she deadpans instead, “what a groundbreaking take on my extremely successful career as a multiplatinum performer. You should consider a second act as a music critic for CosmoGirl.”
Jimmy considers that for a moment, surprised by the sudden heat in her voice. “You know what?” he says. “Fair enough.”
“You know who else wrote a lot about his own life without anyone giving him shit about it?” she continues as if he hasn’t spoken. “Ernest Hemingway.”
