Page 19 of Heavy Hitter

“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.”

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