Page 49 of Heavy Hitter

“Why do you think we had a bad night, exactly?”

All at once, Lacey hears the drumbeat of danger coming closer. “Don’t,” she warns him.

“Don’t what?”

“You know what!” Lacey insists. “Uh-uh, Jimmy. No way. Like, by all means, go ahead and throw a tantrum if you need to, walk it off, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand here and let you make noise about how any of this was somehow my fault for showing up to your game when you’re the one—”

“I said it at the very beginning, didn’t I?” Jimmy shakes his head. “I told you I was worried this was going to be a distraction for both of us, and we can’t afford to have any distractions right now.”

“You can’t.”

“I can’t!” Jimmy bursts out. “I’m literally trying to win the World fucking Series! I don’t get how you of all people don’t understand that!”

“Yeah, well.” Lacey throws her hands up. “It wouldn’t have become a distraction in the first place if you could have kept your fucking mouth shut like I asked you to.”

That blow lands: Jimmy sputters for a moment, shrugging violently. “Well, I’m sorry I’m not a criminal mastermind like you,” he says, a flash of embarrassment visible through the dark scrim of his anger. “I don’t have perfect media training, I guess. I don’t talk to the world in fucking riddles and assume everyone will drop everything to figure out what I’m trying to tell them because they’re all so deeply obsessed with me.”

“I have never, not once, talked in riddles with you!” Lacey explodes, stung by the deep unfairness of it. “I have been direct and I have been forthright and if you didn’t want me to come to your damn baseball game to support you, then you should have done the same thing and told me so! This wasn’t a surprise pop-in, Jimmy. You had plenty of time to put a stop to it if you wanted to, and you didn’t, so now—”

“Oh, please,” he protests. “You know as well as I do that you weren’t asking for permission, Lacey. On top of which, you didn’t come to support me! You came because your fucking publicist told you it would be a good thing to do to distract the people who write the articles on the Sinclair from the fact that your ex was making shitty jokes at your expense.”

This is, it must be said, a little bit true, and Jimmy must see it in her expression before she can figure out how to spin it, because his own face turns rock-solid. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I thought.”

Lacey considers that for a moment, looking around at his tacky chrome floor lamp, his dopey concrete floors. She does not want to be here, she thinks clearly. This is no longer a place she wants to be. “Okay,” she says. “You know what, Jimmy? You win. I don’t want to fight about this anymore tonight. We can cool off and talk about it more later, okay? In the meantime, I’m going to go back to my hotel.”

“Wait.” Jimmy blinks at that, visibly startled by the idea of it. “You booked a hotel room?”

“Of course I booked a fucking hotel room!” God, there is so much he doesn’t understand about the way her life works. There is so much he still doesn’t get. “You think I am a person who ever, under any circumstances, comes to a city without booking a hotel room? I booked three different blocks of hotel rooms, at three different hotels, just like I do literally every time I travel.”

“I just—” Jimmy frowns. He looks so surprised, just for a second. He looks so enormously, bizarrely hurt. “I thought you were staying here.”

“Well.” Lacey quirks an eyebrow. “I guess it’s a good thing I had a backup plan, huh.”

Jimmy’s eyes narrow then, like this information confirms some mean suspicion about her that he’s been quietly harboring. Like this was a trap and she just walked right into it. “Of course you did,” he says, nodding slowly. “You always do, right? You’re always three steps ahead of everyone else.”

“What does that even mean?” Lacey demands. “Do you even want me to stay here right now? Because you’re certainly not acting like a person who—”

Jimmy shakes his head. “This is too much for me,” he announces. “All of this is too much for me. The machine of it, the Lacey Logan industrial complex. You sneeze and it changes the Nasdaq. It’s too much for me.”

“You mean I’m too much for you.”

She’s expecting him to contradict her, but Jimmy only shrugs. “Yeah, Lacey,” he admits quietly. “Sometimes, yeah.”

Lacey absorbs that blow in silence. Up until right this moment she thought this was just a regular argument that they were having but she can see now that it’s more than that, that it’s serious—that Jimmy is the kind of person to go nuclear, that he could end this right now and be fine with it. He could have been fine never talking to her again after that night in New York City; he could have been fine never talking to her again after the last time they fought. All at once it’s glaringly obvious that Lacey herself has been the one pushing this relationship forward the entire time, that she has been the one pursuing him since the moment she asked him to leave that club weeks and weeks ago, and the fact that she somehow deluded herself into thinking otherwise feels like a grave and strategic misstep on her part. She doesn’t know what’s wrong with her lately. She’s never felt so out of control in her entire life. “Well, okay,” she says, throwing her shoulders back and affecting carelessness as best as she possibly can. “That’s instructive. Thank you for your honesty. We’re done, then.”

“Wha—hang on a second.” Jimmy holds a hand up, panic flaring in his eyes. “I’m not saying done forever. I’m saying let’s take some time to cool off, same as you said, until—”

“Until what, until your career is officially over and you need someone to glom on to in order to stay relevant?”

Jimmy looks stung. “Wow,” he says. “Screw you, Lacey.”

“Screw you,” she shoots back, keeping her voice very even. She’s not going to let him see her fall apart. He wants to think she’s a robot, that she has a computer for a brain, let him think it. She’s Lacey fucking Logan, and she doesn’t give a damn. “I’m going now.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, “I think that’s probably for the best.”

It takes Lacey a moment to gather her things and her person, to snatch her jacket off the abominable sofa and shove her purse underneath her arm. She feels unsteady in her shoes as she makes her way back toward the foyer. They were all wrong for a baseball game, she sees now. Everything she did was all wrong.

Jimmy scrubs a hand over his face, yanking ineffectually at his beard. “Lacey,” he says, and for a second she thinks he’s going to be himself again, tell her he’s sorry, he’s being ridiculous, he’s falling in love with her. That they can get through this together. That they can be a team.

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