Page 16 of Heavy Hitter

Lacey laughs before she can stop herself, only the laugh turns into something else on the way out and Lacey has to swallow it again like a too-big shard of tortilla chip, scraping her throat on the way down. It’s disorienting, sometimes, when her mom acts like the person Lacey remembers from when she was younger: the two of them eating Tuna Helper for dinner in the apartment they moved into after Lacey’s dad left, watching music videos on VH1. In some ways, it almost feels worse than when she’s too drunk to stand. “Okay. Well. Thank you.”

By the time they hang up Lacey feels itchy and restless and sad for no reason, pacing the empty house looking for something she can’t quite name. She’s going to get a new place after the tour, she decides suddenly: some weird bungalow in the Hollywood Hills, maybe, something full of crystals where she can invite Stevie Nicks over for jam sessions. Beaded curtains in the doorway. Lots of pink. Michelle Pfeiffer’s apartment in Batman Returns, basically, only expensive. Something Toby would absolutely hate.

She heats up some grilled chicken and vegetables in the microwave. She scrolls through her social media tags. Finally she picks up her phone. It’s a little past ten on the East Coast, and as soon as Lacey flicks to Jimmy’s name in her contacts she realizes she’s been waiting to do this all day—that, even if she didn’t explicitly admit it to herself, she’s been planning it since the moment they hung up last night. Hell, there’s a part of her that’s been planning it since she saw him across the room in New York. You’ve never in your life come into a human interaction without an endgame, Toby told her once, and while she knows he probably didn’t mean it as a compliment, in Lacey’s opinion that kind of strategy is just good sense and self-preservation. There’s nothing she hates more than being surprised.

“Hey,” Jimmy says when he answers. “I was hoping you’d call.”

“Really?” Lacey winces at the sound of it, a full click too eager. God, sometimes she is so acutely aware that there’s a universe in which she never got famous at all and is instead a children’s librarian wearing whimsical dresses printed with cats riding bicycles, trying unsuccessfully to connect with guys on Bumble. “I mean. You were?”

“Yeah,” he says easily, sounding completely unselfconscious about it. She likes his phone voice, how it’s low and a little bit grumbly, how he always sort of sounds like he just woke up. “You back in LA?”

“I am,” she admits, hoping it doesn’t occur to him to wonder why she isn’t out doing something fabulous. “What about you—home to tend to your goats?”

“I’m in the city tonight, actually,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve got a condo in Fells Point.”

“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.”

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