Page 23 of Heavy Hitter

Chapter Ten

Jimmy

THEY WIN THEIR GAME ON SATURDAY, WHICH MEANS THE STREAK is still alive when Jimmy comes into the locker room Sunday afternoon. Jonesy is sitting in a rolling chair with Hugo and a few of the other guys clustered around him, all of them snickering like middle schoolers waiting for their teacher to notice someone drew a cock and balls erupting on the dry-erase board.

“What’s funny?” Jimmy asks, tossing his backpack into his locker and unbuttoning his shirt. They’re looking at Jonesy’s phone, their heads all ducked close together like pigeons going after a pretzel nugget in the waiting room at Penn Station. “I like to laugh, too.”

“No no no, don’t show him,” Jonesy chides the rest of them immediately. “It’s gonna hurt his feelings.”

“Fuck you,” Jimmy says with a roll of his eyes. “I don’t have feelings.”

“That’s true!” Tuck calls from across the room, voice muffled as he rips a piece of KT off the roll with his teeth and sets about taping his ankles. “His ex-wife got ’em in the divorce.”

Jimmy ignores him, hanging his shirt in his locker and holding his hand out for the phone. “Give me that fucking thing.”

“Sorry, Cap,” Hugo says, passing it over. On the screen is some hot pink web page—a gossip site, Jimmy sees on closer inspection, something called the Sinclair that he only vaguely recognizes. “But it looks like you’re not going to be Lacey Logan’s girlfriend after all.”

It takes some effort, but Jimmy keeps his face very, very blank. “Oh yeah?” he asks. They mostly let that whole thing go after Minneapolis, distracted by Jonesy’s feud with some fuckface on the Astros and a particularly disgusting rash on the back of Ray’s calf that might or might not have been scabies. Jimmy figured they’d mostly moved on. “Why’s that?”

“She’s back with her man,” Tito reports seriously. “The skinny dude, the comedian. He announced it on Instagram and she sang a song about it at her concert the other night.”

Once, very early on in his career in the majors, Jimmy got hit in the head with a baseball so hard he briefly lost consciousness, coming to maybe thirty seconds later with no idea how much time had elapsed. He doesn’t know why he’s thinking about that right now. “Well,” he manages eventually, aware of having paused for just a beat too long. It’s not true, probably. And if it is true, it’s not like he has any right to feel any kind of way about it. They were fooling around, that’s all. Not even actually fooling around. Just, like... talking about it, or something. “My loss, I guess. I was awfully pretty for her.”

“Yeah, I think she’s a little taller than you, too.”

She’s not, Jimmy barely stops himself from shooting back. “Could be,” he agrees gamely. “They say you start to shrink in your old age.”

“Not your nose and ears,” Hugo puts in helpfully. “Your nose and ears keep right on getting bigger and bigger until you die.”

Jimmy nods. “Hot tip.” He stands there for another moment, then abruptly realizes he’s still standing there and heads back to his locker, managing by some miracle not to yank his phone out of his pocket and immediately start googling in front of God and the entire starting lineup. He clomps off to the bathroom instead, shutting himself in a stall and typing Lacey Logan + Toby into the search bar on his browser. He doesn’t remember Toby’s last name, but it turns out it doesn’t fucking matter because here are a thousand fucking news articles about the two of them that no sane person needs to be reading; here are a million different slideshows ready to be pored over and perused. Jimmy thumbs the first result, a decently reputable news organization reduced to a gasping tabloid: Tobcey Fans! the headline proclaims. We Are So Back!

It’s not... unconvincing, is the wildest part. Jimmy can see how, if one was the type to buy into a certain kind of deranged, tinfoil-hat logic, the clues are there: The sudden breakup. The T-shirt. And the smoking gun, Lacey’s surprise encore at last night’s show in Montreal, a deep cut called “Laugh Lines” widely known to be the first song she wrote back at the beginning of their relationship.

Jimmy scrubs a hand over his beard. He does not, as a general rule, make a habit of dabbling in conspiracy theories regarding the love lives of megacelebrities, but she said it herself, didn’t she? I am often trying to send secret messages.

So. That’s that, he guesses. Message received.

This is ridiculous, Jimmy thinks, remembering belatedly that he has a professional fucking baseball game to get ready for. He’s thirty-seven years old. He’s going to just call her. He scrolls to her name in his contacts, dialing before he can talk himself out of it.

She sends him directly to voicemail.

Jimmy grits his teeth, telling himself not to jump to any conclusions. He’s going to be an adult about this. He’s going to be a grown fucking man. Hey, he texts, hoping he sounds casual. You got a minute to talk?

I wish, she texts back a minute later. In a car full of people headed to the airport. And I’m still super sick. A frowny face here, and then the one with the mask. There’s some stuff I want to chat with you about, though. Call me when you get home later tonight?

Aaaaaannd there it is. Jimmy doesn’t slam his hand against the tile wall, but he thinks about it. He would certainly like to. He almost just asks her then—Yo, real quick: Are you back together with your boyfriend? Just wondering, since if you guys are making another go of it I figure he’s probably not going to like me telling you to lick your fingers and rub your nipples for me four nights of the fucking week—but that makes him feel insane. That makes him feel like a girl, actually, and not just any girl but the kind of girl who might use the word Tobcey in casual conversation.

Sure, he texts back. Will do.

Okay, she replies—another emoji, the smiley face this time. Have a good game.

***

JIMMY DOES NOT HAVE A GOOD GAME.

The opposite, actually. It’s a shitshow from the very first inning, sloppy and slow. Jimmy knows from the moment he crouches behind the plate that his head isn’t in it, which is a thing that happened to him sometimes, back when he was breaking up with Rachel. Not that he’s breaking up with Lacey—not that they were ever together; not that she owes him anything, an explanation included—but historically Jimmy’s baseball has been better, by a not-insignificant margin, when he’s been single. The last few weeks were a fluke—except they weren’t actually a fluke, because again. He is single. He is unattached.

His game remains absolute shit.

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