Page 26 of Heavy Hitter

Jimmy opens his mouth, closes it again. “Fair enough,” he says. “You take care.”

***

JIMMY HANGS UP AND STAGGERS AROUND THE APARTMENT FOR A while, collapsing into bed fully dressed and passing out on top of the covers only to startle awake two hours later with a blistering hangover, his mouth dry and sour with regret. He heaves himself up and forces himself to chug a bottle of water and pop a couple of painkillers, then kicks his jeans off and drags himself back into bed. He thinks about calling Lacey again, though it’s three a.m. at this point and he suspects I’m sorry, I’m drunk is not an excuse that is going to particularly move her.

He gropes around until he finds his phone on the nightstand anyway, scrolling through his contacts until he gets to Ike’s name. Ike isn’t the kind of agent who answers texts late at night—in fact, he’s not really the kind of agent who texts at all—but Jimmy feels like he needs to do this before he changes his mind.

Hey, he types, squeezing one eye shut so he’ll quit seeing double. Give me a call first thing, will you? Turns out I’m ready to announce after all.

Chapter Eleven

Lacey

OH, FUCK HIM.

“Fuck him!” Lacey exclaims out loud, looking reflexively around her empty bedroom for—for what, exactly? She doesn’t know. An audience, maybe. Someone to perform her anger to. She wants to go live on Instagram and tell all 254 million of her followers what a dick he is. She wants to send her fans to his house with pitchforks and meanly witty signs.

Ugh, she’s so annoyed. She should have known this whole thing was too good to be true, whatever secret fantasy she’s been indulging in the past few weeks as a balm for her own restless loneliness. The reality is that Jimmy Hodges is some grouchy, washed-up old athlete who probably doesn’t even change his socks during the playoffs. He was never serious about this being a real thing.

She hates him. She hates him!

That’s when Lacey starts to cry.

She lets herself indulge in it for a minute, sitting there alone on her enormous ship of a bed, feeling silly and snotty and sad. He is going to lift so neatly out of her life, she can already tell, because nobody but her knows he even was in it to begin with. He wasn’t in it, really; he was just a disembodied voice she talked to sometimes, a blank screen on which to project all her hopes and fantasies and secret desires. He might as well have been her imaginary friend.

She wants to go for a long run alone and have nobody look at her. She wants to lie in her bed and sulk for a week. She wants to go have a casual fling and post about it on social media where Jimmy will be sure to see it and spend the rest of his life awash in shame and regret for letting her slip through his fingers. But none of those options are available to her, so instead she stuffs her resentment and heartache and all the other ugly, spoiled emotions she knows she isn’t really entitled to feel back down where they belong, and she goes back to work.

She meets with Maddie first thing on Monday morning. “I guess I’m just a little concerned about the optics of it,” Maddie says carefully, the two of them sitting on the couch in Lacey’s den while Claire taps busily on her laptop in an armchair across the room. To say Maddie had questions about Lacey’s decision to sing “Laugh Lines” the other night is... an understatement. “I mean, if you and Toby really are back together, then that’s one thing, but—”

“We’re not,” Lacey interrupts.

“Right,” Maddie agrees, “so then I’m just not sure about the benefit of letting people think he’s abandoning the mother of his child in order to—”

“People can think whatever they want,” Lacey points out sweetly. “I mean, it’s not like we actually confirmed anything. I’m just a girl singing a song.”

“Well.” Maddie’s lips twitch. “I think we both know that’s not true.”

Lacey frowns. It would have been easier just to tell them about Jimmy, obviously. It would have been smarter just to come clean. But now there is no Jimmy, and unfortunately the coverage of the Toby thing hasn’t been terribly generous toward her, and Lacey can’t quite quell the uncomfortable suspicion that she may have miscalculated this particular bit of guerrilla warfare. That she didn’t think it all the way through. Still, she doesn’t want Maddie to know that, so she takes a sip of water and smiles her calmest, most capable smile.

“Look,” she says. “I don’t know what Toby’s game is, but I do know Toby, and he was one hundred percent going to keep pulling this petty shit unless he saw I was willing to pull it right back. Just watch. He’s going to slink back into whatever dark, pee-smelling comedy club he crawled out of, and we’re not going to hear from him again.”

“Okay,” Maddie says, though Lacey can’t help but notice she doesn’t look terribly sold on the idea. “You’re the boss.”

Lacey is expecting Claire to leave too once they’ve wrapped up with Maddie—technically today is her day off—but instead she hangs back for a moment, hesitating near the doorway to Lacey’s mudroom. “Can I ask you something?” Claire asks. She’s wearing a pair of black denim overalls and a rainbow-striped T-shirt, the tips of her short hair bleached bright white. “Is everything okay? Like, with you and me?”

“You and me?” Lacey asks, genuinely surprised. “Yeah, of course. Why do you ask?”

“No, no reason,” Claire hedges. “I mean, it’s entirely possible that I’m imagining—” She breaks off. “I guess I’ve just been getting the vibe that maybe there’s something on your mind the last few weeks. And I’m not saying it’s about Toby—”

“It’s not,” Lacey says, then winces at the heat in her voice and quickly amends: “I mean, there’s nothing going on.” Still, now that she’s stopping to think it through, it’s not like she doesn’t understand why Claire is asking. Before New York they spent almost all their free time together, watching rom-coms on Netflix after Lacey’s shows and ducking into boutiques on their off days. Paid assistant or not, she was the person Lacey was telling everything to, before she started telling everything to Jimmy instead.

Claire is still looking at her, her expression even, and for a moment Lacey almost just says it: I’m worried my plan might have backfired a little bit. I’m terrified of letting everyone down. I let myself fall half in love with Jimmy Hodges over the telephone, and now it’s over before it ever really began.

“Everything’s fine,” she promises instead, and for a moment she’s not entirely sure which one of them she’s trying to convince here. “Go enjoy your time off.”

***

SHE’S BACK IN MONTREAL FOR THE SECOND WEEKEND OF SHOWS on Thursday, the crowd soaked and screaming in their branded ponchos and the stage so slick with rain she needs to be careful not to slip and break her neck. “You could cut it a little short and nobody would blame you,” her tour manager urges, but instead Lacey leans in, playing extra songs for all three encores, spending the whole weekend eating, breathing, and sleeping this tour in a way she hasn’t since New York City. Her fans report that these shows are the most energetic of the entire Canadian run, wondering if being back with Toby is giving her a sudden burst of inspiration. There’s a picture of her on the cover of the Montreal Gazette with her arms raised as the storm comes down all around her, guitar slung over her shoulder: LACEY LOGAN CONTROLS THE WEATHER, the headline reads. She couldn’t have asked for better coverage, truly. She couldn’t have asked for better fans.

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