Page 27 of Heavy Hitter

She’s not having fun anymore, is the problem.

It’s not that she misses him, Lacey tells herself, settling in beside Claire for a viewing of 10 Things I Hate About You after her show on Friday night. It was just exciting, that’s all—having a crush, the way it gave her days a kind of forward momentum. A reward at the end of the night. Not that the shows aren’t a reward in themselves, obviously; not that the tour isn’t enough to keep her busy and fulfilled. The performances are 180 minutes long, her set list covering forty songs from nine different albums. She’s got sixteen costume changes, four different sets, pyrotechnics so impressive they scared her the first time she saw the demos. She trained by running on a treadmill singing the whole set list start to finish every day for five solid months. She should be giving it her full and undivided attention. Her fans deserve that much at least.

She’ll recommit herself to her artistic calling, Lacey decides as the stage lights dim on Saturday evening, the screams of the crowd so loud and adoring she can feel them in her molars. She’ll throw herself into her creative work. Forget the Catwoman house; she’ll move to a yurt in the desert. Swear off men altogether and make ceremonial vows to herself.

Lacey Logan’s North American tour ends the last Saturday in September with three sold-out shows in Calgary. She flies back to LA the following morning, then proceeds to spend four full days in bed, drinking smoothies and eating Chik’n Nuggets and watching the entirety of the run of Riverdale in one long, weird binge. As soon as it’s over, she remembers absolutely nothing about it. It occurs to her to wonder if she might be depressed.

On the morning of Day 5, she’s drinking her latte on the patio—Look at me getting fresh air! she texted Claire, who sent back the confetti emoji—when her phone dings with a news alert from ESPN, which Lacey signed up for when she was briefly considering becoming a sports person. Orioles Catcher Jimmy Hodges Announces Retirement, it proclaims.

Lacey gasps before she can quell the impulse. She clicks through and scans the article, then goes back and reads it more carefully:

Hodges informed the team late last week of his intention to hang up his cleats at the end of this season following a thirteen-year run with the Orioles, it reads, alongside a picture of Jimmy looking obnoxiously handsome in a clay-streaked jersey, his giant forearms tanned golden-brown. In a statement, he expressed gratitude to his teammates and confidence that this season’s O’s have a chance to win the World Series—an honor that has to date eluded Hodges despite a storied career laden with awards and accolades.

The article goes fawningly on, but Lacey isn’t really registering anything it says. She’s filled with the same weird, jangly longing she had that very first night at the bar—the panicky, sliding-doors certainty that the tether connecting her to Jimmy, the string connecting him back to her, is about to be snapped once and for all unless she does something to stop it.

She puts her phone down, then picks it up again.

Scrolls to his name.

There’s no way he’s going to text her back, Lacey warns herself even as she’s typing. He’s probably already sleeping with some twentysomething influencer with a show about flipping Airstreams on the Home Network’s streaming platform. She knows this. Still, Lacey is the bigger person, isn’t she? Lacey is fucking huge.

Saw your announcement, she tells him. Congrats on a great career.

That’s sufficiently businesslike, right? There’s plausible deniability there. Plausible deniability up the wazoo.

Her phone rings five seconds later, Jimmy Hodges appearing on the screen. Lacey is so startled she fumbles the thing altogether; it goes skittering under the patio table and she has to drop to her knees to fish it out again, wincing at the fresh new crack blooming across the front. She barely hits the button to answer in time.

“Hey,” she says, a little out of breath, unable to keep the surprise—and, fine, the pleasure—out of her voice. “Everything okay?”

“Uh.” Jimmy clears his throat, the sound of it a little thick. “Yeah, totally.”

Right away Lacey frowns, sitting down on one of the lounge chairs beside the pool and tucking her legs up underneath her. “You sure?”

“No, actually. Sorry. I’m kind of, uh. I don’t know. I’m fine. I hope it’s okay I called, I know we—” He breaks off. “I guess I’m just kind of, like. Freaking out a little.”

“About retiring?” she asks, and then it clicks. “Or about announcing retiring? Because now it’s real?”

“Uh. The second thing, yeah.” He sounds grateful not to have to explain it.

Lacey nods even though he can’t see her. “I mean, of course you are.”

“Of course I am?” That surprises him, she can tell.

“I mean, yeah,” Lacey says, leaning back and making herself comfortable, settling in. “Did you actually think you’d be able to announce your retirement from the only thing you’ve done in your entire adult life and not feel any kind of way about it?”

“Uh.” Jimmy clears his throat one more time. “That was the hope, basically.”

“Wow,” Lacey says calmly. “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

That makes him laugh, only then it turns into something else halfway out, a weird coughing sound. “My heart is racing right now,” he admits quietly, sounding sincerely embarrassed about it. “It’s been racing all morning. Ever since the statement went out, I just—I feel like I can’t even breathe.”

“Oh, buddy.” Just like that, Lacey isn’t really mad anymore. She knows she should be, probably—should make him apologize and grovel and prostrate himself before her. But she doesn’t actually want to do that, she realizes. Mostly she’s just glad he called. “Have you ever had a panic attack before?”

“No,” Jimmy says immediately, then: “I don’t know. Maybe. Is that what this is?”

“Sounds like it.”

“Lucky me.”

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