Page 30 of Heavy Hitter

“Fine,” she says. “Easy.”

“I guess they mostly all are, when you’ve got your own ride.” He offers a hand to first one bodyguard, then the other, shaking in what he hopes is a sufficiently macho and capable way. They’re retired marines, both of them, with necks as thick as five-gallon buckets. Jimmy’s a big dude, sure, but they look like they could snap him in half.

“Do we want to get these guys set up?” Lacey asks. “Do you have, like, a house manager you want them to huddle with, or—?”

“Oh,” Jimmy says, feeling abruptly like he invited Jill Biden to his dorm for a kegger. “It’s just me here today, actually.” It occurs to him that he should have offered to come to her instead, to swim in her gold-plated swimming pool and eat grapes peeled by her many servants. It was easy to forget, talking to her all these nights, the fact that Lacey Logan changed the economy of every city she visited this summer. It was easy to forget how piddly and small his own life might seem in comparison.

In the end her guys want to scope out the property anyway, presumably to hide infrared cameras in his apple trees and launch drones up over the barn, so Jimmy shows them the small guesthouse where they’re going to be staying and sends them on their way, then turns back to Lacey. “Want to drop your stuff?” he asks, shaking his hands out one more time before jamming them into his pockets. “You want some water? Or like... juice? I’ve got juice.” He got kombucha, too, like, six different flavors, though personally he’s never tried one that didn’t taste distinctly like feet.

But Lacey shakes her head, the ghost of a smile appearing just around the very edges of her mouth. “I’m okay.”

“Okay.” They stand there for another moment, neither one of them saying anything. Briefly, Jimmy wishes he was dead. He doesn’t know why it feels so terminally awkward all of a sudden, like he’s forgotten everything he ever knew about how to have a conversation. This is Lacey. He’s spent more time talking to her in the last few weeks than basically anybody else in his life. They once debated the merits of the late-night options at Taco Bell for the better part of an hour while he iced his knees in a hotel bathtub. On top of which, Jimmy is great at talking to women. He literally once got approached about doing a podcast called Fantasy Baseball with Jimmy Hodges, the conceit of which was that he’d give out romantic advice using sports metaphors.

Finally she lifts her sharp chin in the direction of the backyard. “Show me around?”

Jimmy lets a breath out. “Yeah,” he says gratefully, nodding for her to follow. “Sure.”

He brings her into the garden first, through the wooden gate and down the wide gravel path: past the rows of raised beds and the melon patches and the berries, the tomato plants that are almost as tall as her. His farm manager Ricky wanted to do honey last year, so there are half a dozen hives lined up along the fence on the orchard side, the low drone of the bees faintly audible in the still of the afternoon. “You take care of this all by yourself?” Lacey asks.

“Oh, yeah, one hundred percent solo,” Jimmy says with a laugh. “I’m out here on the plow first thing every morning before practice.” Then, when Lacey just looks at him, clearly not realizing he’s joking: “No.” God, she really does think he’s a yokel. “I’m a dilettante. And I’m not here enough. I’ve got a couple of guys who work for me who do the bulk of it.”

“Ah.” She nods, flushing a bit. “So you’re a gentleman farmer.”

“Well,” he says, grinning a little lopsidedly, “I don’t know that I’d go that far.”

Lacey doesn’t laugh, the silence stretching out like old gum stuck to the bottom of his sneaker. Maybe it was a mistake, Jimmy thinks, all this buildup. Maybe there was no way it was ever going to be as good as it was in his head.

“Show me the horses,” she suggests, her voice a little desperate. “You said there are horses, right?”

Jimmy nods. “There are horses,” he agrees, and leads her across the back field toward the tall white barn. The barn is Jimmy’s favorite place on the whole property: the cool, quiet darkness of it, the sounds of the animals snuffling to each other in their stalls.

“Full disclosure: it, uh, smells like a barn in here,” he warns her, touching her arm as they’re about to go inside. “Just, like, to let you know ahead of time. In case that’s something you’re not so cool with.”

Lacey laughs. “I’ve been in a barn before,” she assures him.

Jimmy doubts that very much, actually. “When?”

Her eyes narrow. “I don’t know,” she defends herself. “Times.”

“Uh-huh.” Jimmy nods. “Okay.”

He leads her inside and walks her down the row of stalls, past the goats and the chicken coops to where the three of them are standing patiently side by side. “What are their names?” Lacey wants to know.

“Epitaph,” Jimmy says, pointing to a tall, serious-looking palomino. “Valentine. And Paul Revere.”

Lacey narrows her eyes. “Why does that sound familiar to me?”

“Dunno,” Jimmy says with a grin.

Lacey purses her lips, but she doesn’t push him. “Can I pet them?” she asks instead.

“Sure.”

It’s sweet, the cautious way she does it, standing on her tiptoes to scratch Valentine behind his ears and running her hand over Epitaph’s velvety nose, staring into their solemn eyes like she’s expecting them to reveal the secrets of the universe. “Hi, friend,” she says softly. She reminds Jimmy of a Disney princess, which is not something he has historically looked for in a woman, though he’d be lying if he said it wasn’t sort of working for him in this particular moment. “There’s carrots in the bag there,” he tells her, pointing to the canvas sack Ricky leaves hanging on a nail beside the stalls. “If you want to—”

“I do,” she says, and for a moment the sound of the horses’ happy chomping fills the barn, Lacey feeding them one after another like she’s putting dollars into a vending machine.

“Enough,” Jimmy says finally, laughing a little. “You’re going to give them the shits.”

---