Page 4 of Heavy Hitter

It sort of feels like Lacey Logan is flirting with him.

As soon as Jimmy thinks it he feels deeply and profoundly ridiculous, heat creeping up the back of his neck in a way that makes him grateful the club is so fucking dark. He’s delusional. It’s like thinking a stripper really likes you. She’s arguably the most famous person in America, in the middle of a stadium tour that’s on track to gross billions of dollars. Also, she’s young. Jimmy tries to remember how young, exactly: Twenty-five? Twenty-six? It’s not that he’s never dated that young, but it’s not a great look at this point. He tries to avoid it.

Not that he’s planning on dating Lacey Logan.

Not that it’s even on the table.

“One more game here tomorrow, though,” he hears himself tell her, “so who knows. Maybe we’ll redeem ourselves before we leave town.”

“I hope so,” Lacey says. “For your sake.”

“Thank you for that vote of confidence.”

She grins. “You’re welcome.”

She’s drunk, maybe? Jimmy guesses it’s conceivable she’s flirting with him if she’s drunk.

“Can I ask you something?” he blurts. “Are you drunk?”

Lacey looks at him a little strangely. “Uh,” she says, “nope.”

That’s right, Jimmy remembers. She doesn’t drink. It’s a part of her good-girl, Mickey Mouse Club image, how there’s never been a picture of her spilling messily out of a restaurant or a video of her losing her temper and yelling at a photographer. Lacey Logan never fucks up.

“Are you drunk?” she asks curiously.

Jimmy shakes his head. “No, actually,” he says. “Although I understand why you might think that.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, but she’s smiling at him again, nodding at the space on the couch lately vacated by her mean friend Matilda. “You wanna sit?”

So. Jimmy sits.

She’s strangely easy to talk to, Lacey Logan, about the folly of trying to get anywhere by car in New York City and the Joan Didion essays she’s been reading in between tour stops and how Ray spent all day trying to convince the rest of them to go on the Circle Line. She’s funnier than he was expecting. She seems smart. She’s—not normal, certainly, but normal enough that Jimmy is still sitting there almost an hour later, trying to act like a person who would not be more comfortable in a chair with better lumbar support, when he glances across the club and realizes that at some point Tuck did him the favor of quietly collecting the rest of the team and taking off.

Not that Jimmy needs the privacy, obviously. Not that there’s anything for anyone to see.

“Are you hungry?” he asks her, looking around for a waitress. He’ll eat the sushi at this point. He doesn’t give a fuck. “I would, like, kill a man for a mozzarella stick right now.”

“If you order mozzarella sticks I will one hundred percent go in on them with you,” she promises, and she sounds sincere enough that Jimmy laughs.

“I don’t think they have mozzarella sticks here.”

“They’d get them for me,” Lacey says, then has the good manners to look abashed. “Sorry. I’m sure that sounded very—” She wrinkles her tidy nose.

“No, no,” Jimmy says, holding a hand up. “Honestly, it just makes you sound like a good person to know. In, like, the deep-fried appetizer space.”

Lacey smiles. “I like to think so.” She pulls her phone out then, scrolling through what looks like an endless stream of notifications. Jimmy is about to take it as his cue to say good night when all at once she lifts her sharp face from the screen. “We could go somewhere else,” she announces.

Jimmy snorts. “Okay.”

“What?” Lacey looks at him blankly. “For mozzarella sticks, or whatever. Why is that funny?”

He opens his mouth, then closes it again. “Be serious.”

“I am,” Lacey insists. “And also, you’re the one who came over here to talk to me to begin with, so I don’t know why you’re now acting like it’s so ridiculous that I might actually want to—”

“I came over here to—”

“To what, exactly?” Lacey raises one perfect eyebrow.

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