Page 34 of Heavy Hitter

Jimmy smirks, looking at her with something like amusement as he smooths one calloused hand down the curve of her side. “Was that Slenderman?” he asks, nodding over her shoulder at her phone on the nightstand. “Who called just now?”

“Wh—Toby?” That makes her laugh. “No.”

“Just asking.” Jimmy lies back and shrugs into the pillows, scratches idly at his broad, bare chest. “Heard you guys might be getting back together.”

“He’s going to super bummed to hear I just had sex with you, then.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

Lacey rolls her eyes. “I told you I was never getting back together with Toby,” she reminds him, slinging one leg over his hips and settling herself on top of him, rubbing herself idly against his belly. “And if you thought I was, we could have just talked about it.”

“We could have,” he allows, smiling a little. He keeps looking at her like this, Lacey notices: his face open and easy, like here is a person you could tell weird, secret stuff to and it would probably be fine. He reaches up and curls his hands around her waist, squeezing a little. “Nice shirt.”

“Thank you,” Lacey says, planting her palms on either side of his body and leaning forward so the neckline gapes open. “I stole it from some guy.”

“Poor bastard,” Jimmy says, working his palms up underneath the hem and cupping her breasts, swiping his thumbs along the sensitive skin of the undersides. “Probably already knows he’s never going to get it back.”

“Probably,” Lacey agrees—or starts to, anyway, losing the end of the word in a gasp as he pinches her nipples.

“That feel good?”

“Yes,” Lacey admits, arching her back until he gets the message and does it again, harder this time. “But also, like. I’ve had orgasms before, all right? I’m not having, like, some kind of nineteen-seventies Judy Blume novel sexual awakening with you here.”

Jimmy nods pleasantly. “Great,” he agrees, letting go of her body long enough to pull another condom from the nightstand. “I have no idea what that means.”

It’s slower this time, Lacey sore and sweetly swollen, Jimmy’s mouth on her shoulders and her breasts and her neck. “You’re better in bed than Toby was, okay?” she says finally—breathless and laughing, the last dregs of the orgasm still fizzing through her; in the end he grabbed her hand and dragged it down between them to help her along. “Is that what you want to hear?”

Jimmy seems to consider that. “I mean, I wasn’t fishing,” he says, flipping them so she’s back underneath him in one smooth motion, weirdly agile for a person his size. “But sure, a girl likes to get a compliment from time to time.”

Lacey pulls her knees up, shifting her hips as he sinks back inside her. “Is that what a girl likes?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, grinning down at her in the fading twilight. “Yeah, I think it is.”

Chapter Fourteen

Jimmy

JIMMY’S ALONE IN HIS BED WHEN HE WAKES UP THE FOLLOWING morning. He lies there for a moment, watching the sun spill in through the window, taking stock. He’s waiting to feel terrible, and he unmistakably does—his hands in particular are killing him, the knuckles swollen and fucked-up looking—but mostly he just feels sort of pleased with himself. Mostly he just feels sort of good. They stayed in bed for a long time last night, him and Lacey, talking and napping and fooling around; around eight thirty they wandered downstairs and he made her dinner, a pasta thing that is one of three meals he reliably knows how to cook, except he usually makes it with sausage and he made it with tomatoes instead. It’s better with sausage, frankly, but all things considered Jimmy found he didn’t much care.

“Can I ask you a question?” Lacey said, eyeing him across the kitchen—her long hair sex-messy and tangled, the heels of her smooth bare feet banging gently against the cabinets. “Do you make this pasta for every woman who ever stays here?”

Jimmy hesitated. “I mean,” he said finally, “not this exact pasta.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I mix it up a little,” he defended himself. “And also, for the record, no other women have stayed here since I met you in New York.”

Lacey quirked an eyebrow. “Hooked up with any other women in bathrooms?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“Well,” she said, “me either.” Then she grinned. “When I write my song about you it’s going to be called ‘Hookup Pasta.’”

“Double platinum,” Jimmy predicted, stepping between her knees and sliding his palms up the long, tan expanse of her thighs. “Record of the Year.”

Now he gets up out of bed and pulls on a pair of sweatpants, padding down the stairs in the early-morning light. He can hear Lacey singing quietly to herself in the kitchen, an old ballad by Sam Cooke or the Platters, something he recognizes but isn’t able to name. She has a pretty voice, Lacey—and Jimmy knew that, obviously, but it sounds different here in his house, reminds him of the low, unselfconscious way his mom used to sing to herself in the mornings when he was a kid. Singing clears the gunk, she used to say. He tries to remember the last time he heard her sing something, and can’t. She got a little hard after Matty died, not that Jimmy blames her. It turned him a little hard, too.

“Morning,” he says now, dropping a kiss on Lacey’s shoulder. She’s wearing his T-shirt again and she looks like one of those old American Apparel ads, tall and gorgeous and half-naked. She smells like his detergent and like sex.

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