Page 33 of Heavy Hitter

Lacey’s mouth drops open. “Fuck you!” she says, shoving him gently. “Don’t laugh. I’m serious.”

“I’m not laughing,” he says, and to be fair he doesn’t actually seem to be. In fact, the expression on his face is so fond—is so intimate—she almost can’t make herself breathe. “Lacey,” he murmurs, ducking his head and scraping his beard gently along the valley between her breasts, “let me try to do this, okay? Before you decide it’s inevitably not going to be as good as you imagined it being?”

Lacey presses her lips together. “Okay.”

Jimmy swallows. “Okay,” he agrees, and drops his head again, both of them watching as he notches himself inside her. Lacey pulls her legs up to make room. He takes his time about it, the rasp of his beard against her cheek and the slow, relentless way he’s filling her, every single nerve ending in her body buzzing with pleasure. “You good?” he asks quietly, pulling back to check in with her, and Lacey starts to say yes but then he reaches down between them and the second his thumb finds her clit she’s already coming, the orgasm bursting inside her fast and sudden as the chorus of a song.

“Oh,” she manages—crying out, grabbing at his shoulders. She doesn’t even know if it feels good, necessarily, it’s so unexpected. It just feels.

For a second Jimmy just stares at her in wonder. Then his whole face explodes into a grin. “How am I doing?” he asks cheerfully, once Lacey can speak again. “Just, in terms of your adjusted expecta—”

“Shut the fuck up,” she says—groping for him, pulling his full weight on top of her. “It’s not always—I mean, I was just—” She shakes her head. “Come here.”

“I’m here,” Jimmy promises, and kisses her again.

***

“GUYS AND DOLLS!” LACEY ANNOUNCES AN HOUR LATER, FLIPPING over onto her stomach to look at him in the dimness of the late-afternoon bedroom. “That’s where it’s from.” She puts on her best old-timey New York accent, singing: “I got the horse right here, the name is Paul Revere.”

“Guys and Dolls,” Jimmy agrees, tucking one arm behind his head. They were quiet for a long time once they were finally finished; she thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. Lacey dozed, too, though she’s not generally much of a napper, wrung out by the stretch and the satisfaction and how powerful it made her feel to undo him like that, to take him apart with both hands. She shivers at the memory of the sound that tore from his throat as he came deep inside her, so low and ragged and after-dark private that she already knows there’s no way she’s leaving this house before she gets him to make it again. “‘Fugue for Tinhorns.’”

“Are you a Broadway person?”

Jimmy chuckles. “No.”

Something about the way he says it intrigues her. “Was your wife a Broadway person?”

“She...” He shrugs. “She liked musicals, yeah.”

“Aha.” Lacey props herself up on one elbow, pleased to have solved the mystery. She’s about to ask him to say more about her—tell me about your failed marriage is a weird flex as far as post-sex conversation goes, probably, but she’s curious—when her phone starts to ring in her jeans pocket. She leans over the edge of the mattress to pull it out, wincing a little when she sees her mom’s name on the screen. “Hold that thought,” she says, scrambling up off the bed and scooping Jimmy’s undershirt from where it’s puddled on the area rug, pulling it over her head as she goes.

“Hi,” she says as she shuts the bathroom door behind her, sitting on the lid of the toilet seat and stretching the cotton over her bare knees, breathing in the warm smell of his skin and deodorant. “Everything okay?”

“Where are you?” her mom wants to know.

“Um.” Lacey hesitates, looking out the window at Jimmy’s teeming garden, the tidy rows of trees beyond the fence. It was strange and a little disconcerting when she got out of the SUV earlier, the quiet, rural seclusion of this place. There’s normally at least a house manager at Lacey’s: someone making the coffee and cleaning the bathrooms, someone slipping her clean underwear back into her drawers. She’s so used to having help that she barely even registers the extra bodies at this point. It’s the solitude that catches her off guard. “What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean? It’s a perfectly normal question. Are you home?”

“Oh,” Lacey says, getting up again and easing open the mirror above the sink, peeking inside Jimmy’s medicine cabinet: painkillers mostly, plus about a thousand vitamins and supplements. Another box of condoms. A brush. “Um, yeah. Also, you know what I meant to tell you? You were totally right about the choreography for ‘Fameland.’ I dropped the extra turn and it worked like a charm.”

“I told you,” her mom says—momentarily distracted, just like Lacey knew she would be, and they chat for another minute before she tells her mom she needs to go.

“I ordered food and it’s going to be here in a second,” she lies, hoping her mom won’t ask what restaurant. “I’ll call you later.”

Back in the bedroom Jimmy is still prone on the mattress, the tiny gold pendant on the chain he’s wearing lying flat at the base of his throat. “Are you Jesus-y?” Lacey asks, crawling back up the bed and picking it up to look at it more closely; it’s warm, from the heat of his skin.

Jimmy snorts. “Am I what?”

“You heard me.” She drops the medal back against his chest and stretches out beside him, propping herself up on her elbow and tapping his sternum with one finger. “That’s Jesus, isn’t it?”

“It’s Saint Michael the Archangel,” Jimmy corrects her, “but no. I was raised pretty Catholic, I guess, but I wouldn’t describe myself as Jesus-y.”

“No judgment.” Lacey shrugs. “A lot of my fans are pretty Jesus-y. Also, a lot of my fans are Wiccan.”

“You’ve got a lot of fans.”

“I do,” Lacey agrees.

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