Page 38 of Heavy Hitter

“Oh, sorry,” she says, wiping the corner of her mouth with one red fingernail. Her lipstick is, somehow, still immaculate. “Were you not having fun?”

“Fuck off,” he says, dropping her bathing suit top on the floor and getting his mouth on her—sucking and biting, rougher than he’s been with her so far. “Too much fun.”

“No such thing.”

“Wrong.” Jimmy tugs her bottoms to the side, opening her up with two fingers and groaning quietly when he feels how wet she is. “Oh, I see how it is,” he says. “You were having fun, too, huh?”

Lacey drops her head back in pleasure, grinding herself against his hand. “I may have been.”

“Good.” Jimmy lets her use his fingers for a moment longer, then pulls back and fits himself inside her, holding as still as he can manage while she works herself down onto his cock. She’s beautiful like this, her chest flushed pink and eyes narrowed in concentration, wet bottom lip caught between her teeth. Jimmy drops his face into the crook of her neck, momentarily overwhelmed by her; the last thing he registers before she rolls her hips and his brain stops working entirely is her quiet gasp of pleasure, the press of her hand in his hair.

Chapter Fifteen

Lacey

LACEY’S PLANE BACK TO LA TAKES OFF ON TIME, BUT BARELY. She’s late to the airport following a protracted goodbye at Jimmy’s, his big hands creeping up inside her hoodie as she leaned against the door: “You want to be my girlfriend?” he muttered in between kisses, his deep voice muffled against her mouth. Lacey pulled away, laughing at the high school earnestness of it; still, her heart was a dollar-store helium balloon taped to a locker, bright and shiny and straining to get free.

“Yeah,” she admitted, a little breathlessly. “I kind of want to be your girlfriend.”

Jimmy grinned. “Okay,” he said, like it was just that easy. For a moment it felt that easy to Lacey, too. “You’re my girlfriend.”

Claire is waiting for her on the tarmac, iPad in hand. “Welcome back,” she chirps. “How was it?”

“It was great,” Lacey says carefully. She didn’t talk to Claire while she was in Baltimore, which wasn’t unusual, exactly, though the first time she went away with Toby the two of them texted more or less constantly. She knows Claire is angry with her—that Maddie is, too, though of course neither one of them would ever say so. She knows she caught them both by surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said to Claire the other night, once Lacey had explained what was going on and that she needed a flight to BWI on short notice. “I shouldn’t have lied to you.”

“No, I mean.” Claire cleared her throat, not quite making eye contact. “It’s fine. You’re allowed to keep your private life private, obviously. You’re my boss.”

Lacey felt, briefly, as if Claire had slapped her. “Claire,” she said. Claire had been the one to collect her stuff from Toby’s apartment after the breakup; she’d held Lacey’s dress while she’s peed at six years’ worth of Grammy Awards. Lacey was lying when she told Jimmy she didn’t have an active-duty best friend. Paid or not, what was Claire if not her closest of wartime consiglieri? “Come on.”

“No, it’s fine.” Claire shook her head. “I don’t know why I’m having this reaction, honestly. I should be apologizing. It’s inappropriate.”

“It’s not,” Lacey said, though she supposed it was, technically. Or maybe it wasn’t? At the very least, she felt like they probably ought to talk about it more, but there had been travel to organize and packing to do, and now here they are on the other side of it, just the slightest bit unfamiliar with each other. It’s strange, feeling like there’s a piece of her professional life Lacey doesn’t know how to navigate. It’s unsettling to feel like she doesn’t have it neatly, 100 percent under control.

She climbs into the back seat and slips off her sunglasses, the SUV crawling back toward Malibu while Claire connects with Maddie on FaceTime. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” Maddie announces, sitting at her desk with her hair in a tidy knot on the top of her head. “The good news is, I solved the Toby mystery. The bad news is he did twenty minutes at Largo last night, workshopping some new stuff for what I’m hearing is going to be a Netflix special.” She makes a face. “He’s calling it Problematic Fave.”

Lacey presses her lips together, swallowing down a quiet flare of panic. She barely thought about Toby at all while she was with Jimmy. She barely thought about anything public-facing or career-related, actually; she let herself get lost in the moment, let herself get lazy, and now—“Cool,” she says, her voice sharp with sarcasm and a little bit of mania. “Do we know what it’s about?”

“Mostly about his entire personal brand being that he’s a piece of shit,” Maddie tells her. “Fatherhood, whatever. But there’s also a not-insignificant chunk of it that’s about you.”

Lacey nods slowly, absorbing that information. “Is there video?”

“There is.”

“Okay,” she says, ignoring the faint taste of bile at the back of her mouth. “Well, let’s, you know. Go to the tape.”

“It’s already backfiring,” Maddie assures her, which is how Lacey knows it must be really bad. “The coverage is terrible.”

“It’s fine,” Lacey assures her, managing with some effort to keep her voice light. This is her superpower, she reminds herself firmly: her insatiable hunger for every crumb of meanness anyone has ever flung in her direction, the knowledge that there is nothing anyone can say about her, no matter how cutting or poisonous or untrue, that she doesn’t want to hear. All of it is data, and data is power. Data, Lacey has always been able to use. “I’ll just watch.”

So Maddie sends her the link, staying on the line while Lacey watches the grainy footage: Toby in black jeans and a trim crewneck Comme des Garçons sweatshirt Lacey bought for him in Tokyo two years ago, stalking back and forth across the tiny stage.

The portion about Lacey lasts just over six minutes, and it’s... not great. There’s the usual low-hanging fruit, of course, digs at the pedestrian quality of Lacey’s music and her creepy symbiotic relationship with her fans. But there’s a lot of private stuff, too, stuff Toby only knows about her because they were living together, like a botched laser hair removal from a couple of years ago after which she needed to put burn cream all along her bikini line every day for six full weeks. My ex, he keeps calling her, trusting everyone to know who he’s talking about and also, presumably, trying to shield himself from a lawsuit by never actually using her name. My ex. My ex.

Lacey keeps her face very, very blank, rubbing compulsively at an errant cuticle and telling herself there’s no reason to feel like she’s about to burst into tears. It’s not that she didn’t know he was capable of this kind of sharpness in his comedy, obviously. And it’s not that she can’t take a joke at her own expense. It’s just that it’s Toby, who used to drive across LA to get her coffee from her favorite place in Silver Lake when they were first dating and who is so afraid of spiders he once jumped into the pool fully clothed to make his escape from a daddy longlegs strolling up a drainpipe at her place in Nashville. It’s Toby, whose mom used to send him seasonally appropriate boxes of breakfast cereal for every holiday, even though he was thirty-five years old. Being leveraged this way by people she once trusted is part of the price she pays for being who she is; Lacey knows this. Still, just for a fraction of a second, she feels sadder than she ever did when they broke up.

She’s aware of Claire and Maddie watching her carefully, waiting to gauge her reaction. Lacey bites her tongue hard enough to taste salt. The sum total of everything going on has her feeling out of control and exposed all of a sudden: Toby’s set, everything happening with Jimmy. Even the weirdness with Claire. It feels like too much, like too many variables to manage. It feels like too many things to keep under control.

“I mean,” she says when it’s finished, careful to keep her voice cheerful, “I suppose it’s fair to say he wasn’t deterred by my great plan to sing ‘Laugh Lines’ in Montreal as a way of letting him know not to fuck with me.”

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