Page 42 of Heavy Hitter

That made him laugh, the sound of it reassuring and familiar; for the first time since his disastrous press conference, Lacey felt herself relax. She knows he isn’t crazy about this idea, the staged, theatrical quality of it, and she also knows he feels like he can’t complain about it since he’s more or less the entire reason they’re in this situation to begin with. “Are you sure this was an accident?” Maddie asked when Lacey called her to strategize. “You don’t think there’s any part of him that saw an opportunity—”

“I don’t,” Lacey said honestly, although of course since the moment Maddie mentioned it she hasn’t been able to get the possibility out of her head.

“Because I’m just saying, he has more to gain than you do,” Maddie continued bluntly. “It’s the end of his sports career, he’s looking for a way to stay relevant—”

“Wow,” Lacey said. “Thanks a lot.”

“Well, it’s my job to game out all the possibilities,” Maddie reminded her, not unkindly. Lacey knows this. They had a plan for if Toby overdosed in the first few months after they broke up. They have a plan, though they have never explicitly talked about it, for if Lacey’s mom shows up drunk somewhere in public and goes entirely off the rails. Lacey can recognize, intellectually, that they need a plan for the scenario in which Jimmy is using her to stay in the spotlight after he retires. Still, the idea of it doesn’t exactly make her feel great.

Jimmy flies in late the following afternoon, the Orioles’ first game of the Division Series leaving them only a narrow window of time to make this happen. They could have just done it in Baltimore, but Maddie wanted their first public outing to be on Lacey’s turf. “Is that a huge pain in the balls for you?” Lacey asked him, when they were all on the conference call hashing out the details. “What with the timing and all?”

“I mean,” Jimmy said mildly, and Lacey could hear the shrug in his voice clear across the country. “Does it matter?”

Now she swings her front door open, her stomach swooping at the sight of him standing there on the other side of it. This happened when she got out of the car at the farm, too: the way she was momentarily caught off guard by the size of him, the disarming hugeness of his shoulders and chest. “Hi,” she says, feeling herself blush.

“Hi,” Jimmy says, then drops his duffel bag on the hardwood floor and ducks his head to kiss her.

Lacey makes a quiet sound as he kicks the door shut behind him, her whole body humming underneath the warm authority of his touch. How is it possible this is only the third time they’ve been together in person? How is it possible they haven’t been doing this their entire adult lives? She lets herself sink into it for a moment—his hands spanning her rib cage, his mouth moving slowly down her neck—then taps her fingers gently against his biceps. “Before this goes any further,” she murmurs against his jaw, already wincing a little, “I should tell you I’ve got a house full of various assistants right now.”

Jimmy hums into her skin, his palms skating down over the curve of her ass. “I mean,” he says slowly, “group sex has never really been my thing, but if you think it’d be rude not to invite them to join—”

“Cute.”

“Thank you.” Jimmy straightens up, tucking his hands obediently back into his pockets. “Well, in that case. Nice to see you. Looking forward to our business dinner.”

“Likewise.” They stare at each other for a minute, grinning goofily. Lacey feels something in her stomach uncoil. She wishes they could send the team away and stay in tonight, just the two of them, and she imagines it before she can stop herself: sprawling sacked-out on the couch playing Scrabble or watching something on cable, a candle flickering on the coffee table and dinner simmering away on the stove. Normal-people shit.

Jimmy’s thinking it, too: “You want to, like, go for a walk or something?” he asks, sounding almost bashful. “Before we have to do... all this? Is that allowed, for you and me to just—I mean. Are we allowed to do that?”

Lacey’s heart sinks, just a bit. “We’re allowed to do that,” she says, “and I’d love to. But I don’t actually think we’ve got time.”

“Really?” Jimmy frowns, looking down at his watch. “I thought dinner wasn’t until eight.”

“It’s not,” she says, “but I’ve got to sit for hair and makeup. They wanted me already, actually, but I wanted to see you when you got here.”

“Ah.” Jimmy nods. “Got it.”

“It won’t take that long,” she promises quickly, which is of course a lie. She thinks again of his ex-wife, with her low-key ponytails and Madewell denim, and feels self-conscious about being so ostentatiously high-maintenance. But what exactly is Lacey supposed to do, on a night as important as this one? She’s not about to slap on some Maybelline and call it good. “And then the stylists have some stuff they pulled for you, too.”

Jimmy laughs at that, then abruptly stops laughing. “Wait,” he says, “really?”

“Yeah,” Lacey admits with a wince. “Somebody was supposed to talk to you about that.” She guesses she should have talked to him about that, actually, but she knew he was going to get this exact look on his face and start grumbling about wearing a costume for his mainstage community theater debut, and she wanted to put that off as long as possible. “They’ve got some stuff for you to pick from.”

“Chicken suit?” he deadpans immediately. “Beavis and Butt-Head T-shirt? Lady Gaga’s meat dress?”

“You don’t have to wear anything you don’t want to, obviously.” Lacey wraps her arms around his neck one more time. “Maddie just thought that maybe—”

“Without professional guidance I might show up to dinner in gym shorts and a pair of cleats?”

“I think they were more envisioning a backward baseball cap and sunglasses with Croakies.”

“Croakies are very practical,” Jimmy fires back, then shrugs. “Whatever,” he concedes. “I’m a man of the twenty-first century. I can appreciate a bespoke designer ensemble.”

Lacey exhales. “Okay,” she says. “Thank you.”

In the end they put him in a pale blue suit with a subtle check pattern and a pair of spanking white high-tops, his hair brushed back off his forehead and a Breitling gleaming quietly on one wrist. “Um, wow,” Lacey says, finding him in the living room once the hair and makeup team finally takes off, the house suddenly quiet. “You look hot.”

That makes him smile. “Really?” he asks. “Because I think I look like Ross and Chandler in the episodes of Friends where they’re in college and Courteney Cox is wearing the fat suit.” He tilts his head to the side, wrapping a hand around her waist and pulling her closer. “You, on the other hand, look hot.”

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