Page 46 of Heavy Hitter

She’s joking—at least, she’s sort of joking—but Jimmy doesn’t laugh. “That wasn’t what I was thinking,” he says immediately, hands stilling on her body. “Hey. Lacey. Look at me. That wasn’t what I was thinking.”

Lacey can’t help but notice that he doesn’t tell her what he was thinking, either. “Touch me,” she says, instead of pressing him for details. Jimmy does it, pulling the zipper on the back of her dress down and working the clasp on her bra open. Catching her nipple between his teeth.

Lacey sits up long enough to work his fly open, lets him push her skirt up over her hips. “I don’t have a condom,” he warns her when she wraps her hand around him, stroking gently.

“At all?”

“I mean, no, in the house I do.” He thrusts up into her hand, looking faintly helpless. “Want to go in?”

Lacey considers that. His skin is so, so warm. “Do you still have chlamydia?” she asks.

Jimmy smirks. “No, darling,” he says. “I think I’d be dead by now if I still had chlamydia.”

“Does chlamydia kill you?”

“Didn’t feel like something I wanted to find out.”

Lacey nods, considering. “Do you have anything else? Like, illness-wise?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

Jimmy’s eyes widen. “Okay?” he asks, gaze searching hers with urgency, like he’s afraid he isn’t understanding correctly. “Okay, like—?”

“Okay, like I have an IUD,” she says, which is true. She’s thinking about what his kids might look like, sure, but she’s not insane. “You’re good, go.”

So. Jimmy goes, groaning so loudly she’s glad she’s got so much land around here, glad Javi is parked safely on the other side of the house and her mom will be passed out until at least lunchtime tomorrow. Lacey laughs, she can’t help it, muffling the sound of it into his skin. “Good?” she asks, shifting around until she gets comfortable.

“Yeah,” he says, rubbing at her hips, her back, up and down her spine. “That’s good.”

It’s good for her, too, the way he’s touching her, the night air cool on her bare skin and the sound of the crickets calling to each other in the trees. Lacey closes her eyes, giving herself over to the moment. Holding on tight to the here and now.

Chapter Eighteen

Jimmy

HE FLIES HOME EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, LANDING JUST IN time to make it to practice at Camden. The Division Series starts tomorrow, the team flying up to Boston for Game 1. The air is colder, not quite feeling like fall yet—it takes time for autumn to come in Baltimore—but not quite summer anymore, either, the leaves turning to flame overhead. There’s a scrum of reporters waiting for him outside the clubhouse when he arrives, plus a cluster of teenage girls who don’t exactly fit Jimmy’s usual fan demographic. “How was Cincinnati?” one of the journalists calls—at least, Jimmy thinks that’s the question. The girls are all screaming like they just saw a Jonas Brother, and honestly it’s kind of hard to hear.

“It was good,” Jimmy reports as blandly as humanly possible. “I’m glad to be back here, though. Ready to play.”

He repeats some variation on that sentiment two dozen times in the next twenty-four hours, to his coffee guy and his barber and to Moira, the team doctor, as she shoots cortisone into his swollen knees; to his assistant Jennifer, who after three years of courteous, professional efficiency has suddenly developed more than what one might call a passing interest in the minutiae of his personal life. It’s all anyone wants to talk about, it seems, Jimmy and Lacey Logan. It’s all anyone wants to hear. Dimly, he’s aware that he couldn’t have picked a worse time for this to happen, an awareness that sharpens into stark, unforgiving focus when they lose the first game of the ALDS at Fenway Park, 5–3. BAD LUCK CHARM? reads the front page of the Sun.

They pull it back in Game 2, thank fuck, beating the Sox 7–6, though Jimmy strikes out twice and Hugo winds up on the injured list following a bad landing on his right wrist; still, all anyone wants to talk about at the presser later that night is whether Lacey Logan is going to be coming to Camden anytime soon.

“Didn’t realize your girlfriend had gotten called up to the majors,” Tito says once it’s over, all of them back in the away-team locker room, the stink of sweat and foot spray heavy in the air. He’s teasing—at least, Jimmy thinks he’s teasing—but Jimmy cringes anyway. This is exactly what he didn’t want to happen: the way it’s pulling everyone’s focus, the way it’s singling him out in the exact moment they need to be operating as a unit. This is exactly what he was trying to avoid.

Two things happen the afternoon before the third game of the series. The first is that Toby announces his Netflix special, Problematic Dickhead or whatever the fuck it’s called, which for some reason a significant number of national media outlets seem to believe Jimmy might have an opinion regarding. The second is that Lacey calls him as he’s driving over to Camden. “So here’s a question,” she says, the connection crackling through the Bluetooth. “What do you think about me maybe coming to see you play some baseball?”

“Seriously?” Jimmy laughs at that, then realizes all at once she isn’t joking. “Do you want to come see me play baseball?”

“I’m thinking about it,” she admits. “I might.”

“When?”

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