Page 48 of Heavy Hitter

HE’S STILL STEWING AN HOUR LATER WHEN LACEY TEXTS HIM A mirror selfie of her wearing high-waisted jeans and a number 14 Hodges jersey. Is this right for a baseball game? she wants to know. She’s flying in tomorrow morning, with the idea that someone from her camp will tip off the press while she’s in the air. Asking for a friend.

Jimmy grits his teeth, flopping backward onto his mattress. He doesn’t care what she wears to the baseball game, truthfully, and he knows she really doesn’t care what he thinks, either. She’s got a team of eleven people who are going to make sure she breaks the internet. She is never, at any time, without a plan. Looks great, he types, then tosses his phone on the nightstand and switches the lamp off. He doesn’t fall asleep for a long time.

***

THE PLAN IS FOR HER TO HEAD TO HIS PLACE FROM THE AIRPORT so they can spend some time together before Jimmy needs to be at the stadium, but there’s bad weather out in the middle of the country that means she’s still in the air come midafternoon. Be there in plenty of time for the first pitch, she promises breezily, but in the end she’s still on the plane when Jimmy gets up on the bench in the locker room to give the guys his pregame speech.

“Just one more,” he promises them, his heart red and wet and thrumming; the ALDS is a best-of-five series, which means if they win tonight they’ll leave the field as Division champs. “Just one more; that’s all we need.”

They’re going to take it, too. The beginning of the game is a breeze, three quick runs in the bottom of the second inning. Tuck’s grin is beatific in the stadium lights. This is it, Jimmy thinks to himself, not bothering to tamp down his excitement. They’re going to go all the fucking way.

He’s just turning to Tuck to say so when the roars start up all around the stadium; Jonesy almost drops the ball onto the grass. When Jimmy lifts his head there’s Lacey up on the Jumbotron, all dark hair and winning smile and oversized Hodges jersey. For a second there, he’d honestly forgotten she was on her way.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer intones, the sound of it barely audible over the screaming, “please welcome a very special guest to Camden Yards!”

And that’s when the game starts to turn.

Jimmy strikes out in the third and sixth and seventh. Tuck strikes out in the eighth. The Sox smash bomb after bomb into the outfield, the Orioles scrambling and slow. It feels like Jimmy is watching a car crash: the board at 5–3 Boston, 6–3 Boston, 7–3 Boston. It’s 11–3 Boston at the top of the ninth. It’s excruciating. Jimmy knows part of what’s making it so excruciating is his ego, that he doesn’t want his team to lose in front of his girlfriend. But also: he doesn’t want his team to lose in front of Lacey Logan, international superstar.

It happens anyway.

It’s 12–3 in the end; Sox take it. Jimmy stalks off the field, spitting once into the cool red clay and looking at nothing. Looking at nobody at all.

Chapter Nineteen

Lacey

IT OCCURS TO LACEY, AS THEY RIDE SILENTLY UPSTAIRS IN THE elevator of his building in Fells Point an hour later, that she doesn’t actually like Jimmy’s condo very much at all.

It’s not even just that it’s sterile and anonymous—although it is both of those things, she thinks sullenly, as the doors slide open and they step into the tall, cold foyer, a stereotype of a rich bro’s bachelor pad. It’s that it feels like it belongs to someone else entirely than the person who owns the farm. It makes Lacey uneasy, the idea that Jimmy could be equally at home in both of these places. It makes her wonder how many versions of him there might possibly be.

She drops her purse on the leather sofa and sits down, watching as he stalks over to the bar and pours himself a sizable drink. “Would you like anything, Lacey?” she asks, her voice loud and theatrical. She knows she sounds snotty, and she doesn’t care. “A lemonade, perhaps? An Arnold Palmer?”

Jimmy downs the bourbon in one long gulp, sets the glass down hard on the counter. “Can you not?” he asks. He didn’t shower after the game and he smells like sweat and ballpark dust, the sharp iron tang of shame and defeat. “I mean, can you just give me a minute to be—” He breaks off.

“Sorry,” she says, a little abashed. A person didn’t need to be a baseball expert to know it was an ugly loss. “Yeah, of course.” Lacey shifts her weight, trying to get settled on his stupidly large, stupidly low-to-the-ground leather couch. “You want to talk about it?”

Jimmy shakes his head once. “Not especially.”

“Okay,” Lacey says, only then they’re just quiet again, both of them sulking, the silence getting bigger and denser and heavier like a cloud she wants to reach up and burst with one finger. She rubs her hands over her knees. This couch is ridiculous, truly, far too big for anyone to comfortably sit on; she’s tall for a woman, and still if she were to sit all the way back on it her feet would stick out like a child’s. She feels like a child, here in this tense, silent apartment, like the person she was before she became Lacey Logan: out of her depth and guileless, the kind of girl who still played with Barbies until seventh grade without realizing that was embarrassing. The kind of girl who didn’t understand the rules.

Lacey glances across the room at the bunch of Jimmy’s shoulders, the muscle ticking like a bomb inside his jaw. It was terrible, sitting in that suite making small talk with all those other women, watching it all fall apart on the field and not being able to do a single thing about it. How vulnerable it made her feel on his behalf. She knew full well the cameras were on her as much as they were on Jimmy, watching every single purse of her lips and twitch of her eyebrows, capturing her every wince and tell. I’m proud of him! she wanted to shout, though of course she knew the worst thing to do would be to draw any more attention to herself than she already had just by virtue of coming here. I’m still very much intending to have sex with him tonight!

She had been, too—had been looking forward to comforting him, actually, to distracting both of them into believing this wasn’t a big deal—but when she got down to the locker room she could see right away that he was closed for business: his jaw set and his eyes hard, his body unyielding when she wrapped her arms around him. The rest of his team looked at her like she was a plague. “I’m sorry,” Lacey murmured into his chest, but either he didn’t hear her or he pretended not to. He didn’t say anything the entire ride home, staring out the window of the SUV at the city rolling darkly by.

“Look,” Lacey tries now, twisting her fingers into knots in her lap. It’s strange, feeling like she doesn’t have the first notion of how to handle him like this. It’s strange to feel suddenly like she might not know him very well at all. “It was one bad game, right?”

That’s the wrong thing to say. Right away Jimmy whirls on her. “Are you serious right now?” he asks, his dark eyes wild. “You of all people are going to stand here and have the balls to tell me it was one bad game?”

“The series isn’t over!” she points out, struggling upright off the couch—wanting to make herself larger, to even the playing field somehow. “You guys can go back to Boston and—”

“I don’t want to hear the series isn’t over, Lacey!” Jimmy shakes his head. “I don’t want to hear that it’s one bad game. I can’t have one bad game. This matters to me. This matters to me—”

“I know that!” she interrupts. “Of course I know that.”

“Do you?” Jimmy asks, sounding sincerely curious. “Because for a person who’s so deeply and pathologically obsessed with her own career, sometimes it’s like you can’t quite metabolize the fact that somebody else might care about theirs. What did you think was going to happen tonight, huh? Like, when you were picturing this whole thing, what exactly were you imagining?”

Lacey throws up her hands. “I thought you were going to win your game and we’d go out for ice cream sundaes, Jimmy, what do you want me to say? Like, I’m sorry your team had a bad night—”

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