Page 6 of Heavy Hitter

They leave through the service elevator, same as the one she came up through. Christopher is waiting in the garage. Jimmy puts a hand on her lower back—just lightly, just the very tips of his fingers—as she boosts herself up into the SUV.

“Are you okay to drive around the neighborhood for a bit?” she asks Chris, leaning forward a little as Javi buckles himself into the passenger seat. “I’ll tell you when to stop.” She sits back, the edge of her thigh brushing Jimmy’s. She hopes she sounds more confident than she feels.

She does not, evidently: “You got a destination in mind?” Jimmy asks her as they turn the corner onto West 14th, the lights from the bars and clubs and restaurants winking across his face through the window. Lacey only knows the fancy places.

“No, actually,” she admits. “I’m kind of flying by the seat of my pants here.”

“Fair enough,” Jimmy says easily, settling the bulk of his body back against the seat. “I guess I just didn’t think that was your style.”

“It’s not.”

Lacey peers out the window as the SUV creeps along the narrow street, everything too bright or too trendy or too public, until all at once she spots it: a deeply unremarkable tavern a little ways from the corner, its tall front windows flung open to the balmy night. “What about that one?” she asks, looking first to Jimmy and then to Javi. “That one could be good.”

Chris pulls over in front of a hydrant. “Wait here,” Javi instructs.

The car is quiet for a moment, all of them breathing. When Lacey glances over at Jimmy she sees he’s gazing frankly back. She shifts her weight in the seat, her whole body warm and humming. She doesn’t know what her deal is tonight: she’s never into guys like this, the kind who look like they could fling you over their shoulder and carry you back to a cave somewhere to have their way with you. Toby could have fit in her jeans with room to spare.

“It’s fine,” Javi reports a moment later, Chris rolling down the passenger-side window as he strides back across the sidewalk. “We’re good.”

“They’re not kicking people out, are they?” Lacey asks nervously. “I don’t want to, like—”

But Javi shakes his head. “There’s hardly anyone in there.”

He’s right: the place is mostly empty, just a couple of middle-aged drinkers at a table in the corner. An old Marc Cohn song is playing on the speakers overhead. It’s not a dive, exactly; instead it’s just deeply anonymous, with brick walls and black wooden barstools, Edison bulbs in little wire cages hanging in a row above the bar. They could be anywhere. They could be anybody.

“This is perfect,” Lacey announces.

Jimmy looks at her a little oddly. Lacey feels herself blush, all at once exquisitely aware of the lunacy of having ghosted her most gossipy friend to go sit at a weird bar with this stranger while her head of security sips a bottle of water across the room. She and Toby had been together three months before they were ever even photographed in the same zip code. This is emphatically not the kind of thing she does.

Well, she thinks, as Jimmy settles himself onto a stool and orders a Brooklyn Summer, she’s in it now. Nothing to do at this point but soldier through.

“So,” she says, once she’s asked the bartender for a club soda and cranberry, “what’s your favorite thing about living in Baltimore?”

Jimmy blinks, probably because it sounds very much like she’s interviewing him for a profile in Chesapeake Bay Magazine. “My favorite thing?”

“Yeah.” Lacey shrugs, determined. “You’ve stayed there your whole career, right? You must love it, to have been there so long.”

“That’s not... totally how it works.”

“No, I know that.” Lacey winces. “I mean, of course I know that. I just—”

“I do, though,” he interrupts, apparently having decided at the last possible second to bail her out after all. “Love it, that is. The people, mostly. They’re scrappy.” He takes a sip of his beer. “Also, the crab cakes are lights out.”

Lacey feels her shoulders drop in gratitude. “I have heard the crab cakes are special.”

“You’ve never had the crab cakes?”

She shakes her head. “I’ve been a vegetarian since I was twelve.”

“Yeah, well.” Jimmy shrugs, like What can you do? “Nobody’s perfect.”

Lacey grins. “I’m close, though, right?”

Jimmy barks out a laugh, rowdy and surprised, but then it vanishes into the air halfway through—and oh, the way he’s looking at her, like he can’t quite believe she’s happening to him. Like he doesn’t quite believe she’s real. “I think,” he says slowly, “that is probably true.”

Neither one of them says anything for a minute. Finally, Lacey clears her throat. “How’s your season going?” she asks, reaching for her drink and fussing with the straw for a moment. Her hands aren’t shaking, but it’s a near thing.

Jimmy smirks. Just like that he’s himself again, a veteran ballplayer, unflappable and wry. “Well, as you may have seen on the local news, Lacey, we got killed by the Yankees today.”

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