Page 7 of Heavy Hitter

“I did catch that, yes.”

“So.” He tips the beer bottle in her direction. “Like that, basically.”

She shrugs. “It’s still early.”

“Not that early,” he counters. “Almost the end of the summer. We’re not making the playoffs, that’s for sure.”

“Next year, then.”

“For the rest of the guys, maybe.” Jimmy shakes his head. “But I’m done at the end of the season.”

That stops her. “What, like—” Lacey sets her drink back onto the bar. “Done for good?”

“Yeah, cupcake, done for good.” He grins, his eyes crinkling up around the edges. They’re a pretty shade of hazel, warm with flecks of gold in the irises. “I’m retiring.”

“Why?”

Jimmy shrugs. “It’s time, that’s all. Lots of reasons.” He runs his thumb over the mouth of his beer bottle, not quite meeting her gaze. “Bad back. Bad knees, bunch of other boring shit. It’s just time.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I haven’t told anybody.” He tips his head to the side. “Until now, I guess.”

“Well,” she says. “I’m a vault.”

Jimmy nods like he doesn’t doubt it. “What about you?” he asks. “How’s your tour going?”

Lacey considers that. He told her a secret just now, Jimmy Hodges. She could tell him one back, probably—how lonely she is, how bored of herself, how trapped she feels sometimes—and for a moment she almost does, but in the end she just shakes her head. “You know,” she says, smiling her most brilliant international-superstar smile, “it’s been really, really great.”

Something in Jimmy’s expression shorts out briefly, like he suspects she’s full of shit and finds it vaguely disappointing, but he doesn’t know her well enough to call her on it. “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” is all he says, getting to his feet and nodding in the direction of the restrooms. “I’ll be right back.”

Lacey sits at the bar for another moment once he’s gone, sipping her drink and wondering why she feels so sad all of a sudden. Something about the idea of him retiring is faintly heartbreaking—she’s going to miss him, she realizes with a sharp flash of clarity, which is a deeply deranged emotion to be having, since they only met an hour ago and he’s in the bathroom of this bar at this very moment—but that isn’t the only reason. It’s that she had the chance to be brave just now, same as she did with the Henrietta Lang show, and she whiffed it. It’s that she could have said or done something to surprise herself, and instead she wasted her chance.

Lacey glances over at Javi, who’s pretending to watch ESPN on the TV mounted in the corner.

Then she slips off her barstool as casually as she can.

The bathrooms are in a dim little hallway lined with fake Art Deco posters of European travel destinations. Lacey leans back against the wall to wait, tucking her hands neatly behind her back and squinting at a crude rendering of the Eiffel Tower. Toby did a couple of dates in Paris last year, after his tour through England and Ireland, but the jokes didn’t really translate and he was in a bad mood the entire ti—

The door opens. Jimmy steps out, then stops short when he sees her, his eyes widening. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

He jerks his thumb back toward the bathroom. “Are you—?”

“No.”

“Then what—”

“What do you think?”

She watches as Jimmy processes that, his gaze turning a full shade darker. “Okay.” He takes a step closer, then another, crowding her a little, his body huge in the tiny hallway. Lacey needs to lift her chin to look him in the eye. “You realize this isn’t going to do a single fuckin’ thing for your career,” he warns her softly, his face so close their lips are almost touching. He smells like restaurant-supply hand soap and underneath that like cologne.

Lacey shakes her head. “Fuck you,” she tells him primly, then grabs the front of his shirt with both hands and slams her mouth up against his.

Chapter Four

Jimmy

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