Chapter Twelve Jimmy

Chapter Twelve

Jimmy

J IMMY WAKES UP M ONDAY MORNING, AND HE FEELS LIKE HE'S died. His knees are swollen. His hands are killing him. It takes him fifteen minutes to get out of bed. He dry-swallows four ibuprofen and stands in the shower for a long time, alternating the water as hot and cold as he can stand it and trying to figure out how to call this whole thing off in a way that somehow preserves both his dignity and Lacey's. What the fuck was he thinking, suggesting she come here on such short notice? Sure, when they compared their schedules over the phone it became abundantly clear that between the rest of his season and her various celebrity tea parties it needed to be either today or like six weeks from now, but still. Even after weeks and weeks of buildup, all at once this feels way too soon.

He could say a work thing came up, he thinks, scrubbing the shampoo out of his hair. Baseball emergency? Is that convincing? That's not fucking convincing.

When he sits on the mattress in his towel and he picks up the phone, she's already texted. See you soon! Headed for the airport.

So. That's that, then. This is happening. Jimmy yanks at his beard, then gets dressed and shuffles downstairs to the fridge. What do people like Lacey Logan even eat? Last night he added three bags of baby carrots and some fizzy water to the grocery app he shares with his housekeeper. Is that sexist? Probably. Jimmy doesn't fucking know. She just seems like the kind of person who probably eats a lot of baby carrots, that's all. She seems like the kind of person who might eat most foods raw.

It's not a small thing, moving a person like Lacey Logan, let alone with so little advance warning. "Want to shoot me your assistant's number?" she asked him yesterday. "That way Claire can reach out to her to talk about logistics."

"Oh." Jimmy hesitated. "Well—"

"You have an assistant, don't you?" Lacey asked, sounding uncertain all of a sudden. "I mean, I just assumed, but if you don't—"

"No, I do." He does, too, a fortysomething blonde named Jennifer who makes sure his bills get paid and dresses almost exclusively in capri pants, but arranging a clandestine hookup is not the kind of thing Jimmy likes to use her for, so instead he got on the phone and talked to Claire himself for almost an hour last night, making dutiful notes on a wrinkled yellow legal pad about security and privacy and accommodations for Lacey's various bodyguards. When they finally hung up Jimmy went outside and stood on the back porch of the farmhouse for a long time, staring out into the darkness, wondering if possibly he was making a mistake.

By the time Lacey turns up a little before one, his body is thankfully approximating basic functionality, though his hands are still aching like all hell. Jimmy shakes them out one more time, hard, then hits the button to open the gate at the front of the property and heads out to the wide front porch, watching the black SUV roll down the long dirt road that leads to the main house. It's early October, and warm, the beeches and black cherries and poplars all making a leafy green canopy up above him. Jimmy bought this place mainly because of the trees.

He starts across the driveway as the car slows to a stop, then freezes at the last second, weirdly nervous he's going to get tased if he makes any sudden approaches. Instead he stands there dumbly with his hands in his pockets while her driver gets out and opens the door for her, watching as she hops nimbly down out of the back seat. Her heels kick up a tiny cloud of dust.

"Hey," Jimmy says, lifting a hand in her direction.

"Hey yourself," Lacey calls back, and oh, the fucking smile on her. She's wearing jeans and a little red crop top, the smooth, tan strip of her stomach visible in the golden light of the afternoon. Her hair is long and loose down her back. She looks like a one-woman propaganda campaign for the United States of America and all at once it feels insane that Jimmy was ever in his entire life indifferent to her. It feels insane that he almost let her go.

He crosses the lawn then slows down abruptly as he tries to gauge how the fuck to greet her. Do they hug? Do they kiss? It feels deeply negligent on his part not to have considered this beforehand. He can tell she's trying to figure it out, too.

Fuck it, Jimmy decides. "Hi," he says, and ducks his head to drop a kiss against her smooth, matte cheek. "How was the flight?"

"Fine," she says. "Easy."

"I guess they mostly all are, when you've got your own ride." He offers a hand to first one bodyguard, then the other, shaking in what he hopes is a sufficiently macho and capable way. They're retired marines, both of them, with necks as thick as five-gallon buckets. Jimmy's a big dude, sure, but they look like they could snap him in half.

"Do we want to get these guys set up?" Lacey asks. "Do you have, like, a house manager you want them to huddle with, or—?"

"Oh," Jimmy says, feeling abruptly like he invited Jill Biden to his dorm for a kegger. "It's just me here today, actually." It occurs to him that he should have offered to come to her instead, to swim in her gold-plated swimming pool and eat grapes peeled by her many servants. It was easy to forget, talking to her all these nights, the fact that Lacey Logan changed the economy of every city she visited this summer. It was easy to forget how piddly and small his own life might seem in comparison.

In the end her guys want to scope out the property anyway, presumably to hide infrared cameras in his apple trees and launch drones up over the barn, so Jimmy shows them the small guesthouse where they're going to be staying and sends them on their way, then turns back to Lacey. "Want to drop your stuff?" he asks, shaking his hands out one more time before jamming them into his pockets. "You want some water? Or like... juice? I've got juice." He got kombucha, too, like, six different flavors, though personally he's never tried one that didn't taste distinctly like feet.

But Lacey shakes her head, the ghost of a smile appearing just around the very edges of her mouth. "I'm okay."

"Okay." They stand there for another moment, neither one of them saying anything. Briefly, Jimmy wishes he was dead. He doesn't know why it feels so terminally awkward all of a sudden, like he's forgotten everything he ever knew about how to have a conversation. This is Lacey . He's spent more time talking to her in the last few weeks than basically anybody else in his life. They once debated the merits of the late-night options at Taco Bell for the better part of an hour while he iced his knees in a hotel bathtub. On top of which, Jimmy is great at talking to women. He literally once got approached about doing a podcast called Fantasy Baseball with Jimmy Hodges, the conceit of which was that he'd give out romantic advice using sports metaphors.

Finally she lifts her sharp chin in the direction of the backyard. "Show me around?"

Jimmy lets a breath out. "Yeah," he says gratefully, nodding for her to follow. "Sure."

He brings her into the garden first, through the wooden gate and down the wide gravel path: past the rows of raised beds and the melon patches and the berries, the tomato plants that are almost as tall as her. His farm manager Ricky wanted to do honey last year, so there are half a dozen hives lined up along the fence on the orchard side, the low drone of the bees faintly audible in the still of the afternoon. "You take care of this all by yourself?" Lacey asks.

"Oh, yeah, one hundred percent solo," Jimmy says with a laugh. "I'm out here on the plow first thing every morning before practice." Then, when Lacey just looks at him, clearly not realizing he's joking: "No." God, she really does think he's a yokel. "I'm a dilettante. And I'm not here enough. I've got a couple of guys who work for me who do the bulk of it."

"Ah." She nods, flushing a bit. "So you're a gentleman farmer."

"Well," he says, grinning a little lopsidedly, "I don't know that I'd go that far."

Lacey doesn't laugh, the silence stretching out like old gum stuck to the bottom of his sneaker. Maybe it was a mistake, Jimmy thinks, all this buildup. Maybe there was no way it was ever going to be as good as it was in his head.

"Show me the horses," she suggests, her voice a little desperate. "You said there are horses, right?"

Jimmy nods. "There are horses," he agrees, and leads her across the back field toward the tall white barn. The barn is Jimmy's favorite place on the whole property: the cool, quiet darkness of it, the sounds of the animals snuffling to each other in their stalls.

"Full disclosure: it, uh, smells like a barn in here," he warns her, touching her arm as they're about to go inside. "Just, like, to let you know ahead of time. In case that's something you're not so cool with."

Lacey laughs. "I've been in a barn before," she assures him.

Jimmy doubts that very much, actually. "When?"

Her eyes narrow. "I don't know," she defends herself. "Times."

"Uh-huh." Jimmy nods. "Okay."

He leads her inside and walks her down the row of stalls, past the goats and the chicken coops to where the three of them are standing patiently side by side. "What are their names?" Lacey wants to know.

"Epitaph," Jimmy says, pointing to a tall, serious-looking palomino. "Valentine. And Paul Revere."

Lacey narrows her eyes. "Why does that sound familiar to me?"

"Dunno," Jimmy says with a grin.

Lacey purses her lips, but she doesn't push him. "Can I pet them?" she asks instead.

"Sure."

It's sweet, the cautious way she does it, standing on her tiptoes to scratch Valentine behind his ears and running her hand over Epitaph's velvety nose, staring into their solemn eyes like she's expecting them to reveal the secrets of the universe. "Hi, friend," she says softly. She reminds Jimmy of a Disney princess, which is not something he has historically looked for in a woman, though he'd be lying if he said it wasn't sort of working for him in this particular moment. "There's carrots in the bag there," he tells her, pointing to the canvas sack Ricky leaves hanging on a nail beside the stalls. "If you want to—"

"I do," she says, and for a moment the sound of the horses' happy chomping fills the barn, Lacey feeding them one after another like she's putting dollars into a vending machine.

"Enough," Jimmy says finally, laughing a little. "You're going to give them the shits."

Lacey rolls her eyes, dropping the last carrot back into the bag. "Charming."

"Well, I'm just saying," he continues, doubling down and not sure why. "You want to clean up after 'em?" He can feel that he's leaning into something here, cosplaying some dopier, more rural version of his own personality. He thinks it's possible he's trying to protect himself, though he's not entirely sure what from.

Lacey notices it, too: "This is very Zac Brown Band of you," she says as they head back toward the door. "This whole setup you've got here."

Jimmy looks at her sideways, smirking a little. "Is that an insult?"

"Maybe a little," she concedes with a smile. "But also, it's an incredibly beautiful farm."

"Thanks."

"Are you going to live out here full time?" she asks. "After...?"

"After I retire?" Jimmy considers that for a moment. He could go anywhere, theoretically, move to Europe or spend a year traveling through Southeast Asia, but he's never really been the kind of guy to do that. It'll be strange, not to have anything keeping him in town. "I guess I haven't really thought about it. Why, is that what you'd do?"

"I don't know," Lacey says thoughtfully. "I'm never going to retire, though, so it's kind of a moot point."

"Fair enough."

"I mean it," she says.

"I do not doubt you for a single second."

Lacey nods and looks away from him, at the light seeping in through the barn door. Jimmy can feel it again, that heavy awkwardness, the feeling of having made an avoidable and costly mistake. He wonders if her plane is still waiting for her over at BWI, fueled up and ready. They could call it, he reasons. They could part respectfully, as pals.

"Do your hands hurt?" Lacey asks, out of nowhere.

Jimmy blinks at her, surprised. Yeah, sweet cheeks , he thinks reflexively. All the fucking time. "A little," he admits. "Why?"

"You keep—" She mimes what he was just doing without even realizing it, shaking her own hands out like she just touched something scalding. "You were doing it in New York, too."

"Oh," Jimmy says, tucking them into his pockets, deeply self-conscious all of a sudden. He guesses he does it so often he doesn't always notice anymore. "Yeah. I mean. They're fucked, pretty much. Nerve damage, couple old breaks. It's not a big deal."

Lacey looks at him for another moment, then pulls his hands out of his pockets again and laces their fingers together, squeezing gently. "Look," she says, "maybe we ought to just—"

That's when Jimmy kisses her.

Lacey gasps and kisses him back right away, popping up on her tiptoes and vining her arms around his neck, pressing her whole front against him. "Oh, thank fuck ," she mutters, and Jimmy laughs out loud, the sound of it echoing off the high wooden beams and mixing with the dust motes, disappearing between the shadows and the shafts of sunlight seeping in.

"Thank fuck," he agrees, dizzy with her smell and her smile and how familiar her kiss feels, like somehow they've done this way more than just the one other time. Jimmy smooths his palms over the soft, bare skin of her waist. He reaches down to squeeze her ass, then walks her backward until her spine bumps up against one of the tall wooden posts holding the barn up, wanting every inch of his body to be touching every inch of hers. "Hello."

" Hi ," Lacey agrees, dropping her head back to give him access as his mouth wanders down the pale, delicate column of her throat. "Were you worried that night in New York was a total fluke and we actually had, like, zero chemistry in person?"

Jimmy drops his forehead against her shoulder, sucking gently at the crook of her neck. "The thought had occurred to me, yes."

"Not true, though." Lacey arches, grinding her hips against him.

"Nope." He lifts his face again, really looks at her. "Not true."

He kisses her for a long time, dragging her arms up over her head and holding them there for safekeeping, sliding his denim-covered knee between her thighs. They're alone here, Jimmy reminds himself even as she's gasping her quiet encouragement, even as his own heart slams wildly away with adrenaline and need. Alone-ish, anyway. They can take their time.

But fuck, he doesn't want to wait anymore.

He opens his mouth to tell her so, then loses the words altogether as she pulls one hand free and runs her palm over the bulge in his jeans, her short nails scraping against his zipper. Jimmy growls, he can't help it, pressing himself roughly into her touch. "Lacey." Just for a second he lets himself imagine it, turning her around and peeling her clothes off right here in the humid darkness, burying himself deep inside her from behind; still, he's only going to get to do this for the first time one time, and he's damn well going to do it right. "Sweetheart. You gotta let me get you on a bed."

Lacey pulls back and nods at him dazedly, her cheeks flushed pink and her chest rising and falling inside her top. She takes his hand and lets him lead her wordlessly out of the barn and back through the early-autumn garden, past the pool and in through the side door of the house. Upstairs they're quiet for a moment in the dim light streaming in through the bedroom windows, watching each other; finally Lacey reaches up and plucks his ballcap off by the brim, setting it down carefully on the dresser beside his wallet and his keys. "No hats in the house," she explains calmly, then puts both hands on his face and kisses him one more time.