Chapter Fifteen Lacey

Chapter Fifteen

Lacey

L ACEY'S PLANE BACK TO LA TAKES OFF ON TIME, BUT BARELY. She's late to the airport following a protracted goodbye at Jimmy's, his big hands creeping up inside her hoodie as she leaned against the door: "You want to be my girlfriend?" he muttered in between kisses, his deep voice muffled against her mouth. Lacey pulled away, laughing at the high school earnestness of it; still, her heart was a dollar-store helium balloon taped to a locker, bright and shiny and straining to get free.

"Yeah," she admitted, a little breathlessly. "I kind of want to be your girlfriend."

Jimmy grinned. "Okay," he said, like it was just that easy. For a moment it felt that easy to Lacey, too. "You're my girlfriend."

Claire is waiting for her on the tarmac, iPad in hand. "Welcome back," she chirps. "How was it?"

"It was great," Lacey says carefully. She didn't talk to Claire while she was in Baltimore, which wasn't unusual , exactly, though the first time she went away with Toby the two of them texted more or less constantly. She knows Claire is angry with her—that Maddie is, too, though of course neither one of them would ever say so. She knows she caught them both by surprise. "I'm sorry," she said to Claire the other night, once Lacey had explained what was going on and that she needed a flight to BWI on short notice. "I shouldn't have lied to you."

"No, I mean." Claire cleared her throat, not quite making eye contact. "It's fine. You're allowed to keep your private life private, obviously. You're my boss."

Lacey felt, briefly, as if Claire had slapped her. "Claire," she said. Claire had been the one to collect her stuff from Toby's apartment after the breakup; she'd held Lacey's dress while she's peed at six years' worth of Grammy Awards. Lacey was lying when she told Jimmy she didn't have an active-duty best friend. Paid or not, what was Claire if not her closest of wartime consiglieri? "Come on."

"No, it's fine." Claire shook her head. "I don't know why I'm having this reaction, honestly. I should be apologizing. It's inappropriate."

"It's not," Lacey said, though she supposed it was, technically. Or maybe it wasn't? At the very least, she felt like they probably ought to talk about it more, but there had been travel to organize and packing to do, and now here they are on the other side of it, just the slightest bit unfamiliar with each other. It's strange, feeling like there's a piece of her professional life Lacey doesn't know how to navigate. It's unsettling to feel like she doesn't have it neatly, 100 percent under control.

She climbs into the back seat and slips off her sunglasses, the SUV crawling back toward Malibu while Claire connects with Maddie on FaceTime. "I've got good news and bad news," Maddie announces, sitting at her desk with her hair in a tidy knot on the top of her head. "The good news is, I solved the Toby mystery. The bad news is he did twenty minutes at Largo last night, workshopping some new stuff for what I'm hearing is going to be a Netflix special." She makes a face. "He's calling it Problematic Fave ."

Lacey presses her lips together, swallowing down a quiet flare of panic. She barely thought about Toby at all while she was with Jimmy. She barely thought about anything public-facing or career-related, actually; she let herself get lost in the moment, let herself get lazy, and now—"Cool," she says, her voice sharp with sarcasm and a little bit of mania. "Do we know what it's about?"

"Mostly about his entire personal brand being that he's a piece of shit," Maddie tells her. "Fatherhood, whatever. But there's also a not-insignificant chunk of it that's about you."

Lacey nods slowly, absorbing that information. "Is there video?"

"There is."

"Okay," she says, ignoring the faint taste of bile at the back of her mouth. "Well, let's, you know. Go to the tape."

"It's already backfiring," Maddie assures her, which is how Lacey knows it must be really bad. "The coverage is terrible."

"It's fine," Lacey assures her, managing with some effort to keep her voice light. This is her superpower, she reminds herself firmly: her insatiable hunger for every crumb of meanness anyone has ever flung in her direction, the knowledge that there is nothing anyone can say about her, no matter how cutting or poisonous or untrue, that she doesn't want to hear. All of it is data, and data is power. Data, Lacey has always been able to use. "I'll just watch."

So Maddie sends her the link, staying on the line while Lacey watches the grainy footage: Toby in black jeans and a trim crewneck Comme des Gar?ons sweatshirt Lacey bought for him in Tokyo two years ago, stalking back and forth across the tiny stage.

The portion about Lacey lasts just over six minutes, and it's... not great. There's the usual low-hanging fruit, of course, digs at the pedestrian quality of Lacey's music and her creepy symbiotic relationship with her fans. But there's a lot of private stuff, too, stuff Toby only knows about her because they were living together, like a botched laser hair removal from a couple of years ago after which she needed to put burn cream all along her bikini line every day for six full weeks. My ex , he keeps calling her, trusting everyone to know who he's talking about and also, presumably, trying to shield himself from a lawsuit by never actually using her name. My ex. My ex.

Lacey keeps her face very, very blank, rubbing compulsively at an errant cuticle and telling herself there's no reason to feel like she's about to burst into tears. It's not that she didn't know he was capable of this kind of sharpness in his comedy, obviously. And it's not that she can't take a joke at her own expense. It's just that it's Toby , who used to drive across LA to get her coffee from her favorite place in Silver Lake when they were first dating and who is so afraid of spiders he once jumped into the pool fully clothed to make his escape from a daddy longlegs strolling up a drainpipe at her place in Nashville. It's Toby, whose mom used to send him seasonally appropriate boxes of breakfast cereal for every holiday, even though he was thirty-five years old. Being leveraged this way by people she once trusted is part of the price she pays for being who she is; Lacey knows this. Still, just for a fraction of a second, she feels sadder than she ever did when they broke up.

She's aware of Claire and Maddie watching her carefully, waiting to gauge her reaction. Lacey bites her tongue hard enough to taste salt. The sum total of everything going on has her feeling out of control and exposed all of a sudden: Toby's set, everything hap pening with Jimmy. Even the weirdness with Claire. It feels like too much , like too many variables to manage. It feels like too many things to keep under control.

"I mean," she says when it's finished, careful to keep her voice cheerful, "I suppose it's fair to say he wasn't deterred by my great plan to sing ‘Laugh Lines' in Montreal as a way of letting him know not to fuck with me."

"No," Maddie says, "I guess he wasn't."

Claire puts a hand on her arm and squeezes. "Are you okay?"

Lacey shrugs her off before she can quiet the impulse, wincing when she sees Claire flinch. "I'm fine," she assures them, trying to soften her tone while simultaneously sounding as if she's got it all together. "I think we should ignore it, don't you? Like you said, it's already backfiring. He wants to hang himself out to dry, that's his business."

"Okay," Maddie says. "Well, if you're sure, then, we should talk about a PR rollout for you and Jimmy Hodges."

Lacey hesitates. It's not like she didn't know this was coming; it's not that she doesn't know they need a plan. Still, she finds she doesn't want to talk about it right this second, to turn it into one more thing she needs to manage and strategize about. It's overwhelming. She feels overwhelmed. "I don't think we need to cross that bridge yet."

"Really?" Maddie looks surprised. Lacey is not at all a person who buries her head in the sand. "Because I do have some concerns that after the blind item on the Sinclair, and you flying down there—"

"No, I know, but we discussed it," Lacey says, "and we decided we're going to keep it private for a little bit."

"And if it leaks?"

Lacey smiles. "We can move on."

Maddie eyes her a moment longer, visibly nonplussed. "Sure," she says finally. "Of course."

That was a pretty good hang , Jimmy texts her, just as the car pulls into the driveway. We should do it again sometime.

Lacey blinks, surprised by the tiny zip of anxiety that ricochets through her at the sight of his name on the screen, the sinking suspicion that there may be a cost to whatever it is they're doing here that she didn't adequately anticipate—then tells herself not to be ridiculous. Who gives a shit about Toby and his comedy set? She's the one in control of the narrative. She's the one in charge. Some stupid stunt by Toby doesn't change that.

It was , she agrees. We should.

***

T HE W ILD C ARD S ERIES IS SHORT, JUST THREE GAMES OVER three nights in Seattle: the Orioles win the first, but they lose to the Mariners in the second, forcing a tiebreaker Tuesday night. "Washington's basically Northern California, on the off chance you're in the mood to take in some playoff baseball , " Jimmy says when she calls him that morning to say good luck. "I can leave a funny nose and glasses for you at the gate."

"Tempting." Lacey bites her lip, letting herself imagine it for a moment, being there to watch him on a night as important as this one. Cheering him on while he does what he loves. Then she thinks of Toby workshopping his set back across town at Largo and reminds herself it's better to keep this whole thing under wraps for at least a little while longer. "I'm going to be wearing my Hodges jersey and cheering you on from my mayoral residence," she promises. "Don't fuck it up."

"I'll do my best," Jimmy tells her. Then, just before he hangs up: "Hey. You doing okay, about that video?"

Lacey winces. It's been everywhere the last few days, clips of it playing on the morning shows and on late night, the subject of a million think pieces about misogyny in stand-up and who owns whose stories. She and Maddie both agreed it was better not to comment this time, but none of it shows any signs of letting up and she's starting to wonder if maybe that's a mistake, too. She feels off her game, foggy headed. Distracted , to borrow Jimmy's word.

"Totally," she says. "I'm doing fine."

Lacey's never watched the entirety of a baseball game before, and she makes a little one-woman party of it in her screening room later that night, with a bowl of chocolate-covered almonds and a new flavor of kombucha. She's always thought of baseball as a deeply boring sport, but it turns out she sort of likes it when she's got some skin in the game, remembering stories Jimmy's told her about his teammates, watching for a quick glimpse of him behind the plate. His friend Tuck is pitching, the one who's been on the Orioles almost as long as he has. She spies a few guys she recognizes from that very first night at the club.

The Orioles are behind the first three innings, then tied for the better part of the middle of the game. Briefly ahead. Behind again. Jimmy strikes out in the seventh—"Shit," Lacey says out loud, gnawing her thumbnail before she can catch herself—then redeems himself with a three-run homer at the top of the ninth, and then all at once it's over. All at once, he's won.

"Fuck yeah!" Lacey exclaims before she can stop herself, then claps a hand over her mouth even though there's nobody around to hear her. She feels like she's the one who's going to the Division Series. She feels like there's a hot air balloon inside her chest. She watches as the guys rush the field and pile onto each other like puppies, the joy palpable, Jimmy ripping his mask off and dropping it into the dirt as he goes.

She picks her phone up to text him, ignoring a couple of missed calls from Claire from earlier tonight, even though she knows his phone is back in the locker room. She doesn't want to talk about her own stuff right now. She wants to be happy for her boyfriend, who's going to—she knows it in her gut—win a World Series after all this time . I'm so fucking proud of you , she types, thumbs flying over the keyboard. I can't wait to show you in person how much.

She tucks her phone into the pocket of her hoodie and walks around the house for a bit, the excitement inside her turning to restlessness. She wants to stretch her legs, to go until she runs out of road. Lacey gets this feeling sometimes, even though she knows it's silly: like she's stuck in a cage of her own construction. Like she's trapped. All at once she wishes she'd gone to the game after all, that she was there to celebrate with him, to run her fingers through his champagne-soaked hair. Who cares if people know they're together? she thinks wildly. She wants people to know. She wants to be there for him. She's going to go to the next one, she decides. When is the next one, even? She'll find out.

Upstairs in her bedroom she flicks over to ESPN to watch the postgame press conference while she washes her face and puts on her night cream. She's never watched one of these before, either, but she wants to keep looking at him, to see the flush of pleasure on his handsome face. She liked watching Toby perform, obviously; she thought his jokes were reasonably funny. But this feels different.

"Hey, Jimmy," a reporter says, first question out of the gate, "any truth to the rumors you're dating Lacey Logan?"

Lacey whirls around as if someone has stabbed her, watching as Jimmy freezes, like there's a glitch in the cable feed. The panic is naked on his face. Even if she didn't know anything about it, she'd know the reporter was right.

There's a brief, horrible silence, nothing but the sound of the cameras clicking like a plague of cicadas. Lacey can hear her own breath in her ears. She waits for someone to jump in and end the press conference, to hustle Jimmy back to the locker room. That's what Maddie would have done. Lacey would have been in the car by now. Lacey would be in Burkina fucking Faso.

"I'll tell you one thing for sure," Jimmy says, the words coming out all in a rush. "If I was dating her, I sure as shit wouldn't write a corny fucking comedy routine about it."

Lacey drops the jar of night cream all over the floor.