Chapter Sixteen Jimmy

Chapter Sixteen

Jimmy

H E CALLS HER AS SOON AS THE PRESS CONFERENCE IS FINALLY over, weaving through the cavernous hallways until he finds an empty equipment room to duck into. She sends him to voicemail after one ring, a text popping up a moment later: I saw it, she reports curtly; then, in rapid succession:

I'm on the phone with Maddie

Making a plan

Please don't say anything to anyone else yet

Jimmy swears under his breath. I'm so sorry , he tells her honestly, his whole body buzzing with adrenaline and shame. He feels like he took his dick out and rubbed it all over the fucking microphones when he wasn't paying attention. I got rattled.

Clearly.

Jimmy winces, shoving his phone back into his pocket and shuffling into the locker room, where the entire team immediately bursts into rowdy applause, Hugo shimmying his hips lasciviously and Jonesy chanting his name like something out of an old episode of Jerry Springer . Jimmy honestly can't tell what the rest of them are more excited about, the fact that they just made it to the fucking Division Series or the idea of him embarrassing himself in front of a dozen national media outlets on the biggest night of his career in the last five years.

"You're a sly dog," Tuck says, slinging a sweaty arm around Jimmy's shoulders, clutching a bottle of champagne by the neck with his free hand. "I gotta say, Hodges, you're a sly fuckin' dog."

"We're going out!" Tito announces, wrapping his arms around Jimmy's waist from behind and attempting to lift him off his feet. "You coming?"

"Of course he's not coming," Jonesy puts in, yanking his jersey over his head and tossing it onto the floor. "He's gotta go home and call his famous girlfriend."

"Fuck you," Jimmy mumbles—rolling his eyes and shaking his head a little, shrugging out of Tito's grip and trying to maintain a shred of fucking dignity. Across the benches Ray is looking at him with an expression he doesn't like—a little bit of meanness, like maybe he thinks Jimmy stole his girlfriend, like he took something that didn't belong to him. He's going to need to handle that, Jimmy realizes dully, adding it to the ticker tape of action items accumulating rapid-fire inside his brain. He's going to need to handle a lot of things.

In the end he Venmos Tuck some cash to buy a round and sends the rest of them off to a speakeasy at the top of the Smith Tower, then takes a car back to the Grand Hyatt. There's an accident right outside the entrance to the hotel—at least, Jimmy thinks it's an accident in the moment before he realizes it's actually half a dozen photographers with their SUVs parked haphazardly up on the sidewalk, their cameras drawn like guns.

"Oh, fuck me," he says out loud, briefly feeling like all his internal organs are about to fall out his asshole. He hasn't had mainstream media wait for him outside a venue in years, not since way before he was married, and definitely never this many of them at once. Lacey was right, he realizes dully. Her press is different from his press. He cannot believe he just fucked this up as hard as he did.

He yanks his ballcap down over his eyes—which, Why? he thinks, even as he's doing it; after all, it's not like he's fooling anyone—and tumbles from the back seat of the SUV before the driver has even really stopped all the way. He keeps his head ducked as he hurries through the sliding doors and crosses the lobby, ignoring the cheerful catcalls echoing in his wake: "How long have you and Lacey been together, Jimmy?" the photographers want to know, and "How did you two kids even meet?" For a second he's afraid one of them is going to try and follow him into the elevator, that he's entered some horrifying new Princess Diana level of pursuit by the paparazzi, but in the end he taps his key card and jams the button for his floor without incident, leaning his head back against the wall of the car as the doors slide shut. There's another guest in there already, a woman with a dog in one of those little vented carrying cases.

"Are you anybody?" she asks as the elevator whooshes upward, peering at him curiously through her tortoiseshell glasses.

"Definitely not," Jimmy says.

Upstairs he collapses onto his bed for a minute, staring up at the ceiling and trying to empty his clamoring mind. He should be happy—they made the fucking Division Series tonight, did they not? The season isn't over yet; his career isn't over yet—but instead he's filled with weird but unmistakable dread, the knowledge that he's just set into motion a chain of events, not just for himself but for his entire team, that he's going to be utterly powerless to control. All at once it doesn't feel like this whole thing was such a good idea to begin with. All at once it feels like he should have put it off until the season was done.

He's still lying there when he feels his phone start to buzz in his pocket. When he fishes it out he sees it's Lacey's name on the screen. Jimmy flinches before he can stop himself, queasily reminded of the way he felt when Rachel would call way back at the end of their marriage. The knowledge that he had failed, spectacularly, and that it was about to be elucidated to him in great detail exactly how.

"I'm so sorry," he says, when he hits the button to answer.

"It's fine," Lacey chirps, her voice clipped and tidy. "We'll figure it out. I mean, for the record, it would have been nice if you hadn't sounded quite so condescending when you told me you knew how to handle the media—"

"Yup," Jimmy agrees, squeezing his eyes shut. "That would have been the move, I can agree." He sighs. "Do you want me to say I made it up?"

"What?" she says, a little shrilly. "No. No! That makes you look insane. And frankly it makes me look insane by association, so—"

"I don't understand how they knew," he says, his voice pleading. It feels important that she doesn't think he leaked it. It feels important that she doesn't think he told.

"My fans figured it out a few days ago," she says. "They knew I was in Baltimore, which, combined with the blind item, was enough for them to—"

"Wait," Jimmy says, confused. "How did they know you were in Baltimore? We didn't go anywhere."

"Flight plans are public record."

Jimmy sits up so fast he gets lightheaded. "They track your plane ?"

"Of course they track my plane, Jimmy." She says it like it's normal. "Anyway, like I was saying, that combined with the Sinclair thing—"

"Is still just total conjecture."

"Not for them," she says. "And not in reality, clearly." She sighs. "Maddie says we need to debut as soon as we possibly can."

"We need to what now?"

"Debut," Lacey repeats—a little impatiently, like she thinks he's being stupid on purpose. "Take control of the story. Go out together. Give them a narrative."

"Give who a narrative?"

"Everyone! The media. My fans. Every baseball jabroni who's already on Reddit complaining about me besmirching the sacred and pristine arena of professional sports with my rhinestones and vagina. Either we give them something to talk about, and fast, or they come up with something on their own. And please believe me when I say the first thing is always better."

Jimmy rests his elbows on his knees for a moment, leaning forward and scrubbing his free hand over the back of his head. "Can I ask you something?" he says finally. "Did you ever think that all this weird fucking lore exists around you because you're the one who's actively creating it? That people are like this about you because you expect them to be?"

"Wow, no," Lacey says, her voice perfectly even. "The notion had never occurred to me."

Jimmy winces. "Okay," he amends, "I didn't mean—"

"No, really. Thank you for teaching me this important and heretofore unknown truth about myself."

"Lacey—"

"I have built this career with my brain and my voice and my two fucking hands, James. If I tell you my fans are going to need something from me, it's not because I'm divining it from the phases of the moon or some random Twitter user. It's because, contrary to what people like to tell themselves, doing what I do at the level that I do it takes a lot of strategy and intelligence. I need you to trust me about that."

Jimmy thinks about that for a moment—or tries to think about it, anyway, but he's distracted by the uninterrupted buzzing of his phone at his ear. The thing hasn't stopped vibrating since the press conference: messages and notifications stacking up on top of each other like the cards at the end of the old Microsoft version of solitaire, filling the entire screen. He's going to need to put it on Do Not Disturb. Fuck, he's going to need to throw it into the Potomac. It feels insane now, the idea that he was the one who gave her shit about not wanting to casually go out to breakfast the other morning . I've been dealing with the press for thirteen years. He might as well have told her he could do open-heart surgery because he used to watch reruns of Grey's Anatomy on cable at the gym in the mornings. He wants to beg for her fucking forgiveness. He wants to stand outside Camden in a sandwich board that says I'm a dumb schmuck.

He also—just a little bit—wants to call this whole thing off before it gets any more out of control and go back to concentrating on baseball.

"Okay," he says instead, holding a hand up even though she can't see him. He's in this now, he tells himself. He's committed. And he'll be damned if he isn't going to take it all the way. "I'm sorry. Tell me what we need to do."