Chapter Nineteen Lacey
Chapter Nineteen
Lacey
I T OCCURS TO L ACEY, AS THEY RIDE SILENTLY UPSTAIRS IN THE elevator of his building in Fells Point an hour later, that she doesn't actually like Jimmy's condo very much at all.
It's not even just that it's sterile and anonymous—although it is both of those things, she thinks sullenly, as the doors slide open and they step into the tall, cold foyer, a stereotype of a rich bro's bachelor pad. It's that it feels like it belongs to someone else entirely than the person who owns the farm. It makes Lacey uneasy, the idea that Jimmy could be equally at home in both of these places. It makes her wonder how many versions of him there might possibly be.
She drops her purse on the leather sofa and sits down, watching as he stalks over to the bar and pours himself a sizable drink. "Would you like anything, Lacey?" she asks, her voice loud and theatrical. She knows she sounds snotty, and she doesn't care. "A lemonade, perhaps? An Arnold Palmer?"
Jimmy downs the bourbon in one long gulp, sets the glass down hard on the counter. "Can you not?" he asks. He didn't shower after the game and he smells like sweat and ballpark dust, the sharp iron tang of shame and defeat. "I mean, can you just give me a minute to be—" He breaks off.
"Sorry," she says, a little abashed. A person didn't need to be a baseball expert to know it was an ugly loss. "Yeah, of course." Lacey shifts her weight, trying to get settled on his stupidly large, stupidly low-to-the-ground leather couch. "You want to talk about it?"
Jimmy shakes his head once. "Not especially."
"Okay," Lacey says, only then they're just quiet again, both of them sulking, the silence getting bigger and denser and heavier like a cloud she wants to reach up and burst with one finger. She rubs her hands over her knees. This couch is ridiculous, truly, far too big for anyone to comfortably sit on; she's tall for a woman, and still if she were to sit all the way back on it her feet would stick out like a child's. She feels like a child, here in this tense, silent apartment, like the person she was before she became Lacey Logan: out of her depth and guileless, the kind of girl who still played with Barbies until seventh grade without realizing that was embarrassing. The kind of girl who didn't understand the rules.
Lacey glances across the room at the bunch of Jimmy's shoulders, the muscle ticking like a bomb inside his jaw. It was terrible, sitting in that suite making small talk with all those other women, watching it all fall apart on the field and not being able to do a single thing about it. How vulnerable it made her feel on his behalf. She knew full well the cameras were on her as much as they were on Jimmy, watching every single purse of her lips and twitch of her eyebrows, capturing her every wince and tell. I'm proud of him! she wanted to shout, though of course she knew the worst thing to do would be to draw any more attention to herself than she already had just by virtue of coming here. I'm still very much intending to have sex with him tonight!
She had been, too—had been looking forward to comforting him, actually, to distracting both of them into believing this wasn't a big deal—but when she got down to the locker room she could see right away that he was closed for business: his jaw set and his eyes hard, his body unyielding when she wrapped her arms around him. The rest of his team looked at her like she was a plague. "I'm sorry," Lacey murmured into his chest, but either he didn't hear her or he pretended not to. He didn't say anything the entire ride home, staring out the window of the SUV at the city rolling darkly by.
"Look," Lacey tries now, twisting her fingers into knots in her lap. It's strange, feeling like she doesn't have the first notion of how to handle him like this. It's strange to feel suddenly like she might not know him very well at all. "It was one bad game, right?"
That's the wrong thing to say. Right away Jimmy whirls on her. "Are you serious right now?" he asks, his dark eyes wild. "You of all people are going to stand here and have the balls to tell me it was one bad game?"
"The series isn't over!" she points out, struggling upright off the couch—wanting to make herself larger, to even the playing field somehow. "You guys can go back to Boston and—"
"I don't want to hear the series isn't over, Lacey!" Jimmy shakes his head. "I don't want to hear that it's one bad game. I can't have one bad game. This matters to me. This matters to me—"
"I know that!" she interrupts. "Of course I know that."
"Do you?" Jimmy asks, sounding sincerely curious. "Because for a person who's so deeply and pathologically obsessed with her own career, sometimes it's like you can't quite metabolize the fact that somebody else might care about theirs. What did you think was going to happen tonight, huh? Like, when you were picturing this whole thing, what exactly were you imagining?"
Lacey throws up her hands. "I thought you were going to win your game and we'd go out for ice cream sundaes, Jimmy, what do you want me to say? Like, I'm sorry your team had a bad night—"
"Why do you think we had a bad night, exactly?"
All at once, Lacey hears the drumbeat of danger coming closer. "Don't," she warns him.
"Don't what?"
"You know what!" Lacey insists. "Uh-uh, Jimmy. No way. Like, by all means, go ahead and throw a tantrum if you need to, walk it off, but I'll be damned if I'm going to stand here and let you make noise about how any of this was somehow my fault for showing up to your game when you're the one—"
"I said it at the very beginning, didn't I?" Jimmy shakes his head. "I told you I was worried this was going to be a distraction for both of us, and we can't afford to have any distractions right now."
" You can't."
"I can't!" Jimmy bursts out. "I'm literally trying to win the World fucking Series! I don't get how you of all people don't understand that!"
"Yeah, well." Lacey throws her hands up. "It wouldn't have become a distraction in the first place if you could have kept your fucking mouth shut like I asked you to."
That blow lands: Jimmy sputters for a moment, shrugging violently. "Well, I'm sorry I'm not a criminal mastermind like you," he says, a flash of embarrassment visible through the dark scrim of his anger. "I don't have perfect media training, I guess. I don't talk to the world in fucking riddles and assume everyone will drop everything to figure out what I'm trying to tell them because they're all so deeply obsessed with me."
"I have never, not once, talked in riddles with you!" Lacey explodes, stung by the deep unfairness of it. "I have been direct and I have been forthright and if you didn't want me to come to your damn baseball game to support you, then you should have done the same thing and told me so! This wasn't a surprise pop-in, Jimmy. You had plenty of time to put a stop to it if you wanted to, and you didn't, so now—"
"Oh, please," he protests. "You know as well as I do that you weren't asking for permission, Lacey. On top of which, you didn't come to support me! You came because your fucking publicist told you it would be a good thing to do to distract the people who write the articles on the Sinclair from the fact that your ex was making shitty jokes at your expense."
This is, it must be said, a little bit true, and Jimmy must see it in her expression before she can figure out how to spin it, because his own face turns rock-solid. "Yeah," he says. "That's what I thought."
Lacey considers that for a moment, looking around at his tacky chrome floor lamp, his dopey concrete floors. She does not want to be here, she thinks clearly. This is no longer a place she wants to be. "Okay," she says. "You know what, Jimmy? You win. I don't want to fight about this anymore tonight. We can cool off and talk about it more later, okay? In the meantime, I'm going to go back to my hotel."
"Wait." Jimmy blinks at that, visibly startled by the idea of it. "You booked a hotel room?"
"Of course I booked a fucking hotel room!" God, there is so much he doesn't understand about the way her life works. There is so much he still doesn't get. "You think I am a person who ever, under any circumstances, comes to a city without booking a hotel room? I booked three different blocks of hotel rooms, at three different hotels, just like I do literally every time I travel."
"I just—" Jimmy frowns. He looks so surprised, just for a second. He looks so enormously, bizarrely hurt . "I thought you were staying here."
"Well." Lacey quirks an eyebrow. "I guess it's a good thing I had a backup plan, huh."
Jimmy's eyes narrow then, like this information confirms some mean suspicion about her that he's been quietly harboring. Like this was a trap and she just walked right into it. "Of course you did," he says, nodding slowly. "You always do, right? You're always three steps ahead of everyone else."
"What does that even mean?" Lacey demands. "Do you even want me to stay here right now? Because you're certainly not acting like a person who—"
Jimmy shakes his head. "This is too much for me," he announces. "All of this is too much for me. The machine of it, the Lacey Logan industrial complex. You sneeze and it changes the Nasdaq. It's too much for me."
"You mean I'm too much for you."
She's expecting him to contradict her, but Jimmy only shrugs. "Yeah, Lacey," he admits quietly. "Sometimes, yeah."
Lacey absorbs that blow in silence. Up until right this moment she thought this was just a regular argument that they were having but she can see now that it's more than that, that it's serious—that Jimmy is the kind of person to go nuclear, that he could end this right now and be fine with it. He could have been fine never talking to her again after that night in New York City; he could have been fine never talking to her again after the last time they fought. All at once it's glaringly obvious that Lacey herself has been the one pushing this relationship forward the entire time, that she has been the one pursuing him since the moment she asked him to leave that club weeks and weeks ago, and the fact that she somehow deluded herself into thinking otherwise feels like a grave and strategic misstep on her part. She doesn't know what's wrong with her lately. She's never felt so out of control in her entire life. "Well, okay," she says, throwing her shoulders back and affecting carelessness as best as she possibly can. "That's instructive. Thank you for your honesty. We're done, then."
"Wha—hang on a second." Jimmy holds a hand up, panic flaring in his eyes. "I'm not saying done forever. I'm saying let's take some time to cool off, same as you said, until—"
"Until what, until your career is officially over and you need someone to glom on to in order to stay relevant?"
Jimmy looks stung. "Wow," he says. "Screw you, Lacey."
"Screw you," she shoots back, keeping her voice very even. She's not going to let him see her fall apart. He wants to think she's a robot, that she has a computer for a brain, let him think it. She's Lacey fucking Logan, and she doesn't give a damn. "I'm going now."
"Yeah," Jimmy says, "I think that's probably for the best."
It takes Lacey a moment to gather her things and her person, to snatch her jacket off the abominable sofa and shove her purse underneath her arm. She feels unsteady in her shoes as she makes her way back toward the foyer. They were all wrong for a baseball game, she sees now. Everything she did was all wrong.
Jimmy scrubs a hand over his face, yanking ineffectually at his beard. "Lacey," he says, and for a second she thinks he's going to be himself again, tell her he's sorry, he's being ridiculous, he's falling in love with her. That they can get through this together. That they can be a team.
"You need to leave through the garage," he reminds her quietly. "There's press outside."
Lacey laughs out loud, sharp and ringing. "No shit, Jimmy." Both of them stand in silence as she waits for the elevator, her heels echoing as she steps inside. She waits until the doors whoosh shut behind her before she crouches on the floor, makes herself as small as humanly possible, and lets herself start to cry.