Chapter Three Lacey

Chapter Three

Lacey

J IMMY DOESN'T SAY ANYTHING FOR A FULL THIRTY SECONDS AFTER she suggests it. Lacey watches as a thousand different expressions skitter across his face: amusement, curiosity, deep and abiding skepticism. A warm flicker, quick but unmistakable, of desire.

"What... would even be the procedure for something like that?" he asks finally, rubbing a speculative hand over his beard. "For you to, like, leave a location? Do you need to call someone?"

"Like who?"

Jimmy shrugs. "I don't know," he says. "The Secret Service? Whoever you call."

"The Secret—" Lacey snorts. "You're insane."

" I'm insane?" Jimmy laughs, low and rumbling. "You're the international superstar who wants to leave this very nice bar with me, some fat fuck you just met."

"First of all, don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"You know like what." She pitches her voice low and dopey. " International superstar ."

Jimmy smirks. "What, am I embarrassing you?"

"No, of course not, I just—"

"Because I gotta tell you, you're pretty successful. It's a little late for polite modesty about your career."

Lacey huffs a breath. "Okay," she says, shaking her head, angling her body away from him. This was a wild hair, that's all. She was being silly for a minute. "You know what? If you don't actually want to do this, then—"

"Hold on a second," he cuts her off, holding a finger up. "I definitely never said I didn't want to."

"Really?" she counters. "Because I wouldn't say you sound particularly enthusiastic about the idea."

Jimmy fixes her with a look then, long and leveling. "Lacey," he says, so quietly she almost doesn't hear him. "Come on."

Lacey breathes in, the sound of him saying her name briefly but violently rearranging all her organs. She knew who he was before he came over here. Of course she knew who he was, Jimmy Hodges with his beard and his big shoulders and his unfashionable button-down. He was Rookie of the Year back when she was in high school, all shaggy hair and sulky mouth and a million ingenue girlfriends. Lacey had his milk ad taped to the wall above her bed. He's thirty-seven or thirty-eight now, she calculates, five or six years older than she is. She clocked him as soon as he walked in.

"Wait here," she instructs, then gets up to go find Javi.

There is a procedure, obviously. The procedure is that she tells Claire where she wants to go and Claire handles it, calling ahead to let them know Lacey's coming and coordinating with Javi and the rest of the security team. At least, that's how it used to work. She stopped going to so many places when she was dating Toby, on account of how moody and jealous he always got whenever they went out.

Fuck Toby, Lacey thinks with surprising ferocity. And fuck Claire! Well, no, not fuck Claire , Lacey loves Claire. Claire is arguably the person she is closest to in the entire world, but fuck the procedure . The procedure is how she wound up with Toby in the first place, the two of them set up on a lunch date by their managers in LA three years ago. The procedure feels abruptly absurd.

Javi is standing near the emergency exit, crisp as nine a.m. in his tailored blue suit even though it's well after midnight. "I want to get out of here," she tells him. "And I want to travel light."

Javi nods, his gaze flicking over her shoulder for a fraction of a second. Travel light means one bodyguard and a driver. "All right."

She finds Jimmy right where she left him, tall and broad and barrel-chested, incongruous in the floral print and neon of the club. "Come on," she says, and she can hear that she sounds a little breathless. "Let's go."

Jimmy considers her for another moment, like he's gauging something. "Okay," he agrees finally. "Let's go."

They leave through the service elevator, same as the one she came up through. Christopher is waiting in the garage. Jimmy puts a hand on her lower back—just lightly, just the very tips of his fingers—as she boosts herself up into the SUV.

"Are you okay to drive around the neighborhood for a bit?" she asks Chris, leaning forward a little as Javi buckles himself into the passenger seat. "I'll tell you when to stop." She sits back, the edge of her thigh brushing Jimmy's. She hopes she sounds more confident than she feels.

She does not, evidently: "You got a destination in mind?" Jimmy asks her as they turn the corner onto West 14th, the lights from the bars and clubs and restaurants winking across his face through the window. Lacey only knows the fancy places.

"No, actually," she admits. "I'm kind of flying by the seat of my pants here."

"Fair enough," Jimmy says easily, settling the bulk of his body back against the seat. "I guess I just didn't think that was your style."

"It's not."

Lacey peers out the window as the SUV creeps along the narrow street, everything too bright or too trendy or too public, until all at once she spots it: a deeply unremarkable tavern a little ways from the corner, its tall front windows flung open to the balmy night. "What about that one?" she asks, looking first to Jimmy and then to Javi. "That one could be good."

Chris pulls over in front of a hydrant. "Wait here," Javi instructs.

The car is quiet for a moment, all of them breathing. When Lacey glances over at Jimmy she sees he's gazing frankly back. She shifts her weight in the seat, her whole body warm and humming. She doesn't know what her deal is tonight: she's never into guys like this, the kind who look like they could fling you over their shoulder and carry you back to a cave somewhere to have their way with you. Toby could have fit in her jeans with room to spare.

"It's fine," Javi reports a moment later, Chris rolling down the passenger-side window as he strides back across the sidewalk. "We're good."

"They're not kicking people out, are they?" Lacey asks nervously. "I don't want to, like—"

But Javi shakes his head. "There's hardly anyone in there."

He's right: the place is mostly empty, just a couple of middle-aged drinkers at a table in the corner. An old Marc Cohn song is playing on the speakers overhead. It's not a dive, exactly; instead it's just deeply anonymous, with brick walls and black wooden barstools, Edison bulbs in little wire cages hanging in a row above the bar. They could be anywhere. They could be any body .

"This is perfect," Lacey announces.

Jimmy looks at her a little oddly. Lacey feels herself blush, all at once exquisitely aware of the lunacy of having ghosted her most gossipy friend to go sit at a weird bar with this stranger while her head of security sips a bottle of water across the room. She and Toby had been together three months before they were ever even photographed in the same zip code. This is emphatically not the kind of thing she does.

Well, she thinks, as Jimmy settles himself onto a stool and orders a Brooklyn Summer, she's in it now. Nothing to do at this point but soldier through.

"So," she says, once she's asked the bartender for a club soda and cranberry, "what's your favorite thing about living in Baltimore?"

Jimmy blinks, probably because it sounds very much like she's interviewing him for a profile in Chesapeake Bay Magazine . "My favorite thing?"

"Yeah." Lacey shrugs, determined. "You've stayed there your whole career, right? You must love it, to have been there so long."

"That's not... totally how it works."

"No, I know that." Lacey winces. "I mean, of course I know that. I just—"

"I do, though," he interrupts, apparently having decided at the last possible second to bail her out after all. "Love it, that is. The people, mostly. They're scrappy." He takes a sip of his beer. "Also, the crab cakes are lights out."

Lacey feels her shoulders drop in gratitude. "I have heard the crab cakes are special."

"You've never had the crab cakes?"

She shakes her head. "I've been a vegetarian since I was twelve."

"Yeah, well." Jimmy shrugs, like What can you do? "Nobody's perfect."

Lacey grins. "I'm close, though, right?"

Jimmy barks out a laugh, rowdy and surprised, but then it vanishes into the air halfway through—and oh, the way he's looking at her, like he can't quite believe she's happening to him. Like he doesn't quite believe she's real. "I think," he says slowly, "that is probably true."

Neither one of them says anything for a minute. Finally, Lacey clears her throat. "How's your season going?" she asks, reaching for her drink and fussing with the straw for a moment. Her hands aren't shaking, but it's a near thing.

Jimmy smirks. Just like that he's himself again, a veteran ballplayer, unflappable and wry. "Well, as you may have seen on the local news, Lacey, we got killed by the Yankees today."

"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.