Chapter Five Lacey

Chapter Five

Lacey

S HE WAKES UP WITH A GASP AT SIX THIRTY, HER HEART POUNDING.

Lacey gropes for her phone on the nightstand, fumbling it with clumsy hands and dropping it with a thud on the hotel carpet. Holy shit, what was she thinking ? Anyone could have taken pictures. Anyone could have seen. Lacey hasn't been that careless in years. She's never been that careless, if she's being honest with herself; on her grave, it will probably say, Here Lies Lacey Logan! She cared A LOT. Is this what drunk people feel like the morning after a bender? Does her mom feel like this all the time?

Lacey fishes the phone off the floor and forces herself to search Lacey Logan + Jimmy Hodges , her whole body going soft with relief when the only thing that comes up is a photo of her singing the national anthem at an Orioles game seven years ago. Lacey flops back onto the mattress, waiting for her breathing to slow before reaching up for her water bottle. She didn't drink the whole thing before bed and she can feel it now, the stale, recycled dryness of the hotel in her skin and her sinuses. The insides of her thighs feel raw underneath her pajama shorts, and it takes her a second to realize it's from the scrape of Jimmy's beard.

Lacey opens a new search window. Jimmy Hodges + girlfriends , she types, then clicks on a slideshow from Entertainment Tonight . It's old stuff, mostly, from before he was married: three moderately famous actresses, one singer who died a few years later in a car accident. Two Victoria's Secret models. One Olympic gymnast. They probably had very athletic sex, Lacey thinks with a bizarre, inappropriate stab of jealousy, then sucks down the rest of her water even though it makes her feel a little sloshy.

His ex-wife wasn't famous, she notes. His ex-wife was a schoolteacher from Aberdeen. Lacey doesn't know why that's interesting to her, but it is.

Her phone dings just as she's about to try and find something more recent, and Lacey startles, dropping it onto the mattress one more time. Morning! Claire's texted from her room next door, just like she does every day at precisely seven a.m. Let me know when you're ready for coffee.

I'm up! Lacey texts back, then chews her bottom lip for a moment . Also, would you mind setting up a call with Maddie for sometime this morning?

The typing bubble appears, then disappears, then appears again. Lacey knows Claire wants to ask what the call is for, and also knows that she isn't going to. ofc! Claire assures her. Will do.

Lacey showers and pulls on a tank and leggings, slips a lightweight hoodie on overtop. When she looks in the mirror she can see that her mouth is still a little bit swollen from last night, smudged around the edges; she touches her lips with her fingertips, just gently, shivering at the memory of Jimmy's warm tongue rasping against hers. She's embarrassed by the way she ran out of the bar—she was flustered enough when she came back from the bathroom that Javi asked, just once and very quietly, if everything was okay—and a little guilty about the things she said to Jimmy as she was leaving, even if the Entertainment Tonight slideshow does seem to confirm her general impression of him as a person who probably messes around with women in public places every day of the week. She was rattled by her own desire, the sudden, starving intensity of it. She was rattled by how badly she didn't want to stop.

It doesn't matter, Lacey tells herself as Claire knocks on the door that separates her suite from Lacey's. It's not like she's ever going to see him again. It's a thing that happened, that's all; she'll talk to Maddie, they'll address it, and then everyone will move on. Lacey knows how to control a story. Lacey is, and has always been, the one in charge.

"How was your night?" Claire asks, handing her the latte and pulling up the schedule on her iPad.

"Good," Lacey promises, and settles in to hear about her day.

They have to be at Teterboro at nine for the flight to Toronto, and Maddie FaceTimes from LA while they're still in the tunnel, the connection a little stuttery and slow. "Hey there!" Maddie says, immaculately dressed and seated in her office even though it's barely five a.m. in California. Maddie took Lacey with her when she started her own PR firm eleven years ago, back before either one of them was nearly this successful. Lacey likes to think it paid off for them both. "How was New York?"

"It was great," Lacey says automatically, and they do another few minutes of what Lacey always thinks of as gals-in-business chitchat before finally she takes a deep breath, tucking one leg underneath her. "So, this definitely isn't a big deal," she begins, "but I did want to get out in front of it just in case."

"Sure thing," Maddie says brightly, though Lacey catches the flicker of trepidation on her face in the moment before she can school it coolly away. None of them ever like to let Lacey see them lose their composure. "Hit me."

Lacey explains it as casually as she can—making a jokey, madcap adventure of it, playing up the goofiness of the thing with the mozzarella sticks. If Javi, sitting quietly next to Chris in the front seat of the SUV, has anything to contribute by way of clarifying details, Lacey knows he would never volunteer them in a million years. "Anyway," she finishes breezily, "if you hear something in the next couple of days about me and Jimmy Hodges from the Orioles going to some random bar in the West Village, that's why."

"What bar?" Maddie asks, making a note.

"I have no idea," Lacey says honestly, which leads to ten excruciating minutes of Claire pulling up the websites of various places until finally Maddie tells her not to worry about it and sets her pen down on her desk.

"Okay," she says, her voice perfectly even. "Did anything happen between you guys I need to know about?"

Lacey hesitates for the barest fraction of a second. She knows, she knows Maddie can only do her job if Lacey is 100 percent honest with her. Maddie was Lacey's first call when she found out about Toby and the coke, her first call when she found out about Toby and Audriana; Maddie is one of exactly four people on Lacey's payroll who know the whole truth about Lacey's mom. Lacey trusts Maddie completely, and she's fully aware that the correct thing to do is to come clean, or at least clean-ish, to say she and Jimmy kissed or whatever and have Claire call the lawyers about drawing up an NDA.

But then she thinks of the way he rubbed along her hip bone with the thumb of his free hand while she worked through her long, shuddering orgasm. She thinks of his giant shoulders. She thinks of the sound of his laugh. Maybe Jimmy does that kind of thing all the time, with all kinds of people, but Lacey doesn't. And it's something she doesn't want to share.

"Nope," she promises Maddie brightly. "Nothing you need to know about."

He's not going to say anything, Lacey tells herself, collapsing into her seat on the plane with her noise-canceling headphones and a cashmere blanket twenty minutes later. He's not the type.

At least, she doesn't think he's the type.

She fucking hopes not.

The rest of the day goes exactly as Claire outlined it for her over breakfast this morning: They get settled into the hotel in Toronto. Lacey eats a double protein salad and takes a nap. They head over to the Rogers Centre in the late afternoon to do the sound check, then down into the labyrinthine bowels of the stadium; Lacey sits in hair and makeup, watching the local news in her dressing room while forty thousand fans shuffle in above her, and all she can think about the whole time any of it is happening is the thickness of Jimmy's fingers inside her. The curve of his smile against her ear.

"You're not getting sick, are you?" Claire asks, handing her a water bottle. It's twenty minutes to places; Lacey can hear the thrilled, thunderous roar of the crowd overhead. "I feel like you've been quiet today."

"I'm great," Lacey promises, trying to ignore the way the insides of her thighs are still stinging pleasantly within her three layers of dance tights. "Ready to roll." Then, a moment later: "Sorry I didn't get a chance to fill you in ahead of time," she says quietly, "about, you know. The whole Jimmy Hodges thing." She caught it on Claire's canny, foxlike face as she was telling the story to Maddie—a flash of surprise, what might or might not have been hurt at the lack of a heads-up before the call. It's not like Lacey doesn't get it: normally she doesn't so much as take a Midol without giving Claire both full advance warning and a detailed postmortem. "I guess I have been a little out of it."

It's thin, as far as excuses go, but Claire just shakes her head. "No worries," she chirps. "Sounds like a nonissue, right?"

"Absolutely," Lacey agrees gratefully. "Total nonissue."

Just before she needs to go on she picks up her phone and googles it, Yankees vs. Orioles , scanning the results from this afternoon's game in the Bronx. Orioles 5–4 , she reads, a slow smile spreading over her face. Jimmy Hodges homered in the eighth to break a tie.

Lacey laughs loudly enough that Claire looks up quizzically from her iPad, hit with a rush of gratified pleasure that's almost embarrassing for how strong and sentimental it is. So he had a good day at the office, she scolds herself as the five-minute warning sounds over the loudspeakers. It has nothing to do with Lacey herself.

Still, though. Still.

She doesn't have his phone number. She could ask Claire to find it, which is what she has done every other time she's wanted to get in touch with someone in the last six years, but she doesn't want Claire to know about this, so she waits for Claire to go back to whatever she's looking at and pulls up Instagram instead. He doesn't follow her, Lacey notices, trying not to feel stupidly disappointed by that. After all, it's not like she follows him, either. She doesn't follow anyone anymore, not since three albums ago when she deleted her account and started over again six months later to coincide with the release of a single called "Phoenix," briefly crashing the app in the process. She sent lunch to the corporate offices by way of apology.

Just saying , she types now, once she's clicked the icon to send jimmyhodges14 a private message, it seems to have done something for *somebody's* career.

"Lacey?" There's the PA at the door to her dressing room, a serious-looking Canadian in stage blacks and a headset. "It's time."

Lacey takes a deep breath, then locks her phone and hands it to Claire for safekeeping. Heads upstairs to the stage.