Page 14 of Under the Spotlight

Roxy understood the offer because she spoke the language from the other side. She had locks too. Hers just looked like openness, like a smile she handed out two hundred times a night, like a public life so loud and so available that no one ever thought to ask what it was built to hide. Two women made out of locks, finding out by accident that they fit. It should have terrified her, and it mostly did, but underneath the terror was the first clean want she had let herself feel in years, and she wasn't going to waste it being afraid.

She started, in her head, to pack.

Tilda came in an hour later with a garment bag and a list, and found Roxy on the couch grinning at her phone like a teenager.

"Okay," Tilda said, stopping dead in the doorway. "No. Whatever that is, no. I have seen that face on other people and it has never once made my job easier." She hung the garment bag on the closet door. "Who is it?"

"Nobody." Roxy pocketed the phone. "I need you to clear my press day on the morning of the Montreal trip. The fourteenth. Move the radio thing, push the magazine call."

"You don't have anything in Montreal."

"I'm traveling with the team. Ambassador coverage. Astoria approved it." Roxy stood and stretched, loose and easy in a way she hadn't felt in years, and watched Tilda clock that too, the looseness, because Tilda clocked everything. Three years she had watched Roxy come home from tours hollowed out, had poured her into beds and out of cars and never once said the obvious aloud, which was that the most successful woman she worked for was also the quietly unhappiest. And here was Roxy, loose and lit up and grinning, over a hockey charter. Tilda was far too good at her job not to be a little frightened of it.

"Mm," was all she said. She looked at Roxy a moment, kept whatever she decided, and pulled out her tablet. "The fourteenth. I'll move the radio thing." At the door she paused. "Vivienne's going to ask why you're on a hockey charter to Montreal instead of in a studio in London."

"Then I'll be hard to reach," Roxy said. "I'm good at that. It's practically the whole job."

Tilda almost smiled, and didn't, and left, and Roxy stood in the quiet after the door clicked and understood that she had just lied to two of the four people on earth she didn't lie to, Tilda and herself, and that it was the same lie in both directions. Nobody. Good optics. Ambassador coverage. She was getting on a plane to sit near a woman she couldn't stop thinking about, and she was calling it work, as she'd called everything work for ten years. The only difference this time was that the work was the cover and the want was the truth, instead of the other way around.

That night Roxy couldn't sleep, which was nothing new, except this wasn't the bad kind. Not the staring kind, the two-years-of-static kind. This was the old kind. The kind from before. The kind where something was moving under her sternum and wanted out and wouldn't let her rest until she'd let it.

She got up and got the notepad and her phone and opened the file marked DP.

The seven lines were still there, exactly where she'd left them, the hallway and the cold door and the woman who wouldn't look up. Roxy read them once, and the second verse came the way the first one had, all at once, like it had been waiting in the next room the whole time for her to open the door. This was the thing she'd thought was gone for good, the thing she had quietly buried and mourned and stopped mentioning in interviews. The feeling of a song writing itself, of being less its author than the person who happened to be holding the pen when it arrived. She'd been so sure she had used it up, sold it off with everything else, that whatever let her do this had been one more thing the machine took and never gave back. And here it was. Not gone. Just waiting, apparently, for her to feel something real enough to be worth the trouble of saying.

She wrote about three weeks of texting into a dark that didn't answer. She wrote about a glove reaching into the air and taking back something that was already gone. She wrote, without quite deciding to, about it's fine meaning a door left unlocked, and how she would take that, how she would take a thousand of those, how a woman who only knew how to hand you locks had given her the unlocking of one and not even known what she'd done.

She didn't write Dani’s name. She never wrote her name. But she knew whose verse it was, and so would anyone, someday, if she ever let them hear it, which she wouldn't, because some songs you write to keep and not to sell.

She sang it to herself once, recording it on her phone.

She listened back on her phone once, the tinny voice-memo version, her own voice cracking on the high note in the chorus because she'd been crying a little and hadn't noticed. She sat with that a second, the crying, the not-noticing. She cried on cue for music videos. She had a whole technique for it, a thing she did with her breath that a director had taught her at nineteen. She hadn't cried by accident, alone, over a woman, in longer than she could remember, and the tears on her face now were so unfamiliar she had to touch them to be sure they were hers.

It was the best thing she'd written in years.

She saved it deeper in the folder, under two more layers, where even she would have to mean it to find it again. Then she lay back down in the enormous bed and didn't sleep, and for once in two years she didn't mind, because a few miles away a woman she couldn't stop writing about had a charter to Montreal in her calendar with Roxy's name three rows up from hers, and that was going to happen, in the real world, in a week. She let herself be exactly that stupid about it for the length of one sleepless night, a grown woman looking forward to a Thursday, and it was the most ordinary she had felt in ten years, and she wouldn't have traded it for anything the fame had ever bought her.

8

The charter boarded at dawn, and Dani clocked Roxy three rows up before she'd found her own seat, the honey-blonde knot of hair above a hoodie, Tilda beside her with a tablet already glowing. Dani put her bag in the overhead and sat down and didn't look at the back of that head, which took roughly the same effort as a third period.

Frankie dropped into the seat beside her with a coffee in each hand and a look on her face Dani didn't care for.

"Morning," Frankie said, far too pleasantly, and handed her one of the coffees. "Funny. The ambassador's on our flight."

"Promotional value." Dani took the coffee. "Brand alongside the players."

"That's almost word for word what the email said." Frankie sipped. "You memorize the email?"

"Eat something, Frankie."

Dani put her headphones in and her hood up and closed her eyes and didn't sleep, and three rows away a woman she'd been texting at midnight for a week was doing whatever she was doing, and the plane took them both north into a gray morning sky with weather stacking up underneath it like a problem nobody had read yet.

They beat Montreal in overtime. Dani had the win quietly, as she liked them, thirty saves and nothing flashy, a goal off a Lou point shot with two minutes left in the extra frame and the bench coming over the boards. She'd felt the box the whole game, the one bright spot of attention up behind the glass, and she'd let herself look exactly once, at the final horn, and Roxy had been standing with both hands pressed flat to the glass again, not even pretending, and Dani had looked away first and not stopped smiling for ten minutes.

By the time they got to the airport the storm had come down off the lake and shut the whole region in. Flights scrubbed across the board, the departures screen a long column of red, and the team stood in a cold terminal while the travel staff worked the phones, and the answer that came back was a regional airport hotel and try again in the morning. They bussed over through snow coming sideways in the headlights. The hotel was the kind that existed entirely to catch grounded travelers, low and beige, a lobby that smelled like carpet shampoo and a single bored clerk handing out keys to a hockey team at eleven at night. Dani had spent half her life in places like this, the interchangeable hotels of a road schedule, and she knew the loneliness of them and had never once minded it, because a locked door in a strange town was only a smaller version of the locked door she lived behind everywhere. Tonight, for some reason she didn't look at too hard, the beige hallway and the carpet smell and the snow stacking on the windows didn't feel like solitude. They felt like the inside of a snow globe somebody had picked up and shaken, a place set a little apart from the regular world, where the regular rules had been, for one night, suspended.

They bunked the whole roster on one floor. Tilda materialized out of the chaos and extracted Roxy toward a room at the far end, brisk and practiced, because getting her boss behind a door was the entire job, and Dani caught one look from Roxy down the length of the hallway, just one, before the door closed, and then she let herself into her own room and stood in it.