Page 19 of Under the Spotlight

Dani’s hair was dark still damp from the shower and in its usual loose braid. Her gray blue eyes looked nervous as though she wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen next and if she was honest with herself, neither was Roxy.

"Do you want water?" she said. "I have water. I have, honestly, only water, I didn't think the grocery part through, I was very focused on the part where nobody would know where I was.” She heard herself doing it, the patter, the fluency, the thing she reached for to fill a silence like other people reach for a railing. "There's also tea, I think the last person left tea.”

"I don't want water. Or tea.” Dani said.

"Okay." Roxy's hands went still at her sides.

"Roxy."

"Yeah."

Dani stood just inside the door with her coat still on and her hood pushed back and the snow melting in her dark braid, and she looked at Roxy across the little kitchen with the gray eyes that had spent a month refusing to land on her, landing on her now, full weight, nowhere else to be. "You can stop performing,” Dani said. "There's nobody here. It's just me."

It went through Roxy like a key in a lock she'd forgotten she had. You can stop performing. Ten years of every word she said being a product, every appearance a performance. And here was Dani, beautiful, mysterious Dani telling her she could stop.

So she stopped. She made herself stop. It was harder than a high note. She crossed the small space between them, three steps, no patter, and she lifted both hands and pushed the coat off Dani's shoulders so it dropped to the floor behind her, and she put her mouth on Dani's mouth.

She kissed her slowly. She made it a question the whole way through, because everything Roxy knew about this woman said she had to, that anything that arrived too fast or too sure would close her like a fist, and so Roxy kissed her like she was coaxing a thing out of hiding, soft, unhurried, pulling back a breath to give her the room to stop it and then coming back when she didn't, asking with her mouth the entire time, is this, is this, can I. Dani's hands came up slow and found Roxy's waist and held on. Her mouth opened under Roxy's. And the small sound she made, low in her throat, when Roxy's tongue touched hers, was the least controlled thing Roxy had ever gotten out of her, and it lit Roxy up from the soles of her feet.

"Couch," Roxy said against her mouth. "Come here."

She walked her backward out of the kitchen with her hands fisted in the front of Dani's hoodie, and they undressed each other in pieces in the lamplight, slow, taking turns, no rush anywhere in it. Roxy pulled Dani's hoodie up over her head and Dani let her, lifting her arms like a kid, and underneath was a plain gray tee and underneath that was the body Roxy had watched move like water in a glass box, the broad shoulders, the strong arms, a white scar on one forearm she put her mouth to without asking what it was. Dani found the hem of Roxy's oversized shirt and stopped, hands at the cotton, looking up.

"Can I?" Dani said.

"God, yes."

She drew it off slow, and Roxy let her look, and that was a new thing, being looked at in a way that didn’t feel like they were taking from her. Dani looked at her as she looked at everything, quiet and complete, no commentary, and Roxy felt her gaze move over her bare skin like warmth off a fire, and there was nothing performed in how her breath went short, nothing she was doing for effect, because there was no effect to do it for. Just Dani's hands. Just Dani's mouth finding the side of her neck, her collarbone, lower, slow, and Roxy's head going back against the couch cushion, and Roxy's own hands shaking, genuinely shaking, as she got Dani out of the gray tee and the sports bra under it and finally, finally got her hands on all that warm bare skin.

They sank down together onto the couch, tangled, Roxy half under her, and for a long while it was only hands, both of them, everywhere at once. Roxy ran her palms up the broad muscle of Dani's back and Dani's mouth found Roxy's breast, tongue circling her nipple and then closing over it, and Roxy arched up with a sound she had to catch in her teeth, because the walls here were thin and she was, for once in her loud public life, going to have to be silent about the realest thing that had ever happened to her. They moved against each other slow and then not slow at all, Roxy's thigh pushing up between Dani's and Dani rocking down onto it with a hitch in her breath, Roxy's own hand sliding down to find Dani already wet against her fingers, both of them gasping at the same second, everything tangled together until there was no telling whose pleasure was whose. Nobody was waiting their turn. Nobody was keeping score. It was just the two of them moving like they'd been starved for exactly this and finally got let into the room with it.

It could have stayed there. Roxy could have come just like this, grinding up against Dani's hip with Dani's mouth at her breast and her own fingers slick between Dani's legs. But Dani's mouth went lower, down her stomach, unhurried, leaving a wake of heat, and Roxy looked down the length of her own body at the dark head moving lower and understood exactly where this was going and thought she might come apart before they got there.

"Dani." Her hand found the dark hair. "You don't have to⁠—"

"I know I don't have to." Dani looked up at her from her hipbone, mouth grazing the skin there, gray eyes steady. "That's not why I'm doing it."

And then her mouth was between Roxy's legs.

She did it as she did everything, no wasted motion, completely present, reading the next thing off Roxy's body before Roxy knew it was the next thing, except there was nothing gentle about what it did to her. Dani's tongue moved against her clit slow and broad, and when Roxy's hips came up off the couch Dani slid an arm across them and held her down and opened her up to it and took her time, and the unrushed patience of it was filthier than rough would ever have been. Roxy got a hand in her dark hair and pulled, and Dani groaned into her, and the groan went through Roxy like current. The woman who'd told her in a diner that the crease was the only place she felt safe had found a second one and gone down into it and had no intention of coming up, and the place was Roxy.

She bit down on her own forearm to keep from bringing the rented walls down.

Her pleasure built and kept building, Dani's tongue and then two fingers pushing up into her, curling, and Roxy was soaking and could hear it, could hear Dani's mouth on her, wet and greedy and past caring how it sounded. When Dani found the spot that drew her whole body tight as a wire she stayed there, right there, the patience gone now, hungry, relentless. And Roxy fisted both hands in her hair and set her teeth in her own arm and came against Dani's mouth so hard the room went white, shaking, silent, more naked than she'd ever been in her life.

She didn't come down. She didn't want to. She was still pulsing, still gasping into the crook of her own arm, when she reached down and dragged Dani up the length of her by the shoulders, because she couldn't wait one more second to get Dani’s mouth back, and she kissed her open and filthy and licked the taste of herself off Dani's lips and sucked Dani’s tongue into her mouth and made a sound at it she'd have died of anywhere else. And she was already moving, already rolling them, already getting a thigh between Dani's legs and dragging at the waistband of what Dani still had on, because the wanting had swung around the other way now and she was starving with it.

Because this was the part she hadn't known to want. Roxy wanted, more than she'd wanted anything in years, to be the one who got to undo Dani and take the walls down for her.

She got her hand to the edge of where Dani was wet and stopped, just barely touching, and felt her go still underneath her. Roxy put her mouth to her ear. "Tell me I can," she breathed. "I'm not taking anything from you. I swear it. Tell me you want this.”

"Yes." It came out of Dani cracked all the way open. "I want you to. God, yes."

And Roxy slid two fingers into her, and Dani's whole body arched up off the couch into her hand, soaked, swollen, all that famous control gone like it had never been there, and the sound she made was nothing a teammate or a diner or seven careful years had ever gotten out of her. Roxy worked her slow and deep, thumb circling her clit, and didn't stop kissing her, caught every sound in her own mouth, their foreheads pressed together and Dani's hips rolling up to meet her hand and Dani's fingers digging hard enough into her back to mark, holding on like the crease was gone and the boards were gone and Roxy was the only solid thing left to hold onto in the whole world. "I've got you," Roxy breathed against her open mouth. "Let go. I've got you." And Dani let go, came apart silent and shaking and wide open in Roxy's arms with her teeth set in Roxy's shoulder to stay quiet, the most private woman in the world undone in her hands, and Roxy held her through every wave of it and had never once in her life felt so trusted with anything.

For a while neither of them moved. They stayed tangled on the couch in the lamplight with their legs still threaded together and Dani's face still hidden in Roxy's neck, both of them breathing hard, sweat cooling on their skin, and Roxy kept her mouth at Dani's temple and her arms wrapped all the way around her and didn't let go. She could feel Dani's heart slamming and then slowing against her own chest. She could feel the exact moment the last of the tension went out of those broad shoulders, the braced thing finally setting itself down. When Dani lifted her head at last her gray eyes were soft in a way Roxy hadn't seen on her before and Roxy kissed her, slow this time, tasting sex on her lips, no hurry left in either of them, and felt Dani smile against her mouth, the first real smile she'd ever felt her give.

They made it to the bed eventually, on unsteady legs, and lay tangled under a comforter that came with the rental, in the dark with the lamp off and the snow ticking faint against the window, and Roxy traced the line of Dani's collarbone, over and over, because she couldn't stop touching her now that she was allowed.