Page 20 of Under the Spotlight

"Can I tell you something?" Roxy said.

"Mm."

"My real name's not Roxy. I mean it's mine now, legally, I changed it, but it's not the one I was born with." She kept tracing the collarbone. Her voice had gone strange. "Nobody calls me by the first one anymore. My mother stopped when I was about seventeen. It's on, like, two documents in a vault somewhere and that's it, the actual me, filed away where nobody goes." She breathed. "Roxana. Roxana Halliday. That's who I was before any of it."

The dark held still. Dani turned her head on the pillow.

"Roxana Halliday," Dani said, low, careful, like she was handling something fragile. Like she understood exactly what she'd been handed. She said it again, softer, just to her, into the dark of a rented room nobody knew the address of. "Roxana."

And Roxy, who hadn't cried by accident in years, who cried on cue for cameras and never anywhere else, felt it come up out of nowhere and spill over, silent, her face wet in the dark against Dani's shoulder, crying for a reason she couldn't have named if her life had hung on it. She wasn't sad. It wasn't sadness. It was something else.

Dani didn't ask why she was crying. That was the mercy of her. She just turned and gathered Roxy in, both arms, and held her, and pressed her mouth to Roxy's wet temple and left it there, and said nothing at all and Roxy understood every word.

She fell asleep first. She never fell asleep first. She fell asleep with her face against Dani's chest and Dani's heartbeat under her ear, slow and even, the most reliable sound she'd heard in a decade, and she slept without static for the first time in two years.

She woke at five to the bed cold beside her and a shape at the door.

Dani was dressed, hoodie back on, bag over her shoulder, fitting the world back over herself piece by piece, the same as she'd taken it off. For a half-second Roxy's whole chest dropped, the old reflex, here it is, here's the part where they leave and it meant nothing. Then Dani crossed back to the bed in the gray dark and sat on the edge of it and put a hand to the side of Roxy's face, and Roxy turned into the palm of it.

"I have skate at six," Dani said. "I'm always early. People would notice if I wasn't." A pause. "That's the only reason I'm going.”

"I know."

Dani leaned down and kissed her, once, slow, nothing rushed in it even now. "I'll come back tonight," she said, against Roxy's mouth, and it wasn't a question and it wasn't a line, it was a fact, stated flat in the dark by a woman who didn't say things she didn't mean, and then she was up and gone, the door clicking soft behind her, careful even in that.

Roxy lay in the warm hollow Dani had left and listened to her go down the stairs and out the side door into the snow. She pulled the pillow over and put her face in it where the smell of her still was. She lay on her back in the gray light with the whole city not knowing where she was, and she smiled at the ceiling like an idiot, like a teenager, like a person, until the room went gold with morning and it was time to be someone else again.

Tonight, she thought, holding the word like the screenshot, like the song, the third thing now in the locked folder of her actual life. She'll come back tonight. Roxana Halliday closed her eyes in a bed nobody could find and let herself believe it.

12

She drove home at five-thirty in the dark with the heater ticking and her body not her own.

That was the only way Dani could think of it, that her body had been handed back to her at the rental door an hour ago and she hadn't yet figured out how to wear it. Everything was too loud against her skin, the seat belt, the cold steering wheel, the seam of her own sleeve. She'd had sex before. Occasionally. She'd had careful, controlled, detached sex with careful, controlled women in other cities, the kind you could get up from and drive away from with your locks all still in place, and she had told herself for seven years that this was a thing she did fine, that she'd kept the one drawer she needed and given away the rest. She understood now, at five-thirty in the morning on an empty road, that she had never once done what she'd done last night, which was let somebody all the way in and then lie there afterward and let them hold her while she shook. There was no drawer for that. It had gone into all of her at once.

She showered. The water was too loud too, and too warm, and it found every place Roxy's mouth had been and reminded her, and she stood under it longer than she ever did and came out no steadier. She kept catching herself in small stupid ways, her own reflection in the dark bathroom mirror, the shape of her own mouth, a soreness low in her she'd put there on purpose for once in her life. She ate three boiled eggs standing at the counter without tasting them, because the body needed fuel and she fueled it, like gassing a car you had to drive whether you felt like it or not. She got to the rink fifteen minutes early, because she was always fifteen minutes early, and the one rule she had left this morning was that nothing on the outside was going to show. The outside had always been the easy part. She'd built the outside specifically so it would never show anything. It was the inside that had come off its hinges in the night, and there was no drill for putting that back, and some quiet part of her, under the wreckage, didn't want to.

Lex was already in the gear room. She looked up when Dani came in, and her eyes went over Dani once, slow, as Lex read everything, and one corner of her mouth moved, and she didn't say a single word. She just looked back down at her skate laces with that knowing tilt to her head, and Dani sat down at her own stall and started taping and said nothing back, and the not-saying held all the way through, which from Lex Landry was practically a kindness, and they both knew it.

The practice was a disaster.

Dani had been a professional goaltender for eleven years and the one thing she could always do, the floor under everything, the thing that didn't move when the rest of her life did, was stop a puck in a drill she'd run ten thousand times. She couldn't do it this morning. Camille beat her clean three times, two of them on moves Dani had read off her stick since for years, and she got a glove on the third and dropped it, and Lex walked in twice and roofed both because Dani was a half-count slow dropping into the butterfly, a half-count that may as well have been an hour. Her edges felt borrowed. Her hands felt like somebody else's hands. She'd spent seven years playing behind a wall and this morning the wall was just gone, taken down brick by brick on a couch in a rented apartment, and it turned out she had been using it for more than she knew. It had been holding the net up too.

Mara blew the whistle halfway through and waved the backup in.

She didn't yell. That was the part that nearly undid Dani worse than the goals. Mara Ellison had a voice that could strip paint and Dani had been on the wrong end of it maybe twice in five years and deserved it both times, and this morning Mara skated over with Goldie's gray muzzle watching from the bench door and just stopped beside the crease and looked at Dani for a second.

"You hurt?" Mara said. Low. Just for her.

"No." Dani kept her eyes on the crease.

"You sick?"

"No."

Mara looked at her a moment longer, and Dani watched her decide not to ask the third question, the real one, the one a fifty-something year-old coach who'd seen everything already half knew. "Hit the bike," Mara said. "Get your legs back. You're no good to me leaking five before 9am.” She tapped Dani's pad with her stick, the same as Frankie did, the team's whole dialect of I'm not going to say the soft thing but here is the soft thing, and skated off, and Dani went and sat on the bike in the hallway and pedaled and stared at the wall and tried to find the wall inside herself and couldn't.

Frankie found her in the locker room after, when it had cleared, when Dani was sitting at her stall in her base layer with her elbows on her knees and her head down, looking at the rubber floor and the puddle of melt under her skates and trying to understand how a person could be the happiest she'd been in years and the worst she'd played in years at the same identical time.