Page 25 of Under the Spotlight

"Rude." Roxy bit her lower lip, gently, in retaliation, and Dani felt it everywhere. "Turn the burner off, then. If you're going to be like this."

Dani reached over and turned the burner off without looking away from her, and Roxy laughed, delighted, and kissed her again, slower, and Dani stood between her knees in the small warm kitchen and registered, somewhere under the wanting, how light she felt. That was the word for it. Light. Dani had been a serious child and a serious woman, the steady one, the reliable one, the goalie you wanted in net in a Game Seven because she felt nothing you could see. Nobody had ever once called Dani Petrovic fun. She'd have agreed with them. And here she was lifting a pop star onto a counter and teasing her about burnt chicken and feeling, for the first time in longer than she could name, like a person who had a light setting at all, like the seriousness had only ever been one room in a house she'd forgotten had other rooms. Roxy did that. Roxy had walked into the locked serious house of her and started opening doors, and behind one of them, it turned out, was this, a version of Dani who joked in a kitchen and meant it.

They ate it anyway, at the little table, and it was in fact inedible, and they ate it anyway because Roxy had made it and Dani would have eaten a shoe Roxy made. Roxy talked with her hands and her mouth full about nothing, about a documentary she'd half watched, about Tilda's new tactic for lying to Vivienne, and Dani sat across from her in a rented kitchen and ate burnt chicken and thought she had never in her life been anywhere she wanted to be more than this exact bad table.

"What've you been working on?" Dani said. "You've got that look. The one where half of you is somewhere else."

Roxy went still with her fork halfway up. Something crossed her face, the old caution, the instinct to deflect, and then she set the fork down and looked at Dani a second like she was deciding something.

"I finished a song," she said. "The first one. The one I started the week we met, before I had any business starting anything." She wiped her hands on a dish towel, suddenly shy, which Dani had never once seen on her. "Do you want to hear it? Nobody's heard it. It's just the phone version, it's rough, I sound terrible⁠—"

"Play it."

Roxy got her phone and thumbed through to a file and propped it against the salt, and pressed play, and didn't look at Dani while it played, looked instead at the dark window, her jaw tight, braver than Dani had understood she'd have to be.

It was a quiet song. Just Roxy's voice and a few chords she must have found on something in the rental, the production gone, all the gloss stripped off the famous instrument until it was only a woman in a room. It was about a harbor, and a light that came on at the end of a dock, and a keeper who left before sunrise so no one would see. It was about a person on a boat in the dark who had spent her whole life being looked at by everyone and had finally found the one window where the light was only for her. Roxy's voice cracked on the last line. She'd left the crack in. Dani sat very still with a fork in her hand and understood, slowly and then all at once, that she was the lighthouse, that she had been written into a song by a woman who got paid millions of dollars to write about no one real, and that this was the most anyone had ever said about her in her entire life, and she put the fork down because her hand wasn't steady.

She had spent thirty-one years making herself easy to overlook. That had been the whole project, the careful unremarkable clothes and the corner stall and the quiet, a woman building herself smaller and smaller until there was nothing left for anyone to grab. And somewhere in the last weeks a person who turned ordinary feelings into things millions of strangers carried around in their chests had looked at all of Dani's careful smallness and seen something worth making permanent. Not a story to sell. Not a payout. A song to keep, hidden in a folder, a true thing about Dani turned into something that would outlast both of them, and the gap between that and what Marisol had done with the true things about her was so wide Dani could have fallen into it.

The song ended. The kitchen was quiet.

"Play it again," Dani said. Her voice came out rough.

Roxy looked at her then, finally, eyes bright and scared. "Yeah?"

"Play it again."

She played it again, and the second time Roxy watched Dani's face the whole way through, and whatever she saw there made her own eyes fill. When it ended neither of them said anything about it, because there was nothing to say that the song hadn't already said better. Dani stood up and took Roxy's hand and pulled her up out of the chair and toward the bedroom, and that was the only answer she had that was big enough.

She undressed both of them in the lamplight, unhurried with Roxy and quick with herself, peeling off the training kit while Roxy laughed low and helped with the stubborn parts, and there was nothing careful about tonight, nothing of the first night's terrible reverence, because they'd done this now, they knew each other now, and what was left when the fear burned off turned out to be something lighter and hotter both. Roxy was still half laughing when Dani laid her back across the bed, and the laugh turned into a gasp when Dani kissed down the center of her and settled between her thighs without any of the asking she'd done the first time, because she didn't have to ask anymore and they both knew it.

She used her mouth on her slow and then not slow, tongue against her clit, two fingers curling up into her, and Roxy's hips rolled up to meet her and her hands found Dani's hair. This time she didn't bite down on anything to stay quiet. This time she gasped Dani's name into the dark of their own room like she'd stopped being afraid of the walls, and the sound of it went down Dani's spine like current. Dani took her time and then took her apart, read every catch of her breath like she read a shooter, stayed exactly where Roxy's body told her to stay, and Roxy came hard, her thighs shaking around Dani's ears and Dani's name breaking in half on her tongue.

"Okay," Roxy panted, when she could talk, half laughing again, wrung out, one hand flying down to grip Dani's wrist like she needed something to hold onto in the whole spinning world. "Okay. Okay, you absolute menace, come here, it's not—I need—come up here."

Dani came up grinning and Roxy kissed her filthy and tasted herself and then, with a strength Dani hadn't braced for, flipped them, rolled Dani onto her back and came up over her with her golden honey hair fallen loose out of the clip and her eyes wicked.

"My turn isn't the right way to say it," Roxy murmured against her throat, biting kisses down it, "because it sounds like a chore, and you aren't a chore, you're the opposite of a chore, but I have been thinking about doing this since approximately the second I met you, so." She bit Dani's collarbone, soothed it with her tongue, kept moving down. "Tell me if you want me to stop."

"Don't stop," Dani said, and felt herself smile saying it, an actual smile, in bed, something she couldn't remember doing for so long before she met Roxy, and Roxy felt it under her mouth and looked up and grinned back, and the whole thing was suddenly, impossibly, fun, which was a word Dani hadn't once associated with sex in her adult life.

Roxy kissed lower, and lower, and Dani's breath went short, and then Roxy did a thing Dani didn't expect, climbed back up and swung a knee over and settled her thighs on either side of Dani's head, looking down at her, a question in it. Dani answered it by gripping her hips and pulling her down, and Roxy gasped and dropped her head and rocked against Dani's mouth, riding her face slow, and Dani held her hips and used her tongue and felt Roxy come undone above her, unguarded and loud, completely hers, thighs trembling, one hand braced on the headboard, gasping things that weren't words. Dani had never once let herself be used like this, pinned flat under someone's weight with her mouth working and no way to control the pace of any of it, and the strange thing, the thing that lit her up, was how little she wanted to control it. She wanted to be exactly here, held down and tasting nothing in the world but Roxy, while the most famous woman alive came apart on her tongue and didn't bother being quiet about it. And when Roxy had wrung that out of herself she slid back down Dani's body loose and flushed and reached between Dani's legs and found her soaked, and Dani's hips bucked up into her hand without permission.

Roxy fingered her slow and deep with her forehead pressed to Dani's and her own breath still ragged, kissing her between gasps, and the two of them moved together in the lamplight like one tangled thing. When Dani went over the edge it was with both hands gripping the headboard above her and Roxy's name in her mouth, and Roxy watching her face the whole time like it was a thing worth memorizing. And Dani let her watch, let herself be watched coming apart, the thing she'd sworn at twenty-four she would never let anyone see again, given freely now to the one person she trusted with the sight of it.

After, she didn't get up.

That was the part that undid Dani more than any of it, lying afterward in the wreck of the rental bed with her head on Roxy's chest and Roxy's heartbeat slowing under her ear and Roxy's fingers moving idle through her hair, and not wanting to leave. She always wanted to leave. After, with the careful women in the careful cities, the leaving had started in her chest before her body had even finished, the door already calling. She had built a whole life on the after-leaving. And here she was with her cheek on Roxy's sternum and no part of her moving toward any door.

"Tell me about Detroit," Roxy said quietly, into her hair. "The house. You never finish the sentence when you start it."

And Dani, half asleep, warm, more emptied-out and more full than she could remember being, told her. About the small house with the chain-link and her mother's garden out back that fed half the block. About the kitchen that was always too hot from the stove and too loud with her brothers, Niko and Stevan, both of them bigger than her and slower than her and the proudest people alive when she made the national team, neither of them able to say it, all three of them raised not to say it. About her father's hands, always working, fixing the neighbors' cars in the driveway on Sundays for nothing, for the principle of it. About learning, in that hot loud kitchen, that you showed people you loved them by what you did with your hands and never by what you said. She'd carried that out into the world like a law, and it had kept her safe and it had kept her alone. And she was only now, at thirty-one, with her face on a pop star's chest in a rented room, starting to think maybe you were allowed to do both.

Roxy didn't say anything. She just kept moving her fingers through Dani's hair, slow, listening, as Dani had listened in the diner, all the way, taking nothing. Once she pressed a kiss to the top of Dani's head and murmured that her brothers sounded like idiots and that she loved them already, and Dani huffed a laugh against her chest and felt the words go somewhere deep and stay, I love them already, like Roxy had been handed the family along with the story and meant to keep both.

Dani fell asleep in the middle of a sentence about her mother's tomatoes.

She didn't mean to. She hadn't fallen asleep first, not once, not with the careful women, not anywhere that wasn't her own locked apartment in seven years, because falling asleep first meant going under while someone else was awake and watching and able to do anything they wanted with the unconscious trusting fact of you. Her body didn't allow it. Her body had a rule.