Page 26 of Under the Spotlight

Her body broke the rule. She went under with Roxy's heart under her ear and Roxy's hand in her hair, warm and safe and witnessed, and she didn't wake when Roxy slid out from under her near dawn and eased a pillow under her head and stood looking down at her for a long while in the gray light. She slept straight through, deep and dreamless, the sleep of a woman who had finally, after seven years, set the watch down and trusted somebody else to keep it. She didn't wake at the small sounds of Roxy moving in the next room, the tap running, a cabinet, the low private hum of a woman who couldn't sleep either but for once didn't mind. Dani Petrovic slept on, unguarded and unworried, while somebody else kept the morning watch over her, and that, more than anything they had done in the dark, was the thing that had changed.

15

The calendar reminder went off at six in the morning while Roxy was lying in the gray light watching Dani sleep, and it was, she thought, exactly the cruelty the universe specialized in, that the phone should pick that moment to remind her the world was still out there with its hand out.

LONDON. Tour leg begins in 48 hrs.

She silenced it before it could wake Dani and set it face-down on the nightstand and went back to the only thing she wanted to look at, which was the woman asleep in the bad rental bed beside her. Dani slept as she did everything, completely, no half measures, flat on her stomach with one arm flung across Roxy's hip like even unconscious she'd reached out to keep her there. It had taken four nights for Dani to sleep properly in front of her, and now she went straight under and stayed, and Roxy had decided privately that this was the single greatest compliment she had ever been paid, greater than any award, any review, any sold-out night of her life. The most guarded person she'd ever met slept defenseless beside her because some animal part of Dani had finally filed Roxy under safe. She would have traded every plaque on every wall she owned to keep being filed there.

She let herself look, since looking was free and she was about to be ten days without it. The dark hair across the pillow, loose, none of the game braid in it. The line of Dani's strong shoulder and the strength of her back. The slight frown Dani wore even asleep, like even her dreams took the job seriously. Roxy had spent her whole adult life being looked at, studied, lit and shot from the flattering side, and she had forgotten until these weeks that looking at someone you loved was an entirely separate act, nothing to do with being seen, a thing you did quietly for no audience and no reason except that the sight of the person fed something in you that nothing else reached. She looked at Dani asleep and felt fed and felt, underneath it, the cold thin thread of the countdown already running.

Forty-eight hours. She lay still under Dani's arm and did the math she didn't want to do, and the math came out the same no matter how she ran it. In two days she'd be on a plane to ten days of being the other Roxy, the loud available one, the product. The rental and the snow and the keeper of the dawn watch would all become a thing she'd done once that didn't feel real anymore.

That was the part that frightened her, lying there. Not the distance. The transformation. Roxy knew exactly what happened to her in London, because it had happened to her in a hundred cities, the slow remaking, the wardrobe and the rehearsals and the press and Vivienne's voice in her ear three times a day until the woman currently lying in a rented bed in Phoenix Ridge with her hand on a sleeping goalie's hip was sanded back down into the thing on the banner. She always came back from a tour leg a little less herself. She'd assumed that was just the job. She understood now, with something real to lose for the first time, that it was a kind of erosion, and that she'd been letting it happen to her for a decade because there'd never been anything underneath worth protecting from the tide. Now there was. Now there was a whole self she'd grown back in four secret weeks, soft and new and unprotected, and she was about to carry it straight into the machine that had spent ten years grinding the last one down.

She eased out of bed so as not to wake her, and went to make coffee.

Dani found her in the kitchen ten minutes later, barefoot in one of Roxy's enormous t-shirts that came down to her thighs, hair a disaster, looking so unlike a professional athlete and so much like a person that Roxy's chest hurt, sudden and sharp. She didn't say good morning. She crossed the kitchen and took the coffee cup directly out of Roxy's hand and drank from it, watching Roxy over the rim, which had become a thing between them, the cup, the casual theft of it, an intimacy Roxy hadn't known she was starving for until she had it.

"You're up early," Dani said. "You're never up before me."

"Couldn't sleep." Roxy took the cup back. "I have to go to London. Day after tomorrow."

Dani's face didn't change, because Dani's face was a fortress, but Roxy had learned the small tells, the slight stillness, how the gray eyes went a fraction more careful. "How long?” Dani said.

"Ten days."

"Okay."

That was all. Okay. And Roxy stood there in the small kitchen waiting for the rest of it, the thing a normal person would add, I'll miss you, or that's a long time, or even just a face that showed it cost her something, and Dani gave her none of it, just stood there in her huge borrowed shirt holding the morning, saying okay like Roxy had told her the weather, and for one cold second the old terror got its hand on Roxy, the lifelong conviction that the absence of a grand reaction meant the absence of feeling, that she'd misread all of it, that she was the only one standing in a kitchen about to come apart.

Then Dani set the coffee cup down on the counter, slow, careful, and she crossed the last foot of space and put her arms around Roxy and pulled her in, and held her. Not a sexual thing. Not leading anywhere. Just held her, hard, one hand spread between Roxy's shoulder blades and her face pressed into Roxy's hair. And Roxy understood that the okay hadn't been the feeling. The okay had been Dani holding the feeling still long enough to set the cup down so she could do this instead. Because Dani Petrovic didn't say the thing, Dani Petrovic did the thing. And this was her saying that's a long time and I'll miss you and all of it, with her arms, in the only language she trusted.

They stood like that in the kitchen for a long time without speaking. Roxy held on and breathed her in and didn't say the enormous thing rising up the back of her throat, because it was six in the morning and it was too big and she was a coward, and she pressed her face into Dani's neck and swallowed it back down.

Dani had practice. The world didn't stop for them, that was the cruelty of the whole arrangement. So Dani showered and dressed and went and was a professional goaltender for a few hours, and Roxy spent the morning writing and the afternoon failing to write, because the writing had gone strange and sad in realising she had to go to London. And in the evening Dani came back with takeout and her hair wet and her bag over her shoulder like she lived there, which she nearly did now.

They ate on the floor in front of the couch because the table had become Roxy's notebook's and neither of them wanted to disturb it. And after, full and warm and quiet, Roxy got her phone and played Dani the newest one, the one she'd finished two days ago, a faster song, almost a happy one, the first really happy thing she'd written in years, and she watched Dani listen with her head tipped back against the couch cushion and her eyes closed.

"You should record that one," Dani said, when it ended. "That one's a single. I don't know anything about music and even I know that one's a single."

"Maybe."

"Will you? Record them. Any of them?” Dani opened her eyes. "They exist. It seems like a crime that they just live in a folder."

"Eventually." Roxy turned the phone over in her hands. "It's complicated. Recording means the label, and the label means Vivienne, and Vivienne means a hundred conversations about positioning and rollout and who I'm photographed with that week, and right now these songs are the only thing in my life she hasn't touched." She looked at the dark window. "I'll record them. When I can do it on terms that don't poison them. I'd rather they live in a folder, honestly, than come out of her machine with her fingerprints on them. They're too important to hand over." And then, because the next sentence was they're about you and I won't let her sell you, and because that sentence had the enormous thing folded up inside it, Roxy stopped, hard, mid-breath, and looked away.

Dani saw it. Of course she saw it, she read shots off sticks before they were taken, she could certainly read a woman swallowing a sentence two feet away from her. Roxy felt her see it. And Dani didn't push. She didn't say what were you going to say, didn't lean in, didn't make Roxy account for the place she'd stopped. She just reached over and took Roxy's hand off the phone and folded it into her own and held it, and let the unsaid thing be unsaid, made room for it to stay unsaid as long as Roxy needed, and somehow the not-pushing said more than pushing ever could have.

That night they didn't sleep for a long time.

It was their last for ten days and they both knew it, and there was an ache under everything they did, a held-breath quality. Afterward Roxy lay tangled with her in the dark with her head on Dani's chest, the positions reversed from every other night, Roxy the one being held now. She traced shapes on Dani's stomach and felt the second sentence rise up in her, the same one, bigger now in the dark, and this time it nearly got out.

"Dani," she said. "I⁠—"

And stopped. Again. The three words right there, fully formed, the truest thing she had ever almost said to another human being, I love you, and they jammed in her throat behind ten years of a voice that told her love was a product and a lyric and a thing that happened to people in songs and never, not once, to the woman who sang them. She was twenty-seven and she had told a hundred million strangers she loved them from a hundred stages and she had never once said it in a dark room to one real person and meant it, and the meaning of it terrified her more than any crowd ever had.

"What," Dani said softly, into her hair. Not pushing. Just there.