Page 27 of Under the Spotlight

"Nothing." Roxy pressed her lips to Dani's sternum. "Just. I don't want to go."

"I know." Dani's hand moved slow up and down her spine. "Come back."

"I'll come back."

And Dani, who had heard that cut-off I and felt the stop and surely knew by now what kept jamming in Roxy's throat, didn't ask for it. She just held her and said come back like it was a thing they could simply decide. And Roxy lay against her heart and thought, I love you, I love you, why can't I say it, and didn't say it. And she hated, for the first time in a long time, the cowardly managed creature ten years of fame had made of her, who could perform any feeling on earth except the one she was actually having.

Dani left at dawn with a kiss and a hand on the side of Roxy's face and a quiet I'll see you in ten days, and Roxy lay in the warm hollow she'd left and didn't cry, quite, and started, against her will, to count. Ten days was two hundred and forty hours. She'd done the conversion without deciding to, as she used to count down the days of a contract she couldn't get out of, except this was the reverse of that arithmetic, this was counting down toward a thing she wanted instead of away from a thing she was trapped in, and she lay there and marveled at it, that the same restless math could mean two such opposite things depending only on what waited at the end of it.

In the end she drove Roxy to the private terminal herself that evening, which neither of them had planned and both of them knew was a risk, Dani Petrovic in a ball cap behind the wheel of Roxy's anonymous rented car with the most recognizable woman in the country in the passenger seat. They parked in the dark at the edge of the private lot where the cameras weren't, and for a minute neither of them moved.

"Ten days isn't long," Dani said, to the windshield, in a voice that suggested she was informing herself.

"It's a thousand years."

"It's ten days." Dani turned and looked at her, and reached over and tucked a piece of Roxy's hair behind her ear, a small unbearable gesture she'd never once have made a month ago, and Roxy leaned into the hand. "Go sing for your forty thousand people. I'll be here waiting for you. Text me when you land so I know the plane worked."

"The plane always works."

"Text me anyway."

Roxy kissed her in the dark car, slow, memorizing it, and then made herself get out before she did something undignified. She walked across the tarmac toward the small jet with her coat collar up and didn't look back, because she'd learned a long time ago that the trick to an exit was taking it cleanly. She made it all the way to the stairs before she looked back anyway, once. And Dani was still there, a dark shape in a dark car, watching her go, not chasing, the same as the corridor, a woman who only ever let her leave and never once made it cost her. The not-chasing was the thing that wrecked her. Roxy turned and climbed the stairs into the jet with her throat gone tight, and didn't look back again.

On the plane she pulled out her phone and drafted the message. I love you. I've never said that to anyone and meant it and I'm saying it to you from a runway like a coward because I couldn't get it out of my mouth in a room. It's true. It's been true for a while. She read it four times. Her thumb hovered over send.

She didn't send it. You didn't say a thing like that for the first time over text from a tarmac. She would say it to Dani's face, in the rental, in ten days, like a person, the first true I love you of her whole manufactured life, said out loud to someone who'd earned it. She saved the draft where the song lived.

Then she turned the phone all the way off, as she'd learned to now, and put her forehead against the cold window as the jet climbed out over the lights. Somewhere on the other end of this flight was a sold-out arena and a wall of press and a manager who hadn't called back since Roxy hung up on her, which wasn't Vivienne conceding, Roxy knew, it was Vivienne waiting, the long patient silence of a woman who never lost and was simply deciding how to win. There was a gallery opening on the calendar with a man's name attached to it that Roxy had refused to attend and Vivienne hadn't removed. There was the whole machine down there in the dark, humming, missing its most valuable part, and it would want her back exactly as she'd been, and it had ten days and an ocean and a lifetime of leverage to make that happen.

She let her eyes close. Ten days. She would go and sing and smile and survive it as she survived everything, and she would carry the new soft self through it without letting the tide take it this time, and then she would come home to an ugly rental nobody could find and say the three words out loud at last. That was the plan, and Roxy fell asleep against the window holding onto it, with no way of knowing how little of it she'd get to keep.

16

Dani lied to Frankie's face at the morning skate, and that was the part she'd think about later, on the plane, somewhere over the black middle of the Atlantic. Not the cost of the ticket, which had been obscene, a same-day economy seat bought at six in the morning with her thumb shaking over the confirm button like the phone might talk her out of it. Not the eight hours of practice and travel and customs ahead of her. The lie. Frankie had asked where she was off to with a bag over her shoulder on an off-day, and Dani had said, easy as anything, Detroit, my mom's having some kind of garden emergency, and Frankie had laughed and said tell your mom the tomatoes forgive her, and Dani had walked to her car with her stomach turned over, because she didn't lie to Frankie. She hadn't lied to Frankie in eleven years. She'd just done it standing on rubber matting in her base layers without a flinch, and it had been frighteningly simple, and that was the thing that scared her, how easy the wanting made the lying.

She'd never done anything like this in her life. That was the flat truth of it. Dani Petrovic didn't get on planes to other continents on a feeling. She'd built an entire existence on not doing exactly this, on being the woman who stayed put and kept her head and let the impulsive people around her burn themselves down. And here she was at thirty-one folded into a middle seat with her knees against the tray table, flying three thousand four hundred miles to spend a day and a half with a woman she'd known for two months, and she couldn't make herself regret it no matter how hard she pressed on the bruise of it. Ten days had turned out to be a length of time she couldn't survive with any dignity. Six days in she'd stopped sleeping. The bed was too big and too quiet and the dawn came without anyone in it, and she'd lain there at four in the morning doing math she hated, and somewhere in the math she'd thought, I could just go, and the thought had been so unlike her that she'd sat straight up in the dark.

So she went.

Heathrow was a gray roar of a place, and she came out of it wrung out and gritty-eyed into a cold London drizzle and got into the back of a black cab and gave the driver the name of a hotel she couldn't have afforded a single night in. The city slid by wet and enormous and indifferent. She watched it and didn't take any of it in. She'd been to London once, for a tournament at twenty-two, and had seen the inside of a rink and the inside of a hotel and nothing else, and she suspected this trip would be much the same, and she found she didn't care about the city at all. She wasn't here for the city.

Tilda had handled the key. That had been the one piece Dani couldn't solve from Phoenix Ridge, how a person walked into a global pop star's hotel without a name or a reservation or a face anyone would let past the lobby, and she'd texted Tilda two words, I'm coming, fully expecting to be talked out of it, and Tilda had written back within a minute, Oh thank god, finally, and then a paragraph of logistics. An envelope at the concierge desk under the name Sandra Bell. A service elevator. A floor. Don't tell her, Tilda had added. She's been a ghost all week. Let her walk in and find you. She needs one good thing she didn't have to schedule. And then, a moment later, Take care of her. She won't say she's drowning but she is.

Dani had read that last one four times in the airport.

The suite was on a high floor and it was empty and it was the most expensive room Dani had ever stood in, all low gold light and a wall of window looking out over the wet glitter of the city, and it smelled faintly of Roxy already, that scent she'd stopped being able to name and started being able to find in the dark. There was a half-drunk cup of tea gone cold on a side table. A pair of the reading glasses on a stack of papers. Stage clothes thrown over a chair like a body had been peeled out of them in a hurry. Evidence of her, everywhere, the private wreckage Roxy left behind the polished public thing, and Dani stood in the middle of it in her travel clothes feeling enormous and out of place and unbearably glad.

She showered off the flight. She ordered a club sandwich from a menu with no prices and ate half of it and couldn't finish, too keyed up. And then she pulled on jeans and a clean hoodie and sat down on the long couch facing the door, and she waited, and the waiting was a strange country. She wasn't a woman who waited for people. She'd spent seven years being the one who left first. She sat in the gold light with her hands loose between her knees and watched the door and understood that she'd flown across an ocean to put herself on the other side of that arithmetic, to be the one sitting in the dark when the door opened, and the size of that frightened her almost as much as it steadied her.

It was past midnight when she heard the keycard.

The door opened and Roxy came in already half out of her stage face, jacket over one arm, hair coming down out of whatever architecture they'd built it into, talking low to no one, to herself, as exhausted people did, and she got three steps into her own suite before she registered the shape on the couch and stopped dead.

For a second she didn't move at all. Her bag slid off her shoulder to the floor. Her whole face came open, the public gloss falling off it in one motion, and underneath was something so undefended that Dani had to stand up just to have somewhere to put it.

"You're not here," Roxy said. "You're in Phoenix Ridge. I just talked to you in Phoenix Ridge."

"I lied," Dani said. "I'm in London."