Page 30 of Under the Spotlight

Tilda's text came during skate.

She felt it buzz against her hip through two reps and ignored it as she ignored everything during skate, and it was only after, stripping out of her pads with her hair soaked through, that she read it, and read it twice, because it made no sense. Go to the rental tonight. Around six. There's something there for you. Don't ask me what, don't overthink it, just go, and trust me. No other context. Dani sat on the bench in her base layers and turned the phone over in her hand and felt her pulse do something stupid, because there was only one thing she wanted at that rental and it was six thousand miles away. She told herself not to hope, told herself it was probably a package, a key, some logistics thing Roxy had arranged from London. She got dressed and drove out there in the early dark with her heart refusing to listen to a word of it.

She let herself in with her own key. The rental was empty and exactly as they'd left it, the notebook still on the table, and Dani turned on the kitchen light and put the kettle on for something to do with her hands and stood there in the quiet not letting herself think the thing she was thinking. She found a clean dish towel and wiped down a counter that didn't need it. She waited. The clock on the stove crept toward six and she stood in the kitchen of the only place in her life that felt unguarded and told herself, firmly, to stop hoping, because hoping was a thing that got done to you, and she was too old and too careful to let it happen to her now.

The door opened.

And it was her. It was Roxy, six days early, wearing a gray beanie hiding her hair and no makeup and glasses and an exhausted ordinary traveling face, standing in the doorway with a duffel bag over one shoulder. Dani's whole body went still and then came apart at once, three days of held breath going out of her in a rush. She didn't say anything clever, didn't say anything at all. She crossed the kitchen. She lifted the bag off Roxy's shoulder and set it on the floor and pulled her in, and Roxy came into her hard, both arms around Dani's neck, her face pressed into Dani's throat, and Dani held the whole shaking weight of her and breathed her in and felt the floor come back under her feet.

"You're supposed to be in London," Dani said into her hair, when she could.

"I left." Roxy's voice was muffled against her neck, fierce, half laughing. "I canceled everything. I flew coach. I sat next to a man who snored on me for eight hours so I could walk in here and do to you exactly what you did to me, so let me have it, I have been planning this since the loading dock."

"You flew commercial? Dani pulled back enough to look at her, this woman who traveled by private jet, in a beanie, with airline pretzel salt on her sleeve. "You?”

"24C," Roxy said, like a confession, and Dani laughed, the rough surprised laugh that only happened around her now, and Roxy's face broke open at the sound of it.

And then they just held on. The clever back-and-forth ran out, as it always did when the thing underneath got too big for it, and they stood there in the kitchen with the kettle ticking toward a boil behind them and held each other, and Dani felt the whole strain of the last six days drain out of her between one breath and the next. She'd spent those days being a version of herself that worked, that won games and made jokes and kept the secret, and the cost of it had been invisible to her until exactly now, when it lifted, and she understood by its leaving how much weight she'd been under. Roxy was shaking a little, just slightly, the fine tremor of someone who'd held something together across an ocean and could finally put it down, and Dani spread her hand flat between her shoulder blades and held her until it stopped, as Roxy had once stood in this kitchen holding her, and neither of them said anything because there was nothing that needed saying that their arms weren't already saying better.

Then Roxy tipped her face up, and neither of them was thinking about kettles anymore, because they were kissing instead, and there was, for once, no clock.

They didn't make it through any of the things people did. There was no dinner, no catching up, no sitting on the couch with the bad coffee trading the days they'd missed. Dani got her out of her coat and Roxy got her hands up under Dani's shirt, and they went down the short hall pulling at each other's clothes. By the time they reached the bedroom most of it was already gone, shed in the hallway. Dani laid her back on the bed and just looked at her dazzling beauty for a second, the relief of her, the unbearable real fact of her here and warm and not an ocean away.

"Don't," Roxy said, reading it. "Don't go soft and reverent on me, Petrovic, I've been on a plane for hours imagining you fucking me, so get down here."

So Dani got down there. She kissed her mouth and her throat and the soft of her breasts, slower than Roxy wanted, because making Roxy wait had become one of her favorite things. Roxy arched and complained and dug her heels into the mattress, and Dani grinned against her stomach and kept moving down. And when she finally settled between Roxy's thighs and put her mouth on her, the complaining stopped all at once and turned into a long broken sound that Dani felt in her own spine. She worked her with her mouth and pushed three fingers deep, curling to the place she knew now, and Roxy was already close, already wound tight as Dani began to fuck her slow and hard with her fingers. It was seconds before Roxy tightened around her fingers and came fast and hard gushing into her hand, moaning loudly, both fists knotted in the sheets and Dani's name spilling out of her, hips rolling up off the bed. Dani stayed with her through all of it and gentled her down slow.

And then Roxy was pulling at her shoulders, rolling her up and over, and there was nothing careful in it, just want, and she got a hand between Dani's legs while Dani was still kissing her and found her soaked and made a low pleased sound into Dani's mouth at the proof of it. She fingered her slow and deep, and Dani's hips moved into her hand, and the two of them tangled together in the lamplight, Roxy's mouth on Dani's throat and her fingers buried in her and Dani's breath going to pieces, and there was no clean handoff between one of them and the other, just one long blurred current of it. When Roxy slid down Dani's body and began to lick her pussy, fingers still moving deep inside her, Dani's spine arched up off the bed and she came with a sound she'd stopped being ashamed of making, and Roxy didn't stop, kept her there in it, built her back up with her tongue and her fingers until Dani came a second time, harder, a heel dug hard into the mattress and her breath torn loose in the dark.

Dani thought that was the end of it. She was wrong.

Roxy kissed up her body, loose and flushed and not nearly finished, and there was a look in her eye Dani was learning to brace for, and she pressed Dani back into the pillows and kissed her filthy and then, breathless, murmured something against her mouth that made Dani's blood go hot, and rolled herself over onto her stomach and looked back over her shoulder, an invitation and a dare in one.

“I want you to fuck my ass.”

Dani came up over her. She kissed down the long line of Roxy's spine, slow, each vertebra, and felt her shudder under her mouth. Roxy pushed back against her and said her name low into the pillow, please, and Dani worked down her back with her mouth until she reached the cleft of her ass.

She didn’t stop there.

She worked lower with her tongue, her tongue running long and slow up the crack of Roxy’s ass over her anus, enjoying the new sensations.

Dani had never done this before, but she knew as soon as Roxy had asked that of course she would. She would worship any part of Roxy’s body that she asked for and this was no different.

Dani went to work with her tongue and mouth on Roxy’s anus, her hands holding Roxy’s cheeks apart to allow her access. Roxy’s moans came loud and different than anything Dani had yet heard from her. Deep and intense and Dani lost herself in the giving to Roxy. It felt instinctive, licking her like this, worshipping her with her mouth. She made out with Roxy’s ass as though it was her mouth and she enjoyed every second of it. She enjoyed the way Roxy moved her hips, pressing back into her mouth, desperate for every touch of it.

When Dani pressed her tongue into Roxy’s anus and felt it open for her there was a moan deeper and more guttural than any before.

Dani knew she was going to put her fingers inside Roxy’s ass and fuck her that way and the thought of it turned her on like mad.

There was lube in the bedside table so Dani came up for air and reached for it.

“Is this ok?” she asked Roxy as she did, knowing that Roxy knew what she was asking.

Roxy nodded against the pillow, her hair a lovely tangled mess. “Please. I want it so much. I want to feel your fingers deep inside me. There. In my ass.”

Dani coated her fingers and Roxy’s anus in the lube and began to run her fingers around the rim of her, teasing at her entrance. She began the slow process of inserting a finger, so careful as she did so, watching Roxy’s reaction, not wanting to hurt her.

She felt Roxy’s body open to take her in and she felt her finger go all the way inside and she enjoyed Roxy’s satisfied moan as she did so. She began to move her finger slowly inside Roxy’s ass, slow and deep, in and out, Roxy’s hips moving in response to her.