Page 37 of Under the Spotlight

"I came back," Roxy said. It was all she had.

"I can see that," Dani said, rough, and her thumb moved once across Roxy's knuckles, and that was the whole forgiveness, no speech, no negotiation, just her hand holding Roxy’s. Then she stood, finally took her coat off, folded it over her arm, held her other hand out, and said, "Come on. We can talk, not here." A breath. "I'll drive."

She drove them to her apartment and she stood back to let Roxy through into a place that, the second she crossed the threshold, Roxy understood no one else had ever entered.

The apartment was bare. It wasn't poor or cold, just unshared, the home of a woman who'd never expected to be witnessed in it. One couch. A single mug in the kitchen rack. A stack of goalie books, a foam roller, some dumbbells, a framed photo of a loud-looking family in a Detroit kitchen, and almost nothing else, no version of herself arranged for anyone's eyes, because there had never been anyone's eyes.

The rental had been the only place Roxy stopped performing. This was the same thing from the other side, the one room Dani had kept for no audience at all, and she'd just unlocked it and walked Roxy in. Now, Roxy stood in the middle of it and could hardly breathe around the size of what she was being given.

"You've never had anyone here.” Roxy said. It wasn't a question.

"No." Dani set her keys down. Looked at the bare room and then at Roxy in the middle of it like she was checking whether it would hold the weight. "I keep it to myself usually so there's nothing to lose." A pause.

And Roxy crossed the bare floor and kissed her, and Dani's hands came up into her hair and the kiss went deep and slow, none of the clock-pressure of London, none of the secret-keeping of the rental, just two people in the one place left where neither of them had anything to hide, kissing like they had the rest of their lives, which, Roxy thought dizzily with Dani's mouth opening under hers, they might.

Dani walked her backward toward the bedroom without breaking it, hands already under Roxy's shirt, warm and certain on the bare skin of her back, and they undressed each other slowly in the dark, Dani pulling Roxy's shirt over her head and pressing her mouth to the shoulder it uncovered, Roxy working the drawstring of Dani's sweats and laughing once, wet, against her collarbone when the knot stuck. Dani laid her back on the plain wide bed and looked at her in the streetlight through the blind, just looked with those lovely gray-blue eyes, and Roxy let herself be looked at, all of her, the actual person, and it was the most naked she'd ever been with anyone.

Then Dani came down over her, close, kissing her slow and deep, and slid a hand down between them. She didn't go anywhere. She stayed up where Roxy could see her, their faces an inch apart in the streetlight, and worked her slow, two fingers pushing inside and her thumb circling tight on her clit, watching Roxy's face the whole time, reading every catch of breath off her. Roxy moaned as Dani’s fingers entered her. She wanted Dani on top of her and inside her. All the time. It felt like safety, it felt like home. The scent of Dani above her was intoxicating.

Roxy gripped onto Dani’s back as Dani began to fuck her. There was nothing to perform for. Dani kept her right there in the open, no hiding in the dark between anyone's legs, just the two of them face to face while she took Roxy apart with her hand, and Roxy felt her orgasm build low and enormous and unstoppable, and she came hard against Dani's palm with her forehead pressed to Dani's and a sob she didn't try to swallow, shaking apart, completely undone.

She was still trembling when she pulled Dani down to her, mouth finding mouth, and she didn't wait and didn't ask, just rolled onto Dani with her thigh between Dani's and her hand already moving down, because she wanted Dani undone now, while her own body was still ringing. She got her fingers between Dani's legs, found her soaked, gasped against her jaw at it.

“You are so wet,” she breathed into Dani’s ear and Dani made a low wrecked sound and pushed up into her hand. Roxy worked her clit slow and then not slow, two fingers sinking into her, and Dani's hand came up and gripped Roxy's wrist, not to stop her, to keep her there. Her forehead was against Roxy's and her breath came apart, and she broke with her face pressed to Roxy's face and Roxy's name in her throat. And Roxy felt her come around her fingers and didn't ease off.

"Stay," Dani breathed, which meant don't stop, and Roxy didn't. She pressed deeper, a third finger now, slow, and Dani's whole body wound tight again, faster this time, her hips chasing it. Roxy held her through it with her mouth on Dani's mouth and her other arm wrapped under Dani's back, wanting to feel every piece of it. And when Dani went over the second time it was longer and quieter, a long unwinding shudder with Roxy's name leaking out of her low and ruined, and Roxy held her all the way down to the other side of it, the goalie who never let anyone watch her break, breaking in her own bed with the one person she'd finally let in.

After, they lay tangled in the plain sheets, Dani's head on Roxy's chest, Roxy's fingers in her hair and neither of them said anything for a long time, and it was the good kind of nothing, the kind with no performance in it. In London a war was burning that Roxy would have to go back to in the morning, lawyers and statements and a whole life and career to rebuild, and none of it could reach this room.

"You really came back," Dani said into her chest, half asleep, like she was checking it was still true.

"I'm not going anywhere," Roxy said, and felt Dani believe her, felt it in how the last of the wariness finally went out of her body.

“I love you,” Roxy said for the first time and Dani nuzzled into her breast in response. Roxy knew Dani loved her even if she didn’t yet have the words to say it back.

24

Dani woke at six like always, her body keeping a schedule no alarm had set in years, and for one slow second she didn't understand the weight against her side.

Then she did. Roxy was asleep against her, honey hair loose across Dani's shoulder, one arm thrown over Dani's stomach, breathing slow and even into the curve of her neck. There was a warm spot where Roxy's knee had hooked over her leg in the night, and the faint clean smell of her in Dani's own sheets, and the small ordinary weight of another person, and Dani lay still under all of it in the gray light and looked at the ceiling of her own bedroom and let herself feel the strangeness of it.

Seven years she'd woken in this bed alone, on purpose, by design, in an apartment she'd kept empty so there'd be nothing to wake up to and nothing to lose. She'd built the solitude like a fortress and called it peace. And now there was a famous woman asleep on her arm in the room no one had ever been allowed into, and the fortress hadn't fallen so much as it had simply turned out to have a door in it the whole time, and Dani had finally let someone walk through.

She should have been bracing. That was the old reflex, the one life had carved into her, that the morning after letting someone in was the morning you started counting the ways it would cost you. She waited for the dread to arrive. It didn't come. What came instead, lying there with Roxy's breath warm on her throat, was something quieter and far more dangerous, a feeling she didn't have good practice naming, that she was exactly where she wanted to be and the wanting didn't frighten her. She let Roxy sleep. She slid out from under the arm an inch at a time, as she'd slipped out of a hundred beds at dawn, except this time she wasn't leaving, she was just going to make coffee.

She made it for two.

That was what stopped her, standing at her own counter in the early light with two mugs out instead of one. She'd made coffee in this kitchen alone every morning for years, a single cup, oat milk and one sugar, a small efficient ritual for an audience of nobody. Now there were two mugs on the counter and she was reaching for the second one without having to think about it, and she stood there a second with her hand on it, because a second mug was such a small thing and it undid her a little anyway.

She made the second cup how Roxy took it, black, no sugar, too strong. She carried both mugs back down the hall to the bedroom.

Roxy was awake when she came in, propped up on an elbow, watching the door like she'd been listening for it, and her whole face changed when Dani appeared with the two mugs, went soft and open in a way the cameras had never once gotten and never would.

She was so beautiful like this it made Dani’s heart ache.

"You're still here," Roxy said.

"It's my apartment." Dani handed her the black coffee. "You're the one who's still here."