Page 38 of Under the Spotlight

"I noticed." Roxy took the mug and looked into it and then up at Dani, and her eyes went bright. "You made it right. The coffee. You made it exactly right."

"Don't make a big deal about it."

"Hmm, but it is, to me," Roxy said, and Dani sat down on the edge of the bed and didn't argue, because it was.

They drank the coffee, and then Roxy set her mug on the nightstand and got that look, the careful one, and reached for her phone, and said, "I want you to hear the rest of the songs. The whole album. You heard the first one last night but I need you to hear all of it, and maybe I need to be in the room when you do, which is the most terrifying thing I've asked anyone in my life, so please don't say anything funny or I'll lose my nerve." She turned the phone over in her hands. "It's all you, Dani. Every track. I should have said that before I played you the first one. The whole album is about you, for you."

Dani didn't say anything funny. She set her own mug down and settled back against the headboard and said, "Play it."

So Roxy played her Last Line, all thirteen songs, lying beside her in the bed with the morning coming up gray at the window, and Dani listened without a word.

She heard herself in every one. Not her name, never her name, Roxy had kept that promise even here, in songs no one was ever supposed to decode. But Dani was in all of it, threaded through. The songs were a love letter to her. About falling in love. About seeing someone completely and being seen by them completely.

There was a song about a diner at two in the morning. There was a song that was just the sound of someone realizing they'd been performing their whole life and had finally stopped. There was one near the end, rough and quiet, that was so plainly about the night Dani told her about her childhood and her family that Dani had to look at the ceiling and breathe slow until it passed.

It was a strange thing, hearing yourself from the outside, sung by the person who'd watched you closest. Dani had spent her whole life on the wrong end of being looked at, learning to give the cameras a flat braid and a save total and nothing underneath. But here was every soft thing she'd hidden, set to music by a woman who'd seen all of it and decided it was worth a record. She'd never been the subject of anything good. She'd been a stat line, a contract clause, a tabloid's grainy footnote, and once, at twenty-four, a stranger's payday. She had never once been a love song. Lying there in the gray light with Roxy's careful eyes on her, hearing her own guarded self come back to her as something a person had built on purpose, beautifully, to keep, Dani understood she had no real idea how to be loved out loud, and that she'd have to learn it, and that for the first time in seven years she wanted to.

She lay still and let the album play over her and, for once, didn't reach for the arithmetic of what it would cost her later. Beside her Roxy lay propped on one elbow, not watching her like a lens would, just present, her thumb moving slow over Dani’s right hand. There wasn't any arithmetic to do. There was just the music, and her own guarded self somewhere down inside it, safe.

The record ended. Dani didn't say anything for a moment, because there wasn't a word in her that would have been big enough, and Roxy had gone very still beside her, waiting, frightened, holding her breath for Dani’s opinion.

"They're going to love it," Dani said finally, which was true. "I love it. The songs are beautiful.” And she rolled over and kissed Roxy, slow, with one hand in the loose hair, and felt Roxy let go of the breath she'd been holding, and kissed her until they were both smiling too much to keep doing it.

Then she got up, because it was a practice day, and she had a job, and showing up was how Dani had always said the things she couldn't say out loud.

"You're going to work," Roxy said, delighted, scandalized, watching Dani pull on a hoodie.

"World's still turning." Dani leaned over the bed and kissed her once more. "There's food in the fridge. Make yourself at home. I'll be back by five."

Mara called her into the office before she'd even laced up.

Goldie lifted her gray muzzle off the dog bed when Dani came in, thumped her tail twice, and went back to sleep. Mara was at her desk with tape cued up on the monitor and didn't make Dani sit, which Dani appreciated, the coach reading her as she'd read her for years and knowing the chair was a trap.

"I watched it," Mara said. No preamble. "The press conference. The whole thing." She held Dani's eyes. "I'm not going to ask you anything, because it's not my business and you've never once made your personal life this team's problem in all the years I've had you. I'm going to tell you two things and then we'll go skate. One. Whatever's printed, whatever's coming, you play goal for me, and that has never been in question and isn't now." She let that sit. "Two. Helen's got time this week if you want it, and I think you should take it, not because you're broken, because you carry everything alone and you've been carrying something heavy. That's all. Go warm up."

Dani stood in the doorway a second. "Thank you," she said, and meant the whole of it, and Mara waved her off without looking up, which was Mara's way of saying you're welcome and don't get sentimental in my office at the same time, and Dani went and warmed up.

Practice was clean. She felt good in the net, sharp, more rested than she'd been in weeks. The cold off the ice was the same cold it had always been, the boards the same boards, the crease eighteen feet of painted ice that asked nothing of her but the next save, and for years that had been the only place she trusted, the one room where she was exactly and only what she did. It was still that. What had changed was that she no longer needed it to be the only one. The puck looked like a beach ball all morning, and afterward the locker room was quiet in a way that wasn't awkward but careful, the team giving her room like you give a goalie room, and then Lex broke it as Lex broke everything.

"So," Lex said, dropping onto the bench beside her with her gear half off, loud enough for the room. "A pop star." She shook her head slowly, like she was disappointed. "Years you’ve been keeping all to yourself and now you're out here pulling the biggest celebrity on the planet. I feel personally insulted. I feel like I don't even know you."

And it was so exactly wrong and so exactly right that Dani laughed, really laughed, the first time in days, surprised out of her. Then the room broke with her, the tension going out of it all at once. Camille came over and hugged her hard around the shoulders without a word and went back to her stall. Lou caught her eye across the room and nodded once, the same nod from the garage, and let it be.

And Frankie, lacing her skates off two stalls down, said without looking up, "Don't let it get weird, Petrovic. You're happy. We all watched you be miserable for seven years and now you're happy, and if you go and make it weird by getting in your own head about it, I'm going to be very annoyed." She finally looked up. "That's the whole speech. Be happy. Be in love. It's allowed."

"I'll work on it," Dani said.

"You'll do it," Frankie said. "There's a difference," and went back to her laces, and that was that, and Dani sat in a locker room full of women who'd known the worst of her and had simply decided to be glad, and couldn't, anymore, make the old math come out as it used to.

Astoria called her in at the end of the day.

She didn't sit Dani down either, but she came around the desk and stood, which was different, which meant this was the owner talking to a person and not the boss talking to a player, and Dani stood across from her and waited.

“Ok, I need to know,” Astoria began. “Is this real? This relationship with Roxy Blaze? And are you prepared for it to be public, all the way? Because the next time those cameras find you with her, and they will, you will be famous all over the world as her girlfriend. That's a different life than the one you've been living, Dani. I need to know you've chosen it with your eyes open."

"Yes," she said. "To both. It's real. And I'm done hiding. She is worth it.” She held Astoria's eyes.

Astoria looked at her a moment, and something in her went satisfied and a little bright, and she nodded once. "Good," she said. "Then go home. And Dani." She said it as Dani reached the door. "When it gets loud, and it will, you can come to this office. You don't carry it alone. That's an order from your owner, and you've never once disobeyed one of those, so don't start now."