Page 40 of Under the Spotlight

And Roxy went.

She came out of the lower bowl into the mouth of the tunnel just as the team began to stream off, and it was bedlam, players and trainers and a wall of media pressing in with cameras up and lenses swinging, the broadcast crews already shoving microphones at whoever came past. And Roxy stopped at the edge of it with her heart slamming, suddenly unsure, suddenly seventeen again and terrified of every camera in the world. She had spent her entire life being told exactly where to stand when the lenses were on, and there was no one here to tell her now.

Then the team thinned, and Dani came off the ice last.

She came up the tunnel still in most of her gear, pads on, mask pushed up, helmet hooked under one arm, hair dark with sweat, and she was scanning, Roxy realized, her eyes moving over the chaos with that flat goalie focus, looking for one thing in all of it, and then they found Roxy at the edge of the media scrum and they stopped looking for anything else.

Everything in Roxy said be careful. Eleven years of training said not here, not with the cameras up, protect the brand, protect her, don't make her a story she didn't choose. And she stood frozen at the edge of it ready to step back, to give Dani the out, to let her walk past like they were nothing, as the safe thing demanded, because Roxy of all people knew what the lenses could do and would have cut off her own hand before she made Dani pay that price unwilling.

Dani didn't slow down.

She came straight across the tunnel, through the cameras, past the microphones thrust at her, ignoring all of it, forty-three saves and a series win and the whole press corps shouting her name. She walked right up to Roxy and stopped in front of her, close, sweat-soaked and enormous in her pads, and looked at her. Roxy looked back, grinning, and couldn't have spoken to save her life. The cameras were already turning. Roxy could feel them finding this, the swing of attention, the lenses pivoting toward the goalie and the pop star standing a foot apart in the mouth of the tunnel, and she braced for Dani to flinch, to remember herself, to step back into the privacy she'd guarded with her whole life.

Dani held out her hand.

Just held it out, palm up, between them, in front of every camera in the building, an offer and a question and an answer all at once, and Roxy understood what it cost her, understood it completely, that this was Dani's podium, her press conference, her own thing burned down and rebuilt on her own terms, except Dani didn't have a microphone or a statement or eleven years of training in how to stand. She had a hand held out in a tunnel where the whole world could see, the most private woman alive choosing, on purpose, with her body, to be witnessed. To stop hiding. To pick this in the loudest possible room.

Roxy knew what it had taken to get her here.

Roxy took her hand.

She put her hand in Dani's and Dani's fingers closed, then threaded through her own, lacing them tight, the same grip from the bar, from the bed, from the dark, except now there was no dark. Now, there were only a thousand watts of arena light and a hundred lenses and a national feed, and Dani held her hand in front of all of it.

She didn't loosen her grip. For a second neither of them moved, and the cameras drank it. Roxy felt the old animal terror try to rise but found there was nowhere for it to go, because the hand around hers was steady and sure, a goalie's hand that had stopped forty-three of forty-three and wasn't, now, going to fumble this.

Then Dani tipped her head toward the dark of the tunnel behind her, the one place past the lights, and said the only words either of them spoke, low, just for Roxy, under all the noise.

"Come on. I've got somewhere I'd rather be."

And she turned, their fingers still laced, and walked them both off the bright ice and down the tunnel into the dark, the goalie and the pop star, hand in hand, while a building full of cameras caught every frame of it. By morning the photograph would be on every front page and every feed in the country, the two of them from behind, walking away from the lights together. The papers wouldn't have to invent a headline, because the woman in the tunnel had already given them one, two weeks ago, thirteen songs of it, and they ran the photo under the perfect words, the only two that fit.

Last Line.

EPILOGUE

Eight months later, Dani woke in a bed in the woods with no alarm set, no skate to make, no schedule at all, and a dog asleep across her feet. The cabin had wood beams, wide windows, and a bed big enough that the rescue mutt could sprawl sideways at the foot of it and still leave room for two people. Which he did, every night, having decided on day one that the rule about dogs and furniture didn't apply to him. Pavel was forty pounds of indeterminate brown something they'd pulled from the shelter outside Phoenix Ridge in June, scruffy and one-eared and tongue-lollingly devoted, named by Roxy after a goalie she'd heard Dani mention once and never stopped finding funny. He snored at the foot of the bed in a square of early sun.

Beyond the windows the trees went on quiet and green. Roxy slept on her stomach with her honey hair everywhere and one hand fisted loosely in the sheet. Dani lay in the middle of all of it in the early light and let herself, for what was no longer the first time, simply be happy.

She still wasn't entirely used to it still. After all those years alone, now she woke in a house with another person's books on the shelves and another person's coffee in the cupboard and a dog on her feet, in a place Roxy had bought outright the week after the playoffs ended and put both their names on without making a speech about it. She'd just slid the paperwork across a kitchen table and said I want somewhere that's ours and not leased and not hidden, and I can finally afford to mean it, so don't argue, and Dani hadn't argued. The woman who'd kept every door in her life locked had a home now, in the woods where they had privacy, with her name beside Roxy's on the deed, and the having of it had stopped frightening her somewhere around the fourth month. Now it just felt like waking up.

It was the small evidence that got her, every day, the proof of two lives that had quietly grown into one. Reading glasses left on the windowsill. A second toothbrush. Roxy's ridiculous tour hoodies hung next to Dani's plain dark ones in their closet. A notebook open on the kitchen counter most mornings, lyrics crossed out and rewritten, because Roxy wrote here now, easy and constant. The well that had run dry for two years gone deep and steady the moment no one else was managing it. Dani had spent her whole adult life making herself easy to overlook and small enough to lose nothing, and somewhere in the last eight months she'd accumulated, without deciding to, a whole life full of things she would be destroyed to lose, and the strange part, the part she was still learning, was that the fear of losing it didn't ruin the having of it. It just made the having matter more. She'd had that backward for seven years.

She slid out from under the covers an inch at a time, the old dawn habit, except there was nowhere she had to be and no one she was leaving. Pavel cracked his one good eye, judged the situation, and went back to sleep. Dani pulled on a t-shirt and padded out to the kitchen and made coffee, two mugs, as she did every morning now without thinking about it, hers and Roxy's both, and carried them out to the porch to watch the light come up through the trees.

Roxy found her there twenty minutes later, barefoot, wrapped in one of Dani's old Valkyries tees that hung to her thighs, her face soft and unpainted and creased from the pillow, and she took the mug Dani held out and folded herself into the other chair with her knees up and said, "You let me sleep."

She was never more beautiful than she was right now.

"You were tired. You were up late on the phone with the producer."

"The producer can wait." Roxy drank her coffee, the black bitter way Dani made it for her now, and looked out at the trees. Quiet sat easy between them, a good quiet, the kind that had no performance anywhere in it. A bird trilled then fluttered away somewhere in the green. Pavel's tags jingled inside as he relocated to a sunnier spot.

Dani turned her mug in her hands. She'd been working up to it for a week, which was ridiculous, and she knew it was ridiculous, and she said it anyway, plainly, as she said the things that mattered. "I want you to come to Detroit next week. Meet my parents, my brothers." She kept her eyes on the trees. "My mother's been asking. She wants to feed you. It'll be loud and there'll be too much food and my father will try to fix something on your car whether it's broken or not. That's how they say they like you."

It was a bigger deal than she was making it sound like, and they both knew it. Dani had never brought anyone to Detroit. Not Marisol, not anyone ever.

The rule had been the same there as everywhere, that the people who got let all the way in were the people who could do you the most harm. She'd taken Roxy into her empty apartment in the spring and her body had survived it. This was the last locked room. This was bringing the woman half the world thought it owned home to a street outside Detroit where the neighbors would talk and her brothers would be merciless and her mother would cry in the kitchen. Dani found she wanted it, all of it, the noise and the mess and the exposure, wanted her family to know the person who'd finally seen her completely for who she was and loved her for it.