Page 7 of Under the Spotlight

She had stopped being able to write right around the time she stopped believing the answer was yes. She'd sat at pianos in five countries and waited and felt nothing arrive. She had quietly decided it was gone the way everything else had gone, sold off a piece at a time, and that the machine had finally come for the one part of her that had ever truly been hers, and there would be no getting it back. You didn't tell people that. There was no clause for it. You just kept lip-syncing your own old joy on stage and hoping the hole didn't show in the light.

She wrote a line.

She looked at it. It was about a hallway and a cold door and a woman who hadn't looked up, and it wasn't good yet, exactly, but it was true, and true was a thing she hadn't been able to get onto a page in so long she'd forgotten the feeling of it, the small clean click of a word falling into the place it belonged. She wrote the next line. Then the one under that. Her handwriting got worse as it got faster, like it used to when she was sixteen and chasing a thing before it could get away.

Seven lines came out of her standing at that desk in a hotel robe at midnight. Seven lines, and the shape of where the chorus wanted to go, an ache of melody she could already hear under the words. When she stopped it was only because her hand had cramped around the cheap pen and her face hurt, and she realized she'd been smiling at a notepad in an empty room like a lunatic. She hadn't smiled at her own work in years. She'd performed a thousand smiles and meant almost none of them, and here was one nobody had asked her for, alone, at a desk, over hotel stationery, with no camera to catch it and no one to sell it to, and that was exactly why it was the most honest thing her face had done since she was a kid. She read it back twice. It was the best thing she'd written in years. It had come out of her in the time it took to boil a kettle, after two years of drought, the day after a stranger had politely declined to be impressed by her.

What was it about Dani Petrovic that intrigued her so? Her intense eyes? Her hard to read face?

She knew what it meant for her to start writing again, and she wasn't going to look at it head-on.

She tore the page off the pad, folded it once, and opened the songwriting app she hadn't touched in so long it made her log back in. She typed the seven lines into a clean file with her thumb, slow, getting the line breaks right, handling it like glass. Then she went to name the file and her thumb hovered. If she named it properly, she would have to know she'd done it. If she named it something safe, she'd lose it in a graveyard folder of dead demos and never open it again, which was probably the entire function of safe.

She typed two letters. DP.

She saved it. She set the phone face-down on the desk, imagining Dani setting one down at home, in a life Roxy hadn't been let into yet, and she stood there in a room booked under her own forgotten name with her heart going hard for no reason a cardiologist could find. She didn't show it to Tilda. She didn't call her mother, or her producer, or anyone who would want a piece of it. For a long while she only stood at the window and looked at the dark parking structure, and let herself, privately, for the first time in longer than she could stand to count, be glad about something that was hers.

4

Dani showed up to the shoot in a black shirt and black jeans because the email had said she should, and she walked into the booked studio off the east concourse expecting the usual circus. A dozen players. A publicist with a clipboard. Somebody's branded backdrop and a line to stand in.

The studio was set for two.

One stool. One mark taped on the floor in front of a charcoal seamless. A camera on a tripod, a softbox the size of a door, a laptop on a cart. A stylist she didn't know fussing with a rolling rack of clothes that weren't, she noted, hockey gear. And Roxy Blaze, in jeans and a plain black sweater with her honey gold hair in a knot, sitting on the one stool with her ankles crossed, looking at her phone, who glanced up when the door opened and didn't perform anything at all.

"There she is," Roxy said, her voice as smooth as silk.

Dani's hand was still on the door. She could leave. There was a version of the next four seconds where she said there had been a mistake and walked back out to the parking garage and let Astoria fine her or trade her or whatever it was owners did to players who wouldn't smile for a camera. She could see the whole clean shape of it, the door, the corridor, her car, the deadbolt at the end of the night and the day shut behind her as something she'd refused.

She let the door close behind her instead. She told herself it was about the fine.

“I thought this was a group thing," she said.

"They told me we would have to say that to get you here.” Roxy slid off the stool. Up close, in the work light, she was smaller than the banner and more real than the banner, no lacquer on her, a faint crease on one cheek like she'd been leaning on her hand while she waited. Her green eyes were beautiful. Striking. Emotive.

"It's an hour. Maybe two. Priya's fast." She tipped her head at the photographer, who lifted a hand without looking up from her laptop. "You don't have to talk to me. You barely have to look at me. We stand where she says, she takes the pictures, you go back to your day. I promise it's the least interesting thing that'll happen to you this week."

It was a generous little speech, built to give her an exit from having to want to be there, and Dani recognized the move, because it was exactly what she'd have said herself to settle a nervous rookie. She didn't trust it for exactly that reason. People who were good at putting you at ease were usually good at it because they needed something, and she'd spent seven years learning to find the something before it found her.

"Fine," she said.

Priya was fast, and Priya had no interest in either of their feelings, which Dani appreciated more than anything anyone had said to her in two days.

"Closer," Priya said, from behind the camera. "Goalie, you're a wall, I love it, stay a wall, but bring your shoulder in. Roxy, in front, you can lean. There. Don't smile yet, I hate the first smile."

They brought her in. They put Roxy half a step ahead of her, turned at an angle, one shoulder nearly against Dani's chest, close enough that Dani could smell her. It was nothing like the engineered thing a magazine would have promised, no perfume at all, just clean honey gold hair and a trace of sweat and something warm underneath that her brain insisted on cataloging without permission. Close enough to feel the heat come off her skin. Close enough that when Roxy breathed, it moved against her.

Dani felt her body reacting involuntarily to the proximity of Roxy.

She held still like she was back in her crease with traffic crashing in front of the net, weight set, breath even, face flat, giving nothing away. That was the one thing she was better at than anyone in the league, holding still while everything in her wanted to move, and she put all of it to work now and told her own pulse to behave. Her pulse mostly listened. It was the mostly that bothered her.

She hadn't been this close to another person in months. Longer than that, if she was honest, and she tried not to be. She kept people at arm's length as a standing policy, and the policy worked, and the policy had never once had to account for a photographer who got paid by the hour to close the distance for you and a woman who smelled like a warm afternoon and held still and easy against your shoulder the second she was told to. Dani ran save sequences in her head, the angles on a two-on-one, the read on a screen shot, anything with edges. It helped. It didn't entirely help.

"Good," Priya said. "Hold."

The shutter went. They reset. They went closer. Between setups, while Priya scrolled through frames and muttered at her laptop, Roxy talked, and Dani braced for small talk, the weather, the flight, how about that crowd. None of it came.

Roxy asked questions. They were specific, and she waited for the answers like she meant to use them.