Page 10 of Under the Spotlight

"You'll want to watch our girl in net," Astoria said, appearing at her elbow with two flutes of champagne and her wife a half-step behind her. "Miller thinks she's the best goalie in the league. Miller is usually right about these things."

"Miller is always right about these things," said Miller Scott, who was as dry as a good martini and shook Roxy's hand like she'd already decided whether she liked her and didn't intend to say which. "Petrovic. Thirty-one. Don't waste your time on the puck. Watch her. The puck's a distraction. She isn't."

"I'll watch her," Roxy said, and took a too-large sip of champagne, because she'd been planning to watch Dani Petrovic all along, and it unsettled her to admit it.

The game started and Roxy understood almost none of it. It was fast in a way television flattened completely, bodies hitting bodies along the boards with a bang she felt come up through the glass, the puck a black rumor she kept losing track of. So she gave up on the puck and watched the people instead, how they threw themselves at each other and bounced back up, the casual violence of it, the whole building breathing in when the play swung toward one net and out when it swung back. It was, she realized, the most honest room she had been inside in years. Nobody here was performing. Eighteen thousand people were feeling the identical thing at the identical second and not one of them was doing it for a lens, and Roxy, who got paid an unspeakable amount to manufacture exactly this feeling and sell it back to rooms like this one, stood at the glass and envied them it.

And Miller had been right. You could find the whole game in the goalie. Down there at the far end, small in all her pads, Dani Petrovic moved the way water moves, no wasted motion anywhere in her, sliding post to post, dropping and rising, and Roxy understood for the first time what the woman in the studio had been trying to tell her. In the crease it's just angles. You could watch her do it. You could watch her make the net small, take the shooters' room away from them, dare them to find a gap that wasn't there. Twice in the first period the building groaned at a shot that should have gone in and didn't, and both times Roxy caught herself already looking to the goalie before she understood why, like looking for the one fixed point in a room that won't stop moving. Astoria narrated some of it for her, icings and power plays and a penalty Roxy didn't follow, and Roxy nodded and asked a polite question here and there and watched number thirty-one the whole time.

It was the most herself Roxy had seen her. At the shoot Dani had been braced and polite and giving away nothing, a woman waiting to be allowed to leave. Out here she'd vanished completely into the work, and the vanishing was the whole point, you could see that it was the point, the same thing Roxy chased on a stage and almost never caught anymore. Two people who had each found exactly one place on earth where the noise stopped.

In the second period the other team came down three-on-one and Roxy stopped breathing without deciding to. The shot came hard, top corner, the kind that was already a goal, and Dani's glove was simply there, plucked it out of the air like she'd known the address before the shooter did, and eighteen thousand people came up out of their seats and the noise slammed the glass of the box like weather, and Roxy was on her feet too, champagne forgotten, both palms flat on the cold glass like a kid, close enough to fog it.

"Told you," Miller said, somewhere behind her, deeply satisfied.

Roxy made herself peel her hands off the glass. She made herself pick the champagne back up and put an ambassador's face on. But her heart was going like she'd run somewhere, and down on the ice the woman who'd done it was already skating it off, already gone, tapping each post with her stick, head down, back inside the quiet she'd told Roxy she picked at nine years old, like a save that good was just an average day at work, like she hadn't reached into the air and unmade something that was already true. Roxy had spent her whole life chasing the feeling of doing one thing so well it stopped time. She was standing here watching someone who lived there.

She made herself sit down. She watched the rest of it like an ambassador. By the third period she'd stopped performing interest entirely and was just watching, chin in her hand, the donors and the champagne and the glass box gone soft and far away. Somewhere in there Astoria had stopped narrating and started watching Roxy instead, level and unhurried, no expression on her at all. She owned the contracts on a great many people and hadn't gotten there by missing things. Roxy felt it and didn't turn her head. Let her watch. Let everyone watch. It was, after all, the one thing Roxy Blaze was for.

The Valkyries won. Dani Petrovic saved every puck and Roxy felt like she could remember each one.

"Come down to ice level," Astoria said when the horn went. "We do a few photographs with the players after a win. The ambassador in the family portrait. It plays well."

So Roxy rode the elevator down into the belly of the building and walked out through a tunnel into the cold breath coming off the ice, and the team lined up along the boards in their gear, sweaty and bright-eyed and enormous up close. Roxy had met presidents and walked away unimpressed, and here she was a little awed by a row of women who smelled of sweat and cold air, who had just left everything they had out on the ice and were still standing, still grinning, still loose and bright with the win. There was nothing for sale on any of their faces.

She went down the line doing what she did. A hand here. A word there. Great game. You were unbelievable out there. Thank you for having me. She was good at it. She'd been good at it her whole life, the moving down a line of people and giving each of them one clean warm second of herself, and tonight she felt every inch of how practiced it was, because the entire time she was doing it she was counting down the line to the last person, who stood at the end with her helmet off and her dark hair sweated to her temples and her gray eyes fixed firmly somewhere over Roxy's left shoulder.

Roxy reached her. She held out her hand.

"Great game," she said, and heard how ordinary it came out, and hated it.

Dani shook her hand. One firm pump, like shaking hands with a sponsor, and she didn't meet Roxy's eyes, not once. She looked at the boards and the photographer and the middle distance and the cold air, anywhere in the whole enormous building except the six inches where Roxy was standing trying to be looked at. Her hand was warm and dry, the palm callused hard from a thousand nights in the catching glove, and it was gone almost before Roxy registered it.

"Thanks," Dani said, to no one, and the photographer got the shot, and that was that.

It shouldn't have stung. Roxy got looked at by everyone, everywhere, all the time. It was the entire weather of her life. One woman declining to do it was statistically meaningless. It stung like a slap. And the genuinely humbling part was that Roxy understood it. Dani wasn't being cruel. She wasn't running a game, wasn't withholding to make Roxy want it more, none of the moves Roxy knew by heart and had had run on her a thousand times. She simply didn't want to be looked at by Roxy Blaze, didn't want whatever came bolted to it, and was keeping her eyes on the boards to protect something. Roxy knew all about protecting something. She just wasn't used to being the weather a person needed protecting from. She'd spent a decade as the thing every room wanted a piece of, and not once in all of it had she been the thing a person braced against. It should have felt like rejection. It felt, bewilderingly, like being taken seriously.

She smiled for the camera with a hand on the goalie's padded shoulder and the goalie not looking at her, and she thought, fine. Okay. Fine.

She caught Dani in the corridor on the way out.

She hadn't planned it, or she'd planned it without admitting to herself she was planning it, by knowing which tunnel the players used and by being slow saying goodbye to Astoria until she saw the dark head come through the door. Dani had changed into street clothes, jeans and a hoodie and a bag over one shoulder, the loud famous night sloughed off her, just a tired woman going home. She slowed when she saw Roxy. Her gray eyes looked surprised momentarily. She didn't stop.

"You don't have to say anything," Roxy said, and stepped into her path, close, so Dani had to either stop or walk straight through her. Dani stopped. Up this close, finally, the gray eyes came to Roxy's face, wary and steady, and Roxy felt the whole speech she hadn't known she'd written rise ready in her throat. She kept it to the true part.

"I'm going to keep texting you," she said. "You can keep not answering. That's allowed, it's completely allowed, I'm not asking you for anything and I'm not going to make it weird when we see each other. I just didn't want you lying awake wondering whether I got the message, the not-answering one. I got it. And I'm going to keep texting you anyway." She let it sit one second. "I thought you should know what you were dealing with. I like you. And I want to text you.”

Dani's mouth opened. Whatever was going to come out of it, Roxy didn't wait for, because she'd learned a long time ago that the trick to an exit is taking it before the other person finds their footing, and because if she stood there one more second looking at that wary, unguarded face she was going to say something with a great deal less dignity in it.

She turned and walked away down the bright corridor, heels loud on the concrete, and she didn't look back, and it took everything she had, and somewhere behind her she could feel the goalie standing exactly where she'd left her, watching her go, not saying a word.

Her hands were shaking. She tucked them into her coat. It had been years, genuinely years, since she'd said put herself out there like that without knowing in advance how they'd take it, since she had put a sentence into the world with no media trainer's fingerprints anywhere on it, and the terror of it was almost impossible to tell apart from how alive it made her feel. She'd just told a woman she barely knew that she liked her and was going to keep trying. She had no idea whether that was brave or pathetic. She only knew it was hers, the first thing in a long time that was entirely hers.

She got into the car. Tilda was already in it, on the phone, and she took one look at Roxy's face and said into the phone, "I'll call you back," and hung up.

"Well?" Tilda said.

"Push the flight one more day," Roxy said, looking out the window at the arena sliding past, and Tilda might have had a minor eyebrow raise, but she nodded and started tapping away on her iPad.