Page 17 of Under the Spotlight

Roxy's throat did something inconvenient. "One's fine."

"One's fine," Tilda said, dry as a closing door, and went to make calls, and Roxy stood in the enormous room and loved her so much, suddenly, this prickly loyal child she paid to carry her secrets, that she had to look out the window until it passed.

She sent the first text from the balcony, in the cold, because she'd decided the cold would keep her honest.

She'd composed it for most of an hour, which was absurd for a woman who'd written hooks that had played at a thousand weddings, and every draft was wrong. I can't stop thinking about you. True and far too much. Last night was the most real conversation I've had in years. True and reaching for a thing she hadn't earned the right to claim out loud. Astoria's going to murder us both. Funny and cowardly, hiding behind the joke. In the end she stripped it down to the only sentence that was the right size, which was small, because small was the only honest length with this woman, she'd learned that too.

I haven't stopped thinking about what you told me. Thank you for telling me. I know what it cost.

She sent it before she could revise it a ninth time. Then she put the phone on the balcony rail and gripped the cold iron with both hands and looked at the parking structure and counted, because counting was a thing she did now, apparently, a grown woman counting minutes off a dark balcony like a teenager waiting on a landline.

Twenty minutes. She counted all twenty. The reply, when it came, lit the phone face-up against the iron and Roxy snatched it up so fast she nearly sent it over the rail and into the night.

Same.

One word. From anyone else on earth it would have been a brush-off, the conversational equivalent of a door easing shut, and Roxy knew, with a month of learning this exact woman's grammar behind her, that from Dani Petrovic Same was enormous. Same meant I have also not stopped. Same meant I, who told you a thing I have never told another living person, am still inside the telling of it. Same was four letters doing the work of a paragraph Dani would never in her life write. And Roxy stood on the freezing balcony and read it about nine times and felt the whole lit grid below her go soft and far away.

Then she did the thing she'd done with exactly two texts in ten years. She screenshotted it. The number she hadn't saved, the single small word, the timestamp. She deleted the live message from the thread, because the thread could be subpoenaed, the thread could be sold, the thread was a tabloid waiting to be born, and she'd promised Dani she'd never let that happen. But the screenshot went into a folder inside a folder inside an app that looked like a calculator, where exactly one other thing lived, a file marked DP, and she buried the word Same in there next to the song, the two most valuable objects she currently owned, a one-word text and an unfinished melody, neither of which would survive contact with her actual life.

She went back inside. Tilda had left a slip of paper on the console table, an address and a code and a note in her square efficient hand. Furnished. Month to month, paid through a holding company, your name's nowhere on it. Side door off the alley, no doorman, no cameras on the building. I walked it on the app. It's small and it's a little ugly and nobody will ever find you there. You're welcome. Don't make me regret it. — T

Roxy read it twice. Off the alley. No cameras. Nobody will ever find you there. It was the first address she'd had in ten years that the world didn't have a key to, and she stood holding the slip of paper in the too-bright suite and understood that she'd just rented herself the one luxury all the money in the world had never once bought her, which was a door that opened only for the people she chose.

There was an irony in it she didn't have the strength to look at directly, so she looked at it sideways, as she looked at most of the true things about her life. She was the most available woman in pop. That was the product, the thing the clause sold, forty feet of her on a banner with ONE NIGHT ONLY printed under a face sanded down to nothing human, a woman who belonged to everybody so completely that she belonged to no one, least of all herself. Vivienne had built a decade-long fiction that Roxy was open to the entire world, a door anyone could imagine walking through, and the truest sentence of Roxy's actual life was that she hadn't let one single person all the way inside her in years, that the availability was a stage set with nothing behind the facade, and that she'd just paid a holding company to rent her a real door because every other door she owned was painted on. The world had a key to all of her. None of the keys opened anything. She'd had to go and rent the only lock that mattered under a name that wasn't hers.

She went back out to the balcony. The cold had teeth now, real January teeth, and she let it have her bare arms, and she pulled up the thread that had nothing in it anymore, the clean deleted thread with its single surviving Glad you made it back, and she typed the hardest thing she'd typed in years.

She drafted it in her head first, of course she did, standing there shivering, an hour's worth of drafting compressed into ten cold minutes. Come over. Too bald. I have somewhere we can actually be alone. Too much like a proposition, and this wasn't, or it was, but it wasn't only that, and she wouldn't have it read as only that. She wanted it to say the whole thing, which was I rented a door that only opens for you. There are no cameras here and no Tilda and no version of me that's selling you anything. Come find out who I am when nobody's watching, or don't, and either way I'll survive it, but God, I hope you come.

She couldn't fit that on a screen. So she cut it down to the part that was load-bearing, and she typed the address, and under the address she typed the only words that carried all the rest of it folded up inside them.

No cameras, no one knows about this place. Only me there. Come over if you want to.

She read it once. She thought about Astoria's flat warning and about a long-lens camera and about a Tuesday seven years ago that had cost Dani everything. And she thought, with a clarity that startled her in the cold, that she would rather risk her entire manufactured empire than spend one more month being wanted by everyone and known by no one. Then, before the careful decade-trained machine that lived in her chest could talk her out of the bravest thing she'd done since she was seventeen, Roxy Blaze sent the text, and set the phone down on the iron rail, and stood out in the cold with her arms wrapped around herself, smiling at a parking structure, waiting to find out if the one person who didn't want a piece of her wanted the whole of her instead.

10

The text was waiting when Dani woke at six, as the worst and best things in her life had always waited, patient on a screen for her to be ready, which she never was.

Come over if you want to.

Above it, an address she didn't recognize, a street she'd driven past a thousand times without registering, the kind of low brick block of rentals that existed in every city for people who needed to not be found. She read it standing at her own kitchen counter in the gray dark with the coffee maker ticking behind her, and then she read it again, and then she set the phone face-down on the counter and made her coffee and drank it standing up, alone and on her feet, as she did everything, ready to put the cup in the sink and leave.

She didn't reply.

That wasn't a decision so much as the absence of one. There were no words. She'd spent a week building a small dry vocabulary for Roxy, it's fine and same and four-word apologies, a whole telegraphic country she could just about survive inside, and that vocabulary had no entry for the thing the address was. The address wasn't a sentence. It was a door, held open, with a woman standing behind it who'd already told Dani the worst things about herself in a diner at two in the morning and asked for nothing back but the truth. And Dani had given it to her, the whole Marisol-shaped truth she'd never given anyone. Now there was an address, and the address was the next thing, and Dani didn't have words for the next thing, because she'd spent seven years making sure there would never be a next thing again.

She picked the cup up. She washed it. She drove to the rink.

She was useless at skate and she knew it like a toothache she could feel coming, a pressure under everything, a wrongness she couldn't drill out of herself no matter how clean she kept the routine. Same six-fifteen arrival. Same tape, same stretch, same forty minutes of empty ice that had been the most reliable quiet in her life since she was a kid. Except the quiet had the leak in it again, worse than three weeks ago, and the leak said come over if you want to in a voice she'd spent a month learning, and Dani stood in her crease and let her defense run a drill in front of her and tracked exactly none of the pucks, because the one she was watching wasn't on the ice.

If you want to. That was the part that got under. Not come over. Not the address. The if you want to, which handed it all back to her, which made it hers to decide, which was the one thing in the entire transaction Dani had no defense against, because every defense she owned had been built for people who didn't ask. Marisol hadn't asked. Marisol had taken what Dani gave her and made the decision for both of them and sold the result. The whole architecture of Dani's life since had assumed the other person would always, eventually, take. And here was a woman who wouldn't take, who kept setting things down on the table and stepping back from them, who'd drawn her own hand off six inches of laminate because Dani looked at it wrong, and that woman had sent an address with the door left to Dani to walk through or not, and Dani had no idea, none, what a person did when the choice was actually, finally hers.

Lex walked one in on her short-side and Dani bit on the deke a full beat late and the puck went in clean off her blocker, a goal she'd have stopped in her sleep on any other day of her career, and Lex coasted past the crease with her eyebrows up and didn't say anything, which was worse than if she had. Dani fished the puck out of her own net and dropped it for the trainer and said nothing back. Eleven years she'd built a reputation on being the one who didn't get beat on the easy ones. The address in her pocket had cost her an easy one before nine in the morning.

"Petrovic." Mara's voice from the bench, not unkind. "You're a mile away. Get a drink, reset."

Dani skated to the bench and squirted water through her mask and reset and was, for the next twenty minutes, marginally less useless, and the whole time Roxy’s address sat in her pocket like a coal.