Page 21 of Under the Spotlight

Frankie sat down beside her. She didn't say anything for a second. She held out a Gatorade, blue, the one Dani liked, and Dani took it because Frankie would hold it there until she did.

"So that was the worst practice you've had since the Obama administration," Frankie said.

"Yeah." Dani didn't lift her head from her hands.

"You want to know what I think?"

"Not especially."

"I'm gonna tell you anyway, it's why I'm here." Frankie leaned back against the stall, easy, no warning in her now, none of the parking-garage gravity. That had been a different conversation for a different day, the eyes-open one, and Frankie wasn't a woman who gave the same speech twice. This was something else. "I think you've spent years being the most locked-down person I've ever skated with, and I think last night some of that came off, and I think your body doesn't know what to do with itself yet. That's not a hockey problem. That's a person finally being a person, and the hockey'll catch up soon once your nervous system stops acting like it got hit by a truck." She cracked her own bottle. "I'd know. I played the worst game of my life when I was first getting with Alessia. Lou still brings it up."

Dani looked at her.

"I'm not gonna make you say anything," Frankie said. "I told you that in the garage and I meant it. I just want you to know that I know, and it's safe with me, all the way, forever, no matter what happens with any of it. You don't have to carry the part where you're worried I'll say something. Set that one down. I've got it." She bumped her shoulder against Dani's. "You can keep the rest. But put that one down, you look like you haven't exhaled since yesterday."

And Dani, who hadn't in fact exhaled since yesterday, who had been holding her breath since a door clicked shut in a rented kitchen, let it out. All of it. A long shaking breath into the empty locker room with her oldest friend's shoulder against hers, and her eyes stung and she pressed the cold Gatorade bottle to her forehead and breathed, and Frankie sat there and let her, and didn't make it a thing, and that was the whole reason it could be one.

"Thanks," Dani said, into the bottle.

"Drink your blue garbage," Frankie said. "We've got Tampa tomorrow night. Go be unreasonable."

She suited up that following night as she'd suited up four hundred times, and it wasn't the same.

The order never changed. It hadn't changed since she was nineteen, the same order every game of her life, right pad before left, the superstition so old it had stopped being a superstition and become just the shape of her hands, chest protector, the braid, the jersey last. She did all of it in the quiet corner of the room she'd staked out a decade ago, headphones in, eyes down, the pre-game cocoon she built around herself so completely that rookies had been on the team a month before they'd heard her speak. Tonight she did every step of it exactly the same and felt every step of it different, because last night a woman had taken these same shoulders in both hands in the lamplight and put her mouth to the scar on this same forearm and not asked what it was, and the body Dani was strapping armor onto was a body somebody else had touched now, and the armor went on over the knowing instead of over a locked empty room. She pulled the jersey down. She picked up the mask. Somewhere above her, by now, Roxy was finding her seat behind the glass, and Dani breathed out slow through the cage and skated into the tunnel light more nervous and more sure than she had been in years, both at once, as everything was now.

She was unreasonable.

It was the strangest thing, and she'd think about it for a long time after, that the same nervous system that had leaked five soft goals the previous morning gave her, at seven that night under the lights with eighteen thousand people screaming, the best game she'd played all season. The wall didn't come back. That was the part she didn't have words for. The wall stayed down, brick for brick, and instead of the disaster she'd braced for, what filled the space where the wall had been was something with no name, something that played like the wall but warmer, looser, more awake, a goaltending that wasn't about keeping the world out anymore because the worst had already gotten in and it had turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to her.

Tampa threw thirty-four at her and she turned away every one. Three breakaways in the second period, three skaters in alone with the building holding its breath, and she met all three as she met everything now, square and present and unafraid, because she had run out of things to be afraid of sometime around two a.m. She poke-checked the first, a stick on the puck a half-stride before the shooter could settle it, clean and patient and exactly on time. She took the second high, glove flashing up to snare a wrister already past her ear, the leather closing on it with a sound the front row felt. And on the third she did the splits across her crease and got a pad on a shot already labeled top shelf, threw a leg across the whole width of the net and stoned it on the goal line. She lay there in the paint a half-second longer than she needed to, the crowd coming up out of its seats, and felt, for the first time in her career, no separation at all between the woman in the net and the woman who lived in her body the rest of the time. They were the same person tonight. She didn't have to leave one at the boards to be the other.

She didn't look at the box. Not once, the whole sixty minutes, the old discipline holding even now. But she felt it. She'd told herself in Boston that the not-looking was its own kind of looking, and tonight it was a held hand, a presence behind glass at center ice that she carried in her chest the entire game like a coal she didn't have to check on to know was lit. Roxy was up there. Roxy had watched her and Dani stopped thirty-four pucks for her without once lifting her eyes. Dani felt happy.

When the horn went she let herself look for Roxy.

She'd earned it, was how it felt, after a whole game of discipline, after years of discipline, after a lifetime of keeping her eyes on the puck and the boards and the middle distance and never on the bright thing watching her. The team came over the boards and piled toward her and she let them come, gloves off her mask, the noise of it washing up around her, and over their shoulders, across the whole white sheet of ice, up behind the glass of Astoria's box, she found her.

Roxy was on her feet. Not performing it, as she hadn't performed any of it alone with Dani, just standing with both hands flat against the glass again, the same as she'd stood in this same box weeks ago, looking down at Dani with her whole unguarded face, and Dani held the look. For one second, two, across two hundred feet of ice and eighteen thousand people and a wall of cameras pointed at everything, Dani Petrovic looked up at Roxy’s beautiful smile and let it show, whatever it was, the thing that had been getting in past her walls for a month.

A month ago she had refused this exact woman this exact look across this exact ice and called it protecting herself. She understood now that she'd only been protecting the wall, and the wall was gone, and she found she didn't miss it. Then she broke the look first, because she was still herself, because some discipline you keep even when you're happy, and she turned and skated to the tunnel with her teammates pounding her shoulders, and she was smiling inside her mask where nobody could see it, and she knew exactly where she was driving the second they let her out of the building.

She drove to the rental in her game suit.

She didn't go home and change. She didn't park a block away tonight, or she did, the professional part of her still ran, but she didn't stand at the bottom of the alley working up the nerve, because the nerve was spent, and a thing you've done once is a different country than a thing you've never done. She went up the alley and up the step and lifted her hand to knock.

The door opened before her knuckles touched it.

Roxy stood in the warm gold light in her sweats and her glasses pushed up into her loose honey hair, no makeup, green eyes full of warmth the moment they saw her. Roxy must have driven straight from the arena too. She must have been waiting for her.

Neither of them said anything. Dani came in out of the cold, and Roxy shut the door against it. There was nothing that needed saying that hadn't already been said with hands and mouths and a name spoken into the dark, and a great game was a love letter and they both knew who it had been written to.

Dani crossed the threshold. Roxy closed the door behind her.

This time felt heated and different from the first. Roxy’s arms were around Dani’s neck kissing her and pressing her tongue into Dani’s mouth and Dani felt a deep hunger inside her for Roxy. Like nothing would satisfy the hunger until she took Roxy, fucked her, felt her come apart under Dani’s hands, under her mouth.

“Take off your clothes,” Dani growled between kisses.

Roxy’s green eyes met hers in a second of understanding and she stripped off first her hoodie, exposing her beautiful round breasts, smooth tan skin with pink nipples that Dani had not forgotten. Roxy’s lovely breasts would live happily in Dani’s mind forever. Roxy dropped her sweatpants to the floor and stepped out of them and she was naked. She had been wearing no underwear. Dani could smell the scent of her, different than the public version of her, this version of Roxy just smelled of a fruity shower cream and something earthy and raw underneath that was unmistakably Roxy.