Page 28 of Under the Spotlight

And Roxy crossed the room and kissed her hard enough to knock the breath out of both of them, hard enough to bruise, both hands coming up to grip Dani's face like she had to confirm the bones of it were real. Dani caught her around the waist and held on. And Roxy made a sound into her mouth that was half a laugh and half something that had been waiting six days to get out. She tasted like the cold outside and the long night and underneath all of it like herself, and Dani kissed her back with six days of not-sleeping behind it and felt the floor of her tilt.

"How long," Roxy got out, against her mouth, not letting go. "Tell me how long, I need to know how much⁠—"

"Thirty-six hours." Dani had done that math too. "I fly back tomorrow night. I have practice the day after, I can't—thirty-six hours."

The clock got into Roxy's eyes, and her whole face sharpened, hungry and decided, and she got both hands in the front of Dani's hoodie and walked her backward into the wall beside the window, and the city burned cold and far below them, and Roxy kissed her like the thirty-six hours had already started counting down and she meant to spend every one of them.

She got Dani's jeans open with the city at their backs. There was nothing careful in it, none of the first night's reverence, none of the slow asking, because they were past the asking now and there was a clock running and they both knew it, and Roxy got a hand down the front of Dani's underwear and found her already wet, already aching, six days of it, and they both went still for one breath at the proof of how much.

"God," Roxy breathed against her jaw. "You flew here like this. You were on a plane like this." She stroked through the slick of it, slow then not slow, two fingers finding her and pushing up into her, the heel of her hand grinding against Dani's clit, and Dani's head went back against the cold glass and a sound came out of her she didn't recognize. "Say you're not going to disappear. Say this is real, that you actually crossed an ocean, tell me⁠—"

"I'm here." Dani's hips moved against her hand, helpless, greedy, the whole tired length of her lit up. "Roxana. I'm here, I'm not—" Her voice broke as Roxy curled her fingers. "I came all this way to be here, of course it's real, fuck."

“I’ve been wanting to fuck you so much,” Roxy whispered into her ear. “Feeling you like this for me, coming apart on my fingers…” Dani felt Roxy’s fingers thrusting into her and she felt weak at the knees. Roxy’s whispers were driving her crazy.

“You feel so fucking good. So hot wet and amazing.” Roxy’s fingers kept working inside her, fucking her G spot, the heel of her hand rubbing against Dani’s clit as she did.

Roxy fucked her against the window slow and deep and watched her face the entire time, drinking it, her own breath coming ragged like Dani's pleasure was happening to her too. And Dani gripped her shoulders and rolled into her hand and came embarrassingly fast, came with the lights of London smeared below her and Roxy's forehead pressed to her temple and Roxy whispering filthy tender things into her ear, came shaking with one hand fisted in the back of Roxy's shirt. And Roxy didn't give her a second to come down. She kissed down Dani's throat, her collarbone, dropped to her knees on the expensive carpet and dragged Dani's jeans the rest of the way down and put her mouth on her right there against the glass, and Dani's hand flew into her hair and her knees nearly went, and she had to brace her other palm flat on the cold window to stay standing.

Roxy used her tongue and two fingers still buried in her and brought her up again with no mercy at all, her name a wreck on Dani's lips, the most-watched woman in the world on her knees in a dark hotel suite doing this where not one camera in the world could find them. And Dani looked down at her once and nearly came just from the sight, the loose gold hair, the bare unpainted face turned up, the eyes finding hers. She came the second time with a broken sound and her thighs trembling, Roxy holding her hips to the wall so she wouldn't fold.

They made it to the bed eventually, tangled, half-dressed, laughing breathlessly at the trail of clothes. Dani got Roxy out of the last of the stage costume she was still half wearing, the rigid glittering thing peeled off her like a shell, until it was only Roxy underneath, warm and real and hers. And Dani laid her back on a bed that cost more than a month of rent and took her time even with the clock running, because some part of her refused to be rushed through this one thing.

She kissed down the center of her, slow, and Roxy was already gone, already wrecked from doing the wrecking, gasping before Dani even reached her, and Dani settled between her thighs and put her mouth on her and felt Roxy arch up off the bed. She set her mouth to her and pushed two fingers slow inside her, pressing up to the place that made Roxy's whole body lock, and Roxy's hands scrabbled at the sheets and then at Dani's hair and she said Dani's name into the dark of the foreign room like it was the only English word she had left. Dani read her as she read everything, every catch and stutter of breath, and stayed exactly where Roxy needed her her mouth sucking on Roxy’s swollen clit as her fingers fucked her, and Roxy came apart with her spine bowed off the mattress and a cry she didn't bother to swallow because there were no walls here to hear through, no team, no neighbors, no one but the two of them in a city neither of them belonged to.

And Dani didn't give her the chance to come down. She kept her fingers moving, slow and deep, and gentled her tongue and drove her straight back up toward a second while Roxy was still shaking through the first. Roxy gasped oh my god and I can't and then very clearly don't you dare stop, and Dani laughed low against her and kept going. And she felt Roxy come apart a second time under her mouth gushing into the palm of her hand, harder, longer, one hand clamped over her own mouth out of a habit she didn't need anymore and the other fisted hard in Dani's hair. After, Roxy hauled her up the bed and kissed her, tasting herself, loose and undone, and pulled Dani down against her and held on like the thirty-six hours were a thing she could keep from leaking out if she just gripped hard enough.

They didn't sleep much. Neither of them said the obvious thing, that sleeping was a waste of hours they didn't have, but they both knew it, and so they lay tangled in the gold dark and talked in low voices about nothing and everything, and twice more in the night one of them reached for the other, and the clock ran down the whole time underneath them like a current. Roxy told her about the show, the twenty thousand voices singing words back at her that she'd written about a man she'd never touched, and how hollow it had gone, how she'd stood up there in the lights and felt like a recording of herself. Dani told her her bed feeling empty in Phoenix Ridge, plainly, because Roxy had earned plain, and Roxy went quiet and pressed her face into Dani's neck at that, the admission costing Dani more than any of the louder things she could have said. Dani lay with Roxy's head on her chest and her hand in Roxy's hair and didn't let herself look at the bedside clock, which kept ticking through the count whether she looked at it or not.

Roxy put her in a car to Heathrow at dawn after their 36 hours.

She came down to the service entrance herself, which was a risk, in a coat and a knit cap with her hair shoved up under it and no face on, and she stood in the cold loading bay while the driver loaded Dani's single small bag, and for a moment neither of them said anything because there was nothing to say that wasn't too big for a loading dock at six in the morning.

"This was insane," Roxy said finally. "You're insane. You flew to London for thirty-six hours."

"I'd do it again," Dani said, which was as close to the enormous thing as she could get standing up. "I'll see you very soon.”

“Just a few more days." Roxy nodded, fast, as people do when they're keeping something off their face. She reached up and tugged the collar of Dani's coat straight, the small unbearable gesture, the one she did now. "Go. Before I do something undignified in front of a valet."

Dani kissed her once in the gray cold, brief, and got in the car, and made herself not look back, and got all the way to the end of the loading bay before she looked back anyway, and Roxy was still there, a small figure with her hands jammed in her pockets, watching her go.

She held it together through the cab and the queue and security. She held it together on the long flight with her forehead against the window and her jaw set, watching the gray ocean turn to gray land. She held it together through the jetway and the long fluorescent walk and the slow shuffling line. And it was only at the customs desk at JFK, when the officer asked the reason for her trip and she opened her mouth to say family and couldn't make the lie come out a second time, that it finally came up the back of her throat all at once. She said personal in a voice that came out wrong, and the officer glanced up, and stamped her passport, and waved her through. And Dani walked out into the echoing hall of the terminal with her bag on her shoulder and her eyes burning and let two tears go, finally, fast, scrubbing them away with the heel of her hand before anyone could see. She was a woman crying quietly in an airport for no reason anyone passing could have named, three thousand miles already opening up behind her between the body she'd left and the body she had to go be tomorrow.

17

The show was the best she'd played in two years and she felt almost none of it.

That was the thing nobody warned you about, that a body could do the entire impossible job on memory alone, could hit every mark and every note and every grateful upward-flung gesture toward the cheap seats while the actual person who lived inside it stood somewhere behind her own sternum thinking about a goalie on a plane over the Atlantic. Twenty thousand people in the O2 and another twenty the night before, and Roxy gave them the whole machine, the costume changes and the catwalk and the encore she pretended to be talked into, and the reviews in the morning would say she was reborn, electric, back at the height of her powers, and the truth was that she'd spent the whole two hours running the clock in her head. Dani lands at nine. Dani's through customs by ten. Dani's home, asleep, by the time I'm in the car. She blew kisses to forty thousand strangers and meant none of them and counted the hours until one specific woman was back in Phoenix Ridge.

It should have terrified her, how little she felt up there. For most of her life the stage had been the one place the numbness lifted, the one reliable hour where the engineered girl surfaced briefly into something close to alive, fed by the heat and the roar and the thousand faces tipped up at her like she was weather. She had built a religion out of that hour. She had told herself for a decade that as long as the stage still worked, the trade had been worth it, that whatever they'd carved out of her in the studios and the green rooms was repaid every night by thousands of people who loved a person who wasn't really her and loved her anyway. And tonight the stage hadn't worked, and instead of frightening her it had only clarified things, because she finally understood that the high had never been the crowd at all. It had been being seen. And she'd found, in Phoenix Ridge, in Dani’s arms, a version of being seen that didn't require a single spotlight, that asked for nothing back, that didn't dim the second the house lights came up. Next to that, twenty thousand people screaming her name felt like being shouted at by strangers in a language she'd stopped speaking.

She skipped the after-party. There was always an after-party, there was a whole apparatus of after-parties, sponsors to be photographed beside and a label president to be charming for and a careful quantity of champagne to be seen holding and not drinking, and Roxy looked at the lineup of it on Tilda's tablet in the car and said no. Just no. Tell them I'm sick, tell them I'm precious about my voice, tell them anything. She went back to the suite that still smelled of Dani, and she couldn't eat the food that came up on the silver tray, pushed it around and gave up, and instead she sat on the floor against the couch where Dani had waited for her the night before and she wrote.

Two songs before the sky went gray. They came up as they all came up now, fast and whole and aching. One of them was about an ocean and a thirty-six-hour window and a woman who flew across the whole curve of the earth to be with her.

She wrote about Dani in the airport. She didn't even change the details on that one. Let it be about an airport. Nobody would ever know which airport, or who, or why.

Vivienne called at noon which was 7am where she was, and Vivienne never called at her own seven a.m. unless she wanted Roxy to know she'd been up working on her since before dawn.