Page 31 of Under the Spotlight

“Can you… Another finger… please..” Roxy murmured into the pillow.

Dani nodded although knew Roxy wouldn’t see the nodding. She applied more lube and worked through the same slow process as she pulled her finger out and replaced it with two fingers, working slowly inside Roxy. Roxy was relaxed and open to her and her fingers slid in easily to their full depth.

“Oh, my god. You feel amazing.” Roxy gasped. “This is incredible.”

Dani noticed Roxy’s right hand reaching underneath her body to touch her clit as her hips rolled and Dani began to fuck her ass with two fingers slow and deep.

Roxy's whole body locked and shuddered, and a sound came out of her that Dani had never pulled from her before, raw, undone. Roxy kept her hand working her clit as Dani fucked her anally slow and deep. She laid herself down along Roxy's back and set her mouth at the nape of her neck, all of her covering all of her now, no distance left anywhere. Roxy reached back with her left hand and gripped her thigh while she rode her right hand, biting down on the pillow as she did so. Roxy came around her fingers shaking and gasping crying out loudly as she did so. Dani held her through every aftershock staying with her fingers deep inside her and her face buried in her hair.

Roxy had tears in her eyes and Dani kissed them away holding her tightly, never wanting to let go.

After, they lay tangled and wrecked in the dark, and Roxy was already half asleep, boneless, her back against Dani's chest and Dani's arm heavy over her, and she murmured something about never flying private again if this was what coach got her, and Dani huffed a laugh into her shoulder and held her closer. The kettle had gone cold on the stove, the boil they'd never come back to. Dani lay in the dark with the warm weight of her gone heavy and slow with sleep, and felt days of distance close down to nothing.

She lay there in the warm dark and turned the night over slowly, as she always did. There'd been a time, not even three months gone, when she couldn't have done what they'd just done, couldn't have let anyone behind her like that, couldn't have put her own body that fully into someone else's hands without a wall up somewhere, watching the exits. Sex for seven years had been a thing she managed, kept at arm's length, performed competently and then left. And tonight she'd laced her fingers through Roxy's and laid herself down along the whole length of her with nothing held back anywhere, and it hadn't cost her anything, hadn't set off a single alarm, because the body in her arms belonged to the one person who'd never once tried to take a piece of her she hadn't offered. It wasn't the acts that had undone her tonight; it was the safety underneath them. She pressed her face into the back of Roxy's neck and breathed her in and felt, for the first time in seven years, entirely where she belonged.

She woke at five out of habit, as she always did, and for once she didn't get up.

Roxy was a warm dead weight against her, deep under, as she only went when Dani was there, and Dani lay in the gray hour with her arm gone numb beneath her and didn't move it, didn't want it back, watched the light come up slow across the ceiling and thought about Frankie. Frankie, who'd warned her in a parking garage months ago that this kind of thing ate people alive. Frankie, who'd handed her a Gatorade and said I know, and I won't tell anyone, and kept that promise without ever once making Dani explain. Frankie, who Dani had lied to- Detroit, my mom's garden, and the lie had sat in her since like a swallowed stone.

She was done lying to Frankie. That was the decision, arriving quietly as her real decisions always did, fully formed, in the dark, with Roxy's heartbeat under her hand. She could already picture it, how Frankie would take it. No big speech, Frankie didn't do speeches any more than Dani did. She'd go still for a second, and then she'd nod, and she'd say something dry to cut the size of it, well, you don't do anything halfway, and then she'd ask the only question that mattered to her, which was whether Roxy was good to Dani, whether this woman was kind to her under all the fame, and Dani would say yes, and mean it, and that would be that. Eleven years of trust didn't need more than that. She'd tell her today. Not everything, not the parts that were only theirs, but the true shape of it, that there was someone, that it was Roxy, that it was real and not a mistake and not a thing that was going to eat her alive but the opposite, the thing that had finally taught her she'd been only half living. She'd tell Frankie at skate, quietly, in the corner of the gear room where they'd been telling each other things for eleven years, and it would be the first time she'd said it out loud to another living person, and saying it out loud would make it real in a way even London hadn't.

She tightened her arm around Roxy and pressed her mouth to the warm curve of her shoulder and let herself feel, for one whole minute, completely happy and completely safe, a woman who had finally stopped hiding and was about to step out into the light on her own terms, at her own pace, with the person she'd chosen sleeping in her arms.

She had no idea that by the time the sun was fully up, none of it would be hers to choose anymore.

19

The phone was screaming when Roxy woke, and she knew before she even looked at it. Some animal part of her knew. The buzzing was wrong, too much of it, a phone vibrating itself across the nightstand in a way a phone only did when the whole world had decided to want something from you at once, and she lay in the gray morning in the warm hollow where Dani had been a few hours ago and stared at the ceiling and didn't reach for it, because for one last second she got to not know, and some part of her understood that the second was the last good thing she'd get for a while.

Then she reached for it.

The screen was a wall of alerts. Her own name stacked down it over and over, the notifications she'd muted months ago shoved through anyway by sheer volume, and at the top, the thing, the headline with the photo under it, and the photo was the rental. Her rental. The back stair, the alley, shot long-lens, grainy and unmistakable, and in it a tall woman in a dark coat with her collar up, head down, letting herself in a door. And the next photo, time-stamped a different night, the same woman leaving at dawn. And a third, and a fourth, a whole patient catalog of them, weeks of someone sitting in a cold car down the block with a long lens, documenting every dawn Dani had ever walked out of that door thinking she was invisible, thinking the one place in the world the cameras couldn't find them was safe. POP QUEEN'S SECRET TRYSTS. WHO'S THE MYSTERY WOMAN SLIPPING OUT AT DAWN?

Roxy sat up so fast the room tilted. She couldn't breathe right. The pictures kept loading as she scrolled, more of them, and her brain did the thing it did in a crisis, went cold and fast and clinical, started doing the damage assessment as Vivienne had trained her to from the time she was seventeen, and she hated herself for it even as she did it, because the assessment kept arriving at the same place, which was Dani. Dani's face wasn't clear in any of them, the collar and baseball cap and the dark had seen to that, but it would be. Someone would clear it. Someone would name her by tonight. The most private person Roxy had ever known, the woman who had built an entire careful life around being impossible to find, was about to be found by everyone, and it had happened in the one place Roxy had promised her no one could.

Roxy had thought of that rental as the one place outside the world. There was no place outside the world. She knew that. She'd known it since she was seventeen. She'd let herself forget it for a few months, and Dani was the one paying for the forgetting.

She fumbled the phone trying to call her. And that was when the second story broke.

It came in over the top of the first, a fresh push notification, and Roxy read it twice before it made sense and then wished it hadn't. ROXY BLAZE TO HEADLINE HOLLIS GALLERY GALA. SOURCES CONFIRM POP'S GOLDEN COUPLE 'CLOSER THAN EVER.' And under it, a quote, attributed to a representative for Ms. Blaze, polished and warm and utterly fluent, confirming Roxy's appearance with Reeve the coming weekend and addressing, with breezy generosity, the unfortunate tabloid speculation about Phoenix Ridge. It said Ms. Blaze had formed lovely friendships with several members of the Valkyries organization during her ambassadorship, that she socialized warmly with many people, and that fans should look forward to seeing her on Reeve's arm very soon.

Roxy read the words several members of the Valkyries organization and socialized warmly and understood exactly what had been done to her, and to Dani, and exactly who had done it.

Vivienne hadn't been caught flat-footed by the leak. Vivienne had been ready for it. The statement was too clean, too fast, too perfectly shaped to drop on the same morning, which meant it hadn't been written this morning, which meant Vivienne had known. Roxy sat on the edge of the bad rental bed with two stories burning a hole in her hand and the whole architecture of it assembled itself in front of her, cold and complete. The Reeve event held in reserve for weeks. The too-agreeable phone call. The fraction-too-long silence when Roxy had said fine, send the dress. Vivienne hadn't been placated. Vivienne had been buying time to load the gun. The leak, whoever had technically sold the photos, was the starting pistol, and the Reeve statement was the answer Vivienne had written and chambered before the question was even asked. It was designed to do one thing, to take the true story, Roxy is in love with a woman, and bury it under the brand story, Roxy is single and available and stepping out with Reeve Hollis, and to reduce Dani Petrovic, in the doing, to a friend Roxy briefly socialized with. To make her nobody. To make their whole secret world a line in a managed paragraph.

She called Tilda with her hands shaking.

Tilda answered on the first ring and didn't bother with hello. "I've been calling you for an hour. Where have you been?"

"Asleep. I just saw it. Both of them. Tilda, the Reeve statement, that's⁠—"

"It's hers. I know. I've already been on with three people." Tilda's voice was tight and furious and underneath it something close to tears, which Roxy had never once heard from her. "She moved without you, Roxy. The statement went out under your name and nobody asked you. The Reeve event was locked three weeks ago and held, exactly like I was scared of, she kept it in her pocket. And the photos. I don't know who sold the photos, I genuinely don't, but she had that statement ready to go inside of twenty minutes of the first story, and you don't write that clean that fast, she's been sitting on it. She knew it was coming. She might as well have called the photographer herself." A breath. "I'm done. I want you to hear me say it with my whole chest. I'm done covering for her, I'm done being the buffer, I quit this morning in my heart and I'll quit out loud the second you tell me to. So tell me. What do you want? Whatever it is. I'm yours."

And Roxy, who had spent eleven years being handled, being moved, being told what she wanted by the woman on the other end of these exact calls, gripped the phone and tried to think past the roar in her ears, because for the first time in her adult life there was no one above her deciding the next move, there was only her, and a friend asking what do you want, and a woman somewhere across town whose life had just been set on fire to protect a lie about Roxy's.

"Give me a second," Roxy said. "I have to reach Dani first. Before anything. I have to—she's going to think—" Her voice cracked. "I have to call her before she does the math on this alone."

She was already too late.