Page 6 of Under the Spotlight

There it was, the whole machine in one sentence. Arrive separately, leave together, wear the color that photographed like joy. Ten years of being the most wanted woman in every room she walked into, and the wanting was a thing other people scheduled and dressed and aimed at a lens, and somewhere underneath all of it there was supposed to be a person whose actual life this was. Roxy had spent two years now reaching for that person in the dark and coming back with a fistful of nothing. The clause had a name for what she was allowed to be. Single. Available. Beloved at a distance and belonging to no one, because a woman who belonged to someone was a woman people stopped imagining they could have, and the whole tower was built on people imagining.

"I'll handle Reeve when I get to him," she said.

"You'll handle Reeve by showing up in the green and smiling⁠—"

"I said I'll handle it, Viv." It came out with more edge than she'd planned, a flat little note with teeth in it, and the edge surprised both of them. Roxy took her arm off her eyes. "We're done for tonight. Thank you. Go to bed, it's the middle of the night where you are."

A silence on the line that cost money. "Get some rest," Vivienne said, which from her was almost tender and almost a warning, and the call ended.

The suite was very quiet after.

Roxy stayed on the couch a while, looking at the ceiling.

"You're not tired," Tilda said.

She'd come around to perch on the arm of the opposite chair, tablet face-down on her knee for once, watching Roxy with the sharp brown eyes that had never once signed on to the act, even when everyone else in the building had. Tilda had been with her three years. Tilda knew which smile was which, knew the difference between the one Roxy gave a rope line and the one she gave almost no one. It was the single most relaxing and most dangerous thing about her, that there was one human in the apparatus Roxy couldn't successfully perform for, and that the human had a key to every room she slept in.

"I'm a little tired," Roxy said.

"You held a flight to London to extend a stay in a city whose biggest draw is a hockey team you'd never heard of in August." Tilda tilted her head. "I booked the room under Halliday, by the way. Nobody's looking for you. Or if they are, they won’t find you. So whatever this is, you can tell me or not tell me. Just don't tell me you're tired."

Roxy almost laughed. It was the name that did it, her own real name said out loud and gentle in a hotel suite, Halliday, the thing she'd been before any of this got built on top of her, and it reached somewhere soft she usually kept under armor.

"I requested someone for the first shoot," she said. "For the ambassador campaign. The one-on-one."

"I know. I processed the request." Tilda's expression didn't move. "The goalie."

"The goalie."

"Dani Petrovic." Tilda set the name down on the table between them, careful, like she wanted to see what Roxy would do with it. "The one you chased down after the gig.”

"I didn't chase—" Roxy stopped, because she had, in fact, chased. She sat up and pushed both hands back through her hair, the elaborate gala set long since brushed out, just her own honey mess now. "She didn't watch the show, Til. The whole building had its phone up and she was reading a text from her brother about a four-year-old losing a tooth. And when I went and talked to her she looked at me like I was just a person who'd interrupted her evening. Not Roxy Blaze. Not a brand. Not a thing she wanted a piece of. Somebody who'd interrupted her evening, and was maybe going to keep her standing in a cold hallway when she had an early morning the next day."

It shouldn't have been a thing she was still turning over two days later. She met thousands of people a year and they blurred, all of them, the reaching and the smiling and the phones held up. Then she forgot them by the next city because you couldn't carry the faces and survive. She had carried this one for forty-eight hours, taking it out to look at it on planes and in elevators, and she had no frame for that, because no one in a very long time had cost her the smallest thing, and she didn't know what to call a person who simply wanted nothing back.

"And you found that," Tilda said slowly, "irresistible."

"I found it interesting."

"Mm." Tilda picked the tablet back up, which meant she was about to do something Roxy wanted. "You want me to find a reason to keep you in town past the shoot?”

"Can you?"

"I can find you a reason to be anywhere on the planet. It's the whole job." She was already tapping. "The team's foundation runs a children's-hospital visit every fall. I can attach you to it. It reads as goodwill, buys you a week, and gives the cameras something wholesome." She glanced up, and the tapping stopped. "Roxy. Whatever this is, the clause you just put your finger on has teeth. I'm not telling you not to. I'm telling you I read all forty pages, even on the nights you don't."

"I know you do," Roxy said. "It's why I keep you."

"It's why you keep me." Tilda stood, the next six calls already lining up behind her eyes. "Get some actual sleep. I'll have your week by morning."

She let herself out. The door shut with the heavy, expensive hush of good hotels, and Roxy was alone with the parking-structure view and forty signed pages and the silence she'd been outrunning for two years.

She didn't go to bed.

She paced the suite once, twice, like she did in the wings before a show when the adrenaline had nowhere to spend itself, and then she stopped at the desk because there was a notepad on it. Hotel stationery, thick and creamy and useless. A pen with the hotel's name down one side. Her hands had the pen uncapped before the rest of her had agreed to anything.

For two years there had been nothing. That was the part nobody knew, not Vivienne, not the label, not the millions of people who streamed the back catalog on the assumption that the woman who made it was still in there making more. Roxy Blaze, who'd written her first single at sixteen in a motel bathroom because it was the only door in her mother's life that locked, hadn't finished a song since she was twenty-five. The motel song had been about her mother, not that she'd ever said so out loud and not that she ever would.

Eight years old on a folding chair backstage at a pageant, sixteen in a bathroom with a borrowed guitar, and in between a thousand stages and one woman in the wings counting the judges' faces. She'd built a whole sound out of wanting to be chosen, and the terrible joke of it was that the wanting had sold, the hunger had gone platinum, and once you'd put your own hunger on the market there was one question you could never ask out loud again. Whether anyone would choose you if there were nothing in it for them.