Chapter 9 #2
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.