Chapter 2 #2
Dani looked at the three of them, at Goldie asleep in the sun, at the bowl of the arena going about its morning behind the glass.
There was a version of this where she argued, and she could see all the way to the end of it, and at the end of it she still did the shoot and had spent something getting there she'd rather keep.
That was the part nobody upstairs would ever understand about her.
She didn't fold because she didn't care.
She folded because she had done the arithmetic on what fighting cost and what it bought, and the answer came out the same every time, and a person who had once paid full price for the wrong fight learned to read that ledger early.
"Fine," she said, and turned, and was through the door before anyone could decide that meant she'd taken it well.
She skated badly the rest of the morning. She let in soft ones, the kind she'd have stopped in her sleep, and she felt the team clock her not-quite-there and quietly agree, all of them, not to mention it. She was allowed one of those a season. She'd never once used hers.
The drive home was twenty minutes of wet streetlight and she couldn't have told you a thing about it after.
Her mind kept running the same loop, the office and the small turn of the phone and her name in Astoria's mouth.
She requested you, Dani. She stopped for gas she didn't need, just to stand in the cold under the canopy a minute and not be anywhere.
By the time she let herself into her apartment that night the city had gone dark and quiet six floors down, and she turned the deadbolt all the way, every night the same, until it seated with a sound she could feel in her teeth.
Some people thought a lock was about keeping other people out.
For Dani it had always been simpler. The bolt was the sound of the day ending, of the part where she had to be a person other people could look at finally closing down for the night.
On this side of it nobody needed her to be calm, or reliable, or fine.
The apartment was clean and spare and hers. No one had ever been inside it but her. She'd lived there four years and the only thing on the walls was a calendar.
She ate standing at the counter, leaning on her forearms over the bowl, as she'd eaten her whole life, because that was how you ate in a house where affection came as a plate set down in front of you without comment.
Her mother fed people. Her father fixed their cars.
Nobody in Dani's family had ever once said the word love out loud, and she had never doubted it for a second, and somewhere along the way she'd decided that was the right amount of saying and built the rest of her life to that specification.
Her brothers still called on birthdays. Her mother still mailed her clippings about Yugoslav kids coming up through the men's leagues, in actual envelopes, with no note.
It was a good family. It had taught her that the people who loved you showed up and fixed your transmission and didn't make a production of it.
It hadn't, in eighteen years under that roof, taught her one single thing about what to do when somebody did make a production of wanting you.
She'd had to learn that part on her own, later, and she'd learned it badly enough that she'd never needed the lesson twice.
And now there was going to be a camera. That was the thing that kept snagging behind her ribs the whole way home, and it wasn't Roxy Blaze, exactly.
It was the camera. A lens and a lighting rig and a stranger telling her where to put her hands, all of it pointed at her face for a few hours so the team could sell a season.
Most people got their picture taken and thought nothing of it.
Dani had had her picture taken once, a long time ago, in a way she had never agreed to, and she'd built an entire adult life out of making sure it never happened that way again.
A promo shoot wasn't that. She knew a promo shoot wasn't that. Her body hadn't gotten the memo.
She rinsed the bowl. She should have gone to bed.
Instead she stood at the counter with her phone and typed three words into it before she could talk herself out of them. Roxy Blaze relationship.
The screen filled. Magazine spreads, a red carpet, a long-lensed shot of the singer and some square-jawed man climbing out of a car with his hand at the small of her back.
Pop's most eligible. Inside Roxy and Reeve.
Is Blaze finally settling down? Dani read two of them all the way through, standing there, and learned that Roxy Blaze was twenty-seven and unattached and photographed once a week on the arm of a different beautiful man, and that the whole engine of her ran on her staying available, on being a thing the world got to keep wanting.
She thought about a beautiful woman in a hallway asking what was on her phone like the answer mattered to her.
She thought about how good people got, in Dani's experience, at wanting the version of you that was useful to them, and how rarely it was the actual you underneath, and how much it cost to learn the difference after the fact instead of before.
None of it fit together. The beautiful woman in the hallway and the international superstar in the car with a stranger's hand at her back couldn't be the same person, and Dani knew better than most how easily one human being could be two, how much practice it took, how good you could get at being whatever the room had paid to see.
She just hadn't planned on spending a Tuesday night wondering which of the two had asked for her.
She closed the phone and laid it face-down on the counter and stood in her own quiet kitchen and told herself the only thing there was to tell herself, which was that it was a shoot.
A few hours. She would be professional, and polite, and forgettable, and then Roxy Blaze would take her brand and her square-jawed men and her hand at the small of someone's back and go be the loudest woman in the country somewhere Dani wasn't.
She believed it most of the way to the bedroom.