Chapter 4
Dani showed up to the shoot in a black shirt and black jeans because the email had said she should, and she walked into the booked studio off the east concourse expecting the usual circus. A dozen players. A publicist with a clipboard. Somebody's branded backdrop and a line to stand in.
The studio was set for two.
One stool. One mark taped on the floor in front of a charcoal seamless.
A camera on a tripod, a softbox the size of a door, a laptop on a cart.
A stylist she didn't know fussing with a rolling rack of clothes that weren't, she noted, hockey gear.
And Roxy Blaze, in jeans and a plain black sweater with her honey gold hair in a knot, sitting on the one stool with her ankles crossed, looking at her phone, who glanced up when the door opened and didn't perform anything at all.
"There she is," Roxy said, her voice as smooth as silk.
Dani's hand was still on the door. She could leave.
There was a version of the next four seconds where she said there had been a mistake and walked back out to the parking garage and let Astoria fine her or trade her or whatever it was owners did to players who wouldn't smile for a camera.
She could see the whole clean shape of it, the door, the corridor, her car, the deadbolt at the end of the night and the day shut behind her as something she'd refused.
She let the door close behind her instead. She told herself it was about the fine.
“I thought this was a group thing," she said.
"They told me we would have to say that to get you here.” Roxy slid off the stool.
Up close, in the work light, she was smaller than the banner and more real than the banner, no lacquer on her, a faint crease on one cheek like she'd been leaning on her hand while she waited.
Her green eyes were beautiful. Striking. Emotive.
"It's an hour. Maybe two. Priya's fast." She tipped her head at the photographer, who lifted a hand without looking up from her laptop.
"You don't have to talk to me. You barely have to look at me.
We stand where she says, she takes the pictures, you go back to your day.
I promise it's the least interesting thing that'll happen to you this week. "
It was a generous little speech, built to give her an exit from having to want to be there, and Dani recognized the move, because it was exactly what she'd have said herself to settle a nervous rookie.
She didn't trust it for exactly that reason.
People who were good at putting you at ease were usually good at it because they needed something, and she'd spent seven years learning to find the something before it found her.
"Fine," she said.
Priya was fast, and Priya had no interest in either of their feelings, which Dani appreciated more than anything anyone had said to her in two days.
"Closer," Priya said, from behind the camera. "Goalie, you're a wall, I love it, stay a wall, but bring your shoulder in. Roxy, in front, you can lean. There. Don't smile yet, I hate the first smile."
They brought her in. They put Roxy half a step ahead of her, turned at an angle, one shoulder nearly against Dani's chest, close enough that Dani could smell her.
It was nothing like the engineered thing a magazine would have promised, no perfume at all, just clean honey gold hair and a trace of sweat and something warm underneath that her brain insisted on cataloging without permission.
Close enough to feel the heat come off her skin.
Close enough that when Roxy breathed, it moved against her.
Dani felt her body reacting involuntarily to the proximity of Roxy.
She held still like she was back in her crease with traffic crashing in front of the net, weight set, breath even, face flat, giving nothing away.
That was the one thing she was better at than anyone in the league, holding still while everything in her wanted to move, and she put all of it to work now and told her own pulse to behave.
Her pulse mostly listened. It was the mostly that bothered her.
She hadn't been this close to another person in months.
Longer than that, if she was honest, and she tried not to be.
She kept people at arm's length as a standing policy, and the policy worked, and the policy had never once had to account for a photographer who got paid by the hour to close the distance for you and a woman who smelled like a warm afternoon and held still and easy against your shoulder the second she was told to.
Dani ran save sequences in her head, the angles on a two-on-one, the read on a screen shot, anything with edges. It helped. It didn't entirely help.
"Good," Priya said. "Hold."
The shutter went. They reset. They went closer. Between setups, while Priya scrolled through frames and muttered at her laptop, Roxy talked, and Dani braced for small talk, the weather, the flight, how about that crowd. None of it came.
Roxy asked questions. They were specific, and she waited for the answers like she meant to use them.
"What do you do before a game?" she asked. "Players have rituals. You strike me as someone with a serious one."
"Same playlist. Same tape job." Dani shrugged. "I'm on the ice forty minutes before warmups."
"Alone?" She tilted her head.
"Alone." Alone and glad about it.
Roxy nodded like that confirmed something she'd already suspected. "Where'd you grow up?"
"Outside Detroit."
"Big family?"
"Two brothers." She wasn't going to give more than that, and then she heard herself give more, because the woman was looking at her like the answer was worth keeping. "They both played. Neither one got past juniors. I was the one nobody bet on."
"And you're the one who's here." Roxy said it low, not as a compliment, more like a fact she'd turned over and found interesting. "Why goalie? Of everything on the ice. Why pick the one job where it's your fault when it goes in?"
Nobody had ever asked her that. People asked how she handled the pressure, which was a different question, the kind that already came with the answer it wanted bolted on.
This one didn't. Dani looked at the charcoal backdrop and not at Roxy and told the truth before she'd decided to say anything at all.
"Out there the game's chaos. Twelve people and a puck and a hundred ways to lose it.
In the crease it's just angles. You cut the net down, you stay square, you let the puck come to you.
" She moved one shoulder, careful not to break the pose.
"I liked that there was one spot on the whole sheet of ice where it was quiet.
I picked it when I was nine. Never wanted any other part of the game. "
Roxy went quiet a moment. "One place where it's quiet," she said, like she was setting it somewhere she could find it again. "Yeah. I know exactly what that's worth."
Priya moved them again, hands on both their shoulders, turning them like mannequins, and for one setup she put Roxy's back fully against Dani's front and said hold it, just like that, perfect.
Dani held it. She held it with the warm line of another person pressed the whole length of her sternum and her own hands hanging at her sides not knowing where on earth they were allowed to be, and Roxy settled back against her loose and unbothered, like it cost her nothing at all, like she did this every day.
Maybe she did. Dani fixed her eyes on a scuff on the far wall and ran her breathing and was deeply grateful that whatever Priya's camera could capture, it couldn't capture a pulse.
It was Dani's turn, and she should have let the silence do its work, as she always did. Instead she asked, because she was suddenly, stupidly curious and tired of being the only one in the room with her cards down.
"Why this team? You could put your face on anything. Sneakers, perfume, a car. Why a hockey team in a city you've flown over your whole life?"
Priya said, "Eyes here," and they both gave her their eyes, and the shutter went a handful of times, and Dani had decided Roxy wasn't going to answer when Roxy answered. She stopped half into the next pose to do it, turned her head so she was talking to Dani and not the lens.
"Because it's real," she said. "The games are real.
The women are powerful, raw, real. Nobody out there's faking it.
You can't fake a save. You can't fake a goal in overtime.
The whole thing is just true the second it happens and then it's gone.
I haven't been near something true in a long time.
" Then she heard herself, and the showbiz came back up over it like a tide sliding in, smooth and fast and automatic.
"Also the demographics test through the roof.
Don't tell my manager I said the first part. "
But she'd said the first part. Dani had heard it drop into the room before the tide took it back.
And the speed of the cover coming up over it told her more than the sentence had, because Dani knew a thing or two about how fast a person reaches for the lid when they've let something real slip out where it can be seen.
"Your nephew," Roxy said a minute later, while Priya swapped a lens. "The tooth. Did the tooth fairy come through?"
Dani looked at her. It was such a small thing to have kept, a stray detail from their first exchange, and the fact that Roxy had carried it two days was a quiet alarm. People didn't hold onto the parts of you that weren't useful. This one apparently did.
"Five bucks under the pillow," Dani said. "He's saving for a hockey stick."
"Smart kid."
"He's all right." And because Roxy had remembered, because it would have been rude not to, Dani handed her one for free. "He's got a hell of a slapshot for four. Apparently it runs in the family. Skipped me a generation, my brothers like to say."