Chapter 4 #2
Roxy laughed, a real one, short and surprised out of her, nothing at all like the one on the banner. Her face was so beautiful and the sound of her laugh was… Dani felt it do something to her she chose not to look at.
At the end Priya said she had it, said it twice so they'd believe her, and started breaking down the softbox.
The stylist wheeled the rack away. The spell of being told exactly where to stand was suddenly over, and they were just two people in a cooling studio with nothing left to hold them in their marks.
Roxy crossed to the cart and came back with a paper cup and held it out.
"Here. You came straight from skate, you've got to be running on empty."
Dani took it before she thought about it, which was the problem with being handed things, your hands answered before your head did. It was warm. She lifted the lid out of habit, to see what she'd been given, and stopped.
Oat milk. One sugar. The exact pale color of the coffee she made for herself every single morning of her life, the coffee she drank from a dented thermos with her back to her stall, the coffee not one person on this team had ever gotten right on a group run, because not one person had ever thought to ask.
"I asked someone what you take," Roxy said, easy, already half-turned to thank Priya.
Dani looked at the cup. She didn't say thank you, because thank you would have meant saying something about how it was exactly right, and saying that would have meant standing in a studio and admitting out loud that it had done something to her, and she wasn't going to do either of those things.
She pressed the lid back down. She nodded once, at Roxy's back, where Roxy couldn't see it, and she carried a coffee she hadn't asked for out to her car with her whole hand wrapped around the warmth of it the entire way.
She set the empty cup on her kitchen counter that night and didn't throw it out.
She should have eaten. Instead she opened her laptop at the counter and did the exact thing she'd promised herself in the car she wasn't going to do, which was type Roxy's name into the music app and let it pull up the whole catalog.
Ten years of it, album after album, the covers getting glossier and emptier as the dates climbed up toward now.
She put on the famous single, the one even she knew, and it was good in the way that a thing gets good when a hundred people have sanded every corner off it, bright and enormous and built for a stadium, and it told her nothing at all about the woman who'd stood half a step in front of her for two hours smelling like clean hair and something else that was affecting her more deeply than she wanted to admit.
Then she scrolled all the way back to the start, to a track from before the machine got its hands on the production, and the voice on it was younger and rougher and alone in a small room, and the song was about wanting a thing so badly you'd let it cost you everything.
Dani listened to all of it with her arms crossed over her chest. It was, she thought, the only honest thing she'd heard come out of Roxy Blaze, except it wasn't, because there had been some moments that afternoon that had been honest too, and that was the trouble.
The trouble was that Dani knew how to handle a person who wanted something from her.
She had years of practice. You found the angle, you stayed square, you let them come and you didn't bite.
She had no idea what to do with a person who looked like she wanted nothing except to find out what was true about her, what was real under all the rest, because that kind didn't come at you from the front where you could see it and set yourself.
It came in sideways. In a coffee order. In a question nobody else had ever thought to ask.
She shut the laptop hard, like a lid on a pot, and went to take a shower she didn't need to wash off a day that hadn't dirtied her.
Dani was in bed with the light off when her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
An unknown number. A single line.
That coffee was a guess. Did I get it right? — R.
Dani lay in the dark and read it. She read it again.
She read it four times, and somewhere in the middle of that the small careful thing she'd built her whole adult life out of told her, very clearly, that the correct move was nothing.
No reply. Because a guess was the tell. A guess was what a person made when they hadn't asked someone at all, when they'd stood at a cart and tried to picture what you'd want and then lied about it to your face so it wouldn't look like they'd been paying that kind of attention.
That was worse than getting it wrong. Getting it wrong you could forget.
This was somebody deciding to learn her, on purpose, and being decided about Dani Petrovic had cost her everything she had once, and she had built a whole quiet life on the back of swearing it would never get the chance again.
And still her thumb itched toward the phone where it lay face-down.
Five words back would have done it. It's right.
Or Yes. Or anything at all that wasn't silence. Roxy had guessed (or more likely had her assistant research) Dani’s coffee order, and admitted she'd guessed, and asked plainly whether she'd gotten it right.
Lying there in the quiet, the not-answering didn't feel like safety.
It felt like the start of something she was going to regret in a way she couldn't yet afford.
She knew what the safe thing was.
She locked the phone and laid it face-down on the nightstand, screen to the wood, and she didn't reply, and she lay awake a long time in a quiet that for once didn't feel like the point of anything.