Chapter 5 #2
She went down the line doing what she did.
A hand here. A word there. Great game. You were unbelievable out there.
Thank you for having me. She was good at it.
She'd been good at it her whole life, the moving down a line of people and giving each of them one clean warm second of herself, and tonight she felt every inch of how practiced it was, because the entire time she was doing it she was counting down the line to the last person, who stood at the end with her helmet off and her dark hair sweated to her temples and her gray eyes fixed firmly somewhere over Roxy's left shoulder.
Roxy reached her. She held out her hand.
"Great game," she said, and heard how ordinary it came out, and hated it.
Dani shook her hand. One firm pump, like shaking hands with a sponsor, and she didn't meet Roxy's eyes, not once.
She looked at the boards and the photographer and the middle distance and the cold air, anywhere in the whole enormous building except the six inches where Roxy was standing trying to be looked at.
Her hand was warm and dry, the palm callused hard from a thousand nights in the catching glove, and it was gone almost before Roxy registered it.
"Thanks," Dani said, to no one, and the photographer got the shot, and that was that.
It shouldn't have stung. Roxy got looked at by everyone, everywhere, all the time.
It was the entire weather of her life. One woman declining to do it was statistically meaningless.
It stung like a slap. And the genuinely humbling part was that Roxy understood it.
Dani wasn't being cruel. She wasn't running a game, wasn't withholding to make Roxy want it more, none of the moves Roxy knew by heart and had had run on her a thousand times.
She simply didn't want to be looked at by Roxy Blaze, didn't want whatever came bolted to it, and was keeping her eyes on the boards to protect something.
Roxy knew all about protecting something.
She just wasn't used to being the weather a person needed protecting from.
She'd spent a decade as the thing every room wanted a piece of, and not once in all of it had she been the thing a person braced against. It should have felt like rejection.
It felt, bewilderingly, like being taken seriously.
She smiled for the camera with a hand on the goalie's padded shoulder and the goalie not looking at her, and she thought, fine. Okay. Fine.
She caught Dani in the corridor on the way out.
She hadn't planned it, or she'd planned it without admitting to herself she was planning it, by knowing which tunnel the players used and by being slow saying goodbye to Astoria until she saw the dark head come through the door.
Dani had changed into street clothes, jeans and a hoodie and a bag over one shoulder, the loud famous night sloughed off her, just a tired woman going home.
She slowed when she saw Roxy. Her gray eyes looked surprised momentarily. She didn't stop.
"You don't have to say anything," Roxy said, and stepped into her path, close, so Dani had to either stop or walk straight through her.
Dani stopped. Up this close, finally, the gray eyes came to Roxy's face, wary and steady, and Roxy felt the whole speech she hadn't known she'd written rise ready in her throat. She kept it to the true part.
"I'm going to keep texting you," she said.
"You can keep not answering. That's allowed, it's completely allowed, I'm not asking you for anything and I'm not going to make it weird when we see each other.
I just didn't want you lying awake wondering whether I got the message, the not-answering one.
I got it. And I'm going to keep texting you anyway.
" She let it sit one second. "I thought you should know what you were dealing with. I like you. And I want to text you.”
Dani's mouth opened. Whatever was going to come out of it, Roxy didn't wait for, because she'd learned a long time ago that the trick to an exit is taking it before the other person finds their footing, and because if she stood there one more second looking at that wary, unguarded face she was going to say something with a great deal less dignity in it.
She turned and walked away down the bright corridor, heels loud on the concrete, and she didn't look back, and it took everything she had, and somewhere behind her she could feel the goalie standing exactly where she'd left her, watching her go, not saying a word.
Her hands were shaking. She tucked them into her coat.
It had been years, genuinely years, since she'd said put herself out there like that without knowing in advance how they'd take it, since she had put a sentence into the world with no media trainer's fingerprints anywhere on it, and the terror of it was almost impossible to tell apart from how alive it made her feel.
She'd just told a woman she barely knew that she liked her and was going to keep trying.
She had no idea whether that was brave or pathetic.
She only knew it was hers, the first thing in a long time that was entirely hers.
She got into the car. Tilda was already in it, on the phone, and she took one look at Roxy's face and said into the phone, "I'll call you back," and hung up.
"Well?" Tilda said.
"Push the flight one more day," Roxy said, looking out the window at the arena sliding past, and Tilda might have had a minor eyebrow raise, but she nodded and started tapping away on her iPad.