Chapter 8
The charter boarded at dawn, and Dani clocked Roxy three rows up before she'd found her own seat, the honey-blonde knot of hair above a hoodie, Tilda beside her with a tablet already glowing.
Dani put her bag in the overhead and sat down and didn't look at the back of that head, which took roughly the same effort as a third period.
Frankie dropped into the seat beside her with a coffee in each hand and a look on her face Dani didn't care for.
"Morning," Frankie said, far too pleasantly, and handed her one of the coffees. "Funny. The ambassador's on our flight."
"Promotional value." Dani took the coffee. "Brand alongside the players."
"That's almost word for word what the email said." Frankie sipped. "You memorize the email?"
"Eat something, Frankie."
Dani put her headphones in and her hood up and closed her eyes and didn't sleep, and three rows away a woman she'd been texting at midnight for a week was doing whatever she was doing, and the plane took them both north into a gray morning sky with weather stacking up underneath it like a problem nobody had read yet.
They beat Montreal in overtime. Dani had the win quietly, as she liked them, thirty saves and nothing flashy, a goal off a Lou point shot with two minutes left in the extra frame and the bench coming over the boards.
She'd felt the box the whole game, the one bright spot of attention up behind the glass, and she'd let herself look exactly once, at the final horn, and Roxy had been standing with both hands pressed flat to the glass again, not even pretending, and Dani had looked away first and not stopped smiling for ten minutes.
By the time they got to the airport the storm had come down off the lake and shut the whole region in.
Flights scrubbed across the board, the departures screen a long column of red, and the team stood in a cold terminal while the travel staff worked the phones, and the answer that came back was a regional airport hotel and try again in the morning.
They bussed over through snow coming sideways in the headlights.
The hotel was the kind that existed entirely to catch grounded travelers, low and beige, a lobby that smelled like carpet shampoo and a single bored clerk handing out keys to a hockey team at eleven at night.
Dani had spent half her life in places like this, the interchangeable hotels of a road schedule, and she knew the loneliness of them and had never once minded it, because a locked door in a strange town was only a smaller version of the locked door she lived behind everywhere.
Tonight, for some reason she didn't look at too hard, the beige hallway and the carpet smell and the snow stacking on the windows didn't feel like solitude.
They felt like the inside of a snow globe somebody had picked up and shaken, a place set a little apart from the regular world, where the regular rules had been, for one night, suspended.
They bunked the whole roster on one floor.
Tilda materialized out of the chaos and extracted Roxy toward a room at the far end, brisk and practiced, because getting her boss behind a door was the entire job, and Dani caught one look from Roxy down the length of the hallway, just one, before the door closed, and then she let herself into her own room and stood in it.
She showered. She lay down. She didn't sleep, which was nothing new, except the not-sleeping had a specific shape tonight and the shape was a hallway and a door at the end of it.
At two in the morning she gave up, pulled her hoodie back on over her sleep shirt, and took the stairs down to the lobby, because there was a 24-hour diner across from it she'd seen on the way in, a place that existed for exactly this, for people the weather had stranded between where they'd been and where they were going.
Roxy was already there.
She was in the corner booth in her gray hoodie with the hood down and her hair coming loose from its knot, a plate in front of her with half a grilled cheese on it, and she looked up when the bell over the door went, and she didn't perform anything, she didn't even look surprised.
She just looked at Dani standing there in the doorway of an empty diner at two in the morning in her sleep clothes, and slid the laminated menu across the table to the seat across from her without a word.
Dani crossed the diner and sat down.
A tired waitress brought her coffee she hadn't ordered and went away again. Out the window the snow came down through the parking-lot lights, thick and silent, and inside it was just the two of them and the hum of a drink cooler and a radio somewhere playing something low.
Dani wrapped both hands around the cup. She should have been afraid.
This was every condition she'd spent seven years building her life to avoid, a private hour with a famous woman in a place with no witnesses and no exits she'd planned, the exact set of circumstances that had cost her everything once.
She kept waiting for the alarm to go off in her chest, and it didn't. There was only the snow, and the radio, and the woman across the booth who in this light looked like nobody at all, like a tired person Dani might have met anywhere.
"I can't sleep in hotels," Roxy said, finally, like they were already mid-conversation.
"Ten years and I never learned. Tilda thinks I'm in bed.
" She pushed the grilled cheese around. "I've eaten dinner in about four hundred of these places.
Always alone. It's the one part of the job nobody tells you about, how much of it is being alone in a bright room at two in the morning in a town you'll never see in daylight. "
"Sounds lonely," Dani said, because it did, and because it was the truest thing she could find to put down across the table.
"It's the loneliest thing I've ever done, and I do it for a living.
" Roxy said it lightly, and the lightness was the tell, Dani was learning to hear it now, the way the words got smooth right where they should have caught.
"Do you want to know something nobody knows?
I'll tell you something nobody knows. It's two in the morning, it doesn't count. "
"Okay."
"I was sixteen when my mother signed me to Vivienne.
Sixteen. I'd been doing pageants since I was four, my mom entered me, she was a hairdresser and she had a kid who could sing and that was the lottery ticket, you understand, that was the whole plan from the time I was in diapers.
" She turned her coffee cup a quarter turn.
"By seventeen I was famous. Globally. The kind where you can't go to a pharmacy.
And somewhere in there Vivienne sat me down and explained how it was going to work, which is that I was going to be single.
Forever. Available. The girl every kid in every bedroom could believe was going to be theirs someday, because that's what sells, a woman who belongs to everybody belongs to nobody and the not-belonging is the product. " She looked up.
Dani thought about the banner outside the gala, forty feet of a face sanded down to nothing human, ONE NIGHT ONLY.
She thought about standing in her own kitchen reading two articles about this woman being available and feeling something she hadn't let herself put a word to.
She'd been reading the product. Everyone had only ever read the product.
Across the booth the actual person turned her coffee cup a slow quarter and kept talking, and Dani held her own face still and listened as she'd have wanted to be listened to, which was all the way, without reaching for a thing to say back.
"I've never had a real relationship. They build me fake ones.
Men, mostly. Pop stars, an actor, a guy who plays your sport, even, a striker.
We arrive separately and we leave together and we wear the color that photographs like joy.
There's a man flying to me in three weeks to be photographed loving me at a gallery.
His name's Reeve. He's lovely. He's as gay as I am and we've never so much as held hands off camera. "
Dani sat very still. "As gay as you are?”
"As gay as I am." Roxy held her eyes. "That's the other thing nobody knows.
Or, no, plenty of people know, it's just that knowing it and being allowed to say it are two different countries, and I've been deported from the second one since I was seventeen.
" She let out a breath. "I've wanted women my whole adult life and I've spent it being the most aggressively available straight woman in pop, and I'm twenty-seven, and two years ago I stopped being able to write songs or sleep through the night or remember the last time anybody looked at me and saw a person instead of a thing they could have a piece of. And then I saw you completely calm and reading your phone through my entire show. You are different. I know you are.”
The radio played. The snow fell. Dani looked at the woman across the table, lit flat and unflattering under the diner fluorescents, no makeup, hair a mess, the most famous and beautiful face in the country saying the loneliest thing Dani had ever heard a person say, and understood that she had been handed something.
That Roxy had set it down on the table on purpose, like she'd slid the menu over, an offering and a question both.
I went first. You don't have to. But I went first.
And Dani, who hadn't said the next part out loud to a single human being in seven years, who had built an entire life out of never saying it, opened her mouth and said it.
"Her name was Marisol."
Roxy went still.