Chapter 8 #2
"She was a physiotherapist. Not with the team, I'm not an idiot, she worked at a clinic I used in the off-season.
We were together a year. The only person I ever let all the way in.
" Dani kept her voice flat because flat was the only way the words would come, one in front of the other, like skating drills, edges and shuffles, something you did with your body so your mind didn't have to.
"I was twenty-four. I trusted her completely.
I gave her a key. I sent her things, you know, the things you send someone when you trust them completely.
Photos. Texts. The whole inside of myself.
" She turned her own coffee cup now, a quarter turn, the way Roxy had.
"She sold them. To a gossip blog. For money, not even a lot of money, I looked it up later, you can find out what your whole life is worth if you go looking, and it turns out it's about the price of a used car. "
"Dani."
"I found out on a Tuesday. I'd had a morning skate.
I came out and my phone wouldn't stop and there I was, the inside of me, the things I'd only ever shown one person, on a website with a comments section.
" Her voice cracked. It caught, just once, on the word comments, a small hard hitch, and she stopped and pressed her lips together and waited for it to pass, and across the table Roxy's hand came off her coffee cup and started across the table toward Dani's, an inch, two inches, an instinct, reaching.
Dani looked at it.
Roxy stopped. She read whatever was in Dani's face and she drew her hand back, slow, set it down on her own side of the table where it belonged, and the not-touching sat between them in the empty diner more charged than any touch Dani had felt in years, both of them looking at the six inches of laminate where two hands had almost been.
Later Dani wouldn't be able to say which of them the not-touching cost more.
At the time it only felt like the most honest thing either of them had done all night, two people who had each been taken from, agreeing without a word that this, whatever it was, wouldn't be taken.
It would be given, or it would be nothing.
Roxy's hand stayed where she'd put it. Dani's stayed where it was. The snow kept coming down.
"I ended it the same day," Dani said, when she could.
"I've never talked about it. Not to my family, not to Frankie, not to anyone.
And I decided, that Tuesday, that I was never going to be that stupid again, that being known was the same as being used and being loved was the same as being leveraged, and I built a whole life on it.
A good life. Quiet. Locked. And it worked for seven years.
" She made herself look up at Roxy. "It was working great until about a month ago. "
Outside, the snow had thinned. The black in the windows had gone the faintest gray at the bottom edge, the storm blowing itself out, dawn coming up somewhere behind all that cloud, and neither of them had touched their food in an hour, and the coffee had gone cold in both their cups, and they sat in the bright empty room with the truth out on the table between them like a third thing at the booth.
"I'm not going to do that to you," Roxy said quietly. "I need you to know that I know exactly what it is, what you just handed me. I've had it done to me too, the small version, a thousand times. I will never be the one who does it to you."
"I know," Dani said, and was surprised to find she did.
She believed Roxy Blaze, a woman whose entire public existence was something other people had built and sold, more than she'd believed anyone in seven years, and she didn't examine why, because the why was sitting right across the table with cold coffee and a half-eaten grilled cheese, being the realest thing in any room Dani had walked into since she was twenty-four.
The waitress refilled their cups out of habit and Dani paid for both, over Roxy's objection, because some part of her needed to do one ordinary thing with her hands.
They walked back across the dead lobby together in the gray almost-light, neither of them talking now, the talking all spent, and at the elevator Roxy turned.
There was a version of the moment where Dani closed the foot of distance.
She could feel it there, available, the whole of it, like a save she wasn't going to get to in time.
Roxy was close and tired and bare-faced and had just held Dani's worst thing in both hands and not dropped it, and every cell in Dani's body that she'd spent seven years training to hold still wanted, suddenly, to move.
She held still. One more night. She didn't have a reason she could have said out loud, except that what had happened in the diner felt too large and too new to put a hand on top of yet, like ice that hadn't set, and she wasn't going to be the one who cracked it before it could hold weight.
Seven years of holding still had taught her one thing worth keeping, the difference between the things you couldn't have and the things you were protecting.
This was the second kind. You didn't rush the second kind.
"Goodnight, Roxy," she said.
"Goodnight, Dani." Roxy stepped into the elevator.
The doors started to close on her tired, unguarded, almost-smiling face.
Her startlingly beautiful green eyes had a lightness to them behind the tiredness.
"For the record," she said, just before they shut, "that's the most real anyone has been with me in about ten years. "
The doors closed. Dani stood alone in the gray lobby a moment.
Then she took the stairs back up to her own floor, let herself into her own room, and lay down on top of the covers in her hoodie, and she didn't sleep.
For the first time in seven years, the not-sleeping didn't feel like something being kept out.
It felt like something that had finally been let in.