Chapter 12 #2
Tampa threw thirty-four at her and she turned away every one.
Three breakaways in the second period, three skaters in alone with the building holding its breath, and she met all three as she met everything now, square and present and unafraid, because she had run out of things to be afraid of sometime around two a.m. She poke-checked the first, a stick on the puck a half-stride before the shooter could settle it, clean and patient and exactly on time.
She took the second high, glove flashing up to snare a wrister already past her ear, the leather closing on it with a sound the front row felt.
And on the third she did the splits across her crease and got a pad on a shot already labeled top shelf, threw a leg across the whole width of the net and stoned it on the goal line.
She lay there in the paint a half-second longer than she needed to, the crowd coming up out of its seats, and felt, for the first time in her career, no separation at all between the woman in the net and the woman who lived in her body the rest of the time.
They were the same person tonight. She didn't have to leave one at the boards to be the other.
She didn't look at the box. Not once, the whole sixty minutes, the old discipline holding even now.
But she felt it. She'd told herself in Boston that the not-looking was its own kind of looking, and tonight it was a held hand, a presence behind glass at center ice that she carried in her chest the entire game like a coal she didn't have to check on to know was lit.
Roxy was up there. Roxy had watched her and Dani stopped thirty-four pucks for her without once lifting her eyes. Dani felt happy.
When the horn went she let herself look for Roxy.
She'd earned it, was how it felt, after a whole game of discipline, after years of discipline, after a lifetime of keeping her eyes on the puck and the boards and the middle distance and never on the bright thing watching her.
The team came over the boards and piled toward her and she let them come, gloves off her mask, the noise of it washing up around her, and over their shoulders, across the whole white sheet of ice, up behind the glass of Astoria's box, she found her.
Roxy was on her feet. Not performing it, as she hadn't performed any of it alone with Dani, just standing with both hands flat against the glass again, the same as she'd stood in this same box weeks ago, looking down at Dani with her whole unguarded face, and Dani held the look. For one second, two, across two hundred feet of ice and eighteen thousand people and a wall of cameras pointed at everything, Dani Petrovic looked up at Roxy’s beautiful smile and let it show, whatever it was, the thing that had been getting in past her walls for a month.
A month ago she had refused this exact woman this exact look across this exact ice and called it protecting herself.
She understood now that she'd only been protecting the wall, and the wall was gone, and she found she didn't miss it.
Then she broke the look first, because she was still herself, because some discipline you keep even when you're happy, and she turned and skated to the tunnel with her teammates pounding her shoulders, and she was smiling inside her mask where nobody could see it, and she knew exactly where she was driving the second they let her out of the building.
She drove to the rental in her game suit.
She didn't go home and change. She didn't park a block away tonight, or she did, the professional part of her still ran, but she didn't stand at the bottom of the alley working up the nerve, because the nerve was spent, and a thing you've done once is a different country than a thing you've never done.
She went up the alley and up the step and lifted her hand to knock.
The door opened before her knuckles touched it.
Roxy stood in the warm gold light in her sweats and her glasses pushed up into her loose honey hair, no makeup, green eyes full of warmth the moment they saw her. Roxy must have driven straight from the arena too. She must have been waiting for her.
Neither of them said anything. Dani came in out of the cold, and Roxy shut the door against it. There was nothing that needed saying that hadn't already been said with hands and mouths and a name spoken into the dark, and a great game was a love letter and they both knew who it had been written to.
Dani crossed the threshold. Roxy closed the door behind her.
This time felt heated and different from the first. Roxy’s arms were around Dani’s neck kissing her and pressing her tongue into Dani’s mouth and Dani felt a deep hunger inside her for Roxy.
Like nothing would satisfy the hunger until she took Roxy, fucked her, felt her come apart under Dani’s hands, under her mouth.
“Take off your clothes,” Dani growled between kisses.
Roxy’s green eyes met hers in a second of understanding and she stripped off first her hoodie, exposing her beautiful round breasts, smooth tan skin with pink nipples that Dani had not forgotten.
Roxy’s lovely breasts would live happily in Dani’s mind forever.
Roxy dropped her sweatpants to the floor and stepped out of them and she was naked.
She had been wearing no underwear. Dani could smell the scent of her, different than the public version of her, this version of Roxy just smelled of a fruity shower cream and something earthy and raw underneath that was unmistakably Roxy.
Dani shrugged off her jacket, was still in her base layers from her game gear and knew she was sweaty but the way Roxy was looking at her she knew that Roxy didn’t care about that and she didn’t either.
She didn’t want anything getting between her and Roxy right now.
She took Roxy in her arms, spun around so that Roxy’s back was against the wall and Dani’s body was pinning her there.
“You smell so good,” Roxy murmured and Dani felt a raw hunger running through her as she ran her hands over Roxy’s beautiful body. She kissed Roxy with a raw passion that was burning inside her.
“I want you,” Dani growled and her right hand moved quickly down over Roxy’s stomach, feeling for her pubic hair and reaching down between Roxy’s legs.
“I’ve… um… I’ve got my period,” Roxy whispered. “It’s just started.”
Dani took in the information and met the look of question in Roxy’s beautiful green eyes.