Chapter 14 #2
Roxy kissed lower, and lower, and Dani's breath went short, and then Roxy did a thing Dani didn't expect, climbed back up and swung a knee over and settled her thighs on either side of Dani's head, looking down at her, a question in it.
Dani answered it by gripping her hips and pulling her down, and Roxy gasped and dropped her head and rocked against Dani's mouth, riding her face slow, and Dani held her hips and used her tongue and felt Roxy come undone above her, unguarded and loud, completely hers, thighs trembling, one hand braced on the headboard, gasping things that weren't words.
Dani had never once let herself be used like this, pinned flat under someone's weight with her mouth working and no way to control the pace of any of it, and the strange thing, the thing that lit her up, was how little she wanted to control it.
She wanted to be exactly here, held down and tasting nothing in the world but Roxy, while the most famous woman alive came apart on her tongue and didn't bother being quiet about it.
And when Roxy had wrung that out of herself she slid back down Dani's body loose and flushed and reached between Dani's legs and found her soaked, and Dani's hips bucked up into her hand without permission.
Roxy fingered her slow and deep with her forehead pressed to Dani's and her own breath still ragged, kissing her between gasps, and the two of them moved together in the lamplight like one tangled thing.
When Dani went over the edge it was with both hands gripping the headboard above her and Roxy's name in her mouth, and Roxy watching her face the whole time like it was a thing worth memorizing.
And Dani let her watch, let herself be watched coming apart, the thing she'd sworn at twenty-four she would never let anyone see again, given freely now to the one person she trusted with the sight of it.
After, she didn't get up.
That was the part that undid Dani more than any of it, lying afterward in the wreck of the rental bed with her head on Roxy's chest and Roxy's heartbeat slowing under her ear and Roxy's fingers moving idle through her hair, and not wanting to leave.
She always wanted to leave. After, with the careful women in the careful cities, the leaving had started in her chest before her body had even finished, the door already calling.
She had built a whole life on the after-leaving.
And here she was with her cheek on Roxy's sternum and no part of her moving toward any door.
"Tell me about Detroit," Roxy said quietly, into her hair. "The house. You never finish the sentence when you start it."
And Dani, half asleep, warm, more emptied-out and more full than she could remember being, told her.
About the small house with the chain-link and her mother's garden out back that fed half the block.
About the kitchen that was always too hot from the stove and too loud with her brothers, Niko and Stevan, both of them bigger than her and slower than her and the proudest people alive when she made the national team, neither of them able to say it, all three of them raised not to say it.
About her father's hands, always working, fixing the neighbors' cars in the driveway on Sundays for nothing, for the principle of it.
About learning, in that hot loud kitchen, that you showed people you loved them by what you did with your hands and never by what you said.
She'd carried that out into the world like a law, and it had kept her safe and it had kept her alone.
And she was only now, at thirty-one, with her face on a pop star's chest in a rented room, starting to think maybe you were allowed to do both.
Roxy didn't say anything. She just kept moving her fingers through Dani's hair, slow, listening, as Dani had listened in the diner, all the way, taking nothing.
Once she pressed a kiss to the top of Dani's head and murmured that her brothers sounded like idiots and that she loved them already, and Dani huffed a laugh against her chest and felt the words go somewhere deep and stay, I love them already, like Roxy had been handed the family along with the story and meant to keep both.
Dani fell asleep in the middle of a sentence about her mother's tomatoes.
She didn't mean to. She hadn't fallen asleep first, not once, not with the careful women, not anywhere that wasn't her own locked apartment in seven years, because falling asleep first meant going under while someone else was awake and watching and able to do anything they wanted with the unconscious trusting fact of you.
Her body didn't allow it. Her body had a rule.
Her body broke the rule. She went under with Roxy's heart under her ear and Roxy's hand in her hair, warm and safe and witnessed, and she didn't wake when Roxy slid out from under her near dawn and eased a pillow under her head and stood looking down at her for a long while in the gray light.
She slept straight through, deep and dreamless, the sleep of a woman who had finally, after seven years, set the watch down and trusted somebody else to keep it.
She didn't wake at the small sounds of Roxy moving in the next room, the tap running, a cabinet, the low private hum of a woman who couldn't sleep either but for once didn't mind.
Dani Petrovic slept on, unguarded and unworried, while somebody else kept the morning watch over her, and that, more than anything they had done in the dark, was the thing that had changed.