Chapter 15 #2
And stopped. Again. The three words right there, fully formed, the truest thing she had ever almost said to another human being, I love you, and they jammed in her throat behind ten years of a voice that told her love was a product and a lyric and a thing that happened to people in songs and never, not once, to the woman who sang them.
She was twenty-seven and she had told a hundred million strangers she loved them from a hundred stages and she had never once said it in a dark room to one real person and meant it, and the meaning of it terrified her more than any crowd ever had.
"What," Dani said softly, into her hair. Not pushing. Just there.
"Nothing." Roxy pressed her lips to Dani's sternum. "Just. I don't want to go."
"I know." Dani's hand moved slow up and down her spine. "Come back."
"I'll come back."
And Dani, who had heard that cut-off I and felt the stop and surely knew by now what kept jamming in Roxy's throat, didn't ask for it.
She just held her and said come back like it was a thing they could simply decide.
And Roxy lay against her heart and thought, I love you, I love you, why can't I say it, and didn't say it.
And she hated, for the first time in a long time, the cowardly managed creature ten years of fame had made of her, who could perform any feeling on earth except the one she was actually having.
Dani left at dawn with a kiss and a hand on the side of Roxy's face and a quiet I'll see you in ten days, and Roxy lay in the warm hollow she'd left and didn't cry, quite, and started, against her will, to count.
Ten days was two hundred and forty hours.
She'd done the conversion without deciding to, as she used to count down the days of a contract she couldn't get out of, except this was the reverse of that arithmetic, this was counting down toward a thing she wanted instead of away from a thing she was trapped in, and she lay there and marveled at it, that the same restless math could mean two such opposite things depending only on what waited at the end of it.
In the end she drove Roxy to the private terminal herself that evening, which neither of them had planned and both of them knew was a risk, Dani Petrovic in a ball cap behind the wheel of Roxy's anonymous rented car with the most recognizable woman in the country in the passenger seat.
They parked in the dark at the edge of the private lot where the cameras weren't, and for a minute neither of them moved.
"Ten days isn't long," Dani said, to the windshield, in a voice that suggested she was informing herself.
"It's a thousand years."
"It's ten days." Dani turned and looked at her, and reached over and tucked a piece of Roxy's hair behind her ear, a small unbearable gesture she'd never once have made a month ago, and Roxy leaned into the hand.
"Go sing for your forty thousand people.
I'll be here waiting for you. Text me when you land so I know the plane worked. "
"The plane always works."
"Text me anyway."
Roxy kissed her in the dark car, slow, memorizing it, and then made herself get out before she did something undignified.
She walked across the tarmac toward the small jet with her coat collar up and didn't look back, because she'd learned a long time ago that the trick to an exit was taking it cleanly.
She made it all the way to the stairs before she looked back anyway, once.
And Dani was still there, a dark shape in a dark car, watching her go, not chasing, the same as the corridor, a woman who only ever let her leave and never once made it cost her.
The not-chasing was the thing that wrecked her.
Roxy turned and climbed the stairs into the jet with her throat gone tight, and didn't look back again.
On the plane she pulled out her phone and drafted the message.
I love you. I've never said that to anyone and meant it and I'm saying it to you from a runway like a coward because I couldn't get it out of my mouth in a room.
It's true. It's been true for a while. She read it four times. Her thumb hovered over send.
She didn't send it. You didn't say a thing like that for the first time over text from a tarmac.
She would say it to Dani's face, in the rental, in ten days, like a person, the first true I love you of her whole manufactured life, said out loud to someone who'd earned it.
She saved the draft where the song lived.
Then she turned the phone all the way off, as she'd learned to now, and put her forehead against the cold window as the jet climbed out over the lights.
Somewhere on the other end of this flight was a sold-out arena and a wall of press and a manager who hadn't called back since Roxy hung up on her, which wasn't Vivienne conceding, Roxy knew, it was Vivienne waiting, the long patient silence of a woman who never lost and was simply deciding how to win.
There was a gallery opening on the calendar with a man's name attached to it that Roxy had refused to attend and Vivienne hadn't removed.
There was the whole machine down there in the dark, humming, missing its most valuable part, and it would want her back exactly as she'd been, and it had ten days and an ocean and a lifetime of leverage to make that happen.
She let her eyes close. Ten days. She would go and sing and smile and survive it as she survived everything, and she would carry the new soft self through it without letting the tide take it this time, and then she would come home to an ugly rental nobody could find and say the three words out loud at last. That was the plan, and Roxy fell asleep against the window holding onto it, with no way of knowing how little of it she'd get to keep.