Chapter 16
Dani lied to Frankie's face at the morning skate, and that was the part she'd think about later, on the plane, somewhere over the black middle of the Atlantic.
Not the cost of the ticket, which had been obscene, a same-day economy seat bought at six in the morning with her thumb shaking over the confirm button like the phone might talk her out of it.
Not the eight hours of practice and travel and customs ahead of her.
The lie. Frankie had asked where she was off to with a bag over her shoulder on an off-day, and Dani had said, easy as anything, Detroit, my mom's having some kind of garden emergency, and Frankie had laughed and said tell your mom the tomatoes forgive her, and Dani had walked to her car with her stomach turned over, because she didn't lie to Frankie.
She hadn't lied to Frankie in eleven years.
She'd just done it standing on rubber matting in her base layers without a flinch, and it had been frighteningly simple, and that was the thing that scared her, how easy the wanting made the lying.
She'd never done anything like this in her life.
That was the flat truth of it. Dani Petrovic didn't get on planes to other continents on a feeling.
She'd built an entire existence on not doing exactly this, on being the woman who stayed put and kept her head and let the impulsive people around her burn themselves down.
And here she was at thirty-one folded into a middle seat with her knees against the tray table, flying three thousand four hundred miles to spend a day and a half with a woman she'd known for two months, and she couldn't make herself regret it no matter how hard she pressed on the bruise of it.
Ten days had turned out to be a length of time she couldn't survive with any dignity.
Six days in she'd stopped sleeping. The bed was too big and too quiet and the dawn came without anyone in it, and she'd lain there at four in the morning doing math she hated, and somewhere in the math she'd thought, I could just go, and the thought had been so unlike her that she'd sat straight up in the dark.
So she went.
Heathrow was a gray roar of a place, and she came out of it wrung out and gritty-eyed into a cold London drizzle and got into the back of a black cab and gave the driver the name of a hotel she couldn't have afforded a single night in.
The city slid by wet and enormous and indifferent.
She watched it and didn't take any of it in.
She'd been to London once, for a tournament at twenty-two, and had seen the inside of a rink and the inside of a hotel and nothing else, and she suspected this trip would be much the same, and she found she didn't care about the city at all. She wasn't here for the city.
Tilda had handled the key. That had been the one piece Dani couldn't solve from Phoenix Ridge, how a person walked into a global pop star's hotel without a name or a reservation or a face anyone would let past the lobby, and she'd texted Tilda two words, I'm coming, fully expecting to be talked out of it, and Tilda had written back within a minute, Oh thank god, finally, and then a paragraph of logistics.
An envelope at the concierge desk under the name Sandra Bell.
A service elevator. A floor. Don't tell her, Tilda had added.
She's been a ghost all week. Let her walk in and find you.
She needs one good thing she didn't have to schedule.
And then, a moment later, Take care of her.
She won't say she's drowning but she is.
Dani had read that last one four times in the airport.
The suite was on a high floor and it was empty and it was the most expensive room Dani had ever stood in, all low gold light and a wall of window looking out over the wet glitter of the city, and it smelled faintly of Roxy already, that scent she'd stopped being able to name and started being able to find in the dark.
There was a half-drunk cup of tea gone cold on a side table.
A pair of the reading glasses on a stack of papers.
Stage clothes thrown over a chair like a body had been peeled out of them in a hurry.
Evidence of her, everywhere, the private wreckage Roxy left behind the polished public thing, and Dani stood in the middle of it in her travel clothes feeling enormous and out of place and unbearably glad.
She showered off the flight. She ordered a club sandwich from a menu with no prices and ate half of it and couldn't finish, too keyed up.
And then she pulled on jeans and a clean hoodie and sat down on the long couch facing the door, and she waited, and the waiting was a strange country.
She wasn't a woman who waited for people.
She'd spent seven years being the one who left first. She sat in the gold light with her hands loose between her knees and watched the door and understood that she'd flown across an ocean to put herself on the other side of that arithmetic, to be the one sitting in the dark when the door opened, and the size of that frightened her almost as much as it steadied her.
It was past midnight when she heard the keycard.
The door opened and Roxy came in already half out of her stage face, jacket over one arm, hair coming down out of whatever architecture they'd built it into, talking low to no one, to herself, as exhausted people did, and she got three steps into her own suite before she registered the shape on the couch and stopped dead.
For a second she didn't move at all. Her bag slid off her shoulder to the floor. Her whole face came open, the public gloss falling off it in one motion, and underneath was something so undefended that Dani had to stand up just to have somewhere to put it.
"You're not here," Roxy said. "You're in Phoenix Ridge. I just talked to you in Phoenix Ridge."
"I lied," Dani said. "I'm in London."
And Roxy crossed the room and kissed her hard enough to knock the breath out of both of them, hard enough to bruise, both hands coming up to grip Dani's face like she had to confirm the bones of it were real.
Dani caught her around the waist and held on.
And Roxy made a sound into her mouth that was half a laugh and half something that had been waiting six days to get out.
She tasted like the cold outside and the long night and underneath all of it like herself, and Dani kissed her back with six days of not-sleeping behind it and felt the floor of her tilt.
"How long," Roxy got out, against her mouth, not letting go. "Tell me how long, I need to know how much—"
"Thirty-six hours." Dani had done that math too. "I fly back tomorrow night. I have practice the day after, I can't—thirty-six hours."
The clock got into Roxy's eyes, and her whole face sharpened, hungry and decided, and she got both hands in the front of Dani's hoodie and walked her backward into the wall beside the window, and the city burned cold and far below them, and Roxy kissed her like the thirty-six hours had already started counting down and she meant to spend every one of them.
She got Dani's jeans open with the city at their backs.
There was nothing careful in it, none of the first night's reverence, none of the slow asking, because they were past the asking now and there was a clock running and they both knew it, and Roxy got a hand down the front of Dani's underwear and found her already wet, already aching, six days of it, and they both went still for one breath at the proof of how much.
"God," Roxy breathed against her jaw. "You flew here like this.
You were on a plane like this." She stroked through the slick of it, slow then not slow, two fingers finding her and pushing up into her, the heel of her hand grinding against Dani's clit, and Dani's head went back against the cold glass and a sound came out of her she didn't recognize.
"Say you're not going to disappear. Say this is real, that you actually crossed an ocean, tell me—"
"I'm here." Dani's hips moved against her hand, helpless, greedy, the whole tired length of her lit up. "Roxana. I'm here, I'm not—" Her voice broke as Roxy curled her fingers. "I came all this way to be here, of course it's real, fuck."
“I’ve been wanting to fuck you so much,” Roxy whispered into her ear. “Feeling you like this for me, coming apart on my fingers…” Dani felt Roxy’s fingers thrusting into her and she felt weak at the knees. Roxy’s whispers were driving her crazy.
“You feel so fucking good. So hot wet and amazing.” Roxy’s fingers kept working inside her, fucking her G spot, the heel of her hand rubbing against Dani’s clit as she did.
Roxy fucked her against the window slow and deep and watched her face the entire time, drinking it, her own breath coming ragged like Dani's pleasure was happening to her too.
And Dani gripped her shoulders and rolled into her hand and came embarrassingly fast, came with the lights of London smeared below her and Roxy's forehead pressed to her temple and Roxy whispering filthy tender things into her ear, came shaking with one hand fisted in the back of Roxy's shirt.
And Roxy didn't give her a second to come down.
She kissed down Dani's throat, her collarbone, dropped to her knees on the expensive carpet and dragged Dani's jeans the rest of the way down and put her mouth on her right there against the glass, and Dani's hand flew into her hair and her knees nearly went, and she had to brace her other palm flat on the cold window to stay standing.