Chapter 16 #2
Roxy used her tongue and two fingers still buried in her and brought her up again with no mercy at all, her name a wreck on Dani's lips, the most-watched woman in the world on her knees in a dark hotel suite doing this where not one camera in the world could find them.
And Dani looked down at her once and nearly came just from the sight, the loose gold hair, the bare unpainted face turned up, the eyes finding hers.
She came the second time with a broken sound and her thighs trembling, Roxy holding her hips to the wall so she wouldn't fold.
They made it to the bed eventually, tangled, half-dressed, laughing breathlessly at the trail of clothes.
Dani got Roxy out of the last of the stage costume she was still half wearing, the rigid glittering thing peeled off her like a shell, until it was only Roxy underneath, warm and real and hers.
And Dani laid her back on a bed that cost more than a month of rent and took her time even with the clock running, because some part of her refused to be rushed through this one thing.
She kissed down the center of her, slow, and Roxy was already gone, already wrecked from doing the wrecking, gasping before Dani even reached her, and Dani settled between her thighs and put her mouth on her and felt Roxy arch up off the bed.
She set her mouth to her and pushed two fingers slow inside her, pressing up to the place that made Roxy's whole body lock, and Roxy's hands scrabbled at the sheets and then at Dani's hair and she said Dani's name into the dark of the foreign room like it was the only English word she had left. Dani read her as she read everything, every catch and stutter of breath, and stayed exactly where Roxy needed her her mouth sucking on Roxy’s swollen clit as her fingers fucked her, and Roxy came apart with her spine bowed off the mattress and a cry she didn't bother to swallow because there were no walls here to hear through, no team, no neighbors, no one but the two of them in a city neither of them belonged to.
And Dani didn't give her the chance to come down.
She kept her fingers moving, slow and deep, and gentled her tongue and drove her straight back up toward a second while Roxy was still shaking through the first. Roxy gasped oh my god and I can't and then very clearly don't you dare stop, and Dani laughed low against her and kept going.
And she felt Roxy come apart a second time under her mouth gushing into the palm of her hand, harder, longer, one hand clamped over her own mouth out of a habit she didn't need anymore and the other fisted hard in Dani's hair.
After, Roxy hauled her up the bed and kissed her, tasting herself, loose and undone, and pulled Dani down against her and held on like the thirty-six hours were a thing she could keep from leaking out if she just gripped hard enough.
They didn't sleep much. Neither of them said the obvious thing, that sleeping was a waste of hours they didn't have, but they both knew it, and so they lay tangled in the gold dark and talked in low voices about nothing and everything, and twice more in the night one of them reached for the other, and the clock ran down the whole time underneath them like a current.
Roxy told her about the show, the twenty thousand voices singing words back at her that she'd written about a man she'd never touched, and how hollow it had gone, how she'd stood up there in the lights and felt like a recording of herself.
Dani told her her bed feeling empty in Phoenix Ridge, plainly, because Roxy had earned plain, and Roxy went quiet and pressed her face into Dani's neck at that, the admission costing Dani more than any of the louder things she could have said.
Dani lay with Roxy's head on her chest and her hand in Roxy's hair and didn't let herself look at the bedside clock, which kept ticking through the count whether she looked at it or not.
Roxy put her in a car to Heathrow at dawn after their 36 hours.
She came down to the service entrance herself, which was a risk, in a coat and a knit cap with her hair shoved up under it and no face on, and she stood in the cold loading bay while the driver loaded Dani's single small bag, and for a moment neither of them said anything because there was nothing to say that wasn't too big for a loading dock at six in the morning.
"This was insane," Roxy said finally. "You're insane. You flew to London for thirty-six hours."
"I'd do it again," Dani said, which was as close to the enormous thing as she could get standing up. "I'll see you very soon.”
“Just a few more days." Roxy nodded, fast, as people do when they're keeping something off their face. She reached up and tugged the collar of Dani's coat straight, the small unbearable gesture, the one she did now. "Go. Before I do something undignified in front of a valet."
Dani kissed her once in the gray cold, brief, and got in the car, and made herself not look back, and got all the way to the end of the loading bay before she looked back anyway, and Roxy was still there, a small figure with her hands jammed in her pockets, watching her go.
She held it together through the cab and the queue and security.
She held it together on the long flight with her forehead against the window and her jaw set, watching the gray ocean turn to gray land.
She held it together through the jetway and the long fluorescent walk and the slow shuffling line.
And it was only at the customs desk at JFK, when the officer asked the reason for her trip and she opened her mouth to say family and couldn't make the lie come out a second time, that it finally came up the back of her throat all at once.
She said personal in a voice that came out wrong, and the officer glanced up, and stamped her passport, and waved her through.
And Dani walked out into the echoing hall of the terminal with her bag on her shoulder and her eyes burning and let two tears go, finally, fast, scrubbing them away with the heel of her hand before anyone could see.
She was a woman crying quietly in an airport for no reason anyone passing could have named, three thousand miles already opening up behind her between the body she'd left and the body she had to go be tomorrow.