Chapter 18
Dani had been running on borrowed fuel for three days and she knew it.
She'd come back from London on no sleep and a body clock turned inside out and gone straight into a game the next night and won it, thirty saves, and the night after that won another, and in between she'd been louder and quicker with the team than she'd been in years, cracking jokes in the gear room that made Lex squint at her like she'd been replaced by a friendlier model.
None of them knew she'd been on another continent forty-eight hours earlier.
None of them knew she was running on the memory of a hotel suite and the certainty of nothing, because Roxy had had to delay for six more days over there and Dani had six more days of this, of being a goalie and a liar and a woman counting, and she'd decided the only way through six days was to not stop moving.
So she didn't stop. She practiced hard and played hard and laughed too easily and lied to everyone she loved, and she told herself it was fine, it was manageable, she'd done harder things than miss somebody.
The lying was the part that wore on her.
She'd built a whole life on being sparing with words so she'd never have to spend any of them on falsehoods, and now she was spending them by the handful, a steady low traffic of small untruths to keep the big true thing safe.
Where'd you go on the off-day. Detroit. Why're you so cheerful lately?
Slept well for once. You seeing anybody?
Dani had let that one sit and then said, no, same as ever, to Elise of all people, calm Elise who'd clocked her loneliness for years and had asked it gently over tape in the gear room, and the no had come out smooth and easy and Dani had felt it curdle in her chest the second it was past her teeth.
She wasn't built for this. Roxy could carry a public lie for a decade without it touching her sleep, it was practically her trade, but Dani was a person who'd organized her entire existence around not performing, and the performing was starting to cost her in a currency she'd never had to count before.
She kept telling herself it was temporary.
She kept telling herself there'd come a day when she didn't have to choose between the truth and the woman, and that the day was coming soon, and she was right about that, though not in any of the ways she meant.
Tilda's text came during skate.
She felt it buzz against her hip through two reps and ignored it as she ignored everything during skate, and it was only after, stripping out of her pads with her hair soaked through, that she read it, and read it twice, because it made no sense.
Go to the rental tonight. Around six. There's something there for you.
Don't ask me what, don't overthink it, just go, and trust me.
No other context. Dani sat on the bench in her base layers and turned the phone over in her hand and felt her pulse do something stupid, because there was only one thing she wanted at that rental and it was six thousand miles away.
She told herself not to hope, told herself it was probably a package, a key, some logistics thing Roxy had arranged from London.
She got dressed and drove out there in the early dark with her heart refusing to listen to a word of it.
She let herself in with her own key. The rental was empty and exactly as they'd left it, the notebook still on the table, and Dani turned on the kitchen light and put the kettle on for something to do with her hands and stood there in the quiet not letting herself think the thing she was thinking.
She found a clean dish towel and wiped down a counter that didn't need it.
She waited. The clock on the stove crept toward six and she stood in the kitchen of the only place in her life that felt unguarded and told herself, firmly, to stop hoping, because hoping was a thing that got done to you, and she was too old and too careful to let it happen to her now.
The door opened.
And it was her. It was Roxy, six days early, wearing a gray beanie hiding her hair and no makeup and glasses and an exhausted ordinary traveling face, standing in the doorway with a duffel bag over one shoulder.
Dani's whole body went still and then came apart at once, three days of held breath going out of her in a rush.
She didn't say anything clever, didn't say anything at all.
She crossed the kitchen. She lifted the bag off Roxy's shoulder and set it on the floor and pulled her in, and Roxy came into her hard, both arms around Dani's neck, her face pressed into Dani's throat, and Dani held the whole shaking weight of her and breathed her in and felt the floor come back under her feet.
"You're supposed to be in London," Dani said into her hair, when she could.
"I left." Roxy's voice was muffled against her neck, fierce, half laughing.
"I canceled everything. I flew coach. I sat next to a man who snored on me for eight hours so I could walk in here and do to you exactly what you did to me, so let me have it, I have been planning this since the loading dock. "
"You flew commercial? Dani pulled back enough to look at her, this woman who traveled by private jet, in a beanie, with airline pretzel salt on her sleeve. "You?”
"24C," Roxy said, like a confession, and Dani laughed, the rough surprised laugh that only happened around her now, and Roxy's face broke open at the sound of it.
And then they just held on. The clever back-and-forth ran out, as it always did when the thing underneath got too big for it, and they stood there in the kitchen with the kettle ticking toward a boil behind them and held each other, and Dani felt the whole strain of the last six days drain out of her between one breath and the next.
She'd spent those days being a version of herself that worked, that won games and made jokes and kept the secret, and the cost of it had been invisible to her until exactly now, when it lifted, and she understood by its leaving how much weight she'd been under.
Roxy was shaking a little, just slightly, the fine tremor of someone who'd held something together across an ocean and could finally put it down, and Dani spread her hand flat between her shoulder blades and held her until it stopped, as Roxy had once stood in this kitchen holding her, and neither of them said anything because there was nothing that needed saying that their arms weren't already saying better.
Then Roxy tipped her face up, and neither of them was thinking about kettles anymore, because they were kissing instead, and there was, for once, no clock.
They didn't make it through any of the things people did.
There was no dinner, no catching up, no sitting on the couch with the bad coffee trading the days they'd missed.
Dani got her out of her coat and Roxy got her hands up under Dani's shirt, and they went down the short hall pulling at each other's clothes.
By the time they reached the bedroom most of it was already gone, shed in the hallway.
Dani laid her back on the bed and just looked at her dazzling beauty for a second, the relief of her, the unbearable real fact of her here and warm and not an ocean away.
"Don't," Roxy said, reading it. "Don't go soft and reverent on me, Petrovic, I've been on a plane for hours imagining you fucking me, so get down here."
So Dani got down there. She kissed her mouth and her throat and the soft of her breasts, slower than Roxy wanted, because making Roxy wait had become one of her favorite things.
Roxy arched and complained and dug her heels into the mattress, and Dani grinned against her stomach and kept moving down.
And when she finally settled between Roxy's thighs and put her mouth on her, the complaining stopped all at once and turned into a long broken sound that Dani felt in her own spine.
She worked her with her mouth and pushed three fingers deep, curling to the place she knew now, and Roxy was already close, already wound tight as Dani began to fuck her slow and hard with her fingers.
It was seconds before Roxy tightened around her fingers and came fast and hard gushing into her hand, moaning loudly, both fists knotted in the sheets and Dani's name spilling out of her, hips rolling up off the bed.
Dani stayed with her through all of it and gentled her down slow.
And then Roxy was pulling at her shoulders, rolling her up and over, and there was nothing careful in it, just want, and she got a hand between Dani's legs while Dani was still kissing her and found her soaked and made a low pleased sound into Dani's mouth at the proof of it.
She fingered her slow and deep, and Dani's hips moved into her hand, and the two of them tangled together in the lamplight, Roxy's mouth on Dani's throat and her fingers buried in her and Dani's breath going to pieces, and there was no clean handoff between one of them and the other, just one long blurred current of it.
When Roxy slid down Dani's body and began to lick her pussy, fingers still moving deep inside her, Dani's spine arched up off the bed and she came with a sound she'd stopped being ashamed of making, and Roxy didn't stop, kept her there in it, built her back up with her tongue and her fingers until Dani came a second time, harder, a heel dug hard into the mattress and her breath torn loose in the dark.
Dani thought that was the end of it. She was wrong.
Roxy kissed up her body, loose and flushed and not nearly finished, and there was a look in her eye Dani was learning to brace for, and she pressed Dani back into the pillows and kissed her filthy and then, breathless, murmured something against her mouth that made Dani's blood go hot, and rolled herself over onto her stomach and looked back over her shoulder, an invitation and a dare in one.
“I want you to fuck my ass.”