Epilogue
Eight months later, Dani woke in a bed in the woods with no alarm set, no skate to make, no schedule at all, and a dog asleep across her feet.
The cabin had wood beams, wide windows, and a bed big enough that the rescue mutt could sprawl sideways at the foot of it and still leave room for two people.
Which he did, every night, having decided on day one that the rule about dogs and furniture didn't apply to him.
Pavel was forty pounds of indeterminate brown something they'd pulled from the shelter outside Phoenix Ridge in June, scruffy and one-eared and tongue-lollingly devoted, named by Roxy after a goalie she'd heard Dani mention once and never stopped finding funny.
He snored at the foot of the bed in a square of early sun.
Beyond the windows the trees went on quiet and green. Roxy slept on her stomach with her honey hair everywhere and one hand fisted loosely in the sheet. Dani lay in the middle of all of it in the early light and let herself, for what was no longer the first time, simply be happy.
She still wasn't entirely used to it still.
After all those years alone, now she woke in a house with another person's books on the shelves and another person's coffee in the cupboard and a dog on her feet, in a place Roxy had bought outright the week after the playoffs ended and put both their names on without making a speech about it.
She'd just slid the paperwork across a kitchen table and said I want somewhere that's ours and not leased and not hidden, and I can finally afford to mean it, so don't argue, and Dani hadn't argued.
The woman who'd kept every door in her life locked had a home now, in the woods where they had privacy, with her name beside Roxy's on the deed, and the having of it had stopped frightening her somewhere around the fourth month. Now it just felt like waking up.
It was the small evidence that got her, every day, the proof of two lives that had quietly grown into one.
Reading glasses left on the windowsill. A second toothbrush.
Roxy's ridiculous tour hoodies hung next to Dani's plain dark ones in their closet.
A notebook open on the kitchen counter most mornings, lyrics crossed out and rewritten, because Roxy wrote here now, easy and constant.
The well that had run dry for two years gone deep and steady the moment no one else was managing it.
Dani had spent her whole adult life making herself easy to overlook and small enough to lose nothing, and somewhere in the last eight months she'd accumulated, without deciding to, a whole life full of things she would be destroyed to lose, and the strange part, the part she was still learning, was that the fear of losing it didn't ruin the having of it.
It just made the having matter more. She'd had that backward for seven years.
She slid out from under the covers an inch at a time, the old dawn habit, except there was nowhere she had to be and no one she was leaving.
Pavel cracked his one good eye, judged the situation, and went back to sleep.
Dani pulled on a t-shirt and padded out to the kitchen and made coffee, two mugs, as she did every morning now without thinking about it, hers and Roxy's both, and carried them out to the porch to watch the light come up through the trees.
Roxy found her there twenty minutes later, barefoot, wrapped in one of Dani's old Valkyries tees that hung to her thighs, her face soft and unpainted and creased from the pillow, and she took the mug Dani held out and folded herself into the other chair with her knees up and said, "You let me sleep. "
She was never more beautiful than she was right now.
"You were tired. You were up late on the phone with the producer."
"The producer can wait." Roxy drank her coffee, the black bitter way Dani made it for her now, and looked out at the trees.
Quiet sat easy between them, a good quiet, the kind that had no performance anywhere in it.
A bird trilled then fluttered away somewhere in the green.
Pavel's tags jingled inside as he relocated to a sunnier spot.
Dani turned her mug in her hands. She'd been working up to it for a week, which was ridiculous, and she knew it was ridiculous, and she said it anyway, plainly, as she said the things that mattered.
"I want you to come to Detroit next week.
Meet my parents, my brothers." She kept her eyes on the trees.
"My mother's been asking. She wants to feed you.
It'll be loud and there'll be too much food and my father will try to fix something on your car whether it's broken or not. That's how they say they like you."
It was a bigger deal than she was making it sound like, and they both knew it. Dani had never brought anyone to Detroit. Not Marisol, not anyone ever.
The rule had been the same there as everywhere, that the people who got let all the way in were the people who could do you the most harm.
She'd taken Roxy into her empty apartment in the spring and her body had survived it.
This was the last locked room. This was bringing the woman half the world thought it owned home to a street outside Detroit where the neighbors would talk and her brothers would be merciless and her mother would cry in the kitchen.
Dani found she wanted it, all of it, the noise and the mess and the exposure, wanted her family to know the person who'd finally seen her completely for who she was and loved her for it.
Roxy was quiet a second, and Dani made herself look over, and found Roxy's eyes had gone bright and her mouth was doing the thing it did when she was trying not to let her whole heart out at once.
"Yes," Roxy said. "Obviously yes. I've wanted to meet them since the night you told me about them.” She wiped her eye with the heel of her hand, unbothered, smiling.
"I'm going to be so weird about it. I'm going to bring your mother something absurd.
Tell me what she likes and I'll over-think it for days. "
She said it light, but Dani saw the rest of it underneath, everything Roxy didn't say out loud, that a woman who'd grown up with a mother who entered her in pageants and then receded behind a manager had spent her whole life without a family like the one Dani was offering to walk her into.
Roxy had never had a loud warm family that fed you and fixed your car.
She'd had a brand and a team of people who profited off her.
And now Dani was handing her Sunday in Detroit, too much food and merciless brothers and a mother who'd cry, and a father with bad jokes.
Roxy was looking at it like a person being handed something she'd assumed wasn't available to her in this life.
"They'll love you," Dani said. "Brace for it."
"What do I bring her?" Roxy pressed. "Your mother. You never answered. Give me something to obsess over."
"She likes that you make me happy," Dani said. "So, just bring yourself I guess."
Roxy set her coffee down and leaned across the gap between the chairs to kiss her, slow, tasting of bitter coffee and morning.
Dani's hand came up into her loose, lovely hair, and the kiss went warm and unhurried and then less unhurried until Roxy made a low sound against her mouth and said, against it, "Come back inside. "
Inside, the morning sun lay in long bars across the wide bed, and they undressed each other slow, no urgency in any of it, all the time in the world now and both of them knowing it.
Dani pulled the old tee off over Roxy's head and laid her back into the warm light and just looked at her a second, sleep-soft and bare and unhurried, before she kissed her again.
She took her time. There was no clock anymore, no dawn she had to leave by, no secret to keep.
Dani kissed down Roxy's body the slow way, mouth on her throat and her breasts and the soft of her stomach, feeling Roxy go pliant and warm under her, hearing the lazy catch of her breath.
When she settled between Roxy's legs and put her mouth on her, Roxy sighed out something wordless and slid a hand into Dani's hair, not gripping, just holding.
Dani worked her gently, unhurried, tongue slow on her clit while she eased two fingers inside, slow, working up against the spot that made her gasp, and Roxy rocked up into it without hurry, warm and open in the sun, building slow and easy up up up.
She came that way, soft, a long unwinding sigh more than a cry, her thighs trembling around Dani's shoulders and her hand tightening once in Dani's hair, sun-warm and unguarded.
Dani stayed with her through all of it and kissed her hip when she was done and felt her laugh, low and spent and happy.
Then Roxy rolled her over.
She did it easily, tipping Dani onto her back into the warm sheets and following her down, kissing her mouth and her jaw and her throat, taking her own slow time as Dani had, and Dani let her, which she'd had to learn how to do this year, to lie back in the light and be the one taken care of and not reach for control instead.
Roxy worked down her body, mouth and hands, and settled between Dani's legs.
She started with soft kitten licks, then finally put her tongue on her with purpose, two fingers sliding in slow and deep.
Dani's head went back into the pillow and her hand found Roxy's shoulder and held on.
For most of her life sex had been a thing Dani ran, controlled and detached and over before it could cost her anything.
It had taken this whole strange year to learn the other thing, to go quiet and open under someone's hands and trust them with it.
She trusted Roxy with it. She lay back in the warm bars of light and let Roxy take her apart slow, and it built warm and steady, no rush anywhere in it, and she came with a low sound and her hips lifting into Roxy's mouth, once, easy, the sun on her skin.
Then Dani reached down and pulled her up, because she wanted Roxy's weight on her, all of it, wanted to finish how they'd started, tangled and equal and looking at each other.
Roxy came up laughing into the kiss and let Dani roll them onto their sides in the warm bars of light.
They hooked a leg each over the other and pressed close, moving together slow, no hands wandering anywhere, just a long lazy grind.
Roxy's thigh and Dani's, slick and unhurried, two people with nowhere on earth to be.
It built again like honey, warm and easy between them, mouths gone gasping and a little clumsy.
They went over the edge close together, messy and breathless, laughing into each other's mouths, and stayed exactly there, tangled in the sun, both of them sticky and warm and wrecked, grinning like idiots.
They lay tangled a long time in the morning light, Dani on her back, Roxy half on top of her, drawing slow nothing-shapes on Dani's collarbone with one finger, and the trees moved outside the window and the dog snored somewhere down the hall.
"Hey," Roxy said, into Dani's shoulder, casual, which meant it wasn't. "Have you ever thought about having kids?"
Dani considered the ceiling. She'd known the question was somewhere out ahead of them, had felt it coming like she felt a play developing, and found she already had the answer, had maybe had it for months.
"Yeah," she said. "I have. Eventually. After a championship run or two, when my knees still mean something and I can go out on top.
" She turned her head and looked at Roxy. "I'd want that, with you. Someday."
Roxy's face did the whole-heart thing again, no holding it back this time. "A championship run or two," she repeated, delighted. "You're going to make our future children wait on your save percentage to save the day?"
"My save percentage is excellent. They'll have a very good mother and a very smug one.
" And Roxy laughed, that real laugh, the one no camera had ever gotten, and Dani felt it move through her own chest, and everything she'd been not-saying for eight months, was suddenly the easiest sentence in the world, and she just said it, plain, looking right at her.
"I love you."
Roxy went still. Roxy had said it to her and had known Dani loved her back but was struggling to find the words and now Dani had finally just said the words, flat and certain and unmistakable, as she said the things she meant.
"Say it again," Roxy whispered.
"I love you. I'm not saying it three times, don't push it."
And Roxy laughed and kissed her, wet-eyed, and said it back into her mouth, "I love you, too,” and Dani held Roxy and kissed her.
Pavel jumped on the bed.
He landed on both of them at once, all forty graceless pounds, having decided the human portion of the morning had gone on long enough and there were more pressing matters, namely breakfast, and he stood on Dani's stomach and looked down at her with his one ear up and his whole back end wagging, and Roxy dissolved into laughter, and Dani groaned and gave up on the morning.
"Okay. Okay. Off." She slid out from under the dog and the sheets and pulled the old tee back on, and Pavel beat her to the kitchen, nails skittering on the wood floor.
She fed him and stood at the back door and let him out into the yard, where he immediately put his nose down and set off after some scent like the most important thing in the world had been hidden in the grass overnight.
Dani leaned in the doorway in the morning sun and watched him go.
Behind her she could hear Roxy moving around the kitchen, pulling down mugs, humming something under her breath, a tune Dani didn't know yet and would probably hear finished on a record in a year, in one of Dani's old shirts, in their house, in the quiet, with the whole loud world held safely outside the trees.
She thought, sometimes, about the woman she'd been a year ago, the one who woke alone on purpose in an empty apartment and called the emptiness peace. She didn't miss her.
This was a whole life she had made for herself, a girlfriend and a dog and a house in the woods with Sunday in Detroit waiting at the end of next week, all of it precious, none of it hidden.
It was the most dangerous thing she'd ever done, and she wouldn't have traded a single piece of it back for the old safe quiet.
Dani had never been more known. She had never felt more home than she did now.