30. Darcy
CHAPTER THIRTY
darcy
The harbor light catches me off guard, the way it keeps doing even after ten weeks.
Late-afternoon sun glistens across the water while the wind comes hard enough off the harbor to whip my hair across my mouth mid-laugh.
I’m standing there trying to untangle it when Bex ignores me completely and keeps her phone pointed in my direction anyway.
“Stand there,” she says.
“I’m not posing.”
“Darcy. Stand there and look at the water.”
“That’s literally posing.”
“That’s existing.” She waves a hand impatiently. “Stand there and exist.”
Bex snaps a dozen photos, moving her phone a little higher, then a little lower before tucking it away and smiling like she just captured a Pulitzer. Mine’s already in my hand, fingers moving before my brain has time to catch up.
Darcy
Bex says hi. She also says she better get more pancakes before she leaves.
“Do you actually want more pancakes?” I ask as I hit send.
Bex snorts.
“Is that a real question? No wonder you caved. The man cooks like it’s foreplay.”
I roll my eyes so hard it almost hurts and hit send anyway.
Darcy
Miss you guys.
The message sits there for half a second after it sends, warmth curling low in my stomach before I shove my phone back into my coat pocket and look out at the water instead.
The wind pushes hard enough to sting my ears a little, and behind us somebody’s dog is losing its mind over a seagull.
My phone buzzes a few minutes later.
I leave it there for at least thirty seconds because I have dignity. Barely.
Tyler
Miss you too. Tell Bex she’s welcome for breakfast any time.
“I can literally see your face changing,” Bex says beside me.
“Into what?” I raise a brow.
“You like them. A lot.”
The thing is, I do. Enough that trying to play it cool about it mostly just feels embarrassing now.
Bex hooks her arm through mine while we start walking again, swaying sideways a little as we cut back toward the street.
“I can see why you stayed,” she says after a minute.
“The city?”
“That too.”
I glance over at her.
She’s looking straight ahead while we walk, hair blowing across her Velvet Teddy lipstick every five seconds while she keeps talking through it anyway.
“You feel different here,” she says. “Lighter.”
I think about the coffee shop I disappear to when I need to get out of the apartment for a while, the Pilates studio where they know me by name now, Thursday nights at the Bell, and the two people downstairs who somehow figured out what I needed before I ever did.
Somewhere along the way it stopped feeling temporary.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I think I am.”
Bex squeezes my arm once and leaves it there.
We spend the rest of the morning wandering without much of a plan, following whatever catches our attention first. Every few blocks, Bex stops to photograph another cobblestone street because, according to her, it has “the kind of charm Hallmark location scouts live for.”
Somewhere along the way we duck into a little café because we’re both windswept, and neither of us feels like pretending brunch wasn’t the destination all along.
The place is already buzzing when we step inside, conversations overlapping beneath the hiss of the espresso machine while maple syrup and something savory drift out from the kitchen. My stomach immediately reminds me that we skipped breakfast.
“This place is adorable,” Bex says, shrugging off her jacket.
“I figured you’d like it.”
The hostess leads us through the dining room and out onto a little greenhouse terrace where sunlight pours through the glass ceiling, warming the little corner table she points us toward.
Bex reaches for her menu.
“What’s good?”
“I’ve only been here once.”
“So we’re gambling.”
“I’ve never led you astray.”
She looks up over the menu.
“You once convinced me escargot was basically garlic bread.”
“…The taste is practically the same.”
“It was a snail, Darcy.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you what it actually was.”
She shakes her head, smiling to herself.
“I’ll trust you anyway.”
Twenty minutes later there’s a pitcher of mimosas between us, a crab cake Benedict in front of me, avocado toast in front of Bex, and somehow she’s already stolen half my breakfast.
“You ordered avocado toast.”
“I wanted to try yours.”
“Then why didn’t you order mine?”
“Because I wanted avocado toast, too.”
I stare at her as she steals another bite, shimmying her shoulders as she clearly enjoys both of our meals for us. I slide my plate the rest of the way across the table and reach for the other half of her avocado toast instead.
She beams like she’d accomplished something.
For a while the conversation goes exactly where it always has.
Our latest binge reads. Work and Bex’s exhausting managing editor. The dating scene she’d pretty much given up on back in Philly. Our parents. The familiar rhythms of home that somehow kept moving without me there to notice.
“You remember sophomore year when we swore we’d get an apartment together after college?”
“We were going to split rent.”
“We thought rent was, like, eight hundred dollars for a two bedroom in Rittenhouse Square.”
“We also thought we’d get a puppy.”
“Two.”
“And a record player.”
She smiles into her mimosa.
“I don’t think either of us pictured…this.”
I laugh.
“I can confidently say this wasn’t part of the plan.”
I glance out the window for a second before looking back at her.
Bex smiles.
“I think this plan suits you better anyway.”
“I think so, too.”
After brunch we wander again, ducking into side streets just because they look nice.
We lose almost half an hour in a little bookstore where Bex disappears into biographies while I drift toward romantasy without thinking twice about it.
By the time she finds me, she’s halfway through the inside flap of a celebrity chef’s memoir while I’m standing in front of an entire shelf trying to convince myself I don’t need another book.
A few blocks later she talks me into a tiny kitchen store because she’s convinced every city has one that only locals know about.
Neither of us actually needs anything, but somehow we leave with a bottle of herb-infused olive oil I absolutely could’ve lived without, locally jarred olives, and a twelve-dollar block of artisanal cheese from the specialty market next door because, according to Bex, this weekend qualifies as a special occasion.
“I think that’s just something you made up.”
“It doesn’t make it less true.”
My feet ache in the way they always do after a full day spent walking through the city by the time we get back to my apartment.
We unpack our little collection of unnecessary goodies, open a bottle of wine, and throw together a charcuterie board substantial enough to count as dinner before settling onto the couch beneath a pile of blankets.
Bridgerton is barely five minutes in before Bex disappears into the bathroom and comes back carrying what looks like the entire Sephora skincare aisle.
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes.”
She tosses me a headband.
“Hair up.”
“I don’t trust anything that burns.”
“It tingles.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“Beauty is pain, Darcy.”
“Then I don’t want to be beautiful. I want to be comfortable.”
She just folds her arms and waits. With a dramatic sigh, I pull my hair back.
Twenty minutes later we’re sitting under charcoal face masks that make us look vaguely haunted, the charcuterie board between us while Daphne and Simon dance around admitting the obvious for what feels like the fifteenth episode in a row.
Bex reaches for another olive as she fills me in on Philadelphia—her apartment she’s still deciding whether to keep, the managing editor she’s getting increasingly tired of pretending she likes, and the growing suspicion that she’s simply outgrown the magazine altogether.
“I think I want somewhere that feels like mine,” she says eventually.
The words stay with me for a second because I know exactly what she means now in a way I couldn’t have three months ago.
“You could always come here,” I say, half joking.
“Maybe.”
She reaches for her wine, turning the stem between her fingers for a second before taking another sip.
We’re mostly through the bottle when she says, “Speaking of West Chester…”
I look over.
“Brett reached out to me a few weeks ago.”
The words catch me off guard.
“Instagram DM,” she says. “He asked how you were.”
“He asked you…not me.”
“And I left him on read because fuck him.” She takes another sip. “But I still thought you should know.”
Anthony Bridgerton says something self-deprecating in the background while I stare into my wineglass, watching the last swallow catch the candlelight.
I spent years translating half-measures into love because I wanted them to mean more than they did.
“It’s okay to be upset about it,” Bex says more quietly now. “You gave years of your life to him.”
“I don’t think I’m even upset.” I tap my finger lightly against my glass. “I think it just made what I already knew impossible to ignore.”
“What’s that?”
“That if he wanted to know how I was doing, he would’ve texted me himself.”
Bex nods, her usual humor softer now.
“And the weird part is I used to think that counted as effort. Like expecting anything more was asking too much.”
The room falls quiet again except for Bridgerton playing in the background. Bex reaches for another piece of brie while I watch the wine catch the candlelight through the bottom of my glass.
“I don’t think you were ever asking for too much, Darce.” She looks at me over the edge of her mask. “I think he got very comfortable giving you very little.”
My eyes sting hard enough that I drop my gaze before she notices.
For a long time, I convinced myself not to bring things up because I already knew how the conversation would end—Brett sighing like anything remotely emotional was an inconvenience, me apologizing for bringing it up in the first place.
I try to fix my eyes on anything before my face starts dripping black—the blanket half falling off the couch, my sneakers kicked off near the door, the candle burned low enough it’s starting to tunnel at the center.
Then, somewhere downstairs, Tyler laughs. The sound catches my attention like a reflex, my head turning slightly toward the floor like I might somehow be able to hear him better.
Bex watches the whole thing happen.
“Oh,” she says, smiling to herself. “You’re down bad.”
I let my head fall back against the couch cushions.
“I need you to be less perceptive.”
“You heard one laugh and registered it like a personal mating call.”
“I did not—”
“You didn’t even realize you did it,” she smirks, not accepting my protest for a single moment.
I pull the blanket higher over my legs and don’t argue because she’s right and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“You’re going to regardless.”
“That’s true, but I’m working on consent.” She shifts sideways against the cushions. “When’s the last time you were actually afraid of anything?”
“Define afraid.”
“The good kind.” She looks at me over the edge of her wineglass. “The kind where you want something so much it’s terrifying.”
“Currently,” I admit immediately. “As we speak.”
Bex nods slowly, like she’d expected the answer.
“What I saw this week,” she says, “was two guys who very clearly think of you as more than casual sex.” She holds my eyes. “They adore you, Darcy.”
I shake the thought out of my head before I can even follow her there.
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m serious.”
“We already agreed this isn’t anything more than—”
“I’m not talking about labels.” She shakes her head. “I’m talking about the fact that I spent three days watching the three of you together.”
She shrugs.
“Nobody had to tell me anything. That’s how you know.”
Hearing someone else say it out loud makes arguing with myself a whole lot harder.
I’ve just been waiting for it to stop being true.
“I don’t know what this becomes from here,” I admit quietly. “They told me right away this was only fun. They don’t do serious with girls they share.”
“And?”
“And what if this only works because nobody’s trying to make it anything more?”
Bex doesn’t interrupt.
“What if eventually one of them wants something different?” I hear myself ask. “Or I do.”
The words come easier once they’ve started.
“What if one day this stops feeling easy?”
I swallow.
“What if they make me choose and I break whatever they had long before I showed up?”
I hadn’t even realized that was the fear until it was sitting between us.
Bex watches me for another second before she speaks.
“You’ll literally never know if you don’t try.”
We both know she’s right. I throw the pillow at her anyway, and she catches it without even looking.
“I don’t know how people do this.”
“Do what?”
“Want something this much and not spend every second waiting for it to disappear.”
“You stop waiting.”
She smiles.
The thought settles somewhere deep enough that I don’t argue with it.
I draw my knees a little closer beneath the blanket.
“I—”
The word catches halfway out because the rest still feels too big once it’s actually outside my head. I exhale slowly.
“I think I want whatever this is becoming.”
She studies me for a second, then smiles.
“I know.”
I huff out a laugh.
“Of course you do.”
“Darcy.” She nudges my knee with hers. “I’ve known you for twenty years.”
I shake my head, smiling despite myself.
“I’m proud of you.”
“For what?”
“For finally admitting it out loud.”
I look down at my glass again, watching the last little bit of wine swirl around the bottom.
“Yeah,” I admit. “Me too.”
She leans across the couch and pulls me into a hug that’s tighter than I expect and exactly right. I hold on for an extra second before letting go, and she notices, because of course she does, but for once she lets it pass without saying anything.
We settle back beneath the blanket and keep picking at the last of the cheese board while Daphne and Simon continue avoiding the world’s most obvious conversation, the candle burning lower beside the TV as the city settles into its Saturday-night rhythm outside.