She Came with the Apartment

1

The subway car smelled like someone's lunch, and Leah had been crying for forty minutes, which meant her face looked exactly like the kind of face people studied their phones to avoid making eye contact with.

Fine. She studied her phone too. She'd taken a screenshot of the texts between her now ex-boyfriend Chad and Jenna, not because she needed evidence (she'd seen them in person, in her bed,

in the apartment she'd been splitting rent on since September) but because some part of her had decided the screenshot mattered.

She kept almost deleting it and not deleting it.

The subway lurched. The woman across from her was eating an orange in the aggressive, efficient way of someone who had places to be.

Leah envied her that. Having somewhere to be.

She had Darcy's address. That was something.

Darcy had picked up on the second ring, road noise behind her voice, and said oh my god, oh my god Leah, take the apartment, the key is under the ceramic thing by the door, it looks like a frog but it's supposed to be a cat, just go, I mean it, go right now,

all of this in one breath before Leah could finish explaining.

That was Darcy. Leah had started crying again and Darcy had talked her through it until the connection went patchy somewhere over the Atlantic.

One thing: Whit's been crashing there while his place gets sorted out. But don't worry about it. He'll deal.

Leah had written back: who is Whit.

Darcy had sent three laugh-cry emojis and then: my boyfriend?? I've told you about him. He's fine, you'll love him, just kick him out of the bedroom if he's in it.

This was the first Leah had heard of any boyfriend named Whit.

She looked at her duffel bag between her feet, stuffed to the point where the zipper pulled, and the tote bag on her lap with her laptop and her good moisturizer and the framed photo of her and Darcy from Darcy's graduation that she'd grabbed off her dresser without fully meaning to.

Everything else was still at the apartment.

Chad's apartment, technically. She'd been off the lease since February and hadn't gotten around to getting back on it, and there was a lesson in there somewhere she didn't have the energy for right now.

The train went underground. Leah looked at the screenshot and deleted it.

* * *

The frog-cat thing was unmistakable. Leah fished the key out from under it, let herself in, and stood in the entry hall of Darcy's apartment for a moment, breathing.

It smelled like Darcy, that mix of her shampoo and the candle she always burned in the kitchen.

Leah had been in this apartment a hundred times.

She felt her shoulders come down an inch.

Then she heard someone moving around.

The kitchen was lit and a man was standing at the counter with his back to her, shirtless, doing something with a blender.

For a moment Leah just stood in the hallway and took him in: broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, the kind of back that didn't come from a gym you went to occasionally, dark hair curling slightly at the nape of his neck.

He had an easy, unselfconscious posture, as if he’d never once thought about whether he was taking up too much space.

Sweatpants low on his hips. A strip of skin above the waistband that she looked at for approximately one second before looking away.

He turned around.

His face landed the same way the rest of him had. Sharp jaw, a little of something in his eyes that was either intelligence or amusement or both. He registered her in the doorway and his expression moved through surprise and settled, almost immediately, into a grin.

"Hey." He leaned back against the counter like he'd been expecting her. "You must be the roommate."

"I'm Darcy's best friend," Leah said. "Leah."

"Whit." He said it like she should already know that. "You want a protein shake?"

"No."

"Smart." He poured it into a glass and looked at her duffel bag. "How long are you staying?"

"The summer."

An expression moved across his face, not displeasure exactly, more like consideration. He took a long drink of his shake and looked at her over the glass. The eye contact lasted a beat longer than necessary, the way it did with men who were used to it working.

"Darcy mentioned you," he said, which was interesting, because Darcy had apparently not mentioned him at all.

"She didn't mention you," Leah said.

He laughed, short and genuine. "That tracks. She thinks if she introduces us too fast I'll scare you off." He set the glass down and folded his arms, which did things to the muscles in his chest that Leah declined to acknowledge. "I won't, for what it's worth."

"Good to know."

"Second bedroom's got some of my stuff in it," he said. "I'll move it. Give me twenty minutes."

It was the first reasonable thing he'd said.

Leah looked around the kitchen, at the spread of his things on the counter (protein powder, a charger, someone's sports almanac, keys, a jacket thrown over a chair) and understood that she was standing in a space that had reorganized itself around someone else's presence.

She would be adding a third layer to that. All summer.

"I'm going to put my bag down," she said.

"Down the hall, door on the left." He picked up his shake again. "There's wine in the fridge if you want it. Darcy left it."

She almost thanked him. She went down the hall instead.

Leah set her duffel on the floor and looked at the room.

It was small. Smaller than she'd remembered.

She'd been in here once, maybe twice, when it was still Darcy's de facto storage room, and it hadn't seemed this narrow then.

Now it had a twin mattress on the floor pushed against one wall, a folding table with a laptop stand and a tangle of cables, and a set of resistance bands hanging off the closet door.

A water bottle on the windowsill. A deodorant on the folding table next to the laptop stand, which said something about the level of organization she was dealing with.

It smelled like him. That was the first thing.

Not badly, it wasn't dirty, nothing like that, but it was dense with the plain fact of a man who'd been sleeping here, working here, existing here without apology.

Sweat and cedar and something underneath she couldn't name.

Leah crossed to the window, pushed it open, and stood there for a moment with her face in the night air.

Better.

She turned back to the room. The resistance bands she unhooked from the closet door and set on the folding table.

The deodorant she moved to the windowsill.

Small adjustments, but the act of making them helped.

She opened the closet: three of his shirts, a pair of dress shoes in a box, a single suit jacket in a dry cleaning bag. She pushed them to one side.

"I said I'd move it." Whit appeared in the doorway. He'd put on a t-shirt, which she noted with something she chose to call relief.

"I'm just organizing," Leah said.

"I can be out in twenty."

"I meant your stuff in the closet. You can leave the clothes."

He looked at the closet, then at her. "You sure?"

"There's a whole side you're not using."

He seemed to find this either generous or surprising, she couldn't tell which. He leaned in the doorway the way he'd leaned against the counter, like every surface in the apartment was something to be comfortable against, and looked at the room with a mildly appraising expression.

"Mattress is a spare," he said. "It's not terrible. There's better sheets in the hall closet."

"Okay."

"Darcy keeps extra pillows in there too."

"I know," Leah said. "I've stayed here before."

A pause. "Right." A flicker of amusement on his face, recalibration again.

He was doing that, she noticed, adjusting in small increments, like he was used to being the person in any room who knew the most about the room's inhabitants, and finding himself on the back foot was a mildly interesting novelty.

"I'll get my gym stuff out of here tomorrow. The bands and the box of weights under the table."

"There's weights under the table."

"Didn't want to trip on them."

Leah looked at the floor. There was a shoebox-sized crate of kettle weights that she had not noticed and would absolutely have tripped on. "Thank you," she said, with some effort.

"You eat yet?"

"I'm fine."

"There's leftover pad thai," he said. "It's mine but you can have it."

She looked at him. He said it the same way he said everything, easy, assuming, like generosity was just another form of confidence. She hadn't eaten since breakfast and it was past ten and she had been crying on the subway.

"Okay," she said. "Sure."