2
They ate standing at the counter because the kitchen table was covered in Whit's things, and she didn't push it, and he didn't move them. There was a rhythm to it that she found irritating and also, if she was honest, a little comforting. Something ordinary to do with her hands.
"Darcy said you've been living here a month," she said.
"Give or take. My building had a pipe situation."
"Still?"
"Contractor situation," he said, which seemed to mean something different and less innocent than a pipe situation. He twirled noodles with a focus that suggested he was done expanding on it.
"And you've been seeing Darcy for…"
"Seven months."
"She didn't tell me about you."
"She told me." He glanced sideways at her. "She said you'd just started living with your boyfriend and were in the honeymoon phase and she didn't want to make it weird."
Leah was quiet for a moment. "That was seven months ago."
"Yep."
"We broke up tonight."
"I know." He said it without inflection. Not unkindly.
"She called you."
"She texted. While she was talking to you." He put down his fork and looked at her directly. "He's an idiot. In case that's useful."
"It's not, really."
"Fair enough."
She ate another bite of pad thai and looked at the kitchen: Darcy's pendant light, Darcy's plant on the windowsill that was doing fine, Darcy's mismatched mugs on the open shelf that Leah had helped her pick out at the flea market in Brooklyn three years ago.
The plant surprised her. Darcy had never kept anything alive.
"Darcy's plant is doing well," she said.
"I water it."
She looked at him.
"She asked me to," he said, which she believed, but which also meant he had remembered to, consistently, for however long he'd been here. She filed this away without knowing why.
She called her mother from the twin mattress an hour later, the window still cracked, the room smelling less like him now and more like the city night coming in off the street.
She said she was fine, she was at Darcy's, she just needed a change of scenery.
Her mother accepted this in the way she accepted most things Leah said, with a gentle skepticism that she was too tired to fight.
After she hung up she lay in the dark and listened to the apartment settle around her and thought: one night. Just get through one night.
The mattress was not as bad as it looked.
She was almost asleep when she heard Darcy's key in the lock.
She heard Darcy before she saw her: the sound of Darcy arriving somewhere, which wasn't quite like anyone else arriving somewhere. Keys, the door, a bag set down too hard, and then her voice, already talking.
"Leah. Leah. Where are you, I saw the light under the door…"
Leah opened the bedroom door and got approximately half a second to register Darcy in the hallway before Darcy had her arms around her.
She smelled like airplane and her own shampoo and she squeezed with both arms the way she always had, the way that felt like being actually held rather than just touched.
"I'm so sorry," Darcy said into her hair. "I'm so sorry I wasn't here, I'm so sorry about Chad, I'm so sorry about everything."
"It's okay," Leah said, and then, because it wasn't: "I'm okay."
Darcy pulled back and held her at arm's length and looked at her face with the close attention of someone doing a damage assessment. "You've been crying."
"Subway air."
"Leah."
"I'm fine. I'm better now." She was, slightly. Something about Darcy's physical presence in a room rearranged the air. "You didn't have to fly back."
"I was already on my way back. Presentation's done."
Darcy looked past her into the bedroom, at the twin mattress and the open window and the small careful reorganization Leah had done.
"God, it's so small in here. I'm sorry. We'll get a proper bed frame at least. Or, are you okay on the mattress? I can make Whit take it and you can have my room."
"I'm fine on the mattress."
"You're sure."
"Darcy. I'm sure."
Darcy squeezed her hands once and let go.
Then she turned to the living room doorway where Whit had materialized, still in his t-shirt, leaning against the frame in the way he leaned against everything.
Darcy crossed to him and he caught her like he'd been waiting to, one arm around her waist, her face going up to his, and the kiss lasted long enough that Leah looked at the plant on the windowsill.
When she looked back Darcy had her face against his chest and was saying something low. Leah caught shirt and Whit's response, aggrieved and immediate:
"I'm wearing a shirt."
Darcy murmured something else.
"So I have to wear a shirt for three months?"
"And shorts."
"Darcy..."
She pulled back and looked up at him with an expression Leah recognized as the particular blend of stern and amused that Darcy deployed when she had already won an argument. Whit's expression was the one of a man who knew it too.
"In our bedroom," Darcy said, with a giggle that undermined the authority of it completely, and something about the easy way she said our bedroom, unthinking, settled in Leah's chest in a way she didn't examine.