3
They sat in the kitchen, Darcy with a glass of wine and Leah with the one she'd opened earlier, and Darcy explained the next three months in a bright, slightly too-fast tone, as if she had already practiced this on herself.
The job was good. Genuinely good, a consulting firm that sent her to the cities most people saved for vacations.
London, Paris, Barcelona, Copenhagen. She rattled them off and Leah watched her face do the thing it did when Darcy was trying to convince herself of something alongside the person she was talking to.
Because the reality, Darcy explained, was that she would be traveling Monday through Friday most weeks.
Back on weekends when she could. The cities were real but she was seeing them through the windows of cars going from airports to hotels to client offices and back again,
living on conference room coffee and the kind of tired that came from being professionally cheerful in rooms full of people she didn't know.
"Which means," Darcy said, with a smile that almost reached her eyes, "you and Whit are going to have the whole place to yourselves during the week. Which is actually great. You're going to love each other."
Leah looked at her.
"He's very easy to live with once you get used to him."
"He had weights under the bed I almost tripped on."
"Okay, he's mostly easy to live with. But he's funny, Leah, he's actually really funny, and he knows everyone in this neighborhood and he'll show you around, and..."
Darcy glanced toward the living room where Whit had disappeared after the shirt negotiation, and her voice dropped slightly, not for secrecy but out of some instinct toward privacy.
"He's been alone here for almost a week. He's very happy I'm home."
This landed with no ambiguity whatsoever.
"I can see that," Leah said.
Darcy laughed, a real one this time. "Don't be mean. He missed me."
And he had, visibly. Leah had watched him orbit Darcy since she walked in the door, not clingily but with a kind of low continuous gravity, his hand finding her shoulder when he passed behind her chair, the quality of his attention when she talked.
It was sweet. It was also the most comprehensively couple thing she'd witnessed in person since her own relationship had apparently been a fiction for an indeterminate number of months, and the combination of sweet and excruciating was not doing her any favors.
"I want a movie night," Leah said.
Darcy's face went through several things quickly.
"Darcy."
"Yes. Obviously. Movie night." She said it firmly, like a decision, like it wasn't costing her anything. "Absolutely."
Twenty minutes later Whit was putting his jacket on.
"You don't have to go out," Leah said, because she felt she should.
"Finn's been texting me for a week," he said, which was probably true and also probably not the whole story.
He looked at Darcy when he said it and an acknowledgment passed between them, an IOU, the private ledger of two people who knew each other well enough to keep one.
He kissed her once, and then again, and Darcy pressed her hand flat against his chest when she pulled back.
"Tomorrow," she said quietly.
"Yeah," he said. "Tomorrow."
He nodded at Leah on his way out. The door closed. The apartment felt different without him in it, not emptier exactly, just quieter in a way that had its own texture.
Darcy was already pulling a blanket off the back of the couch. "Okay," she said. "What are we watching."
They watched a movie Darcy picked, something comfort and familiar, and for an hour and forty minutes Leah mostly forgot.
That was the thing about Darcy, she had a gravity that pulled you into the present tense whether you wanted to be there or not.
She made commentary, she stole the good corner of the blanket, she refilled Leah's wine without asking.
Leah laughed twice, genuinely, and felt almost like herself.
Then the credits rolled and the room got quiet and the weight came back.
Not dramatically. Just settled onto her chest the way it had been doing all day, patient and reliable. Chad. Jenna. The image she was trying not to return to and kept returning to anyway, the way her brain kept offering it up like it was being helpful.
"Hey." Darcy was watching her. "Where'd you go."
"Nowhere. I'm here."
Darcy opened her arms and Leah leaned into her without making a decision about it, her cheek against Darcy's shoulder, and Darcy put her chin on top of Leah's head and didn't say anything for a while. The television cycled to a menu screen. Outside a car passed.
"You don't have to be okay," Darcy said.
"I know."
"You're allowed to be furious."
"I'm mostly just tired."
Darcy held her tighter for a moment. "You're going to be so fine. I know you can't feel that right now but you are. You're going to be so fine."
Leah didn't answer. She wasn't sure she believed it yet but she let Darcy say it because Darcy needed to say it and because it was midnight and the wine had made her soft around the edges.
They said their goodnights at the hall. Darcy hugged her again at the bedroom door, a real one, both arms, the full thing.
"Sleep," Darcy said. "Everything is the same in the morning."
"That's not as reassuring as you think it is."
Darcy laughed and disappeared into her room and Leah went to hers.