4
She lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and did not sleep.
The mattress was fine. The window was cracked, the city doing its low ambient thing outside.
She had nowhere to be tomorrow, which was either a mercy or its own kind of problem.
She thought about calling her mother back and didn't.
She thought about the screenshot she'd deleted and felt briefly proud of herself and then felt nothing about it, which was maybe worse.
At some point she heard the front door.
Quiet. He was being quiet about it, she'd give him that. The soft close of the latch, footsteps across the living room floor. A pause. Then the sound of him moving down the hall, past her door, and the soft knock and click of Darcy's bedroom door opening and shutting.
She closed her eyes. Good. Great. Go to sleep.
Whit's voice, low: "I've missed you."
Leah stared at the ceiling.
"Finally get out of these clothes."
A rustling. Then the unmistakable wet sound of kissing, which should not have been audible through a wall but apparently the walls in this apartment had opinions about that. It went on for a while. Leah pulled the blanket up.
"God, baby." Whit again, slightly muffled. "I've really missed your mouth."
"Shhh. Not so loud."
A beat of quiet in which Leah thought with relief that it might be over, and then it very much was not.
"Get on the bed."
The bedsprings registered this as an event worth announcing. Leah turned onto her side. The wall was approximately four feet away. She was extremely aware of the four feet.
Then Darcy made a sound.
It started soft, the kind of sound someone makes while trying to be quiet about making it, muffled in a way that should have rendered it inaudible and instead rendered it somehow worse. Leah pulled the pillow over her head. The pillow was not rated for this application.
She lay there and catalogued her feelings, which were as follows: annoyance, primarily and deservedly.
She had been here less than twelve hours.
She had come here off the worst day she'd had in recent memory.
She was sleeping on a twin mattress on the floor in a room that still faintly smelled like someone else's gym and she was being subjected to this.
The annoyance was righteous and she was entitled to it.
Underneath the annoyance, something else she was less entitled to.
Darcy's sounds were getting less muffled.
Leah pressed the pillow harder against her ear and thought with great practicality about earplugs, about whether any of the shops on the corner carried earplugs, about whether she could order earplugs for same-day delivery at one in the morning,
about the exact star rating she would give this apartment on whatever app handled this kind of situation.
"Whit." Darcy's voice, breathy and unguarded, saying his name like a fact. Like something she couldn't help.
The bedsprings had formed a rhythm now, patient and regular.
"That's right." Whit, lower than before, unhurried. "Ride me, baby. You look so hot."
"It feels so good."
Leah turned onto her other side as if the other side of the mattress was in a different building.
It was not. She looked at the wall, which continued to be four feet away.
She was jealous, she recognized with grim clarity.
Not of him specifically. Not exactly. She was jealous of the fact of two people who wanted each other that much after almost a week apart, who couldn't manage to get through a single hour before they were —
"I want you behind me."
Movement. Rearrangement. The bedsprings briefly silent and then not.
"God, you're hitting me so deep…"
Leah put the second pillow over her face.
She had not had sex in six months. She had not thought about this fact with any particular acuity until this precise moment, lying on a mattress on the floor four feet from a wall through which Darcy was now saying things she would never be able to unhear.
"You're so hot, baby."
"I'm close." Darcy, small and honest.
"Me too."
The rhythm changed. The headboard, previously restrained, apparently decided this was the moment to get involved.
Leah pressed both pillows to her ears and lay completely rigid and listened anyway, because the human body is not actually capable of not hearing things it can hear, and felt her jealousy sharpen into something she couldn't categorize as neatly as annoyance.
Then Darcy made the sound that meant it was over, and Whit shortly after, and then silence came down like a curtain.
Leah lay in the dark.
Earplugs, she thought. First thing tomorrow.
She did not fall asleep for another hour.
Leah woke at eight to sun coming through the cracked window and the sound of someone in the kitchen and the brief, merciful amnesia of a new morning before everything came back in order: Chad, Jenna, the subway, the mattress, the wall.
She lay there for a moment taking stock.
Slept maybe five hours. Felt approximately that.
She got up and found her toiletry bag and used Darcy's bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror with the frank assessment of a woman who had cried on public transit the previous day.
Her hair needed washing. Her eyes were slightly puffy.
She was wearing the pajama set her mother had given her two Christmases ago, the oversized flannel kind in a pattern of small blue checks, the pants pooling slightly at her ankles, the top buttoned to the second button from the top.
It covered everything from her collarbones to her feet.
It was extremely comfortable and made her look like someone's grandmother and she had absolutely no interest in changing it.
She went to the kitchen.
Whit was at the counter again, basketball shorts, no shirt, apparently having made no adjustment whatsoever to his domestic habits since last night's negotiation. He glanced at her when she came in and said "morning" and turned back to whatever he was doing with the coffee maker.
"Shirt," Leah said.
He looked down at himself. "I just woke up."
"We discussed this."
A sound from the hallway and then Darcy appeared, and Leah's tired brain took a moment to process her.
She was wearing a matched pajama set in thin white cotton.
A tank top with narrow straps and shorts that ended at the top of her thighs, both pieces looked designed rather than slept in.
Her dark hair was loose and slightly messed in a way that was also somehow perfect.
She had her mother's cheekbones and her father's legs, long and lean in a way that made the short-shorts look accidental instead of chosen, one hip cocked against the counter while she waited for the coffee.
Her stomach was flat and bare where the tank top had ridden up in the night, a strip of skin Leah noticed with envy and a little awe.
Darcy moved through the kitchen in bare feet, unhurried, like it had never once occurred to her that anyone might be looking.
She looked incredible. Leah looked down at her flannel pants.
"He doesn't have a shirt on, does he." Darcy didn't look up from the refrigerator.
"I was just putting one on," Whit said.
"You were standing there making coffee."
"I was about to put one on."
Darcy emerged from the refrigerator with eggs and looked at him with the expression Leah was already starting to recognize as her primary Whit expression: fond and undeceived, slightly tired of her own fondness. He kissed her once, quick, and she turned her face up for it automatically.
"Shirt," she said against his mouth.
He went and got one. He came back in a white t-shirt that was either old or had been washed too many times, thin enough that it might as well have been a suggestion,
the fabric tracing the line of his shoulders and the flat plane of his stomach in a way that rendered the exercise of putting it on somewhat academic. Leah looked at the coffee maker.
"Eggs?" Darcy asked.
"Please," Leah said.
"Whit, how do you want yours?"
"However." He was behind her now, his hands finding her waist as she cracked eggs into the pan, his chin dropping to her shoulder to look at what she was doing.
Darcy leaned back into him for a moment, easy and unthinking, and Leah watched her friend tip her head slightly and felt the small familiar stab of the night before in a new location.
Because the thing was, and Leah observed this with the detached fairness of someone conducting an inventory, Darcy was genuinely, objectively stunning.
She had always known this. It was not new information.
But standing in her own frumpy flannel in someone else's kitchen, watching her best friend cook eggs in a white cotton tank top with the morning light coming in off the street, Leah was struck by it in a way that was somehow more than the usual friendly acknowledgment of a fact.
The tank top was thin. The kitchen was cool.
Leah noticed Darcy’s hard nipples poking through and found something to do with her eyes.
Darcy reached up for a mug on the high shelf and the movement pulled her tank top higher baring her stomach, the muscle in her calf drawing tight as she went up on her toes, and Leah looked at the backs of her legs for a long moment.
Whit reached past Darcy for the salt and Leah noticed the impressive bulge in his shorts. Was it morning wood, or was he that big soft? She quickly looked away.
She poured herself coffee and sat at the kitchen table, which had been partially cleared.
His doing, she suspected, the jacket gone, the sports almanac stacked on the counter with some semblance of intent.
She watched them cook in the small kitchen, bumping into each other, Darcy swatting his hand when he reached for toast before it was ready.
It was cute. It was technically disgusting.
It was their kitchen, ultimately, and she was the variable that had been introduced into it, which didn't make the watching easier.
They're a hot couple, she thought, with the same resigned fairness. Objectively. That's just true, and only a little enviable.