5
Darcy's car came at eleven.
She had spent twenty minutes before it arrived in a state of compressed efficiency of packing, checking her work bag, moving through the apartment with practiced Monday morning speed. She hugged Leah in the hallway, the full-body kind, and held on for a moment longer than necessary.
"Text me," she said. "Anything. I mean it. I want to know if you're okay, I want to know if you're not okay, I want a full report."
"I'll be fine."
"Text me anyway." Darcy pulled back and held her by the shoulders. "Whit will take you for ice cream if you need it. Or tampons. Or both, no judgment. He knows where everything is in this neighborhood, just tell him what you need."
"I'm not going to send your boyfriend out for my tampons."
"He doesn't mind." She said this with complete confidence, which meant it was probably true and also somehow made everything slightly worse. "And if he gives you any trouble…"
"I won't," Whit said from the living room.
"If he gives you any trouble," Darcy continued, as if he hadn't spoken, "you text me immediately and I will handle it from London."
"I heard that," Whit said.
Darcy kissed Leah on the cheek and went to Whit.
The goodbye was brief and private in the way of people who had made a habit of them.
He walked her down. Leah stood at the kitchen window and watched the car pull away and felt the apartment settle into a new shape around her: just her and Whit's things and the walls, which she was already thinking about differently than she had yesterday.
She went to find her laptop.
The first week settled into a shape Leah hadn't asked for and was learning to work around.
Whit was up at six, which she knew because she could hear him.
Not loudly, just presently, the way large people moved through small spaces with the unconscious assumption that the space would accommodate them.
Coffee by six-fifteen. A workout of some kind by six-thirty, either the resistance bands in the living room or a run, and she knew which one it was because the resistance bands made a specific rhythmic sound and the run meant the front door at six-thirty-two and back by seven-twenty,
and she knew the exact time because she was apparently tracking it despite having no reason to.
He forgot his shirt constantly. She had stopped mentioning it.
It wasn't performance. That was the thing she'd clocked in the first few days and confirmed by the end of the first week.
He wasn't walking around shirtless because he wanted her to notice him.
He walked around shirtless because he was comfortable and it simply didn't occur to him that this required management.
He'd reach for something in a cabinet, or stand reading something on his phone with his shoulder against the wall, or be on a Teams call at the kitchen table conducting himself with complete professional competence while apparently seeing no contradiction between his tone and the fact that he was
wearing sweatpants and nothing else.
She'd walked through once during a call and he'd nodded at her and pointed at the coffee maker without breaking his sentence and she'd made her coffee with her eyes at a responsible elevation.
The abs were a fact. She treated them like weather.
Except.
Chad had been soft. Not badly: he'd been fine, he'd been perfectly fine, he'd been the kind of man whose body suggested a normal life lived by a normal person.
Sugar cereal for breakfast, which had always faintly appalled her.
Cookies on the counter. The domestic disorder of someone who'd never really thought about what they put in their body because it had never made a visible difference and probably never would.
She'd found this endearing at the time. She thought about it now sometimes when she walked through the kitchen and found Whit's meal prep containers in the refrigerator, labeled and stacked,
his obsession with protein ratios and the salads he assembled with the focused attention of someone completing a technical task.
He'd made her one on Thursday without asking and it was the best salad she'd had in recent memory, which irritated her.
She was not attracted to Whit. She was attracted to having a man around who looked like that, which was a different thing and easier to quarantine.