8
She smelled it when she opened the door.
Not aggressively. Darcy had clearly opened a window.
But it was present, unmistakably, the warm close smell of a space where two people had recently been doing exactly what she'd engineered two and a half hours for them to do.
Leah set her bag down and breathed through her mouth and moved to the kitchen.
Darcy appeared from the hallway in her robe, hair loose, face making the satisfied expression it did when she'd recently been very thoroughly taken care of. Flushed, bright-eyed, slightly undone around the edges. She looked beautiful and Leah felt three things simultaneously.
"You're back!" Darcy said. "How was it?"
"Good. Great. You might want to…" Leah gestured vaguely at the general air of the apartment.
"The window's been open for twenty minutes," Darcy said, without a trace of apology.
Whit materialized behind her in his shorts and actually looked slightly caught out for the first time since Leah had met him, which was interesting. He pointed at the bedroom. "I'm going to find a…"
"Shirt," Leah and Darcy said together.
He went. Darcy smiled at his back and cinched her robe and started moving the snacks from the counter to the coffee table.
They reconvened twenty minutes later in their respective pajamas.
Darcy in a pale blue set, shorts and a matching button-front top that she somehow made look intentional, Leah in her second-best flannel, Whit in his eternal sweatpants and a grey henley he'd pushed up to the elbows.
The apartment had aired out. There were snacks. It was, Leah thought, genuinely nice.
She sat in the armchair. Darcy and Whit took the couch, which she'd expected, and Darcy tucked herself under his arm with the ease of long practice and Whit pulled the blanket over both of them and reached for the remote.
They were, objectively, a good trio when the circumstances were right. Whit made dry comments at the screen that were usually accurate. Darcy stole his snacks and he let her. Leah found herself laughing a few times and not having to perform it.
Halfway through the movie Whit shifted and began working his hands across Darcy's shoulders, slow and methodical, the kind of thing a person did without thinking about it. Darcy made a sound.
It was the sound. A smaller, clothed, living-room version of the sounds that came through the wall, but unmistakably in the same family. Leah kept her eyes on the screen.
"Sorry," Darcy said, to no one in particular. "Work stress. My shoulders are destroyed."
"Mm," Leah said.
Whit said nothing. He kept going.
Darcy made the sound again, quieter, and Leah reached for her wine.