9
They made it through the movie. Said their goodnights at the hallway, Darcy squeezing Leah's hand once, Whit giving her the easy nod that had become their version of a warm exchange.
Leah brushed her teeth and put her earplugs on the nightstand where she'd started keeping them and got into bed and was asleep within twenty minutes, which felt like a victory.
She woke at one-fifteen to something she couldn't immediately place.
Then she could place it.
She reached for the earplugs in the dark and got them in and lay back.
This was different than the first time. The rhythm of it was slower, and the earplugs blurred the details into something she could almost process as ambient noise.
Almost. She could feel the pace of it even through the foam, the particular cadence that said this is not urgency, this is something else. Patient. Deliberate.
She stared at the ceiling.
The earplugs helped. They didn't help completely. She knew when the pace shifted and she knew, with a clarity that the earplugs did nothing to blunt, when it was over. She noticed the silence afterward, the kind that had weight to it, that meant both of them and meant together.
She and Chad had never come together. Not once in two years.
She took out one earplug and listened to the quiet apartment and thought about that for longer than was useful, and then put the earplug back in and made herself go to sleep.
* * *
Whit brought the idea up on a Thursday, in the tone he used for things he'd already decided were fine.
"Tommy and Brandon are coming by tonight," he said, not looking up from the pan he was scraping eggs out of. "You should hang out."
"Who are Tommy and Brandon?"
"Guys I know." He said it like that settled the matter of who they were. "Tommy does something with commercial real estate. Brandon's a physical therapist. They're good guys."
"I wasn't aware I needed guys brought to me."
"You don't need anything." He slid the eggs onto a plate and finally looked at her, and there was something almost sheepish underneath the usual ease, which she filed away as new. "I just thought it might be good. You've been in the apartment a lot."
"I have a job."
"You have a laptop. It's not the same thing." He said it without any heat, which was somehow worse than if he'd meant it as an insult. "They're coming at eight. There's no obligation. If it's terrible you can go to your room and I won't be offended."
"You invited them. You'd be offended."
"I'd survive it." He ate a bite of eggs standing at the counter, watching her with the patience of a man used to people eventually agreeing with him. "Eight o'clock."
She told herself she was doing it for the free wine and not because the alternative was another night alone with her laptop listening for the sounds an empty apartment made when she was the only person in it.