10
Tommy and Brandon turned out to be exactly what advertised guys usually were.
Tommy had the kind of build that suggested a personal trainer and talked about a listing in Tribeca for longer than the topic could reasonably sustain.
Brandon was quieter, better looking in the generic way of men who'd clearly been told they were good looking since puberty and had built an entire personality around not needing to try.
They brought a bottle of wine that was fine and a six-pack that was not, and Whit put on a game nobody watched and the four of them sat around the living room in a configuration of people who'd been assembled rather than gathered.
"So you're the roommate," Brandon said, angling himself on the couch so his knee was pointed at her in a way she assumed was supposed to read as casual.
"I'm Darcy's best friend."
"Right, the best friend." He said it like he was filing her under a category he already understood. "Whit says you've been going through it. Bad breakup."
"Whit talks about me?"
"A little." Brandon smiled, the kind of smile that had clearly worked on someone before, possibly recently. "He said you were smart. Didn't mention you'd be this…" a small pause, "... this."
"This," Leah repeated.
"You know what I mean."
"I really don't."
Across the room Whit was explaining something to Tommy about a game he'd apparently already stopped watching, but his eyes came to her for half a second on the last word, there and gone, and she caught it and didn't examine what it meant.
Brandon kept at it for another twenty minutes with the laziness of a man who assumed the outcome was inevitable and the only remaining question was timing.
He complimented her hair. He asked what she did, and when she said graphic design he said that's so creative in a tone that suggested he'd stopped listening around the word graphic.
He mentioned, unprompted, that he had his own place, like this was a piece of information she'd need eventually.
He was not unattractive and he was not unkind and she found she had absolutely nothing to say to him that wasn't a polite variation on no.
It wasn't Whit. She wasn't going to let herself think it was about Whit.
It was that Brandon required something of her.
He wanted a version of herself arranged for his benefit, and she had used up whatever capacity she'd once had for that particular exercise sometime around the discovery of a screenshot she'd since deleted.
She didn't have it in her tonight. Maybe she wouldn't have had it in her regardless of the summer she was having, but she wasn't interested in testing that theory with Brandon specifically.
"I'm going to turn in," she said, around ten-thirty, standing before anyone could suggest otherwise. "Long day tomorrow."
"It's early," Brandon said.
"It's later for me." She smiled at Tommy, who was still mid-anecdote and didn't seem to notice she was leaving. "Nice to meet you both."
She caught Whit's face on her way down the hall, half a second of it, angled toward her over the back of the couch.
He didn't say anything. He didn't get up.
But he watched her go the whole length of the hallway with an expression she couldn't immediately sort into any of the categories she usually filed him under, something quieter than his usual easy amusement, and she was almost to her door before she placed it and decided she'd rather not have.
She heard them for another hour through the wall, low voices and the game and Tommy's laugh landing too loud twice, and at some point heard Whit say something short that made the other two go quiet, and she never found out what it was, and lay in the dark deciding it wasn't her business to wonder.