11
It happened in increments small enough that she couldn't have named the day any of it started.
The coffee, for one. She came out one morning to find two mugs already sitting by the machine instead of one, his and a second one she was fairly sure hadn't been a deliberate gesture the first time, more a happy accident of him not paying attention to how many he was making.
Except it kept happening. By the second week of it she stopped pretending to be surprised and started just taking the mug that was clearly hers, the chipped one with the faded citrus on it, and he never mentioned it and she never thanked him for it,
and it became one of those facts of the apartment that didn't require comment, like the plant or the frog that was supposed to be a cat.
The couch was its own quiet negotiation.
There was a good cushion, objectively, denser than the others and angled right for watching television without your neck complaining about it later, and for the first two weeks she'd taken it out of simple self-interest, and Whit had never said anything about it,
just arranged himself around whatever was left with the same unbothered ease he brought to everything.
Somewhere in the third week she caught herself moving it to his end before he sat down, and didn't examine why, and he said "thanks" the first time like it was mildly notable and didn't say anything about it after that, which she understood to be its own kind of acknowledgment.
They watched something together once that neither of them had chosen.
She'd been at the kitchen table with her laptop and he'd had the television on low in the background, some documentary about deep sea creatures that she wasn't watching until she was, her eyes drifting up during a segment about anglerfish and staying there,
and he'd noticed her noticing and hadn't said anything, just turned the volume up two notches without looking away from the screen.
Forty minutes later the credits rolled and her laptop had gone to sleep beside her, entirely unattended, and neither of them acknowledged that this had been a thing that happened.
"That was upsetting," she said, of the anglerfish.
"That was nature," he said. "The little guy just wants to be part of something bigger than himself."
"He fuses to her body and dissolves into a parasite."
"Commitment," Whit said, and got up to make more coffee, and she found herself laughing before she'd decided to.
The arrogance never went anywhere. He still walked around half the apartment shirtless without a flicker of self-consciousness, still assumed his opinion on the coffee maker's settings or the thermostat or which grocery delivery service was superior was simply correct and didn't require defending,
still moved through every room like it existed to accommodate him.
But she'd started reading it differently by then.
It wasn't that he thought he was better than the room.
It was that the question of whether he was better than the room had simply never occurred to him as a question worth having an opinion about.
He didn't need the room's approval. He barely seemed to notice the room had opinions of its own to withhold.
She found this both irritating, in the way confidence was always a little irritating from the outside, and, quietly, something closer to enviable.
She had spent most of her adult life managing how much space she took up, arranging herself smaller in rooms that hadn't asked her to.
Whit had never once done the math. She didn't know what it would feel like to walk through a life without doing that math constantly, and some nights, lying on the twin mattress listening to the building settle, she found she was more curious about the answer than she wanted to admit.
* * *
The Spoil Day
Whit left at seven, gym bag and a golf bag that looked like it had opinions, kissing Darcy in the kitchen in a way that went on slightly too long for a Friday morning and that Leah pretended to be very interested in her phone for.
"Back Sunday night," he said. "Behave."
"I always behave," Darcy said.
"You don't, but okay." He looked past her at Leah, who was at the table with coffee and her laptop, doing a credible impression of someone not listening. "You too. Both of you behave."
"We'll be fine," Leah said.
"That's what worries me." He hauled the golf bag over his shoulder, kissed Darcy once more, briskly this time, like a punctuation mark, and was gone. The door clicked shut. The apartment exhaled.
Leah went back to her laptop. She had a logo revision due by noon and a client who used the word "pop" as if it described something specific, and she'd been chipping away at it since six-thirty in the particular hush that had become the morning's natural rhythm: Whit's coffee, his run,
the quiet after, her own coffee somewhere in the middle of it.
She didn't look up when Darcy padded into the kitchen a few minutes later in an oversized sleep shirt, hair a disaster, blinking against the light like the morning had personally wronged her.
She did look up when Darcy didn't say anything. Darcy just stood there, in the doorway, looking at her.
"What."
"Nothing." Darcy crossed to the coffee pot, poured a mug, and kept looking at her over the rim of it in a way that made Leah close the laptop a little.
"Darcy."
"I've been a bad best friend," Darcy said.
"You have not…"
"I have. I've been gone four days a week for six weeks and when I'm here I'm…"
she gestured vaguely, encompassing herself, the bedroom, presumably Whit, "...busy. And you've been here the whole time being normal and fine about it and I don't think I've actually asked you a real question since the day you moved in."
"You ask me things."
"I ask if you've eaten. That's not a real question." Darcy set her mug down with a small definitive click. "He's gone until Sunday night. It's just us."
"Okay."
"No, I mean…" Darcy came and sat down across from her, leaning forward with both elbows on the table, the particular focus she got when she'd decided something. "I mean today is yours. I already know what we're doing. I've been saving it."
"Saving what."
"You'll see. Be ready by eleven."
Leah opened her mouth to say something about the noon deadline, the client, the word "pop," and then looked at Darcy's face. It was bright, a little nervous, the hopeful expression of someone who'd planned a surprise and needed it to land, and felt the no dissolve before she'd finished forming it.
"I'll email him that I'm sick," she said.
"You're not sick."
"I'm emotionally unwell. It's basically true." Leah closed the laptop the rest of the way. "Eleven. Fine."
Darcy's whole face did something complicated and pleased, and she got up from the table and went to go shower, and Leah sat there for a second in the quiet kitchen feeling something loosen in her chest that she hadn't entirely known was tight.