12
The brunch place was tucked behind a flower shop two neighborhoods over, the kind of place that didn't have a sign so much as a discreet awareness among the people who already knew about it, and Darcy steered them to a table in the back corner like she'd reserved it personally, which, it turned out,
she had.
"I've been saving this for the right occasion," she said, sliding into her chair. "I read about it in March."
"What was the occasion going to be?"
"I don't know. I just knew I wanted you here for it eventually." She said this simply, without any particular weight on it, already reaching for the menu, and Leah felt the sentence land somewhere a beat after it was said, the way some sentences did.
They ordered too much. Darcy insisted on it.
A thing with poached eggs and something green underneath, a thing with cinnamon that arrived looking architectural, a side of potatoes that neither of them needed and both of them ate most of.
Somewhere around the second mimosa the conversation found its old shape again, the one Leah hadn't realized she'd missed until it was back.
Not the kitchen-table conversation, careful and logistical, conducted with one ear toward whether Whit needed something.
Just the two of them, properly, the way it used to be before there was an apartment to manage or a man in it.
"Tell me about the wedding thing," Leah said. "The presentation. You never actually told me how it went."
"Oh my god, it was a disaster, and then it wasn't."
Darcy launched into it with her hands, the way she told every story, and Leah listened and laughed in the right places and remembered, with something like relief, that Darcy was properly funny, sharp and a little merciless about herself,
the version of her that got flattened under six weeks of careful roommate logistics.
By the time the check came they'd been there two hours and Leah's face hurt from laughing and she'd forgotten, almost entirely, that she'd had anywhere else to be.
"There's a shop I want to show you," Darcy said, once they were back out on the sidewalk, sun warm and a little hazy, the kind of June day that didn't ask anything of you. "You mentioned it. Months ago. The ceramics place."
"I mentioned that in passing. In April."
"I remember things you say in passing." Darcy looped her arm through Leah's, easy, automatic, the way she'd always done it, and steered them down the block. "That's what being someone's best friend is. Retaining the passing things."
Darcy was in denim shorts that afternoon, and Leah had spent more of the walk than she'd admit tracking the length of her legs in them, tan and toned from nothing more strenuous than the walking they were currently doing,
an unfairness Leah had catalogued about her best friend a hundred times before and was, this particular June afternoon, finding harder to treat as background noise.
The shop was small and overpriced and exactly Leah's taste, and Darcy stood close behind her at the window display, chin landing on Leah's shoulder to look at the same bowl Leah was looking at, and said, into the space right next to her ear, "that one. You should get that one,
" and Leah was aware of her in a way that had a low, specific charge to it that she filed away without looking at directly, the way she'd been filing away small things like it for weeks now.
They didn't buy the bowl. They bought a smaller one, the same glaze, because Darcy insisted and because arguing with Darcy in this mood was like arguing with weather.
Outside, walking, Darcy kept her arm through Leah's the whole rest of the block, and at some point, apropos of nothing, looking at a stranger's dog across the street, she said, "you know you're the most beautiful person I know," with the same casual certainty she'd use to mention the weather,
and kept walking, already on to something else, already pointing out a mural on the next building over.
Leah did not keep walking, internally. She kept the sentence with her the rest of the afternoon, turning it over without meaning to, the way you'd hold a stone that was warmer than you expected.
By the time they got back to the apartment it was past five and they were both a little sun-drunk, a little wine-loose from the bottle Darcy had insisted on at a sidewalk table somewhere in the last stretch of the walk,
bags from the ceramics shop and a bookstore Darcy had detoured them into swinging against their legs.
Leah's feet hurt in the good way, the way they hurt after a day that had been entirely worth it.
Darcy was singing something under her breath, badly, happily, and bumped Leah's shoulder with her own going up the front steps, and Leah bumped her back, and they let themselves into the apartment laughing about nothing in particular, the kind of laughing that didn't need a reason anymore,
just momentum.
"Best day," Darcy said, dropping her bags by the door. "Objectively. I'm calling it."
"You can't just call it."
"I'm the judge. I'm calling it." She kicked off her shoes, already heading for the kitchen, already talking about wine, and Leah stood for a second in the entryway.
She noticed the frog that was supposed to be a cat, the smell of Darcy's candle, six weeks of a life she hadn't planned on settling into a shape that felt, for the first time in a long time, entirely like her own, and then followed her in.
The wine got opened around seven, ostensibly to go with the leftover potatoes from brunch that neither of them had finished, and was mostly gone by nine, which felt less like a decision than a thing that had simply happened to them over the course of an evening.
"Movie," Darcy said, sprawled sideways on the couch with her feet in Leah's lap, scrolling with single-minded focus. "I'm picking. You always pick documentaries about cults."
"One documentary about one cult."
"It's a pattern, Leah, I'm noting a pattern." She kept scrolling. "I want something with… I don't know. Tension. Not a comedy. I don't want to laugh, I want to feel something."
"That's an oddly specific request."
"I had wine and a perfect day. I'm allowed oddly specific requests." She landed on something, angled the remote, and didn't explain the choice, just hit play with the satisfaction after finding exactly what she was looking for.
It was a slow-burn thing, moody, two people who clearly wanted each other circling it for reasons the script kept manufacturing.
There was a wedding they were both attending, then a hotel mix-up, the kind of contrived nearness that worked because the actors had real chemistry and the camera knew where to put itself.
Leah settled in. Darcy's feet were warm in her lap and at some point during the first twenty minutes had become less feet-in-lap and more legs tangled with Leah's under the blanket Darcy had dragged off the back of the couch,
the two of them shifted sideways toward each other the way people did without registering they were doing it.
The wine was doing what wine did, which was lower the threshold for things Leah might otherwise have noticed and pulled away from.
She didn't notice when Darcy's head came to rest against her shoulder, only that at some point it was there, weight and warmth, Darcy's hair against her jaw, smelling like her shampoo and the candle and faintly like the wine, and Leah didn't move, because moving would have meant acknowledging it,
and acknowledging it felt like more than she wanted to do right now, with the movie's tension climbing toward whatever it was building toward and the apartment quiet and dim and entirely theirs.
On screen, the two leads finally stopped circling each other.
"Oh, finally," Darcy murmured, not lifting her head.
"You've seen this before."
"I read about it. I know how it ends." She said it without moving, her voice low, close enough that Leah felt it more than heard it. "I just like watching people figure it out. The part right before."
"The part right before what."
"You know." Darcy turned her face up then, just slightly, just enough that her cheek wasn't against Leah's shoulder anymore but turned toward her, close, closer than the couch really required. "Before they stop pretending they don't already know."
Leah looked at her. In the dim light off the screen, Darcy's face looked content and unguarded, something Leah hadn't let herself look at straight on in six weeks of careful sideways glances: the line of her jaw, her mouth a little soft from the wine, her eyes not on the movie anymore.
"Darcy."
"I know," Darcy said, like Leah had asked a whole question instead of just her name.
"I know who I am. I know who you are. I know all of it."
Her hand had found Leah's, somewhere under the blanket, fingers loose between hers, not gripping, just present.
"I'm not asking you to figure anything out tonight."
"That's not… I wasn't going to say that."
"What were you going to say."
Leah didn't have an answer ready, which was its own answer, and the silence sat there between them doing something neither of them named, and the movie kept going, forgotten now, just light and motion at the edge of the room.
She was aware of Darcy's whole body in a way she'd spent six weeks not letting herself be aware of anyone's body, the warmth of her along the side of the couch, the unhurried, deliberate stillness of someone who had decided not to rush this and was finding it cost her something to hold to that.
"I've thought about it," Leah said. It came out smaller than she meant it to. "I haven't let myself think about it very hard. But I've thought about it."
Something moved across Darcy's face, quick and bright, gone almost as fast as it arrived. "Okay," she said.
"Okay," Leah said back, because she didn't have anything bigger than that, and it turned out she didn't need anything bigger than that, because Darcy was already closing the distance, slow enough that it was still a question right up until it wasn't one anymore.