13
The apartment had gone quiet in the way it only did after midnight, the city outside reduced to the occasional hush of a passing car, and Leah lay in the dark of Darcy's bed with her heart still doing something complicated in her chest.
Darcy was asleep between them. Actually asleep, her breathing had gone slow and even maybe ten minutes ago, her face turned into the pillow, one hand still loosely curled around Leah's wrist like she'd fallen asleep mid-thought and hadn't wanted to let go of whatever she'd been holding.
She looked peaceful like this. Leah had seen her sleep a hundred times, on planes, on couches, in the bed at her parents' house the summer they were nineteen, and it had never once looked like this.
Whit was on Darcy's other side, on his back, one arm behind his head, not asleep. Leah could tell by his breathing, which had the deliberate evenness of a person being polite about being awake.
Nobody said anything for a long time. It didn't feel like it needed filling.
Leah looked at the ceiling. There was a water stain near the light fixture shaped vaguely like Florida that she'd noticed the first night, lying on the twin mattress down the hall, thinking one night, just get through one night.
She found it almost funny now, in a way she didn't have the energy to laugh at.
Six weeks. The mattress, the runs, the protein shakes, the sound through the wall she'd spent a month trying not to hear and a month after that not trying very hard at all.
She felt wrung out in a way that had nothing to do with tired.
Her body still had its own opinions about the last hour, low and warm and unhurried, the kind of feeling that didn't want to be examined too closely yet because examining it might make it stop.
She let it sit there instead. Darcy's hand was warm around her wrist.
Across the bed, Whit shifted, just slightly, and she felt the mattress dip and right itself.
"You're thinking very loudly," Whit said. Quiet, not to wake Darcy. Just to her.
"I'm not thinking anything."
"Sure."
She turned her head. He was looking at the ceiling too, not at her, which made it easier to say the next thing.
"I used to lie here and listen to you two," she said. "Through the wall. I know that's not news to anyone at this point."
"We knew."
"You knew?"
"The wall's not that thick, Leah." He said it without heat, almost gentle. "We figured it out around week two."
She should have been embarrassed. She found she wasn't. There wasn't room left for shame tonight, or maybe she'd used up her whole supply of embarrassment about this situation somewhere over the last six weeks and there was nothing left to spend. "That's mortifying."
"It's not, actually." He turned his head then, found her eyes in the dark. "We didn't mind. For what it's worth."
Darcy stirred at that, not waking, just resettling, her hand tightening briefly around Leah's wrist before going loose again.
Leah looked at the line of her shoulder, the soft parted breathing, and felt something that didn't have a clean name yet but wasn't any of the things it might have been six weeks ago.
Not jealousy. Not the old ache of standing outside a thing she wanted.
Just the plain fact of being here, inside it, with nowhere outside left to stand.
"Go to sleep," Whit said, quieter now. "Both of you have had a week."
"That's not an exaggeration."
"No," he agreed. "It's not."
Leah looked across at him again.
“Whit?”
“Yeah.”
“What happens now?”
He was quiet for a second. Not evasive. Thinking.
“I don't know,” he said. “But I don't think we pretend it didn't happen.”
Something in her chest loosened.
“Good,” she said. “Because I don't think I could.”
Darcy stirred between them, murmuring something unintelligible, and Leah smiled despite herself.
Whit lowered his voice. “You don't have to decide anything tonight. Or tomorrow. Or because something happened and it was good, that you have to figure out the rest of your life.”
“I know.”
“But I want you to know something.” He turned onto his side, facing her now. “This isn't Darcy getting something she wanted and me going along with it. I wanted you here. I've liked having you here. I like you.”
Leah swallowed.
“I like you too.”
His smile was small, almost shy by his standards. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And Darcy?”
Leah looked down at Darcy's hand still resting loosely around her wrist.
“I think I fell in love with her a long time ago,” she said. “I just didn't know that's what it was.”
Whit nodded slowly, like that answer didn't surprise him.
“Then maybe,” he said, “we just see what happens.”
Leah let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.
For the first time since arriving at the apartment, the future didn't feel like something waiting to happen to her.
It felt like something she might actually get to choose.
She closed her eyes. The apartment held its quiet around the three of them, and somewhere past the window a car went by, and the water stain on the ceiling that was supposed to be nothing in particular but had always looked a little like Florida stayed exactly where it was,
and Leah slept better than she had in six weeks, with Darcy's hand around her wrist and Whit's steady breathing on the other side of her and absolutely no part of her trying to be anywhere else.