10. Industry Pressure
Industry Pressure
Morgan
Saturday morning found Morgan in the apartment above the shop, listening for a car in the lot.
This was new. Morgan did not, as a rule, listen for people.
People arrived or they didn’t; either way the work got done.
But she’d kissed Nora Carter three days ago in the shop—or Nora had kissed her, and Morgan had, after a stalled second of her mind going completely blank, kissed her back—and in the days since neither of them had said anything directly about it, and the new category of variables that had opened up hadn’t settled.
She’d spent three nights running the problem, had run it the same way she’d run a misfiring engine through every possible fault.
The conclusion hadn’t changed no matter how many times she cycled it: Nora was temporary.
Nora would leave when she’d figured herself out, back to LA or wherever stardom took her, into a life Morgan couldn’t follow.
Getting attached was the sort of decision a person made against their own clearly available data.
She’d made it anyway. She’d known she’d made it the moment Nora’s hand had come up against her jaw and Morgan had stopped wanting to be careful.
Rusty padded over and rested his head on her knee. She scratched behind his ears.
“I’m aware,” she told him. “It’s noted.”
His tail thumped once. Gravel crunched in the lot.
Morgan got to the window in time to see Nora climb out of the Honda with a coffee carrier in one hand and the guitar case over her shoulder, and stop, and look up at the apartment window, and go visibly uncertain about her own face—and Morgan understood, with a small private relief, that Nora didn’t know how to do this morning either.
She went down to let her in.
“Morning,” Nora said, holding up the carrier like a flag of truce. “I brought bribes. One black coffee for you, one unnecessarily complicated oat milk situation for me. I didn’t know if—I mean, I don’t know if I should still text or—” She stopped. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Morgan said.
For a moment they stood in the bay door, a foot apart, both holding coffee, neither moving, and the awkwardness was so total and so mutual that something in Morgan’s chest eased.
“I have coffee already,” Morgan said. “But I’ll take yours too.”
“Efficient.” Nora’s smile flickered on, realer than her public one. “Can I… is it okay if I come up? I’ve never seen where you actually live.”
Morgan considered the request. Her apartment was hers in a way very little was; she didn’t bring people into it. But the word no didn’t arrive, and after a second she understood she didn’t want it to.
“Okay,” she said.
Upstairs, Nora turned a slow circle, taking it in—the built-in shelves with the books arranged by subject, the pegboard of kitchen tools Morgan had installed herself, the spare order of it.
“This is so you,” Nora said. “I was expecting more garage. This is… everything has a place.”
“Yes,” Morgan said. It came out more clipped than she meant, because everything having a place was a fact with a deadline on it now, and the deadline was not something she was going to put into this morning.
“You okay?” Nora asked. “You went somewhere just then.”
“I’m fine. Didn’t sleep well.”
They settled at the small kitchen table. It should have been strange, having someone in this space. Instead it was… good. Nora’s guitar leaned against the wall like it had always leaned there. The morning light came through the window and caught the pink in her hair.
“So,” Nora said, wrapping both hands around her cup. “I figure we should talk. About us. Because it’s been a few days.”
The word us made something move in Morgan’s chest, and she tried to determine what it was.
Morgan had tried this once before, in college.
Fanny Holstein from her automotive technology program, who’d seemed genuinely interested in Morgan’s knowledge and had laughed at her dry observations about their classmates.
Morgan had spent weeks building up the courage to ask Fanny out, had finally managed to voice her interest during a study session in the library.
Fanny’s response had been a little laugh, a hand on Morgan’s shoulder, and words that would haunt Morgan.
“I like you as a friend, Morgan, but I don’t think of you that way.
You’re just… you know, kind of… different.
And you don’t really get people. Honestly, I don’t even know if you know what love is. ”
It had hurt. It had hurt so much.
But Nora had kissed her. Nora was still here. Those were data points. Morgan held them and did not trust herself to read them right.
“Morgan?” Nora’s voice was careful. “You got quiet. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just thinking.”
“About what?”
Morgan considered how much honesty the question warranted. “About whether I’m misunderstanding what this is,” Morgan said carefully. “I’m not… I don’t have much experience with… these things. I’m not always good at reading what people actually mean versus what I think they mean.”
But she didn’t get further.
“I kissed you because I wanted to,” Nora said. “I’ve wanted to for days. Maybe since the coffee, or before, and that was why I asked you out for coffee and I didn’t realize it.”
She took another step forward, looking up at her with a coy and soft expression, and Morgan met her halfway.
Then they were kissing again.
Morgan’s hand settled at the back of Nora’s neck, deliberate, and Nora made a small sound and rose into it, and the coffee got set down on the table by someone, blindly, before it spilled.
When they broke apart, Nora’s eyes were bright and her lips curved into a smile.
“I’m not good at this,” Morgan said. “People. You should know what you’re… choosing.”
“I’m a catastrophe held together with breathing exercises and screenshots. I think we covered that.” Nora’s forehead came to rest against hers. “I really like you, Morgan. A concerning amount, for someone I’ve known for two weeks.”
“Two weeks isn’t that short.”
“It kind of is, for feelings this size.”
Morgan’s chest did the complicated thing again. “We’re—” She stopped, because she wanted to get the word right. “Is this a relationship? Are we that?”
“I’d like to be.” Nora bit her lip. “If you want that too. I know it’s impractical. I know I’m a mess and you’ve got—” she gestured vaguely, “—a whole life, and I don’t even know how long I’m—but I want to try. With you.”
Dating Nora meant variables Morgan couldn’t control, emotions she had no clean process for, a vulnerability that made her want to retreat into the engine bay and stay there. And yet here was a person who saw her clearly and had decided, knowing the data, to want her anyway.
“Okay,” Morgan said.
“Okay?” Nora’s smile spread. “Romance icon. Truly.”
“I told you I’m not good at it.”
“You’re good at being you. That’s better.” Nora kissed her again, quick and certain. Then her phone buzzed on the table, and the certainty went out of her face like a switch.
She stared at the screen. Sighed. “It’s my manager. I should—he’ll just keep calling.”
“Take it.” Morgan stood, gave her the room, started rinsing the abandoned coffee cups so she’d have somewhere to put her hands.
But Nora didn’t leave the kitchen, and the call was impossible not to hear.
“Adrian, hi. Yes. I got your messages. All fifteen of them.” Nora’s posture changed the instant she answered—shoulders up, spine straight.
The voice on the other end was male, clipped, relentless. Morgan caught fragments. Market presence. Momentum. Wasted window.
“I’m fine,” Nora said. Her free hand started picking at her sleeve. “I’m just taking time to write.”
More from Adrian’s end—something about Cam’s EP, about staying relevant, about how short industry memory was.
“I know it’s been—” Nora said, her voice tightening. “But I’m not ready to—”
He cut her off. Morgan watched Nora’s shoulders climb.
“I’m not having a breakdown,” Nora said, sharp now. “I already did that. Now I’m regrouping.”
Adrian’s answer came loud enough that Morgan heard the shape of it across the kitchen: —can’t afford to disappear—need to show you’re still viable—
Morgan’s hand went still on the cup she was drying.
The relentlessness of it. The flat assumption that Nora’s worth was a function of output, that a person who stopped producing had stopped being valuable.
It landed too close to things Morgan knew the inside of—every voice that had wanted her more: more social, more pleasant, more like everyone else, more useful in the shape they’d already chosen.
“Look,” Nora said finally, tired. “What if I did something small? Just… a sign of life.”
Adrian’s enthusiasm was immediate and audible.
“Bean There has already said they’d have me.” Nora’s eyes went to Morgan as she said it. “Wednesday. I could play a few songs. Nothing big. Would that get you off my back for a while?”
Whatever Adrian said, it was a yes. The call wrapped fast after that. Nora set the phone face-down on the table like it might bite.
“That was my manager,” she said unnecessarily.
“I gathered.”
Nora pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “He means well. I think. But sometimes I feel like he thinks I’m a machine that just needs the right maintenance schedule.”
“Is that what you think you are?”
“No, if that were the case, I’d be easy to fix.”
Morgan frowned. “You don’t need fixing.”
Nora gave her a half-smile that seemed grateful, maybe, and shrugged. “It’s just hard to hold onto… myself… when someone talks about your ‘career momentum’ like it’s a quarterly earnings report.” She went to the window. “I told him I’d play on Wednesday.”
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?” She turned back. “It’s small. Town people, not industry. If I freeze, at least it’s a small crowd to freeze in front of.”
“And if you don’t freeze?”
“Then maybe I remember what music feels like when it’s just… music.” Nora bit her lip. “Would you come? Not to support me, exactly. Just… it’d be nice to have someone there who’s heard me play when there was nothing riding on it.”
Morgan’s first instinct was the reliable one: no. Crowded café, expected reactions, the particular exposure of being a body in a watching room. Everything she arranged her life to avoid.
But it was Nora asking. Nora, who already knew Morgan didn’t do crowds, and who was asking anyway.
“What time?” Morgan asked.
Nora’s whole face changed. “Really? Seven-thirty. I’ll text Jordan to confirm.” She paused. “Thank you. I know it’s not your thing.”
“It’s not.” Morgan turned the next words over, found they were true, said them. “But you’re different.”
The words hung in the kitchen, more honest than Morgan had planned. Color rose in Nora’s cheeks.
“Different how?”
Morgan should have deflected. Returned to safe ground.
Instead she found herself, against her own better practice, cataloging the things she’d been trying not to catalog: the pink vivid against the dark of Nora’s hair, the freckle just below her left ear, the way Nora’s hands never quite went still—picking at a sleeve, touching her neck—except, Morgan had noticed, when Nora was actually playing. Then they went calm.
“Just different,” Morgan said, rougher than usual.
Nora crossed the kitchen and kissed her for that, slow, and Morgan let the cup she was still holding find the counter.
They ended up on the couch. Nora tucked against her side, their fingers laced together on Morgan’s stomach.
It was, Morgan noted with quiet astonishment, not difficult.
It didn’t require conversation or managing.
It was just warm, and close, and it held still—the first variable all morning that did.
“I’m scared about Wednesday,” Nora admitted into the quiet. “What if I freeze again? What if I get up there and I can’t?”
“Then you stop. Get down. Try again another day.” Morgan said it the way she’d say a torque spec. “It’s not a contract. It’s a test run. If the conditions are wrong, you change a variable and run it again.”
Nora laughed softly. “Only you could make a panic attack sound like a diagnostic.”
“Everything’s a diagnostic.”
“That’s so Morgan.” Nora lifted their joined hands, studied them. “Thank you. For… this. For you.”
Morgan didn’t have a clean answer for that, so she tightened her grip on Nora’s hand and let the quiet say it instead.
Later, after Nora had gone to get ready, Morgan stood alone in the apartment among the things that all had a place and the deadline she still hadn’t said out loud. She’d told Nora she didn’t sleep well and let it cover everything underneath. There would be a time to say the rest of it. Not today.
Morgan rinsed the last cup and set it where it went.
Wednesday, she’d sit in a crowded café, which she hated, and watch someone she had—apparently, impractically, definitely—chosen, try to find her way back to the thing she loved.
That, Morgan thought, was worth showing up for. Even the parts of it she’d be bad at.