14. The Inside of a Door
The Inside of a Door
Morgan
It was new to Morgan to want to spend this amount of time with anyone—even Hannah had never been around this much without Morgan wanting space.
Friday, they had eaten dinner in Nora’s hotel room—takeout from the Thai place on Clement Street, containers spread across the small table by Nora’s window—and then Nora had picked up the guitar without asking, the way she did now, the way Morgan had somehow let become normal, and played fragments of her a new song she was working on.
It wasn’t finished, but there were words like foundations and staying in there, the melody circling back to the same chord the way a thought does when it isn’t done with you yet.
Morgan sat on the edge of the bed with her forearms on her knees and listened, and it occurred to her that she was becoming a person who sat still and listened to music.
After, they meandered back through the August dark.
It was well past nine and still warm—the valley held heat the way the shop’s concrete held it, slowly, reluctant to give it back.
The oaks were big dark shapes against a sky that hadn’t quite gone black.
Nora walked close enough that their arms touched every few steps, not reaching for Morgan’s hand, just allowing the contact, and Morgan didn’t pull away from it.
At the bottom of the outside stairs she stopped.
She’d meant to say goodnight. Had the word assembled and ready. Nora turned, reading the pause, and waited.
“You want to come up?” Morgan said.
Nora gazed at her for a moment, reading whatever was in her expression, and then said, “I’d like that very much.”
The apartment was one good room and some smaller ones that were mostly functional—kitchen that was really a wall, a bathroom with ancient tile that she kept scoured clean, a bedroom with a window that looked toward the ridge.
The main room had the couch she’d had since she moved out of her mom’s house, worn along the armrests.
The walls were mostly bare except for two things: a Rand McNally road atlas page she’d pulled out and framed years ago—the western states, creased at the old fold lines, the kind of thing she couldn’t explain to anyone who asked and so had stopped trying—and a small oil painting, maybe twelve inches square, a field and a tree line and a sky going orange, bought at a craft fair from someone whose name she’d forgotten.
She’d bought it because the light in it was right.
It was tidy because she couldn’t function in a mess. The books were on a shelf by color. The kitchen had one plant on the windowsill, a succulent that had survived four years of neglect and occasional guilt-watering.
Nora moved through it and she stopped at the road atlas page. Tilted her head.
“Oregon’s circled,” she said.
“I grew up wanting to leave,” Morgan said. “And then I didn’t.”
Nora nodded like she understood. “What made you stay?”
“The shop.”
Nora made an mmm sound, and Morgan went to the kitchen to find something to drink that wasn’t terrible.
She came back with two glasses of wine. Nora had settled on the couch—one leg tucked under, completely at home in the body language of someone who had learned to make a place for herself in borrowed spaces, which Morgan had noticed without remarking on.
She handed Nora the glass and sat beside her, close but not crowding.
They talked for a while. It wasn’t about anything important, which was the point—the Thai place, Rusty’s most recent attempt to eat Patricia’s latest creation, Nora’s father’s unexpected reasonableness. It was easy conversation, flowing back and forth—mostly Nora, but Morgan wasn’t silent.
At some point Nora set her glass on the coffee table, turned slightly on the couch, and looked at Morgan.
“Is all of this okay?” Nora said.
Morgan nodded. “It is.”
Nora scooted closer. “Still?”
“Yes,” Morgan said.
Nora kissed her, which Morgan had expected, and was slow about it, which she hadn’t.
She kissed as if Morgan was something precious, and wasn’t that something?
Morgan’s hand went to Nora’s jaw and she felt Nora’s breath change against her mouth, something loosening in it, a sound low in her throat that Morgan wanted more of.
They kissed on the couch, Nora moving slowly closer, and Morgan was in two minds about the speed—one being frustrated that Nora felt the need to treat her like a skittish animal, yet the other being grateful.
Morgan was the one who moved her hands to second base, and she felt Nora’s smile against her lips.
They moved to the bedroom without ceremony, without bumping into anything.
The light through the window was the lot-lamp’s yellow, coming in through the blind in soft bars, enough to see by.
Morgan sat on the edge of the bed and Nora stood in front of her and Morgan took the hem of Nora’s shirt in both hands, gazed up to check, and Nora reached down and pulled it over her own head and dropped it on the floor.
Morgan studied her in the bar-light for a long moment, taking her in. The yellow from the lot-lamp came through the blind in soft bars and caught the line of Nora’s shoulder, the dip of her collarbone, the slight flutter of her breathing.
“Hi,” Nora said, dry and soft and nervous under it.
“Hi,” Morgan said, and pulled her down.
The nervousness lasted about thirty seconds total and then something easier took over—not ease exactly, more like the specific focus Morgan got when she was working on something she cared about getting right.
Nora’s skin was warm, warmer than the night, and Morgan pressed her lips to the curve of her shoulder and felt her shiver despite the heat, which was useful information, and followed it to her throat.
Nora’s hands were in her hair and then at her shirt buttons, patient at first and then less patient, and Morgan shrugged out of it and let it go.
When Nora’s hands found her back—flat-palmed, following her spine—Morgan made a sound she hadn’t planned on and Nora made a pleased, quiet noise against her collarbone in response.
“Morgan,” Nora said.
“Yeah.”
“Still okay?”
“More than.” She pulled back just enough to look at her—Nora’s face in the bar-light, slightly undone, very present, watching Morgan with a directness that most people couldn’t hold. Morgan could hold it. “You?”
“Yes,” Nora said. “God, yes.”
Morgan pressed her back into the mattress and Nora went willingly, her hands already moving—at Morgan’s waist, at the button of her jeans, unhurried but with intention, like she knew where she was going and was taking her time getting there.
Morgan hissed in a breath. Nora peered up at her with a slight smile and Morgan leaned down and kissed the smile right off her face.
She found that Nora was warm and responsive and not shy about saying what she wanted, which Morgan appreciated deeply, having spent years with people who expected her to guess.
She started at Nora’s throat—the place that had made her breath change earlier, during the kissing on the couch, filed and remembered—and worked down slowly, learning the geography of her with the same methodical attention she gave anything she’d decided was worth understanding.
The soft skin below Nora’s collarbone. The curve of her waist where it dipped and then flared.
Nora made a low sound and her hand found the back of Morgan’s head, resting there, a weight that said yes, that, stay.
Morgan stayed.
Nora’s body was warm and real and right there, and Morgan ran her hands up Nora’s sides and felt her shiver against the heat of it. She pressed her mouth to the inside of Nora’s wrist—the thin skin there, pulse jumping—and then to the soft inside of her elbow, and Nora’s breath went ragged.
“You’re taking your time,” Nora said. Her voice had gone low and a little rough, which was new, and Morgan intended to hear more of it.
“I’m learning the territory,” Morgan said against her arm. “I work better when I know what I’m doing.”
Nora laughed and the laugh turned into a sound that wasn’t a laugh at all when Morgan’s mouth moved to the side of her throat and stayed, and her hand traced down Nora’s sternum, her stomach, continuing down, slow and certain.
Nora’s hips shifted up toward her. Morgan didn’t follow—not yet—just kept her hand still and felt Nora chase it.
“Morgan,” Nora said.
“Mm.”
“I will actually die.”
“No you won’t.”
“I might.”
Morgan moved her hand and Nora’s whole body arched, a sharp exhale, heels pressing into the mattress. Morgan watched her face in the bar-light, completely unguarded, head tipped back, the long line of her throat exposed.
Morgan pressed her mouth to Nora’s collarbone and worked with her hand and paid attention—the sounds Nora made, which ones sharpened and which ones smoothed, where she went taut and where she went loose—and when she found the specific combination that made Nora say her name in a way that was barely a word at all, she stayed with it.
The sounds Nora made went from low to unguarded to something that had no category, her hand gripping Morgan’s shoulder hard enough to leave a mark, her breathing gone ragged and then entirely beyond her, and when she came it was with Morgan’s name in her mouth and her whole body pulled tight and then releasing all at once, a long wave of it, her free hand fisted in the sheets.
Morgan held her through it, which was something she hadn’t known she was going to do until she was doing it—her arm across Nora’s waist, mouth against her temple, both of them breathing. After a moment Nora made a sound that was mostly a laugh, exhausted and unself-conscious.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I take back the dying comment.”
“Good thing.”
Nora turned her head and looked at her, hair a mess of dark and pink, eyes still a little unfocused. “Your turn,” she said. “Right now. Immediately. I’m being very serious.”
“I can see that.”
“Morgan.”
Morgan let herself be pushed back into the sheets.
Nora took her time in a way that should have made Morgan impatient but didn’t.
Nora moved like she was genuinely interested rather than working through a sequence, and that made the slowness feel like being studied rather than delayed.
She traced the line of Morgan’s throat with her fingertips first, then her mouth, following the same path a half-beat behind, and Morgan’s skin went electric in the wake of it.
Nora’s hands were sure and when they moved over Morgan’s stomach and hips they pressed with intent, learning her the way Morgan had learned Nora.
Warm palms. The slight drag of her nails.
Nora found the inside of her hip and Morgan gasped.
Nora paused to look up at her with a pleased smirk, eyes dark and completely focused on Morgan, and Morgan reached down and pulled her up by the shoulder and kissed her. Nora laughed against her mouth and her hand moved and Morgan stopped thinking about her face.
She had a firm grip on the headboard by the time Nora’s mouth reached her stomach.
The slow southward progress of it had been doing something to Morgan’s nervous system that she didn’t have a clean diagnostic term for—a steady build of heat, her whole body oriented toward wherever Nora was and whatever came next.
Nora pressed her lips to the sharp point of Morgan’s hip and Morgan’s grip on the headboard tightened.
Then Nora looked up at her from that position, waiting.
“Yes,” Morgan said, before Nora could ask.
What followed was thorough and entirely without mercy, and Morgan, who maintained her composure professionally in situations that would floor most people, lost hers in stages—first her grip on the headboard, then her even breathing, then the running internal commentary she’d had going since forever, and then finally, comprehensively, herself.
She came with her hand in Nora’s hair and her face in the pillow and a sound she’d be privately embarrassed about and also not embarrassed about at all, which was its own small revelation.
Afterward they lay in bed, not talking, the valley dark outside the window and the August warmth everywhere, Nora’s arm loose across Morgan’s stomach. Morgan stared at the ceiling. She felt good. More than good.
“Can I ask about Hannah?” Nora said.
Morgan’s body tightened before she could stop it. Nora lifted her head.
“You don’t have to answer. Forget I asked.”
“No.” Morgan looked at the bars of yellow light on the ceiling. “You should know.”
Nora’s hand moved once over her stomach, then went still.
“In college, there was Fanny,” Morgan said. “We were friends. I thought we might be more. She told me I didn’t understand people well enough to know what love was.”
“Oh my god, Morgan, that is so—”
“She said it kindly.”
“I don’t care how she said it.”
Morgan swallowed and continued, because that was easier.
“So I wasn’t all that… I mean, I was surprised.
When Hannah came around and wanted me. She liked me.
Liked that I was quiet, in the beginning.
Or that’s what she said. Then she started making plans for both of us and telling me I needed to get out more.
A few months in, and she’d correct me in front of people.
If I asked her not to, she said she was helping. ”
Nora shifted closer. “How long were you together?”
“A year,” Morgan said. “She left.”
Nora stayed silent.
“She signed a lease on another apartment before she told me she was leaving,” Morgan continued. “She’d arranged the move while I was at work. When I got home, she’d already packed her bags.”
“Oh, Morgan.”
A breath to get the words out. “She said I wasn’t as self-sufficient as I thought.”
Nora paused, still against her. “Why would she say that?”
“Because she thought she was the reason I could manage people. She handled invitations. She talked when I didn’t. I guess she wanted me to know I’d miss her once nobody was doing it for me, as though I was the one ending things.”
Nora pushed herself up on one elbow. “She was cruel.”
“Yes. I also let her decide what I was capable of for a long time. After she left, it was easier to keep everyone outside.”
“And now?”
Morgan looked at her. Nora was in her bed, hair spread across Morgan’s pillow, one hand still resting on her stomach. “Now you’re here.”
Nora leaned down and kissed her once, slow and quiet. Morgan held her close when she settled again.
Downstairs, the development company’s letter waited in the desk.
Morgan would tell her tomorrow.