27. Foundations
Foundations
Nora
The light in Morgan’s apartment came in flat and pearl-colored at six-thirty in the morning through the one window over the sink that looked out at the alley, and Nora had been awake for ten minutes watching it slide along the ceiling without thinking very hard about anything at all.
Morgan was asleep beside her, on her back, with one arm flung over her own forehead.
Back in August when they’d first slept next to each other, Nora had thought that it was the most defended sleeping position she had ever seen on a person.
Under the covers, there was a hand-shaped warmth across Nora’s stomach, the unguarded hand, the one Morgan’s brain wasn’t currently using to protect herself with.
Rusty was on the foot of the bed, taking up more bed than any dog his size had any right to.
Nora didn’t move. There was a version of waking-up-next-to-someone that involved getting up and being efficient and making the coffee and pretending you weren’t fragile, and she had been good at that version for years. She wasn’t going to be good at it today.
When Morgan came out of sleep she did it in stages. A breath. A small movement of her jaw. Then her eyes opened straight to the ceiling and stayed there for two seconds before her head turned, and she found Nora, and a small softening happened to her face.
“Hi,” Nora said.
“Hi.”
“You slept.”
“Mm.”
Nora smiled. “Me too.”
Morgan didn’t move her hand off Nora’s stomach. Nora didn’t move hers off Morgan’s hip. They lay like that for another minute, the alley light slow on the ceiling, Rusty’s weight at the foot of the bed.
Then Rusty got up, apparently tired of the scenery, and Nora heard him start drinking from his water bowl.
Nora turned her head on the pillow and found Morgan already watching her—soft, no defenses up yet.
Nora moved, rolled in against Morgan’s side and kissed her, because there was no way Morgan could look like that and not get kissed, and Morgan’s unguarded hand slid off her stomach and around to the small of her back and stayed, which was a yes on its own.
Morgan made a low sound, the one Nora had tried not to think about at three in the morning in a hotel she hadn’t liked.
Nora smiled into the kiss and felt Morgan smile too, just for a second, before the kiss deepened further.
Heat spread through Nora’s body, and she let her hands roam across Morgan’s warm skin, over the curve of her hips and then lower, to the places that made Morgan gasp and groan against her throat.
Nora took her time. She wanted to be here and nowhere else, and it came out in how slow she went. Morgan’s hips lifted toward her without Morgan seeming to decide it, and Morgan’s hand found the back of Nora’s head, resting there, that weight that meant yes, that, stay.
Nora stayed.
It stayed quiet. The apartment was small and the morning was still and this wasn’t about being loud.
Morgan’s other hand went up to the headboard and gripped, and her breathing came apart by degrees, and Nora kept her mouth at Morgan’s throat and worked with her hand and listened—which was the thing Nora was best at in the world, listening, finding the exact place a sound wanted to go and going there with it.
She found the combination that made Morgan’s breath catch and stop being even, and she stayed with it.
When Morgan came it was almost silent, her face turned into Nora’s hair, one hand white on the headboard and the other tight at Nora’s shoulder, all of her pulled taut and then released at once.
Nora held her through it. Felt the last of it move through her and ease, and pressed her mouth to Morgan’s temple and left it there while Morgan came back to her own breathing.
Neither of them said anything. There wasn’t a word that would have improved on the quiet.
When Nora did, eventually, get up she went to make coffee. Morgan followed, and sat with a blanket around her shoulders by the table and watched her cross the small kitchen. Rusty followed Nora and bumped her hip, asking for breakfast, and was only satisfied once she poured a bowl full for him.
Morgan kept good beans and a hand grinder, which Nora had learned about her in August and had taken as further evidence of someone who refused to be sloppy with herself. Nora ground the beans. She made the pot. The smell filled the small apartment, and Rusty glanced up from his bowl approvingly.
She brought two cups back to the table.
Morgan took the cup and drank. After a minute, looking into the cup, not at Nora, she said: “I’m going to live in the house.”
Nora set her own cup down.
“Yeah?”
“I thought about it last night. I’d been thinking about it since you offered it.” She paused, picking words. “I don’t want to sleep at the Inn for a week and then a different rental for a month and then somewhere else after that. I want my mail to go to a place. I want Rusty to know his home.”
“Okay.”
“And I want you to be able to come there. When you’re here. Without it being a—without it being your house and I’m letting you in.”
“Yeah.”
“So I’ll pay rent on the house.”
“Morgan.”
“I’m not negotiating that part.”
She had to laugh. The strict Morgan accounting that turned a gift into something she could stand inside of. “How about this instead: you fix the roof, and any other part of the house that needs fixing, and we’ll call that even?”
Morgan narrowed her eyes.
Nora chuckled and shook her head. “I am pretty sure I’m getting the much better deal out of that.”
Still, Morgan’s eyes narrowed… but then came the nod. “Okay. That’s acceptable.”
Nora reached out and touched Morgan’s cheek because she could, and Morgan didn’t flinch back. “Good,” she said. “I’m glad we could come to an agreement.”
Morgan looked at her. “Good.”
“Good.”
“I’ll move the rest of the apartment to the house Monday and Tuesday. With the shop.”
“Okay.”
“I want it to still be your house. I’m not going to make it not yours.”
“Morgan.”
“I’m just saying it. So you know.”
“I know.” She reached over and put her hand on Morgan’s bare shoulder, the warm bone of it, the freckle she’d long since memorized. “I know.”
Her father called at eleven and Nora picked up on the second ring.
“Eleanor.”
“Hi, Dad.”
“I hear you’re back in Redwood Hollow,” he said. “Your mom told me.” There was no accusation in the words, at least; he was used to getting news through her rather than following everything himself.
“I’m back through this evening,” Nora said.
“I heard.” A pause. “Your mother saw something on the internet.”
Of course she had. RedwoodHollowDaily had its uses but it was, fundamentally, an opt-in surveillance system, and her mother was opted in. “I figured.”
“How are things?”
Plain, formal, sincere. She found she had an answer for it.
“Things are better, Dad.”
A pause. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“I have a plan for the house,” she said. He didn’t say anything, so she continued, “Morgan. My… uh, girlfriend—” she hesitated over the word not because she was hesitant about it, but because they hadn’t discussed labels, “—she’s going to live there.”
A longer pause. “That sounds—”
“It’s good, Dad. The roof is bad. The roof is the next problem.”
“I know a roofer in Salem.”
“Morgan’s going to do the roof herself.”
“Oh? She can do roofs?” In his voice, the doubt of a man who wanted to solve things himself, who was trying to figure out the appropriate version of offering to help.
“Yes, she can.”
“Okay.”
A pause, and when it went on for a little longer than strictly comfortable, Nora said, “Dad?”
“Yes?”
She hesitated for only a moment. “Thank you for the conversation. The other week.”
He grunted something in response, and she knew to leave it alone. “Are you going to come up sometime?” she asked instead. “To see the place?”
A breath. “Your mother has been asking the same thing.”
“Then come.”
“We’ll see. One step at a time.”
“Okay.”
They hung up. Morgan, who had been pretending not to listen from the kitchen, came back and sat down next to her, and Nora let her shoulder lean against Morgan’s. Sometimes the leaning was all of it.
“I don’t mind it,” Morgan said after a while.
Nora didn’t raise her head. “Mind what?”
Morgan took a moment before she answered. “You calling me your girlfriend.”
Nora smiled against her. “Oh. Good. Because I like that too.”
After lunch, she made herself open the guitar case, because she had eight hours left in Redwood Hollow and the foundations song had been waiting for almost two months, and she could feel that the ending had finally arrived. This was the time, and the place.
Morgan was working at her kitchen table on something paper-and-pencil, lists for the move, and she peered up when Nora put the guitar on her knee.
“Don’t listen,” Nora said.
“Okay.”
“I mean, you can listen, because it’s hard not to when we’re both here,” Nora said. A breath to steady herself. “Just… don’t make me know you’re listening.”
“I’ll read.”
“Yeah. Read.”
Morgan picked up a magazine she didn’t read. Nora picked up the guitar.
She’d been writing the ending of this song in her head every day for weeks. Lines in the shower, lines in the hotel, lines on the plane down on Sunday.
Only now she knew how it ended.
She tuned by ear. The first verse came easy—the one she’d written in August on Morgan’s stool with the carburetor reek in her nose. The second verse came easier—the one she’d written on the porch on Gramps’ land in the September light. The chorus had always been the chorus.
Then the bridge. And then she was at the place where the ending was, and the ending came out of her fingers and her mouth without consulting her brain. Songs were like this when they were done waiting. It was four lines.
She played it through once.
Morgan was looking at her over the top of the magazine with her own eyes soft like they rarely were.
“I told you not to listen.”
“I lied.”