It seems I did not give Morgan the strength that she needed.
I arrived back in their apartment to find them both there, but Brooke was making herself stay in her room, trying to give Morgan space. Morgan was sitting on her bed, flipping through her calendar. Her thoughts were not defined, but they were about Brooke, and there was so much consternation and struggle in her thoughts that I feared the worst.
I thought that I had to make a decision: whether to encourage Morgan to go and speak to Brooke, or whether the situation was still too delicate, meaning I should give them more time. I was trying to make that decision, to weigh the significance of time in this situation, when Morgan suddenly got up and left her room, going right to Brooke’s door and pushing it open. I was surprised, but I followed, of course.
Brooke looked up from the report she had been failing to focus on as Morgan sat down heavily on the bed, slid back against the wall, and pulled a large teddy bear[1] tight against her chest. “So I’ve been thinking,” she said.
Brooke pushed her chair back from the desk and looked at Morgan. Her heart was beating very fast. So was Morgan’s.
“About what you said,” Morgan clarified, as if any of us needed clarification. “About…me. That was a really big thing to dump on me, by the way.”
A tiny smile came to Brooke’s face. “I’m not going to apologize, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
Morgan shrugged that off. “So something like that is going to stick in your head for hours. I haven’t been able to get it out, it’s like that really annoying song—”
“Can’t feel my face?” Brooke asked, which confused me, because of course Morgan would not have been able to feel her face, she was sitting across the room.
Morgan snapped her fingers and pointed to Brooke. “Exactly! So it was like every time something happened that might distract me, it kept popping up as if somebody was messing with the radio in my brain.” She curled tighter around the bear. “So I’ve been thinking about it all day,” she said, “and I just now realized something.”
There was silence between them for a moment. I went to stand beside Morgan and give her the fortitude to continue.
“I was thinking about all the ways it wouldn’t work,” Morgan said, and I could feel the pain that caused in Brooke even from a distance. “I mean, there’s my family, and the church would pipe up, and our friends would be confused about it, and what will your mom think about it? Then there was that stupid director…”
I was certain in that moment that she had given the man what he wanted. I really did not think it was possible for an angel to feel sick until that moment; now I know differently.
Brooke felt sick, too. She cleared her throat and turned back to her computer, moving the mouse.[2] “You’re right, of course,” she said, and the strain in her voice seemed to cut into me. “I shouldn’t—”
“But,” Morgan said loudly, slamming the bear down onto the pillow to emphasize herself. Brooke and I both stared at her. “I just figured what I wasn’t thinking about. And that was…that I’m not interested in your proposal.”
This left both of us rather confused, as you can imagine.
Morgan looked up, her eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t do it, Brooke,” she whispered. “I didn’t sleep with the bastard.”
All of the air rushed out of Brooke’s lungs in a gale of relief that swept me up with it. Brooke put her face in her hands.
Morgan got to her feet and went to crouch by Brooke’s side. “I still wasn’t sure why I was doing it when I said no,” she said. “But I know how hard it had to have been for you to say what you said this morning. You have to have been thinking about all that stuff for—weeks, I guess. All the reasons it wouldn’t work. But I’m not one of those reasons.” She waves her hands, groping for the words. “When it comes down to it, when it boils down to just me—I don’t hate the idea.”
Caught up in hope now, after weeks and weeks of suppressing her feelings, Brooke couldn’t bear to look up. I stepped in to stand by her, and she managed to lower her hands a few inches to look at Morgan over her fingertips.
Crying openly now, Morgan reached up to take hold of Brooke’s wrists. “No one is as good to me as you,” she said. “No one takes care of me the way you do. No one knows me like you. And when I was looking that jerk in the eye and he was trying to get me to come back to his place, I knew…somewhere in me, I knew I wanted to not disappoint you. That’s what I want.”
“You could never,” Brooke sobbed, putting her arms around Morgan’s shoulders.
They wept together for a while, and I folded my wing around them, thanking the King.
“So,” Brooke said finally, when they had fallen to the floor and calmed enough to sit curled together next to her desk, “what next? Are we…dating now?” She had Morgan’s hand resting on her own and was tracing patterns with one finger in her palm.
“Give me a little time, will you?” Morgan asked, but she didn’t pull her hand away. “You are way ahead of me on this, remember?”
“You can have all the time you want,” Brooke assured her, kissing her forehead.
“Hmm,” Morgan said, smiling. “It’s different now. Everything is going to be different now, isn’t it?”
“Good different, I hope,” Brooke said, a bit of anxiety creeping in to her warm contentment.
Morgan lifted her head from Brooke’s shoulder and smiled into her face. “You’ve been with me all this time. As long as you stick around, I know I’ll be okay.”
Brooke tightened her grip. “I’m not going anywhere, baby.”
“Then we’re good.”
So you see, I did very little. It wasn’t I who gave Morgan what she needed; it was Brooke. They take strength from one another, as it should be. Thanks be to the King.
[1] This is not actually a bear—it is a small representation of one made of cloth, used as an object to bring comfort to young children. Often—as in Brooke’s case—a child will keep one of these objects into adulthood for further comfort.
[2] Similarly, this is not a mouse. It is instead a small device, which looks nothing like a mouse to me, used to reach into the realm of the computer and indicate the direction of the human’s observations.