Who: Morgan and Olivia What: Reaching out Where: Olivia's apartment in Turnberry When: Backdated to after her mugging Warnings/Rating: Olivia being frazzled.
The first and only time that Morgan had been mugged (or nearly so), she'd been in Rome. The man hadn't been successful in separating her from her fashionable leather purse due to a group of young men happening by at the same time he was attempting to take it, but the event had left her rattled for a few days. After that, she'd always gone with smaller purses or none at all, but at least she hadn't called Sugar or Tomas, nor her mother. Instead she had sat in her hotel room for a day and a half, not going out, not speaking to anyone before she forced herself out again. It had only been down to the bakery half a block away, but it had gotten her started.
Talking with Olivia had reminded her of her own stunned emotions afterwards. It was worse trying to get through it alone, but she had needed to at the time. For all she knew, Olivia might need to do that as well, but given the state that she'd been in for their brief conversation over the journals, Morgan would feel better once she had a look for herself to make sure Olivia was going to be all right.
Dressed in a comfortable pair of jeans and a baby doll t-shirt that was half-faded from frequent wear, Morgan hurried through the streets to the apartment building. It wasn't what she would normally wear if she was going out, but she hadn't stopped to change before she left the Gardens. Olivia's shock had been more important than being fashionable.
And there were two words she never thought she'd put together. Olivia. Shock. The other woman was always in control of herself and had the presence to suggest that things would get back into order simply because she wished them to be that way. Concern outweighed all the what ifs, the maybes, the could bes as she entered Turnberry. Her surroundings were dimly, duly noted, the polish and sheen suggesting the affluence of the owners and residents, and the note was filed away, pushed to the back of her mind. That wasn't what she was here for.
Letting the security desk know that she was there to see Olivia Landon and at their request, giving her name, Morgan was allowed up to see the other woman. The elevator ride was short, shorter than she expected at the very least, and then she was striding down the hallway, her sandals barely making any noise at all. Hell, she made little noise at all until she knocked quickly on Olivia's door with her knuckles.
There was little sound from within. Olivia was not the kind of neighbor that caused gunshots in the near-dawn and she was not a neighbor who played music late into the night. She was the kind of woman who thought neighbors were best ignored, that the living situation was perfect when one’s own living was not impeded or encroached on by someone else’s living and as she was gone from the early morning until late into the evening, she led by her own example. She had neither made the attempt nor had the interest in getting to know those who lived either side and when she had been stood outside her own door and the keys jangled in her palm because she could not quite make her hand still enough to get them into the lock, it had been an almost familiar rush of terror, of the cold adrenaline that Fury had been wont to coax into being, that fear of what lay behind her own threshold. It had taken five minutes to move beyond the door frame and then it had been with a steady determination easily recognizable by anyone who had seen her in business. A shower; she had shed the business suit as though more than the faint scent of her own sweat clung to it, discarding it as she went and she had stood under the hot water until it drained through to lukewarm, her teeth juddering in her jaw until it hurt. Clothing; she wore the same soft, garnet-colored loose pants and a burnt umber cashmere cardigan knotted firmly around her waist as she had pulled without thought to the precision of her appearance from her drawers an hour or so before. She had been barefoot when she’d padded through to her kitchen and she’d reached for the bottle kept above the cabinets with a bloody-minded certainty.
The door did not open immediately. There was the distinctive metal grate of a bolt sliding back, even if the telephone had rung to announce Morgan’s arrival not five minutes previously. When it swung back, Olivia stood in the frame as alike to a picture that had been re-hung, something awkward and not entirely fitting about her presence there. Her hair was damp and it clung to her head with some of the sleekness of her usual style, but it had dripped and the shoulders of her cardigan were darker, damp with it. She stood with bare feet on her own rug and her glass was in her hand - the couch not more than ten steps away, had a discarded blanket thrown back across it and the tablet on the coffee table alongside a coaster was evidence enough of where she had been prior. The apartment was bold color and rich textures; a vast painting, modern art hung over a long sideboard, the couch was a rich velvet and the armchairs pulled near were deep and they were inviting, thick cushioned and dowsed in cushions. It was warm-looking, reds and oranges and purples and greens, the dark jewel tones of contrasting colors - it had a fitted look to it that meant perhaps a designer or someone who knew enough about art to be unafraid of contrasts, but the thick carpet underfoot and the chenille softness to the cast-off blanket said that it was a place for someone who liked touch.
Olivia’s face had the flat look of someone who had coaxed their features into bland nothingness, and she had a set to her jaw that said she was holding very tightly to the dignity she had - but nothing of the smoothness and polish of her business self. “Oh,” she said, and she looked blankly at Morgan as if she had not expected the woman to make it entirely from offer and sympathy in electronic entries, to her door. It was not, after all, how one did things with clients. “You’re here. Come in.” The latter an afterthought, after a beat overlong stood on her doorstep. Olivia stepped back, permitting admittance.
There was a time when Morgan would have taken in the look of the place, the bold colors and the lush mix of things that caught the eye and the things that were meant to be touched, but her focus was narrowed to the woman before her. Morgan had never seen her out of the office, where bland, neutral colors dominated, like all of these bold colors had been sterilized, rinsed out to leave only the bare bones of their existence behind.
This place wasn't the slash of color on Olivia's feet it was the home of that color. A wild escapee carrying the other woman out. Later she might be able to enjoy it, but for now she was focused on Olivia, the paler features, the look in her eyes that suggested she was trying to hold everything in, hold it together, in control of this as much as she would be inside her office. For a woman that held that all so closely, armored herself in it, Morgan would have been surprised if she wasn't in shock.
"I said I would come," she said gently as she stepped inside. If it had been Sam or Spencer, she would have hugged them right off, but Olivia? They didn't have that relationship. It made Morgan pause and just as she realized they didn't have it, she realized it shouldn't stop her. Comfort might not have been her best skill, but she still came forward slowly, giving Olivia enough time to recognize what she was doing and not surprise her before her arms closed around the other woman.
Olivia smelled of soap, the kind without anything but the soap itself to smell of and of the ginger shampoo and beneath the clean scents was the tang of the whiskey in its glass. She was surprised by it, oh so surprised and she was marionette-stiff in Morgan’s arms, a puppet jerked into tension by touch and the arm that had the glass was very rigid. It took a minute, of the warmth-bleed of Morgan’s own body and of the softness that was being encircled, for her body’s ramrod straightness to sag into something approaching receptivity. It had been months that she could remember, being touched and a handful more since this - the silky-skim of someone else’s hair against her cheek and the giving that was being hugged, the least transactional of physical comforts. It was comforting, something unasked for but at that minute desperately wanted - but it came coupled with the faint urge to laugh, toward the hysteria bubbling in the back of her throat and the subsequent sharp brink and throb of tears. There was only so much relaxation that she could permit, unless she wished to disgrace herself entirely, and when she pulled away, it was the jerk of broken dolls and limp limbs, an extrication as reluctant as it was required.
“I’m sorry,” Olivia said and her voice was careful, like broken glass and whiskey over ice, “I shouldn’t, this oughtn’t to be,” she made a sound, derisive of her own inabilities and she turned, rather than stand in the doorway where any neighbor might see, and she walked back to the couch and the artificial warmth of her own abandoned blanket rather than ask for anything like more.
“You did. You said you would come and you did. Thank you. Yes, thank you is what you say, isn’t it?” The glass slid a little in her hand, she put it down rather than listen to it rattle. “Would you like...?” Olivia made a gesture at the glass, at the bottle on the low table.
There were times when a person pulled away because they needed to, things were no longer healthy, things were downright bad, a multitude of reasons for the sudden space between two souls translated through the physical realm. It was never with the jerkiness that Olivia displayed then, as if she was moving without really wanting it, body trying to draw her back while her feet led her away. Morgan let her go, but stayed close enough to be comforting without being overbearing after shutting the door to the apartment.
"There's no reason to apologize," she said, voice soothing like honeyed tea. She made no more comment on the other woman's behavior or her inability to phrase her thoughts, but dimly noticed how she pulled the blanket around her like armor and the glass nearly slid from her grip. Morgan set one hand on her shoulder and gave it a small squeeze. "I'll get a glass. Have you eaten yet?" She was going to guess no, but perhaps if Olivia had something plain, like toast or crackers, she should try to get her to at least put that in her stomach.
Olivia was dimly aware that the firm would not approve. Socializing with clients was a staid sort of affair, one best served in expensive environments, where the alcohol in glasses was wine, champagne at the very most and the conversation surrounded by a hundred other equally inoffensive conversations. One did not summon a client to pat one’s hand and drink whiskey in one’s own home, particularly at this kind of bank. Her mind drifted from the cardinal professional sins to the faint surreality of Morgan in and about her own furniture and apartment and she took another sip from the whiskey glass until the burn in the back of her throat was reassurance enough of reality.
“No,” she said and she didn’t care that her voice was dim in her own ears, she had been cold for that brief minute by the door and the blanket was residual warmth and heat and comfort, and she wound her feet into it and tucked the glass into her palm like a blanket of a different sort, loathe to put it down. “I ate something at the office. Before, you know. I had intended to go out, I don’t cook a great deal.” If Morgan rummaged through the cupboards, the clarity of the understatement would become real. ‘Food’ comprised precisely of one half-bag of dried pulses and a piece of suspicious-looking cheese in the fridge; Olivia brought home what she ate and the kitchen remained as pristine as it had as a show-piece apartment.
“There’s ice, if you want it,” an afterthought, belated - “I don’t take it, but you might. Some people do.”
Of course Morgan looked, thinking that surely Olivia had to have something. Minute rice even, or soup crackers, but there was so little in the cupboards that a mouse would have starved. "That's... a bit of an understatement," she said quietly, deliberately not pitching her voice loud enough for Olivia to hear her. Was there anyone at the house that could do a grocery run? Star was at the door and manning the phones, but everyone else was out with the renovations. Damnit. Nico? No, he'd bitch the entire time. She could maybe call Liam, but -- no. Morgan didn't know him well enough for that.
Her continued search turned up no more food and she began considering grocery delivery, but that too was nixed. It was too late for that, but there were likely to be some places still open for delivery of something. Maybe Morgan could tempt the other woman into ordering something light like soup -- something to fill her belly without upsetting it. Pulling her cell phone out of her pocket, she checked the very last cabinet, hoping that there would be something inside -- only no, she saw. Only clean glasses that looked like they had never touched water. Had they even been used? Or just polished after being cleaned? Given the showroom state of the kitchen, either was truly possible and equally likely.
Holding on loosely to her glass (sans ice) in one hand and her mobile in the other, she put the thoughts of the kitchen out of her mind as she returned to the couch. "I don't," she said as she poured a finger of honey colored liquor into her own glass and silently offered it out to Olivia, in the possibility that she might want a refill.
There was a rhythm and an order to Olivia’s days, one that did not account for the smooth and polished kitchen surfaces. She ate with her heels kicked off and in her stockinged feet, stood up at one of the counters out of waxed paper boxes or she drank her coffee hurriedly whilst weaving between the rooms. Turnberry came with a vastness of utilities and the kitchen - oak cupboards and shining marble countertops was the bland of showrooms with little of the color and verve of the rest of the place. The couch was warm beneath her with her own body heat, the blanket drawn up beneath her bare feet until she was bound within the folds - it was not a posture Olivia cared for nor one she had ever intended to present to the woman who opened and closed cupboards in her kitchen but then at the present minute she was still sticky-stained with the futile, embarrassing tears of mourning something she’d liked along with her own dignity.
She was half-shut eyes and the unnatural stillness of those who are gathering up the threads of themselves in an attempt to weave themselves whole and the clink of the glass and the splash of the liquid drew her back into the room; Olivia looked at Morgan, the sleek ink-fall of her hair and the amber glint of the bottle in her hand. “Good. I don’t think I have ice,” she said, very precisely and she finished the last swallow of her glass to punctuate it, taking the whiskey into her own hand. It was a smoky taste and a hard burn at the back of her throat that made her eyes water, but the smell was redolent of her grandfather, of his study and the glass he had put into her hand when she’d received her acceptance letter for college. It was a celebratory drink then as it was a steadying one now and for a long minute, Olivia wished the warmth and the burn would be enough, would sear through clogging shame and dim humiliation and leave her mercifully empty of self-pity.
“Are you now doubting my ability to keep myself alive?” Her voice was very dry, it had a rhythm to it better suited to men, the deadpan very flat and very calm. “I don’t use the kitchen at all.”
"No," Morgan said with remarkable ease as she settled into the deeply plush cushions. "No, you've made it this long," she said, mouth quirking at the corners. She'd always assumed that Olivia was close to her in age, though she'd never asked (more because she'd never been driven to know that particular detail) and you had to do something successfully besides have a steady helping of luck to make it this far. She rotated the glass slowly, whiskey draping over the sides before sliding to pool in the bottom.
Another time she might have asked why Olivia didn't use her kitchen. Morgan used up every bit of her space and she preferred those spaces that looked inhabited. Not messy, but somewhere that looked like it was inhabited by people and without that bright lit show-ready perfection. It was standard, undeviated from the point of purchase and so unlike the rest of the apartment that actually looked like someone with personality lived there. From what she had seen, the rest of Olivia's home looked like it had some sort of life within it, not that carefully contained, metered out perfection.
And the kitchen didn't matter a damn thing at all, except that it reminded her of Olivia in the office with her immaculate suits, all in neutral tones, inoffensive and bland. But the colors in here were the wild escapees that made it free and after a moment's consideration, Morgan kicked off her sandals and pulled her legs up, her toes curling around the very edge of the cushion before her knees butterflied and she tucked her feet under her thighs. "You need to get some food in you, even if it's toast, or soup. I know you might not be hungry, but you need to eat something. And then we're going to make a list of everything that was in your purse and what it looks like for when you call the police." It was stated bluntly and from a woman that was very much used to making decisions about what needed to be done.
There was a tone there, as distinct as a bell’s chime. Morgan spoke like a woman at a board-room meeting full of men; her voice was calm but it was firm and it held the definitive expectation that she would be obeyed, that there would be no argument at all and that any attempt at instigating one would be put down swiftly and with no effort at all. It was strangely familiar, and Olivia sat with her glass in her hand and the aftertaste of the whiskey on her tongue and contemplated Morgan for a minute, sat in the center of her living room as if it were not odd and unexpected that she was there. And then she laughed.
It was a strangled thing, choked off much before it was permitted but Olivia found that with the laugh came her own breath a little more easily, the tight iron band about her rib-cage eased until it hurt, and her free hand went there, heel of her palm digging against herself as she held herself together with her own warm hands and the whiskey knotting together the fractured pieces and she wasn’t entirely sure that if she let go, she’d be able to stay together with just the sharp brine-fire of whiskey on her lips and tongue. “You sound like me,” she said then, into the stillness with an faint air of dispassionate observation to it. “You sound like me with clients, do I sound like that?” She shook her head and the damp weight of her hair brushed against the sodden wool of her cardigan and the sensation made Olivia shiver, wind herself more deeply into the blanket.
“I ate before I left the office. Complicated carbohydrates,” dryly, with a look toward the empty kitchen, “Really, I’ll be fine. I just need more,” Olivia tipped the glass, observed the dropping level of the whiskey in it, “Of this. There was nothing in the bag.” She was abrupt, in the shift of speech but Olivia did not seem to notice. “Nothing important, cards and so on, I called the bank,” she waved a hand, dismissing credit card theft as an inconvenience. “But I liked the bag.”
Another time, Morgan might have been more worried about that laugh than she was now, but it seemed to ease something inside Olivia and what the woman said afterward was far more put together than anything else she'd said all night. It wasn't the broken sentences, words and syllables tripping over each other, repeating themselves as they came out in molasses-rich tones. And whether it was her words or her tone, the effect was still the desired one.
"Sometimes," Morgan confessed, the laughter bringing out a smile of her own. Never had she heard Olivia laugh, not in that sterile box she called an office with all its perfectly quiet machines and honey toned woods. Such laughter would have been out of place there. It was almost out of place here, but given the situation, a full bellied laugh might have been just as alarming. She lifted the glass to her lips and took a sip, letting the taste roll over her tongue and set fire to her belly.
"If all that's missing is the bag," she started, tongue sliding over her lips to collect the faint taste of whiskey still on them. "You should still call the police." Her hands lowered the glass, one cupping the bottom, the other holding it loosely by the side, the backs of them rested against her denim-clad calves. "If he's done it before, they'll have a record of him and you might find it sooner than you expect."
Olivia knew police stations. She had stood in enough of them in the dreary, gray early hours to know exactly how they smelled (antiseptic, beer, vomit) and how they sounded (the shrill chirp of the telephone over a rattle and clank of metal bars, conversations overlapping like ocean waves until it was a cacophony that drilled, relentlessly into one’s head. Usually she was there for collection, all stone-colored suit like armor and neatly arranged hair and jewelry to keep at bay the expectation, the suggestion she was a usual visitor. I do not belong, written solidly across her visage. She rolled her shoulders, all awkward-tight at the thought, and she did not shrink but she tucked herself more securely into the depths of her own sofa cushions.
“No,” she said, decidedly. It was neither flat nor did it sound sensible. It had all the intonation of a child, refusing out of sheer ill-temper. The glass in her palm was warm through, the whiskey was almost gone. There was a drop, sliding down the inside slope of the tumbler; Olivia slid her fingertip across it, put it in her mouth absently. “They won’t find it, and they won’t care - Vegas has too much crime for one bag to be anybody’s priority.” Three glasses and the whiskey had begun to take a slow, warm hit at all that frozen fear, ribboning through tight-tense muscles and uncurling her. She felt like a doll, floppy and serious movement incomprehensible, and she slid one bare foot out from beneath the blanket, pink sole and crimson-painted toenails. “I haven’t got shoes.”
She looked at Morgan, glass cradled in her hands, denim and casual reassurance and wondered when it was she’d become the kind of woman who required someone else’s aid in reassuring herself of anything at all. “If I sound like that, I’m impossible.”
"You're very capable," Morgan said. "And very professional." That was one of the reasons why she ended up as a client of Olivia's instead of taking care of everything on her own.
If Olivia hadn't been capable, hadn't relieved that stress from Morgan, things might have been different. She didn't like playing the game of what if, what could be. What if she'd gotten pregnant with Tomas? What if she had stayed with Sugar? There were so many what if's and possibilities for her life to have turned out differently that it gave her a headache to think of. Few stuck with her. There was no time to think about what might have been while she was busy enjoying life, but there was one thing that she knew for sure, that her mother had been quick to point out whenever she might have forgotten it. If you allowed people to treat you one way, they would keep on treating you that way.
Morgan lifted the warming glass to her lips and took a small sip, just enough to taste the contents. "You need to report the mugging, Olivia. Even if they can't find your bag, he needs to be reported. He pulled a gun on you."
The blanket was far too comfortable for cold necessities like police stations. It reminded Olivia as she twined her fingertips through its fringed edge, ever so slightly of being eight and sat on the stairs out of sight as the mirror in the hallway caught the blue strobing light and painted it across the ceiling in rhythmic, soundless waves. Of the cool from the front door, and the hushed voices, and her mother being violently sick on the front porch. She had sat bundled in her own blanket, dragged off her bed, until her feet had gone cold beneath her nightgown and until she had fallen asleep there in the gray and neon-blue cool and woken only as her grandmother had carried her back to bed. She had felt small and unsafe and strange, as if the world beyond were a foreign language she hadn’t learned. It crawled across her skin, like cool air and incompetence, and Olivia straightened, her spine steeling against it. The whiskey was warmth pooled in her stomach, a looseness to her shoulders that mimicked relaxation.
“You’re right.” Calm and quiet and a gathering up of control once more. Olivia passed her hands across her hair; it was a familiar movement, one usually smoothing it back into its usual twist, but now it was all springy, damp curls. “I should - dress, shoes. I need shoes.” The glass set down on the table with a quiet click, Olivia padded across her own thick carpet toward the nudged-open bedroom door. “Are you all right if I...?” She indicated the door.
Though Morgan didn't say it, she knew she was right and nodded to Olivia's assessment. It did need to be done and she nodded again as the woman began putting herself back together, the pieces sliding home like the tumblers of a safe's lock. The portcullis lowered, the walls sliding back into place to keep the courtyard of Olivia's psyche back into place and it was almost interesting to watch, if not for the fact that it left Morgan feeling like she might be on the outside and not on in the inside.
She nodded absently to the question. "I'll be right here," she said, the right side of her mouth quirking upwards. And here she would remain until Olivia returned, ready to visit the police station, where the lights would likely be too bright and the entire place too noisy. Morgan finished off her drink, knocking it back with a single swallow of liquid fire and set the glass back down on surface of the coffee table while trying not to think about how strange it felt to be accompanying Olivia to the police. Of all the ways she thought to get to know the woman better, this had never crossed her mind. Her imaginings had all been set to laughter and warmth, wine or maybe beer, even the whiskey that they'd been sharing with soft jazz in the background maybe, or the blues, her hands in those soft, springy curls, loosened from whatever tight hairstyle Olivia had chosen. This had never been an option and whatever benefit came of it, Morgan wished it hadn't come with Olivia on the wrong end of a gun.