Devil's Desire [h.s.]

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

It turned out Morgan had been trying to offer me an out.

She'd only called on me in case things were going south with Olivia and I needed an excuse to be out of the room for a little while. Louis, who had been hovering outside the door, had apparently tried to tell her that we both seemed fine—all the while pointedly assuring me that he had not been listening to our conversation directly, simply the cadence of our voices. He gave me a roguish grin when I rolled my eyes. Still, Morgan had come in anyway.

Truthfully, I hadn't realized just how taxing the brief few minutes of conversation had been with Olivia until I slumped against the wall in the hallway and felt my shoulders dropping away from my ears, where they'd been tucked for the better part of an hour. The tension that eased was nothing in comparison to what remained, what might have become just that much more exacerbated, when Morgan told me Harry hadn't yet come back. I hadn't expected him to, but that didn't mean the sting in my chest subsided.

Morgan eventually abandoned her task of trying to get me to sleep, seemingly having realized it wasn't in the cards until Harry returned, and instead tucked herself into the bed beside me. In mine and Harry's room where we'd drifted after I peeked my head into the guest bedroom and seen that Olivia had already fallen asleep—laying on her stomach and snoring, much to Louis's amusement—the weight of the day having apparently caught up with her.

"I realize I don't know how to talk to girls," Morgan was in the middle of saying, drawing a red polish coated brush over her toenails. "Unless I'm trying to sleep with them apparently."

I laughed loudly, holding the small nail polish bottle steady where it was braced on her knee. "What? What are you talking about?"

Morgan shrugged. "I mean exactly that. I tried talking to your friend Olivia the whole flight here and just found myself saying very... weird things." She paused. "River, I kept panicking and asking things like if she was comfortable or liked the airline food."

"Those are normal things."

"For a flight attendant maybe."

"You would have made me feel at ease," I teased.

Morgan rolled her eyes. "Then I tried to fix it and started asking about what she did for work or if she'd gone to school anywhere only for her to look like she was about to cry and suddenly asked if this was for some sort of internal profile that I was drafting up to stalk her." She huffed a short breath. "I can't win."

"To be fair," I watched as she dragged the nail polish brush over her pinky toe, "that's exactly what Harry did to me when I first met him."

"Well, I was just trying to be nice this time around," she grumbled. "And apparently, I've lost complete ability to do that. To actually have casual conversations or make friends."

"I'm your friend," I said with a grin, closing a hand around her ankle and giving it a brief squeeze. "You made me."

Morgan levelled me with a flat look. "Yeah, and how did that start?" She muttered, running a tongue along her bottom lip—completely exasperated. "You were nice to me one time, so I brought you to an illegal, underground fight full of children without even telling you because I wanted you to like me so badly."

For some reason—and not in a million years would I have considered rehashing this memory having this effect on me—I grinned harder. "Well, it worked."

"After your boyfriend threatened to kill me. Multiple times over. Exile me from the land like a movie villain."

"He wasn't my boyfriend at the time."