Mutual Benefits Ch. 10 – First Time – by BashfulScribe..,

It was hard to read Morgan. I know there was this whole stereotype that ‘when a woman tells you she’s not upset and it was not that big a deal, she’s very upset and it was the biggest deal’ — Kevin in particular was sure to drill that into me. But not trusting someone I was dating seemed kind of silly. If she told me she was not upset and I was supposed to take that as ‘I am upset,’ when the heck would I ever think she was truly not upset?

Granted, this situation was a bit unique. This wasn’t exactly a small matter. It wasn’t like I told her she only ‘kind of’ looked pretty in a dress — she caught me grinding on her best friend. Some part of me was amazed that it wasn’t game over for our relationship right then and there.

I was both relieved and weirded out that it seemed like this wasn’t the first time Morgan had to deal with this kind of thing from Taylor. She seemed more… exhausted than surprised. I was equally relieved, as well as a little nervous, when Morgan texted me early in the morning and asked if we could meet up and just talk about what happened last night with no Taylor in the room.

I agreed instantly, thanking my lucky stars I was up early enough, and rushed to school. I was about an hour early, with no pre-school extracurriculars or anything lined up, so we had ample time. Given very few other students were there, we decided to just walk around the halls and talk.

We didn’t speak for a minute or so after we said hello to each other and decided to just walk. After a minute of just walking, Morgan sighed loudly. “I guess I’ll have to be the one to bring it up, huh?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say about it. You asked me to meet up,” I softly replied.

“Yeah, fair. I guess, is there anything you wanted to ask me now that Taylor isn’t there?”

I stopped and shuffled in place, before continuing when I realized that Morgan didn’t stop walking. “I guess I’m just amazed that you don’t seem to… mind it. Not as much as I’d have thought.”

Morgan turned to me, her face plain and emotionless. “That’s not a question.”

I coughed nervously. “Do you really not mind this situation, or did it bother you more than you wanted to… show?”

She rolled her shoulders and leaned back against a wall. I stopped with her. “Well, yeah, of course when I first heard about it it bothered me a lot. It bothered me even more that Taylor told it to me as if she was testing you or something.”

“She was te-”

She waved a hand in front of me. “Don’t worry. I know you weren’t. She just wanted to use this to get to me and try to make herself look as innocent as possible.”

My face soured. “Taylor’s a snake,” I spat.

“No, she’s just… complicated,” she replied. “It’s not right of her to care so much about this, like, revenge of hers, but it is a fact that I did hurt her in the past. She has a hard time getting over things. At this point you can’t name-drop half of the boys in the school to her without setting her off somehow.”

My sour expression remained, but I got a bit of sympathy for her. “She sounds… damaged.”

“‘Damaged’ is an extreme word,” Morgan replied, still leaning against the wall. “Not inaccurate, though. I think she feels as though she’s been hurt so much by some guys here, she has this free opportunity to hurt whoever she wants as long as she gets her own safety or something.”

It probably would have been betraying Taylor’s trust to admit to Morgan that she hit the bullseye with that one, but I couldn’t help remembering Taylor practically said as much to me before.

“So in this weird way, I don’t mind,” Morgan continued. “It’s pretty clear you two were doing stuff before our date, and I get that would have been hard to bring up.” She got up from the wall and looked directly at me. “That doesn’t change the fact that it hurt a lot when I first found out, but… the tears are out now, I guess. I’ve had time to think about it and process it. It happened. I don’t think I’m going to get hurt any more than when I first found out. I meant it when I said I won’t care if you two continue. I get that it’s hard to say no to that kind of thing and as long as it doesn’t change our situation, I don’t think you two doing your own thing is going to emotionally affect me.”

She said a lot there, but one thing stuck with me. “I’m sorry that it hurt a lot, Morgan,” I admitted. “I didn’t want to hurt you, and I feel awful that I did. ”

Strangely, she smiled at me. “I appreciate that that was the part you cared the most about,” she told me softly. She gave me a small hug, which, out of awkwardness, I barely returned. To top it off, when the hug was over, all I could do was blush and look down.

She laughed pityingly at me. “I really will have to make the first move for everything with us, huh?” she asked rhetorically. “If you can’t hug me because of last night, we clearly have to have a whole other type of talk.”

I blushed again. “No, no, it’s not that,” I replied quickly.

“But I will have to be the one to start everything, won’t I?”

“That… might be the case,” I admitted. “I’m just worried about… going too far when I initiate or something.”

“Don’t you think we’re through the looking glass?” she asked with a smile. “I know you don’t have a hard time getting into the groove, even if you’re not dating the person.”

I looked down in shame, and she slowly brought my head back up. “Nope, none of that,” she commented lightly. “I may be cool with it, but I’m allowed to make jokes about it. It happened. Joking about it is how I deal with it.”

“Okay,” I sighed. “But it’s so much easier when someone else does it and you just go, ‘okay.’ I don’t know how far you want to go, or if you want it, or what the right time is, or…”

“Quinn, you’re overthinking,” Morgan cut in. “I’m challenging you to make the next step with us without worrying about that.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I won’t initiate anything until after you do. To give you some practice.” She smirked at the silliness of her own comment. “I want you to not think about any of that stuff. I just want you to feel out what the next step is for us, and do it when the time is right. I appreciate you thinking about what I want, but you keep second-guessing yourself. You’re just going to keep telling yourself not to show you care for me in case I think it’s weird or too much, and I won’t. Odds are, whatever you choose to do with me… I want it too.”

I gave her a confused expression. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Morgan gave a small laugh. “Quinn, if I told you, that would defeat the whole point of this, wouldn’t it?”

I wasn’t laughing with her. “It feels… weird to press on after last night. Especially so freshly after last night happened.”

Morgan dropped her laughing face and looked at me with complete seriousness. “Maybe that’s actually a big part of why I want to move forward. It we’re just awkwardly saying semi-sweet things to each other, but you and Taylor got to… you know…”

It was my turn to smile. “What, are you jealous?”