“He could have theoretically offered me anything I wanted. My heart’s desire. And you just unilaterally banned him?”
“Yes.” Morgan crossed her arms. If it was the right thing, why did she feel bad now? “It was too dangerous to let him stay here otherwise. Because you’re—”
“Because I’mwhat?”
“Because you’re mundane!” Her cheeks burned. She’d never wanted to treat Gisele as lesser because she wasn’t magical; Morgan got enough of that herself. But she needed to be protected, even when she didn’t see it. “You didn’t grow up with this stuff. You don’t know the danger.”
That didn’t look like the answer Gisele had been expecting. It only occurred to Morgan then that there might have been a different answer, and her cheeks burned even hotter.
“That wasn’t your call to make, Morgan. If you were worried about me not knowing enough, the solution should have been to teach me.” Gisele sat back, folding her arms. Only now did she relax enough to show her anger. “Why didn’t you trust me to make the right decision?”
“Because I didn’t want this random demon to steal my best friend’s soul?”
“Random?” Luke said, outraged, and then quailed under their glares. Rix whimpered a little, sensing the tension.
“That’s… I don’t know how I feel about that.” Gisele turned back to Morgan. “It feels like you undercut my agency. To save me from damnation. Which an awful lot of people try to do on a regular basis, you realize.”
“That’s…” Morgan hunched. She hadn’t thought about it like that. She continued in a small voice. “That’s not what I was trying to do, but that’s what I did and I’m sorry.”
Gisele blew out a breath. “Fine. OK.”
Luke kept looking back and forth between them.
“What?” Morgan sighed. “Oh. You’re waiting for us to attack each other or something.”
He nodded, shrinking in on himself.
“What do we want right now?”
His eyebrows creased and he said slowly. “You want her to forgive you and for you to not to mess up again, and she wants to not stop being friends just because you did something stupid when you meant well? And… that’s enough?”
“It kind of has to be,” Morgan sighed. “Because humans mess up a lot.”
“Do you actually want a Deal of your own?” Luke asked Gisele. Morgan supposed it was a sign of growth or affection or something that he looked more wary than excited.
Gisele looked off into the distance, thinking. Morgan forced herself not to rush her. Finally, Gisele sighed. “I’ll go with the ‘diminish and remain Galadriel’ option. I don’t really want all to love me, despair or not.”
“I don’t see any diminishing happening,” Morgan said fiercely.
Gisele snorted. “You got that right.”
Morgan could tell Gisele wanted the focus off her. Her roommate had never enjoyed being the center of attention. It suddenly occurred that it might be part of why her (much more capable) friend put up with Morgan’s Disaster Human ways. She changed the subject. “So. Brad. He needs to know what he’s signing. But we need to ease him into it so he doesn’t completely lose his shit like Hayley.”
“Well, what does he want?” Gisele asked. She still sounded irritated but Morgan knew she would prefer to process the whole thing on her own time.
“Investors,” said Luke.
“A byline inForbes,” said Morgan.
“Ruff!” Rix chimed in, continuing to be helpful.
“But why?” Gisele curled a ringlet of hair around her finger.
“Victory,” Luke added. “He wants to win.”
“To be recognized as being victorious,” Morgan added as she thought about it. “Probably by all the other CEO bros.”
Luke thought, trying to tease out the details. “He wants to be seen as visionary, but he doesn’t actually care about being visionary. What the company does doesn’t matter to him. Maybe it did at some point, but now he’d change it to whatever he thought would get the investors invested.”
