Chapter Text
Hesitation is not in Morgan Abbas’s vocabulary.
She’s always been lucky like that. Throwing herself into the winds of Fate with reckless abandon, only to land on the other side, unscathed.
Many call her brash. Others crazy. Others still a heartbreak waiting to happen.
Morgan likes to think she’s just human.
Still, a lack of hesitation did bring about odd moments in her life.
Odd, but no less wonderful.
That Day when she was 16 comes to mind.
She had been leaving a coding class when she spotted him. White shirt, dark pants, shoes that had clearly seen better days. He was bent over a small legal pad, sketching something outside the door of what she remembers was one of the art classes you could sign up for.
The whole thing was funded by NYU, a way (she assumed) the school could look at potential applicants to their various programs. Morgan had been able to get past the large entry fee because the instructor had been her mother’s client a few years ago.
Al, the security guard, caught sight of the boy (though boy might not be the best word, she thought he might have been older than her).
“Hey kid….” Is all he got out before the boy was up and running.
She had only a second to register the brilliant blue eyes he had before he was sprinting past her.
Al, of course, gave chase, shouting “Hey, slow down kid!”
Hesitation isn’t in Morgan’s vocabulary. So, when she, without even giving it a second thought, pretending to trip to halt Al in his tracks, she didn’t question it.
Self-doubt is often how we slight the universe out of giving us what we didn’t know we needed.
At least, that’s what her father likes to say.
Morgan made all the appropriate “Sorry Al, no idea what happened, lost my footing, clumsy me,” noises as she gestured for the boy behind her back to keep going.
Because for some reason only he and God could decipher, he chose that moment to pause and look at her.
She heard him finally take off again. By the time Al was to the front, he had vanished into the crowd and out of sight.
Unseen by everyone, the drawing he’d been working on was left in his wake.
Well, almost everyone.
Morgan managed to find it and him.
It was a simple matter to double back and go around the side entrance, leading to the alley beside the building.
As luck (or Fate, or whatever you call it) would have it, the boy was walking by as she was coming out, pretending he was another New Yorker with nowhere to be.
She rushed forward, legal pad drawing in her hands, a drawing of what she just realized was a rose.
“Hey!,” she called out as she waved the boy down. He started badly but attempted to cover it up with a small smile.
Shyness overtook her suddenly because, damn it all, he was gorgeous.
Those blue eyes were sharp, piercing and yet had a calm Morgan could envy if she got the opportunity to look at them more often.
His hair was all boyish curls, the kind that had, by that point, started to make her fingers itch with desire to card through them.
His smile, while small, hid so much within it, a diamond she wanted to cradle and examine with equal fervor.
She held out the drawing. “You dropped this.”
She wanted to say something else, something witty or coy or anything to make her sound like the women in the movies she loved, the ones that had the protagonists hook, line, and sinker with a word.
Apparently, she didn’t need those. Because the boy looked at her in a combination of awe and confusion before his smile became a bit wider.
“Keep it.”
His hand cradled hers, gently pushing it towards her.
Morgan likes to think of love at first sight while knowing it probably wasn’t real, but she’d swear on every holy book up, down, and sideways that a spark of something brushed between the space of their hands.
She just nodded, and he began to walk away.
“Will you be back tomorrow?”
Morgan doesn’t know what possessed her to ask such a question. But, once again, hesitation was a foreign concept to her.
The boy seemed to consider the question, now walking backwards like this was a rom-com. He smiled again, wide with uncertainty playing at the corners.
“Maybe.”
And with that, he was off.
He didn’t come back and Morgan hasn’t seen him since.
(She didn’t know that he would meet a man the very next day after conning him in Three Card Monty. That he would go on a whirlwind con that led him to what he assumed was the love of his life. That he would be chased by the FBI until he was caught, put in prison, escaped, released, and lost that woman in one mighty swoop of fire and regret.
And that a few short months after all of it, that he’d meet Morgan once again on her first day as the New York White Collar office’s newest analyst).