Under Control.

chapter one.

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If a word exists to describe the way a room feels on a night like this, Nora hasn't found it, yet.

It's not so simple as it being a too-small space for quite so many warm bodies, or the sway of the heady dankness floating around on the city air that smells just like it sounds — of car horns and sirens, faraway voices, and chaos.

No, it's more than that.

It's got to do with the worry that's pressing gently into her side — him, Al; the boy made up of mostly hair and joy and confused neurones — and the disorientation drifting her way from across the crowded room, carried on the sleepy, hazel-eyed gaze of another boy altogether.

It's all that, and the wary potential for bad ideas that's sprawled across the surface of the coffee table in front of her — all of the possibilities for debauchery left behind but waiting, and the ones that have already been gathered up and whisked away, toted around in bloodstreams, galloping hearts, and whirring minds. They'd been picked, licked, sucked up where inhibitions had been laid down, and all of that and then some was just one small part of what was making the room and the city that was leaking into it, throb.

'Don't get any ideas,' Al croons into Nora's ear from his spot beside her all of a sudden, shattering her reverie. He's being caring in his own way. Which is to say, although he has little consideration at all for his own wellbeing, he does seem to be quite bothered with Nora's. And she doesn't mind it. Because if the two of them can be anything for each other, at least it's that — worried about the things the other can't be, for themselves.

'I have to work, tomorrow.' Nora says it the same way she always does — plainly and without judgement, but like it means something. And even though it sounds like she's making an excuse, she and Albert both know she's not.

She does have to work tomorrow. And on nights like these when she has to be a whole person the next day, all she ever is, is merely an observer.

The din of it all — the room, and all the bodies in it — leaves space for the aimless chatter between Nora and Albert to droop. And it's in that moment — with her, sitting quietly in the corner of the sofa and trying to disappear, but failing — that the other boy slips back in.

He's staring right at her, all the way from over there — over there, where he is perched on a chair that looks like it fell out of the sky and into this room solely for the purpose of giving him someplace to sit, and with his lap serving the same convenience for a pretty someone who Nora has never seen around, before.

She tries to get him to stop noticing that she exists by shifting her own gaze determinedly to the boy wilting slowly but surely beside her. But then, the boy notices them, too.

'Who's that?' Albert wonders aloud, and mostly to himself. There's no filter between his sparking brain and his cottony mouth, and if Nora weren't so worried about how often this seems to be happening lately with him, she thinks she might laugh about it. But she is worried, and so she can't. And it's with that thought, that Nora realises it might be time to leave.

'Dunno,' Nora murmurs in the general direction of the soft blur beside her that is Albert, her chin resting on his shoulder for a beat, her eyes trying to fix on his just to see if she can find the him she knows better hiding in there, somewhere. But he's too restless, and so she speaks again, right into the shell of his ear this time, so at least someone in this room will, in theory, know her whereabouts. 'I'm gonna head out.'

'I'll be good,' he says, and she knows that he's not saying it to her, exactly. His words are shaped like a question, and both of them know that he's not good, and won't be later. But it's nice that he wants to be.