Under Control.

chapter two.

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Nora is, as a person, basically a cobbled together mess of student debt, coffee, and fading hope.

Every week-day morning of her new, semi-adult life — and some weekend-nights, between — she crawls her way uptown, and then stands still for eight to nine hours, day-in and day-out, looking fashionably blank and occasionally judgemental.

It is her job, really, to be judgemental. But how much and how performatively varies depending on the clientele. If she's alone in the gallery — just her and the blank walls heavy with brightness brought in by other people; with the perfect lighting and the temperature controlled misery — she looks at the things themselves with silent, curious judgement. She tries to see beyond the bravura and the air-brushed theatrics. She tries to find honesty in the things made in solitude for the sole purpose of pleasing other eyes, other hearts, other minds.

But all too often, she fails. And usually, that's because there's nothing much to see. But sometimes, she doesn't. Sometimes, Nora's judgements shift, and they become gentle and new — admiring, or of wonder, or love, even. However, that same new softness rarely applies to the people who arrive to judge the things she watches alone. The people who she judges in turn, but, from a distance behind the safety of her desk.

Nora, in her blazer and her too-high shoes, hiding behind her carefully crafted mask of indifference.

Almost no one who stumbles into the fluorescent wonderland of pretentiousness that is the gallery is hardly ever honestly excited to find themselves in it. They usually arrive with a purpose — to spend money, or to see something they've been told they should, just so they can talk to all the right people about it at a later date. But then, one day, someone shows up who is, in fact, almost unnervingly excited about everything, including Nora.

All of her usual tricks of icy nonchalance fail in the face of the wild-haired, pixie-like guy who looks as though he just crawled out of a bed and stumbled into the gallery instead of the shower he was aiming for, by mistake. But he takes Nora's steely nerves as a challenge, and makes it his mission to not only break her, but, she thinks, to make her like him.

And at this he succeeds. And in record time, no less.

As it turns out, the tornado of leather and wild hair had recognised her as he was stumbling past. Which at first, Nora thinks, sounds like a likely line. But then the man bursts into a soliloquy about an underground exhibition that she'd helped to put on a year ago, and how he'd tried all night to meet her then but kept getting scared off by her serious face (his words) and the way she was downing whiskey like it was going out of style (also, his words).

('We had bets on when you might fall over — you're so tiny! Your legs had to have been filled with Jameson by the end of the night, right? But you never did. Impressive — scary.')

And so between reminiscing and being generally charming, by the time late morning turns to early noon, the man has made his way behind Nora's desk, and has planted himself on the top of it while he steals sips of her coffee in the meantime.

'Is it always this busy in here?' He asks, with his voice that sounds like a never-ending giggle.

With that, Nora gives him a wary side-eye, one that they both know says — Why would people who knew anything about anything come in here to look at all of this pretentious shit? — and then he laughs again in his sing-song-y way that she finds entirely too endearing.

'I'm an artist, you know? Or, kind of. I went to art school. But then I dropped out.' His eyes dart around the room while he speaks, still curious even though he's been in here with Nora for almost two hours, at this point.