Under Control.

chapter three.

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Nora had already felt like she was buzzing, even before she downed the shot that Albert passed her way as soon as she'd made it over the threshold of the new, quieter dive bar that she stumbled into in the wake of Fab's unrelenting chatter.

After leaving the gig, Nora and Fab had disappeared together back to his place where he'd laid on her an assortment of beautiful things, ranging from doodled sketches of loved ones and bandmates, to fiddly little sculptures, and a few abstract canvases. Nora was excited by what he could do, and by the way he could translate what he saw in the world, into art. And Fab had seen it — he could tell how Nora felt by the look on her face, and never more so than in the moment he'd pressed into her hands the sketch he'd finished just the other day of his enigmatic, stony-faced frontman.

There was just something about it — something revealing, but loving. Fab's art was all the things Nora missed seeing in the pieces she had built her day-to-day around, and seeing the world through his eyes and by his hand had made her hungry for change.

On the walk between Fab's place and their second bar of the night, Nora had revealed to him her plans, still in their infancy, to revive her underground collective. She was sick and tired of doing what she had been with the Capital-A Artists that she dealt with so often these days, and, she'd told him, she was desperate to get back to something that let her love it all, again.

Fab had been almost contagiously, outrageously excited about the whole thing. And it felt good. Nora liked him, and she was glad now that she'd stayed to see him doing his thing with his band. But, most of all, she was thankful to have had the chance to have him show her what he could do apart from just the music, even if the music was quite so good.

At the door of the bar though, all of Nora and Fabrizio's new but easy camaraderie had been checked. Because, almost as soon as they'd made their way through it, Fab had found himself swarmed by hopeful company. And that which, frankly, had come as a relief to Nora as much as it was an amusement.

Al had been the first one to see it — that Nora had meant what she'd said earlier, about her and Fab not being anything more than maybe-friends. And that had left Nora wondering for all of a second what the suited guitarist's intentions might have been with the shot he'd handed off to her. But then, any conversation Albert had tried starting with her thereafter had gotten interrupted by arms being flung around his neck and hungry lips searching for his, and so that was a worry that had quickly dissipated, too.

The other guitarist — Nick — was surrounded by a bevy of similar company every time Nora managed to spot him in the crowd, and occasionally she'd notice him disappear briefly into another room before raggedly reappearing again a short time later. (A very, very, wanted man, he seemed to be.)

Nora eventually found herself huddled in the quietest corner — and quiet was relative, in here — she could find, with the band's gently-spoken bassist, Nikolai, who to her seemed to be more interested in hearing about Nora's own doings than he was in speaking to his own.

At some point though, Nora had lost count of how many drinks she'd had. And so after returning from an escape to the bathroom — one of those interludes in the night where, once trapped in a stall with your own humming flesh and foggy head, you suddenly became unrelentingly aware of your own inebriation — she decided that it might be time to call it a night.

'You heading out?' Fab's head popped up from its new home roaming someone's pretty neck as Nora swanned passed him determined, and on her way swiftly to the nearest exit.

She nodded back with a barely concealed smile, amused, but hoping not to get waylaid by her new pal for too long. Nora's feet were killing her, and she was pretty sure that, by her own foggy calculations, she was due to be back at work in less than four hours, with the night having almost certainly given way to the morning, by now.