Under Control.

chapter eleven.

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In the weeks since the band had started sending out demos to labels, the world had begun to tilt on its axis.

Everything was moving fast, so fast, and no one had barely had the chance to catch their breath in the meantime. And no two people less so, than Julian and Nora.

Nora had started to make a habit of turning up to their Friday or Saturday gigs when she could, and she and Julian had been keeping on with their almost-but-not-quite routine of never really getting it together. And Albert, for one, was exhausted with trying to keep up with their hopeless shenanigans. Between Julian and his habit of bringing fleeting company home — but only ever once Nora was firmly out of sight though never quite out of mind — and Nora's newer-to-him attentions from preppy dudes that he'd found himself having to resist the urge to fight off on a semi-regular basis, Albert was just about ready to just lock the pair of them in a cupboard to get it all over with.

In non-Julian related matters, Nora and Fab had recently recruited Nikolai and some other friends to their slowly-but-surely getting-there plan with the art exhibition, and all in all, the group of them seemed to be slowly taking over their little corner of downtown with get-togethers and intriguing made things.

Art for Nora, music for them, and both for Fab.

They were all busy, and they were all gently but excitedly spiralling, too. Spiralling upwards most of the time, but collective tornados of newness and anxiety they all were, none the less. And so parties had become quite the habit lately, with everyone in almost constant need of an excuse to let their hair down, and all of that at a frequency that outsiders might have found alarming.

But they were young and rubbery still, and in their own way, everyone was getting kind of good at it — at trouble, refined debauchery, and everything in-between.

And tonight, was yet another one of those nights.

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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.

'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 work tomorrow. These days, almost always, she has to work tomorrow.

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.