Under Control.

chapter fifteen.

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Nora and Julian spend the next several weeks twisting in chaotic flurries apart from each other.

The band leaves for Britain, and then swiftly conquers it. And in New York, Nora grabs a tiny piece of the city she's been left behind in for herself, and makes her mark on it.

They end up existing mostly to each other as fragments passed on by other people. Albert and Fab both keep in semi-regular contact, mostly by way of phone calls that ring out in the absolute dead of night. No one, it seems, on their tour is sleeping. And even if they are, they're not keeping hours that resemble anything like the rest of the living.

Julian calls Nora all of once, not too long after the band first lands in England. It's late and she's sleepy and they don't really say anything to each other, but they don't need to. And it's in that moment that he realises, just by the sound of her being there, existing down line from faraway, that he hadn't been wrong.

He does love her. And he didn't leave the way he feels behind with her in New York.

She's still with him, everywhere he goes, an opened wound around his unsettled heart.

The soft sigh of her tired voice is enough to rattle Julian's bones. But despite it all, he can't bring himself to regret it — regret her, regret what they did together. And so before he lets her go, lets her get back to sleep, he manages to make her laugh just by doing almost nothing, and then he tells her goodnight. And it's only after he hangs up from her that Julian decides.

If he's not going to be able leave the way he feels behind, then he might as well try to bury it, instead.

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In the absence of the ragtag band of boys who had become such a force in her day-to-day life, Nora — newly promoted and with a skerrick of extracurricular time on her hands now that she wasn't trekking all the way uptown on the daily, anymore — finds herself not without the potential for easy company.

In the beginning, soon after they all fly away and for much of the time thereafter, Nora palms off any and all smooth talking advances in much the same way as she almost always had done before the melancholy boy with the thousand-yard stare had crept into her bed and stolen her heart. 'I have to work tomorrow,' remained a convenient excuse for just about anyone who was not him — not Julian. But even still, there is one time when she doesn't resist.

An old friend from school who was living and working in London had finagled their way into one of the now-notorious afterparties that had become synonymous with every and all of the band's gigs. Nora had heard about it all later — something about the drummer, and was he really the sculptor from the LES show? And after assurances that, Yes, he indeed was, the chatter had turned to the pretty singer with the perfect nose and the melancholic bedroom eyes.

He, who Nora was informed in almost excruciating detail, had spent the entirety of that party and apparently most others as well, attached at the mouth to not just one but any pretty and willing hangers-on who would have him.

The boys were all, it seemed, making quite the name for themselves. And not just on stage.

And so it was on that night that Nora had finally given in to the clumsy but persistent advances of the visiting gallerist who she had been charged with the unenviable task of keeping amused while he was in town. She didn't care about him, or even that much for him, and the idea that he would be gone sooner rather than later was appealing enough. But more than just that, Nora had wanted to see if she could use a new body to get the memory of Julian's out of her apartment, her bed, and maybe even out of her heart.