Under Control.

chapter twenty five.

+

Nora was very good at a few, hyper-specific things. And one of those things, it turned out, was disappearing.

After London, she'd all but vanished. Albert couldn't get a hold of her, not going by the list she'd left for them of where she was staying on her work trip, and not at her apartment by the time she was supposed to be back. And Al wasn't the only one who had been unsuccessful. Because Julian hadn't been able to track her down, either. Not in the frantic hours that had followed her walking in on him making his big mistake that night, and not for the few days he'd tried — relentlessly — after the fact.

For the past several weeks, after Julian had moved firmly into the oblivion phase of regret, Albert had kept trying, moving on and inevitably still failing to manage to get a hold of her at the gallery. But it wasn't until his third phone call in as many days that someone had finally let slip as to the why of Nora's absence.

The reason she wasn't there, it turned out, was because Nora didn't work at the gallery, anymore.

Albert hadn't yet dared to tell Julian — not that he hadn't been able to reach her since she'd run away that night, and not about any of the rest of it, either. And mostly, that was because he just couldn't bring himself to do it. Not considering the potential that was there for making an already bad situation so much worse. Because the truth of it, was that what had been left of Julian in the wake of loosing Nora, was a miserable husk.

Every day of the tour since that night and those first few shows, Julian had been determined to make it his life's mission to wake up and then race rapidly toward numbness. He was still doing his job and nailing it, but that was about all he was doing well, because he was drunk seemingly always, and more than just drunk almost as often. And if all of that wasn't bad enough, Julian, it seemed, had also developed a new and slightly startling ill-regard for his own wellbeing.

That, which was also how he'd ended up spending most of the European tour leg hobbling around on crutches.

Despite Albert's own many and varied Nora-related failures of late, one thing he had managed to do — when he wasn't busy trying to find her — was to put together a decent idea of what had gone down between his two friends in the weeks since it had all blown up. He knew they'd had given in to whatever it was that'd been simmering between them before the band had left for London. And, he knew that once the reality of being apart had hit home, they'd decided to try doing the thing for real.

Albert had heard Julian on the phone that first night, when he'd locked himself in the bathroom of their London hotel room. He'd heard the happiness floating out from under the door and seen the relief in Julian's eyes thereafter. But not long after, Al had also born witness to Julian somehow managing to convince himself that Nora had gotten cold feet.

Al had tried to explain to him that morning that he was being stupid — 'Look outside, man. It's fuckin' crazy out there. She can't control the weather. You're being ridiculous, right now.' — was actually what he'd said. But Julian being Julian, had not listened. Because Julian had already decided by then that he wasn't good enough for Nora — that all of his deepest fears had finally come true. And so the fact that had made the most sense to him that day, was decidedly not an act of god.

Nora had always been too good to be true. And so far as Julian was concerned, her not showing up for the gig that day was just the universe proving him right. And so, he'd spiralled. And he'd done so right into the arms and waiting, willing mouth of somebody else.

But then in the end, Nora had shown up. Because she did love Julian, even if Julian was a fucking idiot. And she'd fallen to pieces in front of Albert's eyes that night before running swiftly out of all their lives, determined, it seemed to him, to never look back.