Under Control.

chapter twenty eight.

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Nora's halting breath whispered over Julian's face, her voice thick and her face tear-streaked.

'This isn't fair,' she rasped, unmoving except for the quiver of her bottom lip and the salty tracks slipping down her pale cheeks, her neck, and over the tops of his thumbs as he tried hopelessly to chase them away.

It should have been a relief, the feeling of the rest of the world falling away just by the simple touch of him, his lips on hers, his wounded hand grasping at her side. But the fact that Julian could still have such an affect on her after everything was a stab in Nora's already broken heart.

For Julian, all it took was the briefest glimpse of everything he'd given up — Nora, in his arms again, soft and warm and just like he remembered — and his own heart too, was cracked open. All of the twisted ways he'd tried to escape what he'd done to them both but mostly to her surged up inside him like a sickening tide, and it was a bad thing made worse only by the sight of Nora, hurt and upset, and standing regret-filled right in front of him.

'I'm sorry,' Julian couldn't bear the sight of Nora's shattered face, anymore. He couldn't stand how much it hurt him to see her hurting, and the thought of that alone terrified him, but moreover he knew that he owed her so much more just than staggered silence.

Nora didn't have words. Her throat was too wrought and she didn't trust herself to be able to make a legible sound, let alone to speak. And so she looked up at the wide-eyed boy sitting across from her — him, with his trembling hands and his pouty, frowning lips — and she waited.

'I didn't — I never apologised. So, I'm sorry,' Julian met her eyes then, and traced the new, watery tracks that were falling down Nora's face. He forced himself to watch and see and accept what he'd done to her. 'I'm so fuckin' sorry, okay?'

Sorry alone wasn't enough and it didn't make what had happened then, or since, or today, make any more sense than it had done before they'd found each other in pieces earlier, outside on the street. But Julian was here now, and he was sorry, and Nora could see as much. It was real, and so was he, and so instead of being brave this time, or forcing herself to come up with anything that might be right to say, Nora just let him hold her for a while, instead.

She was near enough to him already that there wasn't even a whole step left to take to close the gap between their bodies.

All it took was for her to lean into Julian's open arms, and then there was nothing between them except for the remnants of their broken, not-quite togetherness, and the odd hiccuping gasp.

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Julian could have stayed like they were in the bathroom, wrapped up in each other, forever. And if Nora had've let him, he thinks, he would have just committed to the moment and lived in it — moved into her little bathroom in her strange new apartment and given up on any and everyone else who was waiting for him outside of this place. He would've stayed and waited for her to forgive him, just so he could have it all back.

He'd give anything for that. But, eventually, she'd moved.

Nora had withdrawn from him and the circle of his arms, taken in his drawn and regretful face, and then, she'd slipped away.

Julian didn't like the way she seemed — the way he feared he'd made her be. She moved tentatively through space and she seemed small, and not once had Nora ever been either of those two things in the entire time he'd known her. She was the biggest thing in his whole world — unimaginably, unfathomably monumental and brave and brilliant — and that she seemed like an echo of those things now was almost as terrifying to him and the way he still felt about her.