Under Control.

chapter forty four.

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Being apart is simple, insofar as it is an ache to which one can acclimate.

It's a kind of stinging tug of the heart that lives like a ghost inside a person, somedays more haunting than others. Somedays, there are tears, and on others, yearning. The time is filled with phone calls — some missed and some not, but all a kind of relief — and postcards and emails, and with the basic fact that it is possible to miss another person so much that you can fail to feel whole without them near. Until, that is, you do again — are, again. And then, somehow, all of the lonesomeness and the lovelorn pain isn't worth it so much as it just doesn't matter, anymore.

Nora wakes one morning — a Tuesday, nondescript — and Julian is just there.

He has a key, because she gave him one on a hazy night weeks and weeks ago, when they'd been so desperate for closeness that they had managed to stumble in the direction of each other out of nowhere, in the dark. He had been near enough to drive to for a change, and so on a random Friday afternoon Nora had ended up in the lemon Julian and Albert shared that had been being kept safe in the parking garage of his mother's building.

The day she drove up and over to see him was the same day she met his mother, to get the keys. And it was that which had given her the idea in the first place.

She'd stopped off back at her place on her way out of town to pick up the spare key she kept buried in a far off draw in the kitchen. And as she'd dug it out with a smile on her face, the sharp edges left over from wondering too much softened at the thought of him. Julian had known that for Nora to be able to see him, he would have to let other people — and his mother, no less — in on the fact that he cared. And so he did, and he did not flinch. And Nora knew what that meant.

And so the best she could do, or the least she could do, in return, she'd figured, was to let him in to her life, as well. And the simplest way she could think to do that, was with a key.

And that key was the very same one he'd used to get in last night, coming home to her place rather than returning to his apartment, or his own bed, instead.

Here and now, even in sleep, there's an exhaustion seeping from Julian that's unmistakable. He's fighting a loosing battle against the creeping sunlight, his face hidden between Nora's hair and the pillow, and his limbs heavy where they lay. He's curled around her, greedy for the warmth of her to be pressed up against all of him, and he's almost snoring, but still, not quite.

So Nora finds it easy to slip from the circle of his arms, only just for long enough to call in sick before returning to that home that is him in her bed, and then she forsakes what's left of the morning and drifts together with him back to sleep.

The next one of the two of them to wake is Julian, and by then it's no longer morning and barely still Tuesday. Nora is sound asleep beside him, her face gentle and soft, her breath a steady beat that soothes him just by being. He has been good enough to be proud, while he's been away. And so he doesn't feel guilty for giving himself this — a moment just to take her in, and to let himself feel relieved for being back with her, here, in her bed.

When Nora does rouse again, Julian knows it even before her eyes have even opened, and there's something gratifying about that fact, he finds. He's glad he still knows the rhythm of her body, even after weeks and weeks away. He remembers, because of course he does, but the act of reminding himself is what's kept him going while he's been gone.

'Hey,' he mumbles, his face half hidden beneath the tangle of his hair and the fluff of the pillow.

Nora smiles first, then she opens her one eye, a perfect reflection of him there on the opposite side of the bed. She's pink and messy and sleepy, and his. And he's home, and she's glad to see him, and everything, he thinks, is going to be okay.