Under Control.

chapter forty nine.

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Nora feigns ill and sends Ash on his way.

Once they get back to his place, she wilts in the back seat of the cab but reassures him that she's fine nonetheless — that everything is fine, and nothing has changed between them, and all is just as it was back when the night had begun.

But, it's not.

And they both know that. And so does the cabbie, who sits in amiable silence while he ferries Nora home, all alone again, and weeping.

She tips him for his peaceful kindness and then stumbles her way, misty-eyed, up the stairs to her empty, baron apartment. Once she's inside, she starts stripping her clothes from her body like they're poison — like if she can just get far enough away from all the pieces of herself that Julian has touched with his gaze, then, maybe, she might finally be able to breathe again.

She falls into the shower like she is — naked, but for the necklace he'd given to her long ago, somewhere between Los Angeles and Milwaukee — and then she lets the torrent of water wash away her tears, and leave her face streaked with kohl black.

When she reappears from the fog of the bathroom underneath the dark cloud that she's conjured around herself, Nora dresses in a left-behind shirt of Julian's, and nothing else. She scrapes her wet hair from her face and gives up on the façade she'd tried to pull on before she'd left, and then she slips on into the darkness of her place clad in just him and her socks, and sits in the shadows, to wait. But for what, she does not know.

For a while, Nora thinks she's waiting on the morning, spread out like she is, hopeless, on the floor. But then there's a soft rap at the door, and just like that, she knows.

Julian doesn't say anything when she opens the door, he just looks. First, at her (his), then at her shirt (his), and then at the nothingness that lurks behind her (his).

Nora stares back at him, broken but stubborn in defeat, and then she leaves the door swung open and waiting, letting him decide for a change what it is he wants, and what he was going to do about it.

'Why didn't you say anything?'

Julian looks lost, but then he sits down on the floor opposite her and tries to remember how to belong.

'Why didn't you ask me?'

Nora is just as lost as he is, and she knows that as well as Julian does. But she also knows that there's no fighting it anymore, so she sits still, and she lets him see what's left of her in the wake of them and him being gone.

'Because I was scared.' Julian is sure when he says it, but then he meets Nora's eyes, and he shrinks.

They made each other this way, he thinks. But still, he can't help but to feel guilty, because he hates seeing Nora sad, and that's all of her that there is here, on the floor of her empty apartment. Tonight it's just them and an ocean of hurt, regret, and things left unsaid, stretching on and on, between them.

'You think I wasn't? You think you're the only one who gets scared?'

'I don't think you have any idea how much you terrify me, to be honest.'

And that's all there is, for a while — an uneasy armistice in the shadowy darkness where no one wins, and everyone is left broken and reeling. But then, for a change, Julian decides to leap first.

'I miss you,' he says, and the words pour out of him like he's been holding them in since the first moment she left that morning, all those months ago. And, he has been.

Nora breathes, and she watches him, and she lets the tears that she's been holding back finally spill over in her. And it's only then — streaked with salt and illuminated by the silvery moonlight — that she recognises the shape of her devastation reflected back at her, spread across Julian's own face.