Under Control.

chapter seventy.

+

Nora is standing in the middle of an empty gallery — or, a space that will be one, soon enough — all alone and with nothing but paintings and strewn paper to keep her company when she hears a soft chime.

A more suspicious person — or maybe a more sensible one, considering the fact that she was a very small woman presently alone in a semi-abandoned building at god-knows o'clock at night — would maybe have been spooked, or considered something more ghostly. But to Nora, the sound is haunting in a much different way.

As soon as Nora hears it, her head fills with Julian, the sound sending her rushing into a medley of moments that live inside her, of him. It conjures the image of him hovering above her, a silly smile on his flushed face and a determined furrow in his brow, while his tinkling necklaces bump across her nose, her chin; a cool thing against her bruised lips.

He was always wearing something — a watch, often useless, sometimes a bracelet or seven, and a necklace. Or, several necklaces, all at once. And always, they jangled.

Nora joked often that he was like a cat wearing a bell, and that apart from him being lanky and clumsy it was his jaunty accessorising that made it impossible for him to sneak anywhere, ever.

And so even though he's not here now, and even though she knows that the sound that would-be him, is not — it's just an echo ringing out like a bell, a reminder alive in her subconscious — the phantom feel of the cool metal dangling between their overheated bodies is real. And it's that — the memory of him, and them together — which catches Nora so off guard.

She didn't know that she could conjure him out of thin air. And at the realisation that she can, Nora can't help but to wonder if it would always be that way, like a kind of sultry hypnotism that would live on, buried deep inside of her, for forever.

+++

Julian hadn't realised it when he'd packed to leave, but at least two of the shirts he'd brought with him to Britain were ones that Nora must have stolen to wear to bed before they'd gone their seperate ways.

Because, they smelled like her.

It's soft cotton perfumed with citrusy soap and her shampoo too, plus something vaguely ethereal that's just her. And when he first recognises it, he's sitting backstage, staring down a journalist and trying not to spiral.

His stony rockstar visage must've softened, he thinks, when it had first occurred to him. Because the reporter had seen an in, mistakenly taking the echo of his lovestruck realisation as a welcome. But even so, if it hadn't been for him — the man and his scribbles — left to his own devices, Julian probably would have done something pathetic and unexplainable.

There was a greed that had reared up inside of him in that moment — a want to take off the shirt and preserve it, even for as much as he wanted to keep it on and have Nora near. And it had embarrassed him, the thought of it, and so he'd pushed his desire back down into the depths of himself and worn it on stage anyway, revelling in the perfumed ghost of her beside him until the scent mixed with memory and all that was left was him, drenched, and missing her.

He'd found the second shirt the next night when he was alone in his hotel room, freshly showered and perched by the phone.

It had been a fortnight now, that he'd been away. And for the most part, thus far, they'd managed. But the waft of her in the room with him and the anticipation of having her nestled in his ear from over timezones and seas, had sent all the blood in his body rushing downwards.

He missed her. And he was doing fine. But he wanted to feel the weight of her body pressed against his, wanted to kiss her smiling lips, wanted to taste her and have her and take her for his own.