Under Control.

chapter seventy one.

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It's been three days since last they've spoken, and almost three months since they said goodbye.

Julian is gone from their home again, out on one last hurrah before the band ensconces themselves in the studio and gets back to making instead of being looked at. And for that, he's glad. But still, he misses Nora, and it's been so long but there's nothing for it.

This, for now, is just the way things are.

Most of their phone calls these days land in the space between adrenaline and exhaustion — between him finishing a show, alone in his hotel room, and her at the end of her day, weary and tucked away in the room in her bosses house that she was still calling home.

Nora hasn't brought it up, but Julian knows that the way things are now can't be for always, and that at some point, she was going to have to think about getting a place there, even if just for a little while. And on the one hand, 'that's fine', he thinks. He pays the rent on the place in the city, and she pays the bills. They could swing a second place, if that's what she needs. He could be fine with that — a small change that makes their life a little bigger.

Being back at the apartment without her though was a different thing altogether — a reminder of before that he hadn't been prepared for.

Since they'd made their way together out from underneath his self-imposed dark clouds, Julian hadn't been there alone. And that wasn't a fact that he'd realised until he was already back in it. The place had been just the way they'd left it, complete with two empty, crusty mugs left lying forgotten in the sink. It was dusty, and it looked like a home, and the drains were still taped up.

The bathroom was filled with all of her various stuffs, and he liked that — liked getting to steal her soap and smell like her shampoo, now that the perfume of her was washed from his clothes. The bed was made — the way she made it; perfect — and the cushions on the couch were just-so. None of the plants were dead, the mail had been dropped off by a neighbour, and there was nothing that'd been left in the fridge to rot.

It had been almost everything that Julian remembered it to be, except for Nora being missing. And so he'd spent his whole time back there pausing in the entryway whenever he walked through it, and getting lost in the painting she'd left there that reminded him so much of the clear grey-blue of her eyes.

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When Nora finally gets the chance to steal a few days at home, by the time she's back Julian is already gone from it.

He'd had to leave the night before she'd arrived, and the realisation that they'd be missing each other for a while longer yet had been a bittersweet one. But then, when she'd fallen through the door, all of that bitterness had given way to something gentler.

The apartment was clean — bins emptied, sinks wiped down with cups placed carefully over the drains just in case she didn't make it back, and the bench tops showed the telltale signs of being rid of dust. The bed was made, lumpy but lovingly, and there were fresh towels in the bathroom waiting for her. There was milk in the fridge, and coffee ground, and a loaf of bread.

It was almost home.

Almost, except that Julian was missing. And so almost was make-do.

Leaving wasn't so hard the second time, and that, Nora knew, was because she was leaving the place and not where she belonged. 

If being away and apart for so long had taught Nora anything, it was that the reason the last four years had been all that they were was because Julian was where she belonged — not a place, a city or an apartment. And while succeeding at being apart was a strange thing, Nora liked to think of it as a new way of loving one another — that the fact they could still show up, still love each other at a distance, meant something. Probably that they'd grown, and that they hadn't just imagined what lived between them being a thing so fundamental, so essential, in the make up of their individual and shared lives. But more than that, it meant that they'd made each other better.