lost tapes.

one // 'rememberings'.

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There's a knock at the door, loud and unrelenting and backed up by giggles.

Nora's eyes are wide all of a sudden, and she's very, very awake. She doesn't look panicked so much as she does bewildered, and all Julian can do in return is to laugh at her, because somehow, her face hasn't changed at all in this decade from the last.

It's just the same as it ever was, here and now on this morning, so many past their last. 

Their last time had happened in another place, blocks from here, and it was sad not happy, a long goodbye. And this isn't that — this is a delicious hello, a wholly new moment that's unfamiliar if laden with echos, even still. They've each lived whole lifetimes between then and now, and that's all in here, too. But fundamentally they're both the same — same shy smiles, same darkened eyes, same looks, same love.

There is though, despite it all, something so absolutely absurd about the whole thing — this, them, cowering like teenagers in his apartment whose sultry secrets are about to all be found out. And it's funny, and Julian can't help but to laugh, and it's uncontrolled now, just how much he's dissolving into giggles at the furious look on Nora's sleepy face.

She looks so determined, and it's as beautiful as it is familiar, the recognition of it. That's just her face, and she's the same even though they're both so different now, and so is everything else.

There's another rap on the door, and it's either Fab or Albert, and Julian remembers now that he was meant to be at a meeting this morning. It's nothing crucial that he's missed — just pre-tour business plus some other more hopeful asides. But still, he definitely forgot about it.

And who, really, could blame him, he thinks? If option one is hauling ass uptown first thing on a Saturday morning, and option two is staying in bed with a beautiful ghost, then, the most sensible choice seems obvious. Regardless though and in spite of his old friends and their very much still intact abilities to sweet talk and swerve their way past doormen and shut locks, Nora half naked in his bed, simmering with an alluring amount of fury, is not really a situation he feels like explaining, just yet.

This is new, even though it's not, and neither of them have dared to even consider what it might be outside of moments like this. It makes sense when it needs to — like last night at her gallery, watching her work, or after, here at his place, remembering how to be together under the heady glow of the moon. It makes sense this morning, even though it might be the only thing that does — Nora, beautiful and beatific, even despite the rest of it and the banging on his door.  And so for now it just is, and that's enough. Because life is enough, and as ever, with her, everything is something else, something more, and always worth it.

'Would you,'

Julian rises from the bed finally, shucking the blanket and finding his pants, and then he drops a quick kiss on Nora's stern-set lips before he takes off across the apartment and toward the door.

'Ever,'

He makes it to the door just as one of them is raining their knuckles down upon it again, and when he swings the it open (but only just), he already has a plan as to how to guarantee the rest of his day. And it involves making up for his misplaced laughter, and pointedly, not showing up for a meeting that could have just been an email all along.

'Just, fuck off?'

Waiting in the hall are the two very people he expected, and at the sight of them, Julian remembers suddenly to look morose, and play at ill.

'Oh, shit,' One of them says, and then they both take a leaping step backwards.

This is how things are, now — mind yourself, and stay out of the range of sneezes.

'We thought you just forgot. Sorry, man. You need anything?'

Julian needs many things, but soup or more interruptions are not it. Mostly, he needs for them to leave, and right now, because he can sense a whisper of movement behind him, and if this time is anything like the last this happened between them, then he's missing quite the show.

'Nah, all good. I'll take a test and make sure it's all good before the thing on Monday. Cool?'

Cool.

And then, just like that, the morning is back in hand, and everything is right with the world again.

'You didn't used to be like this,' Julian murmurs gently once he's back in the bed and watching as Nora floats across the room, making her way from the bathroom. What he means is carefree, and he's not complaining. It's just one of many tiny little new things that he's noticed lately, and like always, it's a half-baked thought that's slipped from his head to his lips without a filter.

'I like it.' 

He says the last bit with a smile as Nora slips back under the sheets, her cold hands pressed teasingly, fleetingly, to his middle.

'Oh yeah?' Nora tilts her head then and chuckles softly, her whole face an open secret to him, and at the sights and sounds of her like she is, Julian can't help the gentle tugging at his heart.

He can't think or care about any of it for too long though once she's hovering above him, bare and bathed in sunlight with the sheets piled messily around their hips. He can't think of anything expect for her, and how much this feels at once unreal but also like the realest thing there ever was, both at the same time.

'Neither did you,' Nora sighs, her minty breath a cool breeze from above him. And when she says it, she watches him, sees the hitch that exists in him now — careful, bruised, unwilling — and then she undoes it all with the simple touch of her hand, and her fingertips that trace from his frowning lips (omnipresent), to his chest and the tattoo that lives there, and then down, down more.

She covers the scribbles on his arms, delights in the shudder that she pulls from him when her touch dances over his ribs, and then she laughs when he tries to pay her back but only fails to undo his own self more by the feel of her warm body underneath his wanting hands.

'Everything's different,'

'Is it, though?'

'Maybe.'

'Well, we'll just have to find out.'

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