I haven’t been able to sleep since I plunged into the frigid Pacific, provoking Nick to save me again.  It was the culmination of our first fight.  I keep reliving that afternoon at the beach – the argument with Nasrin, my overwhelming frustration at Nick’s aloofness, the angry tenderness of his blanketed embrace and commands to “Never do anything like that again!”  Those memories replay in my mind, looping faster and faster, until I’m a million shades of desperately awake.

Now my sleep deprivation is so bad that I’m past exhaustion and into a weird state of heightened consciousness.  2 AM and all the usual sensory boundaries just seem…gone.  I can feel every tooth in my jaw, and hear individual helicopter blades whirling far beyond the border fence, and see through my eyelids as if I don’t even have any.  At first the hypersensitivity is unspeakably cool, then unnerving when the effect doesn’t go away, and finally terrifying.

I hope to remedy my condition by paging through one of Nick’s thick tomes about academic this or that.  Maybe a dose of severe boredom will help me calm down and fall asleep.  But walking out of my bedroom on bare feet that feel every molecule of the concrete floor, I discover the living room is lit with monochromatic flickers.  I’m surprised to find Nick wrapped mummy-like in blankets on his bed – our couch, during daylight hours – and watching Casablanca.  Dubbed.  Humphrey Bogart is speaking in a laughably ultramacho voice.  The sound is so intense I can almost taste it.

Nick is surprised to see me too.  I probably look pretty spooky, since I’m seeing every pore in his skin.  “Still can’t sleep?” he asks.

Eons lapse between the time I think of saying “yeah” and the vibration that passes up my throat and through my opening mouth.

“Same here,” he sighs.  The reflective pools of his eyes return to the TV screen.  “I’m not over how you just plunged into the ocean like that.  You really pissed me off with that stunt.”  But his timbre is haunted, not angry.

I watch a strangely disembodied hand reach down to the hairy leg jutting out from beneath the blankets.  It’s a muscle memory from my fantasies.  The hand glides along the bony ridge of Nick’s shin, blazing with warmth, following it to the knob of his knee –

“Uh, Nooshin?  What are you doing?”

I’m in flight without understanding how or even why, my body a streaming buzz of sensations.  I feel air batter my face as I move through it too quickly.  Then the bedroom door is slamming behind me, a painful thunderclap, and I’m submerging beneath the sheets, trying to drown in stuffy darkness, searching for a place where desire can’t reach.