He lay there napping but I was awake. The air was cold. I sat up beside him and pulled a blanket round my shoulders, then looked past his somnolescent form out my window and gazed at nothing. Car sounds roared through the emptiness in my head. I was an impostor. Someone had plucked the rightful woman out of a warm and tender postcoital scene and replaced her with me instead—me, full of uncertainty and doubt, distant, confused, not sure what I was doing. There were too many sounds: they grew not louder but more menacing; they were a rumbling sonic stampede heading towards me. I bent low and covered my ears against the assault.
He opened an eye and saw me huddling. "Are you all right?" he asked with sleepy concern.
"I'm fine," I said, and he pulled me closer to him and wrapped large languid arms around me, then went back to sleep. I lay there tangled in his limbs and looked skyward, my eyes tracing the lines in my stuccoed ceiling, tracing again and again the same lines. He lay there napping but I was awake.
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