COLEThe ceiling hadn't changed in three nights.Same water stain in the corner, the one shaped vaguely like a hockey skate if you looked at it long enough, which I had. Too many times. I knew every crack in the plaster above my bed like I knew the lines on my own palms.Sleep wasn't coming. Hadn't come in three days.I lay there in the dark with my arms behind my head and my jaw clenched and every light in the apartment off, listening to the building settle around me. The pipes knocked. Someone two floors up walked across their kitchen. A car alarm went off somewhere on the street below and then stopped.I was so tired my eyes burned.I still couldn't sleep.The problem — and I'd been very carefully not calling it a problem — was that every time I got close, my brain did the thing. The uninvited thing. The thing I'd been shutting down for weeks with varying degrees of success.Tonight I was too exhausted to shut it down.So when it started, I just — let it.Luke's jaw. The particular
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