Imagine! One moment, you’re busily going down on your girlfriend (an absolutely vital and necessary thing to do with one’s girlfriend, no matter what sex you happen to be), rapidly drawing her to the other side of the sun, when suddenly your heart up and shuts off! Like it were a switch someone accidentally flicked off with one’s pre-orgasmic foot. As if you weren’t even using it at all! The indignity of it! The grand merciless tongue of the universe stuck out and pointing at you! So, when the defibrillator revives you (as it always does), you take your heart aside and give it a strongly worded talking to. No heart of mine cuts out before my partner comes, do you hear me? and Listen, heart—if this is your grand plan to take over the universe, you’re going to have to find yourself an asexual host to carry out your plans for you, because I will not work without sex! Period!

And then, of course, Wynne would pop in at some point during Nadia’s supposed recovery and venture to say something implying the culpability of Nadia’s copious alcohol intake. And Nadia would whirl around (figuratively if she happened to be lying flat in a bed at the time) frustrated and somewhat loud, and say, "Wynne! Good God, the alcohol is destroying my liver. My liver! Not my fucking heart! The implosion of my heart was it’s very own brilliant idea! So, for Gaia’s sake, stop fussing over me."

It was growing increasingly difficult to maneuver under the ever-expanding weight of well-wishers’ concerns. They were always bothering her with what they thought was the inevitability of her death. As if she weren’t (and quite obviously) alive! And moreover, it was as if she didn’t have enough to manage, keeping her own spirits light, her focus attentive to the business of living and breathing (keeping that dysfunctional heart steady and beating) and making sex and mischief. She didn’t want to think about death. Not more than she had to, anyway, what with all the cardiac arrest. Why should she? She’d thought about death for decades and came up with no answers. It brought her no joy or comfort. She didn’t want to go there any time soon, and didn’t mean to.

So a sort of resentment chafed at her, borne of having to deal with all this fretting and studious concern, like sandpaper stuck to the bottom of an otherwise interesting (if peculiar) love affair. So that whenever Wynne turned a certain way in Nadia’s arms, she would leave raw red patches on Nadia’s skin that Nadia would claw at when she was alone. She loved Wynne and knew the girl meant well. But she was sick of being worried over.

Lumbersome and pop-shoddy, her body was full of whirly-gig and disaster. Enough with the exhaustion and chest pains (both sharp and dull) and the inability to breathe and to sleep. She would leap awake, sometimes, sweating, and spit up immediately all over the pristine floor by the side of the bed, on general principle, she later thought. She felt nauseous waking from disturbing dreams centered on the excavation of her girlfriend’s heart. The fear of her lover’s potential suicide threatened to tip her over some under-explored edge.

Every time Nadia woke like that, she would find Wynne steadfast and still somewhere alive nearby and Nadia trusted that her heart was still where it belonged. She slept like the dead, that girl, thank heavens. Wynne never knew how many times Nadia clambered out of the bed to clean up her fear smeared red-brown and smelly on the ice-cold floor.