Dawn crests like a bloody wave, washing over the dusty blocks of Colonia Aviacion and turning the clouds into pink styrofoam. Past the rusty steel-and-chainlink fence are the massive light towers, going dark one by one, their racks of day-bright bulbs supplanted by the real thing. The last searchlight chopper is a droning finger of sunlight that vanishes toward the Pacific. Border Patrol humvees are emerging from shadow on the morning slopes, parked with doors open, their work mostly done until the next sunset. Retreating down the gravel road that deadends at the border fence is a despondent group of wannabe Americans who lost their nerve, joined by the neighborhood walking club of elderly women out for their pre-breakfast constitutional.

Tomorrow, for chrissake. It’s tomorrow already. Nooshin has kept me up all night, ever since we got back from clubbing on Avenida Revolucion.

She curls a little, laying her head on my chest and playing with my soft-on. Which quickly becomes a hard-on. Don’t ask me how. Even Viagra can’t promise this many erections. “Condoms are weird,” she says matter-of-factly, pausing to tear open a foil wrapper.

“What do you mean?” I yawn.

“I don’t know, really.” She peels the condom over my erection and unrolls it to the base. “It just seems like a weird form of birth control, doesn’t it?”

“Have you used condoms before?”

“Used them? I’ve never even seen them! Only once in sex ed, back in high school. Saman refused to use them. He said there was something in the Qu’ran against wearing one, but I think he was just making it up.” Nooshin runs her fingertips over the latex, then her fingernails. “Can you feel that difference?”

“Yeah. I can feel the difference. Wearing a condom isn’t so bad, you know.” The reduced sensation is probably the only reason I’ve been able to endure this sex marathon. I slide a hand across her spaghetti tanktop, the only thing she’s wearing. “I wish you’d get all the way naked again.”

“I’m feeling self-conscious.”

“Why? You know I love your boobs — um, your bumps.” I nuzzle her teasingly.

“Oh god. Let’s not talk about my chest right now. Are there any positions we haven’t tried yet?”

A reminder that she was a marital prisoner of the missionary position. I wasn’t pushing an education in the Kama Sutra, but that’s basically what we accomplished in the past two weeks. Her bedroom courage comes in little joys and awkwardnesses and sometimes even setbacks.

I roll into Nooshin’s slippery warmth and make her gasp with deep thrusts. She rocks beneath me as if tugged by an invisible lapping current of thick water, the slow undulating rhythm of heavy seaweed. The delicate angles of her face are pinched with need. Beads of perspiration magnify the tiny scars that ghost across her forehead and down the bridge of her nose. Tendons rise and fall in her neck as she stares at me — into me, through me — with eyes like dark oceans, the right one slowly drifting away.

Climaxing she becomes too beautiful to look straight at, but then the moment passes. She smiles faintly and slows into excruciating ecstasy, until the only movement is me throbbing inside her with every heartbeat, my ribcage pulsing against hers. We press together so tightly that emotions pass through our skin. I’m drowning in the deep irresistible undertow of her, pulled inexorably out of my body and into hers.

Panting, I roll off Nooshin and flop on my back. “Can we…get some…sleep now?”

“Let me reload the scanner first.” She plucks off the condom for me and wads it up in a kleenex. The bed rocks, then her footsteps pad into the bedroom-slash-office — with a brief pause to dump the wad in the bathroom wastebasket. “Guess how far I am.”

“How far…what?” I say around a satisfied yawn.

“Guess how far I am!”

“I’m too fucking exhausted. You guess for me.”

“Okay, fine. Be a poop.” Familiar sounds drift through the claustrophobic house, echoing off the cinderblock walls — paper rustling, clicks from a laptop keyboard, the scanner thunking into action again. “I’m on box 37 of 41.”

Something like adrenaline surges through me. “No shit?”

“Only 4 boxes left.” Nooshin returns to her side of my queen-sized bed. “It goes pretty fast when I keep reloading the scanner and just let it run like this.” Her profile is pleased, looking in the direction of the rhythmic thunking.

I’m propped up on an elbow now. “You’re going about twice as fast as I expected,” I say in wonderment. “That means I need to hurry up on the index. And start worrying about the rest of the archive.”

“The tax records in the family’s hometown?”

“Yeah. Chirbampo. We’ll have to drive down there and scan the documents on-site. Juan already made a call to the family to let them know we’d be coming sometime soon.” A grin is spreading across my face. Juan Angel Santelana is my friend the Budweiser distributor. I can’t wait to finish preserving the Korea Textile maquiladora archive and name it after him.

Nooshin pulls the sheets up to her navel, belatedly covering the fuzzy juncture of her thighs. She’s more self-conscious about her top than her bottom. A forearm lies across her face, blocking out the creeping daylight. “Good night, Nick.”

The caramel sphinx-girl lying next to me doesn’t seem real. This doesn’t seem real. Three months ago life was a joyless grind — between Koreatown and UCLA, through academia’s flaming hoops of bullshit, into Phoebe’s torpedo-titted ennui. Now life seems like it could turn in an infinite number of directions at once, all of them thrilling with Nooshin beside me. That’s the upside. The downside is that I’m afraid of love and trust and partnering for a damn good reason, and the happiness can’t last indefinitely, and when it ends this girl will leave me with all the pieces of my heart in my hands.