He was uninterested in the time that had passed; the pale pink traces of sunset on his walls, the steadily increasing urgency of his cat’s pleas for his dinner.  He saw nothing, nothing in his peripheral vision, nothing but the letters on the screen, which after the first ten minutes (it had in fact been exactly eighteen) had ceased to be words and phrases, and become a pattern that was visible only through a growing red haze.

He put his fingers against his wrist, trying to measure his pulse as he had learned from his last girlfriend, an ER nurse with a gentleness and quiet intensity that at times scared him; scared him much as he was scared now — because in certain precipitous moments, it was the quiet intensity that felt like a loaded gun, loaded and slowly leveled, an unseen finger pulling, in nearly immeasurable increments, on its trigger. He enjoyed guns; enjoys them and feared them, both for the same reason: the potential, the threat, of immense power, a power that could destroy in an instant.

He felt that trigger, now, except that in the place of metal was a growing tightening of his stomach.  He felt his breath growing more and more shallow.  

NO.  No.  Not now.  Not again.