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unresolved sensation in his stomach.
    “Why don’t you go to sleep?” Lou asked quietly.
    His lips pressed together. He felt a cold shudder move down his back.
    “No,” he said.
    Imagination again? Or was his voice as frail as it sounded to him, as devoid of masculinity. He stared somberly at the V-neck of her robe, at the flesh-walled valley between her breasts, and his fingers twitched with his repressed desire to touch her.
    “Are you tired?” she asked.
    “No.” It sounded too harsh. “A little,” he amended.
    “Why don’t you finish up the ice cream?” she asked, after a pause.
    He closed his eyes with a sigh. Imagination it might be, but that didn’t prevent him from feeling like a boy—indecisive, withdrawn, much as though he’d conceived the ridiculous notion that he could somehow arouse the physical desire of this full-grown woman.
    “Shall I get it for you?” she asked.
    “No!” He lifted his head from her shoulder and fell back heavily against a pillow, staring morosely across the room. It was a cheerless room. Their furniture was still stored in Los Angeles and they were using Marty’s attic castoffs. A depressing room, the walls a dark forest green, pictureless, only one window with ugly paper drapes, a pale, thread-worn rug hiding part of the scratched floor.
    “What is it, darling?” she asked.
    “Nothing.”
    “Have I done something?”
    “No.”
    “What, then?”
    “Nothing
, I said.”
    “All right,” she said quietly.
    Was she unaware of it? Granted it was torture for her to be living with terrible anxiety, hoping each second to get that phone call from the Center, a telegram, a letter, and the message never coining. Still…
    He looked at her full body again, feeling breath catch in him uncontrollably. It wasn’t just physical desire; it was so much more. It was the dread of tomorrows without her. It was the horror of his plight, which no words could capture.
    For it wasn’t a sudden accident removing him from her life. It wasn’t a sudden illness taking him, leaving the memory of him intact, cutting him from her love with merciful swiftness. It wasn’t even a lingering sickness. At least then he’d be himself and, although she could watch him with pity and terror, at least she would be watching the man she knew.
    This was worse, far worse.
    Month after month would go by—almost a year of them still if the doctors didn’t stop it. A year of living together day by day, while he shrank. Eating meals together, sleeping in the same bed together, talking together, while he shrank. Caring for Beth and listening to music and seeing each other every day, while he shrank. Each day a new incident, a new hideous adjustment to make. The complex pattern of their relationship altered day by day, while he shrank.
    They would laugh, unable to keep a long face every single moment of every single day. There would be laughter, perhaps, at some joke—a forgetful moment of amusement. Then suddenly the horror would rush over them again like black ocean across a dike, the laughter choked, the amusement crushed. The trembling realization that he was shrinking covering them again, casting a pall over their days and nights.
    “Lou.”
    She turned to face him. He leaned over to kiss her, but he couldn’t reach her lips. With an angry, desperate motion he pushed up on one knee on the couch and thrust his right hand into the silky tangle of herhair, fingertips pressing at her skull. Pulling back her head with a tug, he jammed his lips on hers and forced her back against the pillow.
    Her lips were taut with surprise. He heard her knitting thud on the floor, heard the liquid rustle of silk as she twisted slightly in his grip. He ran a shaking hand across the yielding softness of her breasts. He pulled away his parted lips and pressed them against her throat, slowly raking teeth across the warm flesh.
    “Scott!” she gasped.
    The way she said it seemed to drain him in an instant. A barren chill