She was a lot of girl. Then she put the side of her dark head against my cheek and we held tight in a drowning world. She shuddered and it went away and she shuddered again and again.

"What's the matter?" I whispered.

"I don't know. So long.... The... the ice going out, maybe?" She leaned back to give me a crooked grin, but the grin turned into the pinched child-face of tears. She went face down diagonally across the bed, hitting it hard enough to bounce a little. I sat beside her and didn't touch her.

She couldn't possibly feel the same. I sank into a grey swamp-loving and unloved. Then she defeated the tears, turned and curled, and snagged me and hauled me down.

This one was a salty kiss. She put the words with it, and the words were fine. It had come true for her some months back and she had been carrying it around, waiting, without much hope.

We lay facing each other, noses touching, her eyes like sooty saucers. When she breathed I took her warm breath deep into my lungs. My hands were on the concave softness of her waist. Her fists lay against my chest. We told each other how wonderful it was.

Everything dowly became more heated, crowded, excited. We had started up the slant of a dangerous spiral. I moved away from her.

We whispered until one. We fixed my bed, spare blankets on the floor under the windows, with a sheet and her winter coat over me, and her extra pillow under my head. I was all tucked in in the dark room when she came out of the bathroom, the light behind her. Her summer pajamas might have been hung between two shrubs by a self-respecting spider. She turned out the light and the floor creaked as she came over to me. She knelt and kissed me.

"Sleep well, darling," she breathed against my cheek.

She smelled of all the summer gardens of my childhood, with a dash of Pepsodent. I slid my arm around her waist.

She pulled back a little.

Then leaning against my arm, she made a funny sound way down deep in her throat and came toward me.

It was a foolish and desperate chance, born of haste and greed. It could have been cheap. It could have spoiled too many things.

But it was magical.

Chapter 8.

I awakened in the high bed in the morning, awakened early for me, and without any shock of disa.s.sociation. I knew exactly where I was and why I was there and all about it. I knew she was behind me.

I rolled over with the greatest of care. The covers were over her shoulder and bunched under her chin. A good clean line went down from the point of her shoulder to the nip of her waist, then mounded up warmly over her hip. A strand of black hair lay across her cheek. Each soft exhalation stirred it.

Her face was smooth, faintly dusky, without blemish or scar or mark of living.

The alarm clock behind me let off a horrid clanging. Eyes still closed she lunged for the alarm, sprawling across me. She gave a gasp of fright and shock and yanked herself back, eyes wide and dazed and uncomprehending. I turned and grabbed the metal beast and stilled its fury. When I turned back to look at her, her eyes were shut again.

"Don't look at me," she whispered.

"But I like to look at you."

"Please. I feel so strange."

I kissed her and tried to hold her. She pushed my hands away.

"Go in the bathroom," she whispered.

I took my clothes in, dressed in there. I thought as I walked by the gossamer pajamas, crumpled on the floor near my makeshift bed, that they looked forlorn, betrayed. After quite a while she tapped on the bathroom door and I came out. She was in her woolly yellow robe and her hair was combed. She wouldn't look right at me.

I took her by the shoulders and shook her gently.

"Toni! What's the matter?"

"I... I feel ashamed."

I tilted her chin up with my knuckles.

"There's no need for that. Kiss me good morning

She dutifully allowed herself to be kissed. But she still wouldn't look at me. It wasn't until after she was dressed that she seemed to regain self-respect.

"Don't make me feel that it was a mistake," I pleaded.

She glowed then.

"It wasn't, Clint darling. I know it wasn't. But... well, if you want to know, I never woke up with a man before. I guess it's stupid. I feel shy or something. And Clint..."

"What?"

"I don't want to do this again until... afterward."

"All right."

She looked at me dubiously.

"You aren't cross?"

"You're lovely, Toni."

"I've got to go to work."

"Your boss won't be in today."

She stopped the nonsense and gave me my orders:

leave the door locked; not a sound while she was gone; don't walk, the floor creaks; don't run any water; don't put the blinds up; don't cough or sneeze; if you snore, don't take a nap.

"Do I snore?"

She looked away.

"I was going to stay awake and sort of... watch over you, but I fell asleep."

She left and the long day began. I heard people moving around the house, someone using a vacuum cleaner. I began slowly to starve. I was empty from collar to knees. I was a hollow tree, with squirrels enlarging the hollow. As a desperate experiment I ate a Kleenex; it didn't help a bit.

I wished I could risk using the little radio to find out what they were saying about me. The dull, interminable minutes went by. I stood at the window and looked out the crack between blinds and frame and watched the infrequent cars and local delivery trucks go by. Next door an old man, scrawny and withered as a dead chicken, guided an asthmatic power mower back and forth across the May gra.s.s.