She was too tired to walk the eight blocks to the office as she sometimes did, and took a bus. But no sooner had the doors closed her in when she began to feel afraid. Suppose they bumped into something? Suppose the doors stuck and she couldn't get out? She started to get up, moved by an almost uncontrollable urge to ask the driver to stop and let her off- Then common sense took over and she sat down.

Okay, Dr. Liebermann, she thought grimly. So I'm really hoping we'll bump into something and I'll get cracked up. Anything to keep me from going to the show with Doug Martin and maybe getting my hand held. I'd like to be in a hospital with a cast on my leg. You're one hundred per cent right, and I'm not so dumb I don't know it, but do you think that makes me feel any better about the whole thing, you Freudian son of a bitch?

She got off at the corner and sauntered across the street in front of a moving truck, ignoring the red light. The driver leaned out of the cab laughing. "Take your time, doll, I got all day. What's your phone number?"

By noon her wastebasket was full of crumpled letters and the office manager had spoken to her twice about the way the tapes were piling up. She skipped lunch and went for a walk, but it didn't do any good. I'd like to walk right out of this damn town and never come back. Drop dead beside the road somewhere. I can’t do it. I won't.

She told herself it was silly to be afraid of Doug Martin. Half the human race was male, if you didn't count the gay boys who were certainly no threat. You couldn't avoid half the human race. And this was a nice fellow, like any other—but nicer than most.

But she was afraid of him.

Paul, she thought. The small thin worm stirred warningly in the dark of memory.

She stopped. She was in the town's main shopping center. All the stores were lighted and filled with hurrying lunch-hour shoppers. She stood beside a liquor store, bigger and fancier than any she had ever been in. The bottles in the show windows winked enticingly.

I've always known it, she thought. While we were fixing up the apartment, and all. I knew it couldn't last.

Tears of self-pity welled into her eyes. One sure thing, I can't go back to that office and sit at a desk all afternoon, mangling letters. She went in.

* * *

The apartment was still when she opened the door, with that peculiarly empty feeling a place has in the middle of a weekday when everyone is at work. She walked on tiptoe, although no one was there to hear her. The drip of water in the kitchen sink was loud in the silence. A car on the street below backfired. She jumped.

Two used cups stood in the sink. She washed them and put them away, straightened the little spice tins on the top shelf, and wiped the stove top with a plastic sponge. There was nothing else to do. Erika was a domestic type. Trying to stall it off, she thought coldly. Might as well go ahead and get it over with.