“I don’t know. I just had a feeling, that’s all. I mean, seeing you here all alone, wasting kindling on the fire that really could use a log, a couple of logs—”

“Are you criticizing me? Talking down to me? Again?”

What he wanted was to hold on to her, feel her beneath him, feel her move. “No,” he said, and he was sliding in beside her on the couch now, “I would never talk down to you, never—you know that. What I want to do, the only thing I want to do, is go to bed with you. Right now.” He put his arm over her shoulder, brought his face to hers. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go upstairs.”

Her face—he leaned in to kiss her, but she shifted away from him—was the most perfect physical manifestation he had ever seen, the living presence, but her expression didn’t match it. She looked—what? Frightened? Or no, no, worse than that: detached. “I’m coming down with a cold,” she said. “I don’t feel good. Really.”

“Don’t give me that crap—you just told me you were fine, never better. So what is it, what’s the matter? Don’t you know what I’m going through here?”

The small voice, the distant eyes, the pout: “I don’t feel like it.”

“I do,” he said.

“Well, I don’t.”

“What is this, a debate? It’s been four days—four days!”

She turned her head away, shut her eyes. “‘The brain is wider than the sky, / For, put them side by side, / The one the other will include / With ease, and you beside.’”

“Jesus Christ! I don’t need quotes, or what, riddles? I need you. Don’t you hear me? Don’t you care?”

Her eyes flashed open then and she wasn’t looking at him but beyond him to where Tommy Eggers, six foot one, gawky, thin-shanked, his face red with the cold and a scarf wrapped like a noose round his throat, was edging up to the fire, his hands spread wide to catch the warmth. “It’s colder than a witch’s tit out there,” he observed, glancing over his shoulder to where the two of them sat squeezed in at the end of the couch.

He heard himself say, “Yeah, and how do you suppose the witch’s mother feels about it?” and it was nonsensical, a cover, something to say while he took his arm from Lori’s shoulder and inched over on the cushion.