He stood in the doorway a moment, looking at her.

She was wearing a yellow robe over her nightgown. Both garments were made of silk, clinging to the jut of her rounded breasts, the broadness of her hips, the smooth length of her legs. Electric pricklings coursed the lower muscles of his stomach. It had been so long, cancelled endlessly by medical tests and work and the weight of constant dread.

Lou looked up, smiling. "You look so nice and clean," she said.

It was not the words or the look on her face; but suddenly he was terribly conscious of his size. Lips twitching into the semblance of a smile, he walked over to the couch and sat down beside her, instantly sorry that he had.

She sniffed. "Mmm, you smell nice," she said. She was referring to his shaving lotion.

He grunted quietly, glancing at her clean featured face, her wheat-coloured hair drawn back into a ribbon-tied horse's tail.

"You look nice," he said. "Beautiful."

"Beautiful!" she scoffed. "Not me."

He leaned over abruptly and kissed her warm throat. She raised her left hand and stroked his cheek slowly.

"So nice and smooth," she murmured.

He swallowed. Was it just ego-flattened imagination, or was she actually talking to him as if he were a boy? His left hand, which had been lying across the heat of her leg, drew back slowly, and he looked at the white, glaze-skinned band across the bottom of its third finger. He'd been forced to take the ring off almost two weeks before because the finger had become too thin.

He cleared his throat. "What are you making?" he asked disinterestedly.

"Sweater for Beth," she answered.

"Oh."

He sat there in silence while he watched her skillful manipulation of the long knitting needles. Then, impulsively, he laid his cheek against her shoulder. Wrong move, his mind said instantly. It made him feel even smaller, like a young boy leaning on his mother. He stayed there, though, thinking it would be too obviously awkward if he straightened up immediately. He felt that even rise and fall of her breathing as he rested there, a tense, 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.