Robie frowned at the copy of Time. "I don't know what you need with pictures. I'm not leaving you, Art." He kept turning pages, expecting an argument.

Instead, Arthur Mohr, M.D., went out of the room. A large man, beefy, his movements were normally slow and gentle. When they were fussy it meant he was either displeased or determined. Evidently now he was determined. He returned with his camera on its tripod, leaned it against the back of the couch, and went out again.

Robie threw down the magazine. "Art, I said I'm not going to do it."

Art came back, struggling with floodlamps, awkward on their standards, their great, gleaming heads nodding and clattering idiotically. "Don't pout, Robie." Briskly he set lamps and camera in place. "No, don't get up. Sit there."

"You know," Robie said grimly, "it's only when you act like this that I ever think I really might leave you."

"Like what?" Art crouched and plugged light cords into sockets. "Like what, Robie?"

"Overbearing." Robie got out of the chair. His jacket lay on the couch. He picked it up. "I'm going out."

"Please, Robie." Art turned. Kneeling, he looked a little absurd. "What possible difference can it make to you? I'll develop and print them myself. They're certainly not going out as Christmas cards. You and I are the only ones who'll ever see them. Good God, Robie, after nearly three years, it's a little late for you to turn prim and proper on me.”

Robie sighed. "Isn't it enough that I just don't want to? Doesn't it matter to you that I'd feel-oh, hell, I don't know-dirty, like some cheap, hungry little hustler?"

"Why would you feel that, Robie?" Art's tone was reproachful. "Have I treated you like that? Ever?"

"Well, you do push me around sometimes, Art. You're doing it now.'

"I don't mean it that way." Art got to his feet. "I only want-images of you, Robie. As you are now, young and quite unbelievably beautiful.” For a moment he stared at Robie, gently, wheedlingly. Then he came to him, stepping across the tangle of wires on the floor. "When you're my age, you'll understand."

Robie hadn't put his jacket on. It hung from his hand. Art took it gently and dropped it on the little cane-seated chair beside the doorway to the hall. Then, still looking into Robie's eyes, he began to unbutton the boy's shirt.

"Art, you can't just walk all

Over-

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Art covered his mouth with a kiss. At first, Robie kept his lips stiff, teeth clamped. But in the end, he yielded, as he always did. He couldn't deny Art anything. He hadn't the right.

Art had met him when Robie's mother was dying of cancer in County Hospital. Upon her death, rather than let him go live with his drunken Uncle Clyde on his filthy chicken farm twenty miles from nowhere, Art had taken the boy in, given him a room of his own in this pleasant house, bought him clothes, fed him, sent him to school.

And asked nothing.

Robie had made the bid for sex. Oh, undoubtedly Art had suspected from the moment he'd set eyes on Robie, forlorn beside his mother's bed in the white hospital ward, that the boy would someday make that bid. So perhaps Art could be said to have taken advantage. But he rarely abused that advantage. And he honestly loved Robie. And Robie, though at barely twenty he knew little about love, couldn't conceive of life without Art.

So, fighting down his instinctive dislike of this, his unreasoning shame.

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