Seize the Night

you.”
    Bobby moved from the kitchen onto the back porch. He wasn't investigating a suspicious noise, and he wasn't stepping outside to give us privacy. His slacker indifference was a shell inside which was concealed a snail-soft sentimental Bobby Halloway that he thought was unknown to everyone, even to me.
    Sasha started to follow Bobby. When she glanced at me, I shook my head, encouraging her to stay.
    Visibly discomfited, she busied herself by brewing another serving of tea to replace the one that had cooled, untouched, in the cup on the table.
    “You never turned away from me, never, never,” I told Lilly, holding her, smoothing her hair with one hand, and wishing that life had never brought us to a moment where she felt compelled to speak of this.
    For four years, beginning when we were sixteen, we hoped to build a life together, but we grew up. For one thing, we realized that any children we conceived would be at too high a risk of XP. I've made peace with my limitations, but I couldn't justify creating a child who would be burdened with them. And if the child was born without XP, he—or she—would be fatherless at a young age, for I wasn't likely to survive far into his teenage years. Though I would have been content to live childless with Lilly, she longed to have a family, which was natural and right.
    She struggled, too, with the certainty of being a young widow—and with the awful prospect of the increasing physical and neurological disorders that were likely to plague me during my final few years, slurred speech, hearing loss, uncontrollable tremors of the head and the hands, perhaps even mental impairment.
    “We both knew it had to end, both of us,” I told Lilly, which was true, because belatedly I'd recognized the horrendous obligation that I would eventually become to her, all in the name of love.
    To be honest, I might selfishly have seduced her into marriage and allowed her to suffer with me during my eventual descent into infirmity and disability, because the comfort and companionship she could have provided would have made my decline less frightening and more tolerable.
    I might have closed my mind to the realization that I was ruining her life in order to improve mine. I am not adequate material for sainthood, I am not selfless. She had voiced the first doubts, tentative and apologetic, listening to her, over a period of weeks, I'd reluctantly arrived at the realization that although she would make any sacrifice for me—and though I wanted to let her make those sacrifices—what love she still had for me after my death would inevitably be corroded with resentment and with a justified bitterness.
    Because I am not going to have a long life, I have a deep and thoroughly selfish need to want those who have known me to keep me alive in memory.
    And I am vain enough to want those memories to be cherished, to be full of affection and laughter.
    Finally I had understood that, for my sake as much as Lilly's, we had to forgo our dream of a life together—or risk watching the dream devolve into a nightmare.
    Now, with Lilly in my arms, I realized that because she had been the first to express doubts about our relationship, she felt the full responsibility for its collapse. When we'd ceased to be lovers and decided to settle for friendship, my continued longing for her and my melancholy about the end of our dream must have been dismally apparent, because I'd been neither kind enough nor man enough to spare her from them. Unwittingly, I had sharpened the thorn of guilt in her heart, and eight years too late, I needed to heal the wound that I had caused.
    When I began to tell her all this, Lilly attempted to protest.
    By habit, she blamed herself, and over the years she had learned to take a masochistic solace in her imagined culpability, which she was now reluctant to do without. Earlier, I'd incorrectly believed that her inability to meet my eyes resulted from my failure to find Jimmy, like her, I'd been quick to torture myself with blame. This side of Eden, whether we realize it or not, we feel the stain on our souls, and at every opportunity, we try to scrub it away with steel-wool guilt.
    I held fast to this dear woman, talking her into accepting exoneration, trying to make her see me for the needy fool that I am, insisting that she understand how close I had come, eight years ago, to manipulating her into sacrificing her future for me. Diligently, I tarnished the shining image she held of