"Oh, my gosh!" Marc gasped. He turned to Toffee, his eyes filled with alarm. "Now, you've got to take me seriously...."
"Oh, I will!" Toffee said happily, locking her arms around his neck. "I'm going to be positively grim about you!"
"No!" Marc cried. "Let go of me!" The darkness was coming rapidly now, and the last traces of the sky were nearly gone. "Let go!"
"If I feel myself slipping," Toffee said breathlessly, "I'll just hook my fingers in your ears." She drew her lips close to his ear. "Lover," she murmured, "I'm going to stick to you like a barnacle on a boat. You'll never scrape me off!"
Marc stirred. He inched his hand forward tentatively over the cold relentless surface of the floor and opened his eyes. For a moment he couldn't think where he was, then the dull grey walls and the barred-in opening that looked out on the passage brought it all back to him. He raised himself to his knees and crawled forward. He grasped the bars and dragged himself partially upright. Then he froze, staring fixedly ahead.
At first it seemed only that his sight had dulled. Then slowly, out in the passage, the haziness before him began to take form, languidly, easily, gathering itself into a dismaying solidity. A bit at a time, Toffee, working from the toes up, appeared in all her vivid aliveness on the other side of the bars. Standing there against the background of iron greyness, she seemed even more outrageously alive and lovely than she had in his subconscious mind. And also more naked. She turned to Marc and regarded him quizzically.
"Oh, no!" Marc wailed. "No, no! You can't be here!"
"But I am," Toffee said brightly. She studied the bars between them with an air of bafflement. "What are you doing in that cage? Why don't you come out?"
"I can't come out," Marc said. "This is a jail. I'm locked in."