they decided. They had found, indeed, a perfect place together, where subjective time raced and the external world stood entirely still.
It did not work anywhere but in their loft bed -- and only when they touched. They could stay there for hours or days, although there was no way they could tell how long the "time" had really been; they could make love, sleep, read, talk, and no time passed whatever.

Only one detail doesn't match perfectly:

But when the landlord came in, through the empty shelves in what was for him the next day, he found them in the loft bed, back to back, each staring into a different mirror. They were perfectly beautiful, with healthy, clear complexions, youthful figures, dark and glistening hair. But they had no mindsMELBOURNE, Fla. — The first hint that something was amiss here, in the shallow lagoons and brackish streams that buffer inland Florida from the Atlantic’s salt water, came last summer in the Banana River, just south of Kennedy Space Center. Three manatees — the languid, plant-munching, over-upholstered mammals known as sea cows — died suddenly and inexplicably, one after another, in a spot where deaths were rare.

A year later, the inquiry into those deaths has become a cross-species murder mystery, a trail of hundreds of deaths across one-third of the Indian River estuary, one of the richest marine ecosystems in the continental United States.

Along 50 miles of northern estuary waters off Brevard County and the Kennedy space complex, about 280 manatees have died in the last 12 months,