In the dark her eyes were two pinpoints of light as she simply gazed at him under lowered eyelashes. He could feel her heartbeat against his chest. He didn't look at her.
          She sighed, a cool wind brushing against his cheek, stirring his hair, and closed her eyes. The light extinguished, gone without a flicker. One last flicker.
          He needed at least one last flicker.
          Waiting until her breathing had evened out into the shallow plateau of sleep and then he reached over and gathered her hair in his hand, bringing the scarlet fistful of it to his lips and inhaling the scent of her, so heady and intoxicating. He needed that.
          Lights in the dark.
          Her skin was silk beneath his touch and he relaxed his hand on her hair, letting his arm lie loosely around her as she slept, her head pillowed on his shoulder. He knew better than to try to sleep. It was over too soon, the night, and when it was taken away, she would be too.
          She smelled like spring flowers and sweet wine all at once, the flowers that would bloom in the spring. He would gather as many as he could into his hands and bring them back for his mother to put in the window. Then as he lay in bed at night he would see the moon shining off the white petals and he would smell their scent wafting to where he lay still and silent on the small bed, like lights in the dark.
          But they withered the next day, and then he would have to throw them away.
          She shifted in her sleep and he looked down at her in the shadows. His hand that lay free on the covers shifted to touch hers, ever so slightly. The moon glimmered off her skin, like they had done off the white petals of his childhood.
          In his dreams he could still see them sometimes, the white flowers. And then he would see her eyes.
          He gently untangled himself from her, slipping out of the bed down gently to the floor. It was cool and hard beneath his feet and the room's coldness wrapped itself around his naked body like a satin shroud. The moon was only a sliver tonight.
          So many things he needed, that he needed to know, and yet it all came down to her. Because here in the dark and in the sliver of moon hanging from the sky, there was only him and her and no one else.
          He needed to know.
          She curled around herself in the bed, missing the warmth of a body even in her world of dreams. He wrapped his arms around himself. He could go back to the bed. Could go back to her, wind his arms about her and drift off towards darkness.
          So close, yet so far apart, and so, so cold.
          What he needed.
          He needed a blanket to stop the shivering.
          He needed the white flowers that would shine in the window.
          He needed the scent of spring and sweet wine.
          He had a dream once in which he woke up in pure darkness and when he reached out his hand, his arm, to touch, there was no one there.
          He needed lights in the dark, one last flicker.
          To find his way home.