Listen to this while reading: https://youtu.be/MnV9w-KLxms

The moonlight made the room flitter with shadows and white light. Green blinking lines indicated that it was four a.m.. He had to blink several times before he could convince himself it was true. Hadn't it just been one? He could feel her hand on him, loosely draped over his thigh. He cautiously picked it up and laid it lightly by her side.

Her shoulders showed sterling in the cool moonlight as her breast raised and fell to the quiet rhythm of her breath. He moved to get up but sat at the bed side for a while, listening to the slow rising morning yawning through the partially opened window. A hermit-thrush called it's final lullaby as a distant blackbird piped up with it'd song to the new coming day. But the world seemed held in place by icy shadows still waiting for the morning sun to melt it into dew.

"Leaving already?" she whispered behind him. She didn't move, but he could feel her eyes tracing his back. He turned and smiled at her in the darkness, his eyes lingering on the parts of her exposed in the fading sliver light.

"I don't want to leave, but I-"

Her tongue caught the rest of the sentence before it left his mouth, like a serpent to it's mouse. They held each other, interlocked in the shadows of one another.

"Then don't," she whispered in his mouth. Each letter lapped at his tongue making him shiver. He wanted to cover back up in the blankets, get lost again with her under the folds of wool and linen and never come back out. But he sat with her, knowing his next movement would break this moment. If he could just linger on it's tip for just a few seconds longer.

"I have to leave," he finally breathed into her, each word betraying his radiating warmth and quivering hands, which screamed for him to turn to her and pull her close. But he sat still.

"You want to leave," she said, pulling away from him, but still close enough for him to feel her on his back.

"I have to leave soon. We talked about this. You said you were fine. This was goodbye..."

He trailed off, squeezing her thigh behind him before letting his hand drop.

"I lied. I'm not. Stay. Please," her hands wrapped around him and fell to his inner thigh and caressed. He caught his moan and shivered it away. But she could feel it and pressed closer. She rested her chin on his shoulder as she continued to caress, kissing now, and humming an all too familiar tune.

His feet urged him to go, sliding back and forth nervously on the fringe of the bedside carpet. The tingling warmth tickling the soles of his feet. But the rest of him urged to stay, to lunge back into the darkness of the night for a few moments more in her cold embrace.

He was rigid now, and she stroked him as she hummed like a washerwoman at work. Her echoes reverberating in her breast on his back. She was slow, but each movement pulled him closer, her legs wrapping around his stomach, her warmth now resting just at the small of his back.

"Come back to bed. Stay. It's what you want, isn't it?" she hums in his ear, her legs constricting, her hands wringing him dry, pulling him back into the cold corners of the dark room. She doesn't wait for his answer.