She didn’t move when he sat down beside her. The breeze blew smoke from the tip of her cigarette in her place.
It stirred her hair, or he might have thought she was made of stone. That was how it had been all along, wasn’t it? If the world hadn’t kept moving her, to action and laughter and the rage that had shaken him and that city to their foundations, he would have wondered, sometimes, if she was real at all.
Maybe it was a safety measure. Self-imposed, or the world had placed it on her. She burned only when blown on, because otherwise they would all have burned down much sooner than that night.
The concrete crackled under him as he shifted his thighs. There would be no softness left to touch within the city limits. Farther, perhaps. Past the horizon, perhaps, forests and fields were all razed flat and black and the world was slumbering beneath its first truly dark night in centuries. If so, he could love her sadly, a little, for making it happen.
“Can I have a light?” he asked.
She looked at him as if ready to make him regret the joke. Just for a second, an arch of her brow, then sank back into stillness. It wouldn’t be much longer for her. Which meant it wouldn’t be much longer for him, either – he had already decided.
“Do you even have a cigarette?” she asked.
He shook his head. Something fine dusted down the back of his neck.
“Nah. They’re all gone.” He looked out to the black, the smoulder, spiderweb outlines of the city sure to die by the time the moon set. That true, darkest night, coming on quick as the chill in the air. He shivered with it and anticipation.
“It’s all gone,” he said. “Everyone.”
She stared out the same way. Didn’t nod. Didn’t swallow tears. The smoke swayed, a grey silk metronome between her eyes.
Could she even be sorry? If not, he could hate her a little, happily, for that.
“I guess I should be grateful to you for saving me,” he said.
But they both knew there was a point where being saved didn’t matter. As just a scrubby, living body – being a person took context. Being saved as a person took context. She had taken all of his away, so there was nothing left but the question he asked again.
“Can I have a light?”
She looked at him longer then, truer, stirred. He could be a breeze to her, he had been, and he had loved and hated that. While it had lasted. But now the spiderweb outlines were erasing themselves against the black, the moon was setting, and the only thing that would make the night darker was having no one to watch it.
She nodded. He did the same.
He stood. He couldn’t have said why, except it seemed right, like a match held up by fingertips, to blaze briefly to the night with all the light she struck to him.
