The heater was going full-blast, a dull roar trying to drown out the sound of the rain drilling against the roof of the car.

The vehicle rumbled slowly down the road, my wife trying to discreetly look at me through the rear-view mirror. When she caught my eye, she smiled secretly at me.

But it's wasn't her that left me stilled and chilled in the coming mornings. But she would be the one to later kiss away the cold with her warm mouth, licking along the patches of frost coating my neck and chest.

A crack of thunder rolled.

The storm looked like a black wave ready to crash down onto the car at any moment. The road like a long black ribbon, clumsily tied into a curving knot. The wheels slid as we surged through a deep puddle.

I lay in the back car-seat, my head in my other lover's lap. Her short pale hair hangs in sheets of icicles above me.

She was sublime. Vapor slowly spun away from her, battling with the hot air blowing from the vents. I looked up into her blank white eyes. A drop of water dripped onto my face, and I winced. I reached up to wipe the cold trail off my cheek. Her tears always burned like fire for a moment.


She lifted her head and gazed out the window at the blur of scenery receding behind us. We were rushing forward into an unknown future, throwing caution to the wind. But the longer my lover looked, the more she sublimated. The side window fogged up with ice, making it impossible to see outside.

I had long supposed that the only thing flowing through her veins was pure ice water, turgid slush that slowly pushed and pulsed its way to her heart. Looking at her always shot me through with urgency and passion, but none of that penetrated her glacial exterior.

Eventually, the car stopped.

If anything I said or did after that point truly reached her,

I never saw it.
In only a month, my calls would go unanswered.

If someone melted her, it wasn't me.

My wife's hot hands would press against my shoulders, and she would murmur softly.

But with just a look, my other lover could freeze me in place and stop all my thoughts. My wife couldn't do that. Maybe I had grown too used to heat, too tolerant of the summer weather.

I would lay stretched out across the concrete of the patio, soaking up the rays of her sun with an unsurpassed languor.

My other lover was a rough ice sculpture as incomplete as a half-finished