Melted Snow

*This one came from thinking about how we stop exploring our partners after years together. I wanted a spicy, silly take on marital rediscovery. With ice powers. Thanks for reading, and may your own melt be just as fun.*

The coffee maker was still gurgling when I looked out the kitchen window and saw the person standing in my driveway.

They weren't walking. They weren't moving at all. Just standing there at the end of the gravel, right where the mailbox leans a little to the left, facing our house.

Six in the morning. Slate Ridge in early April. The snowbanks along the road were doing that sad spring slump, all gray and dripping. Nobody in their right mind was out standing still in that.

"Adrienne," I said. "There's someone in the driveway."

No answer. Her bathrobe was still hung on the bathroom door and the shower was running, so I did what any sensible forty-four year old man does at six a.m. I picked up my phone, squinted at it, and kept watching through the window.

The person didn't move. Not a shiver. Not a breath that I could see, and it was cold enough that breath should have shown.

I put my boots on. I did not put a coat on, because apparently I have a death wish. I stepped out onto the porch and the cold bit through my flannel immediately.

"Hey!" I called. "Hey, you okay?"

Nothing.

I came down the steps slow. The gravel crunched and that was the only sound in the whole world. Up close it got worse, or weirder, or both. The figure was a woman, or shaped like a woman, and she was covered in frost. Not dusted with frost. Covered. White and crystalline, like someone had grown her out of a freezer, hair and clothes and skin all one shimmering surface.

Her eyes were open. They were the color of a lake in January.

"Ma'am?" I said. My voice cracked like I was a nervous teenager again, which was ridiculous, because I'm forty-four and I've been married twenty years and I own a landscaping business with three trucks. "Ma'am, can you hear me?"

She didn't blink. I reached out, real slow, and my fingertips were about six inches from her shoulder when the front door banged open.

"Sean! Don't touch her!"

Adrienne came down the driveway in her bathrobe with wet hair, bare feet on forty-degree gravel, and she didn't even hiss about it. That should have been my first clue. My wife has complained about cold feet since our honeymoon in Estes Park.

"Adrienne, there's a..."

"I know what there is." She walked right past me. Right up to the frost woman. And she put her hand on the woman's shoulder, the way you'd steady a friend on a dance floor.

The woman came apart.

Not broke. Not shattered. Melted. All that frost went to steam in about two seconds, a soft hiss and a puff of white rolling off the gravel, and then there was nothing there at all except a wet patch and my wife, standing in her bathrobe with her hand still out.

The shower, I should mention, was still running in the house. Our water bill is going to be interesting this month.

I did not scream. I want credit for that. I stood there with my mouth open and my coffee breath fogging in the cold, and I said, very calmly, "What."

"Okay." Adrienne turned around. She had that face she gets when she's about to tell me the truck needs new brakes. "Okay, so. Don't freak out."

"You just melted a person."

"She wasn't a person, exactly."

"You melted a person with your hand, Adrienne."

"She was a messenger. Sort of. A... a piece of home, I guess." She rubbed her hands on her bathrobe and looked at the wet spot like it was a stain on the carpet. "Can we go inside? My feet are freezing."

"Your feet are freezing," I repeated.

"Well. Part of me is."

* * *

We sat at the kitchen table. She wrapped her hands around her mug and didn't drink, just held it. I made a fresh pot because my hands needed something to do. Forty-four years old, father of one, and my wife of twenty years had just unzipped reality in my driveway.

"Start wherever you want," I said. "Start with the frost lady."

"Her name doesn't translate. She's... think of her like a letter. A letter from my mother, delivered the slow way." Adrienne blew out a breath. "I'm not from here, Sean. Not from Colorado, not from... anywhere you'd find on a map. I'm what you'd call an ice elemental. My mother calls us something else. It doesn't translate either."

"Twenty years."

"Twenty years."

"You taught half the town's kids to snowboard. You complain about my truck's heater. You make soup." I was listing evidence like a lawyer. "You make soup, Adrienne."

"I like making soup. That's not against any laws of nature." She almost smiled, then didn't. "I was going to tell you. I was waiting for Josie to leave for college, honestly, because I kept thinking, when it's just us again, when the house is quiet, then. And then she left in August and I still couldn't find the words, and then this spring the letters started coming, and..."

"Letters. More frost ladies?"

"Two before this one. They melt on their own after a few days if I don't answer them. I've been... not answering them."

I sat with that. Outside, a robin was going absolutely nuts in the crabapple tree, like the world hadn't changed at all.

"So you're cold," I said. "Inside. Like, all the way through."

"Forty degrees lower than you, give or take. You've never noticed because I'm careful. I've been careful for twenty years." She turned the mug in her hands. "You run hot, Sean. You always have. I used to put my feet on you in bed and watch you not wake up."

"I thought that was just cold feet."

"It was. Just colder than most."

I looked at my wife. Forty-three, hair still damp, robe cinched wrong like always. The same face I've woken up next to for two decades. The face I proposed to in a Denny's parking lot because I was twenty-five and had no imagination.

"Why are you telling me now?" I asked. "Really."

She was quiet for a second. Steam curled off the coffee and drifted past her face and didn't fog at all, which I found myself staring at.

"Because my mother wants me to come home. There's... a thing happening, where I'm from, and she wants me there for it. And I can't decide anything until you know what I am." She finally looked up. "And because I'm tired, Sean. I've been holding my whole self at room temperature for twenty years and I'm tired."

"Holding yourself at..."

"Every handshake. Every hug. Every time we..." She stopped and I felt my ears go warm, which is a joke between us, my ears going red at fifty-two degrees of conversation. "Every time we made love. I've been holding back. All of it. Not because I wanted to. Because I was scared of what you'd feel. What you'd think."

"Of what I'd feel," I said.

"You'd feel it. The cold. If I let go, you'd feel all of it." She said it like a warning. But she was watching me across the table, and her face held another thing, something I hadn't seen since before Josie was born.

"You want to let go," I said.

"I want to show you," she said. "What it feels like from my side."

The coffee maker clicked off. The robin kept yelling. And my wife, my frost-covered, soup-making, snowboard-teaching wife, reached across the table and laid her hand flat on the wood between us, palm up, waiting.

"Okay," I said, and put my hand in hers.

Her hand was cold. Not dead cold, not corpse cold. Cold like a lake in the shade, like the inside of a marble. I held it anyway, and something in my chest went loose.

"That's it?" I asked. "That's the big reveal? You're just... chilly?"

"I'm a walking glacier, Sean." But she squeezed my fingers, careful, the way she always did. "You're taking this well."

"I'm taking this weirdly, is what I'm doing." I rubbed my thumb over her knuckles. "I should be freaking out. I know I should be freaking out. Instead I'm sitting here with a..."

I stopped. Because the honest thing was ridiculous, and I almost didn't say it, but this woman just melted a person in my driveway and I owed her some honesty.

"Instead I'm kind of turned on," I said. "There. I said it. My wife admitted she's an ice elemental from another whatever, and my body's response is apparently..." I gestured at myself with my free hand. "This."

Adrienne's eyebrows went up. Then, slowly, she started laughing. Real laughing, the kind she does with her whole face.

"Sean Harmon. You absolute disaster of a man."

"I know."

"Twenty years of secrets, and your reaction is a half chub at the kitchen table."

"Hey, full disclosure was the deal, right? I'm disclosing." My ears were burning now, which she noticed, because she always notices, and her smile got a little crooked.

"Most men would be reaching for a phone. A priest. Something."

"I own three landscaping trucks and a mortgage. I don't have time for a crisis before six thirty." I turned her hand over in mine, studying it like it was new. It wasn't new. It was the hand that's handed me coffee every morning since we were broke and twenty-something. Just colder. "So what happens now? You answer the letter? You go home?"

"I don't know. That's the honest answer." She pulled her hand back slowly, dragging her fingers across mine like she was memorizing the temperature. "But there's something I've wanted to do for a long time, and I kept telling myself someday. And I'm so tired of someday."

"What kind of something?"

"Lessons," she said simply. "I want to teach you what I feel. The cold. Not the painful kind, the... the real kind. From my side of it. What it's like when the whole world is a temperature and you can taste it."

I should point out, in case you're judging me right now, that nobody ever accused me of being a smart man. I got a C minus in high school chemistry and once cut a customer's phone line with a shovel. But when my wife of twenty years says she wants to teach me a secret language, I say yes.

"Yes," I said. "Obviously. What do I do?"

"Now? Now you finish your coffee and you don't get ahead of yourself." She stood up and filled a glass from the tap. Water, plain water, the kind I drink a hundred glasses of a year without thinking about it once. She set it in front of me and sat back down.

"This is the first lesson?" I asked. "Water?"

"Water is the best teacher there is." She folded her arms on the table. "Here's what I want you to do. Touch your tongue to it. Just the surface. Don't drink, don't gulp. Touch it and hold still and pay attention."

I looked at her. She looked at me. She had that face, the one she gets when she's teaching kids to carve, patient and a little amused and completely sure of herself.

"Sean. Tongue. Water."

"Yes ma'am." I leaned down. The water was room temperature, obviously, tap water in April, about as boring a sensation as exists. My tongue touched the surface and I held there like she said, and I was about to announce that this was the dumbest lesson ever, when it happened.

The cold moved.

It wasn't dramatic. It was small. A thin line of coolness going up from the tip of my tongue, following... I don't know, some path, some wire inside me I didn't know I had. It went up the middle of my mouth and I felt it pass the roof of my palate and keep going, faint, like someone walking down a hallway in another room.

"Oh," I said, and the word came out muffled because my tongue was still in the glass.

"Did you feel it?" she asked, and her voice had gone quiet. Intimate. Like we were in bed with the lamp off.

"Yeah. Yeah, I felt it. It went up. It's..." I lifted my head. Water dripped off my chin and I