To Fall for Winter

by Kelsey Kingsley

Maybe even on her heart?

  God, I hoped so.

  “What are ya thinkin’?” I gently pried.

  She hesitated with a small shake of her head, black hair swaying over her shoulders, and I smirked at the back of her head.

  “Hey Snow, talk to me.”

  She turned, clutching the orange in her hands, biting her lip tentatively. “I, um … I’m thinking I don’t want to be a goddamn cat. I don’t want you to go out and find some fucking black cat if we, uh …”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding. My heart hammered. God, it hammered so hard. “I can be a dog person.”

  “God, Ryan,” she groaned, and she laid a hand over her eyes.

  In the month and a half since she walked into the clinic, in the month since she moved in with me, I had learned very quickly that she only used my real name when she was serious about something. My name had never irritated or scared me so much as when she used it.

  But right then, I felt hopeful.

  “You won’t be a cat, Snow,” I insisted.

  “Did you think any of them would turn into cats?” she asked, breathing heavily, pressing her hand to her eyes.

  “No,” I replied honestly, “but I also didn’t have any of this with them. None of them were you, and that’s how I know you won’t ever be a cat. Or a dog. Or a feckin’ gerbil. Nothing else could be you.”

  And she swallowed, hesitated, and then, her hand dropped from her eyes.

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  “Okay, what?” I asked, lifting a side of my mouth into an apprehensive smile.

  “I’ll be your girlfriend. We can … go ahead and label this thing.”

  I laughed triumphantly, leaning back in the chair. “Why are ya okay with it now, but not before Christmas?”

  She walked toward me, still gripping that orange between her hands. “Because, Ryan, you only wanted me to be your girlfriend when I wanted to meet your family. You wanted me to be your girlfriend, because we were having sex and you felt guilty about it. You felt like you had to, to avoid being some disappointment to some bitch that never mattered. But now? You want this, because it’s what you truly want, and I want that, too.”

  Snow came to stand in front of me, and I reached out, pulling her between my thighs. I wrapped my arms around her, and I looked up to her face, my bearded chin between her breasts as she rolled the orange around in her hands. I stared into the chilly eyes of that strange feckin’ woman, and I felt for the first time that I was looking beyond her exterior, beyond her eyes, and straight into the wild, calm, unpredictable core of everything that was Snow. I thought for a minute that I was looking at her soul, and it was comfortable and warm. Like coming in from the freezing cold, and I swore I felt the feeling of pins and needles pass through my fingers and toes as I thawed out.

  A heavy breath passed between my lips. The rest of my self-doubt, self-loathing ... It left my body, left my lungs, and the air I breathed was clean. Fresh.

  “You just fell in love with me.” Her quiet voice pulled me from my world within her eyes, and I saw her face. Her soft pink lips, her white skin.

  I cleared my throat. “How can you even know that?”

  “Because I let you in.”

  “A little arrogant to think you have that kinda power, isn’t it?” I asked, smirking.

  “Yes,” she agreed with a slight nod, “but isn’t it the truth?”

  And feckin’ hell, it was.

  My eyes held hers, delving deeper into that chaotic world of silent, snowy nights, as my hands slid up and under her tank top. The orange was placed lovingly onto the table, watching us with its unblinking eyes as the shirt was pulled up, over her breasts, and off of her arms. My mouth homed in on one nipple, drawing it between my teeth, rolling my tongue over the smooth round jewelry, as my hands went to work on getting her out of those pants. And I never once retreated from the world within her eyes.

  “Don’t fuck me here,” she groaned, her lids drooping partially as my fingers slid easily between her legs. “I can’t. Not when it’s looking at me.”

  I released her nipple with a laugh and pulled her down to straddle my lap. “Come on, I’ve always wanted a smiling orange to watch me fuck my girlfriend.”

  But y’know, the truth of it was, I didn’t particularly want to fuck her at all.

  Because, in that world of icy warmth, there was no fucking. There was no screwing, or even sex. There was something deep and meaningful. Something binding. Something that said our crazy nipple-biting, back-scratching banging against the refrigerator door meant something more than just coming.

  Hell, maybe it said forever, maybe it said always—I had no idea. But one thing I knew for sure was, it said that I loved that feckin’ woman. I loved her more than drawing, more than cats. More than tattoos, more than cigarettes and motorcycles.

  More than anything.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN |

  L WORDS & CRUTCHES

  Two months had passed since meeting Snow, and neither one of us had uttered the L word after that night when she saw what had combusted in my heart.

  Initially, I didn’t think it mattered. It was just a word, a word for a feeling that I knew we both felt in the purest, rawest of ways. I felt it in the way we constantly needed to touch; when we were throwing food into the crockpot, when she was teaching me how to tattoo the skin of dozens of oranges, and when we slept in our bed. I felt it in the way we talked to each other; the banter, the reassurances, the refreshing honesty.

  The teamwork, the togetherness.

  I felt it in the way we couldn’t unlock our eyes when we made love, and Christ, when the feck had I started calling it that? It had all started as just sex—fucking—but it had changed somewhere along the way, and we both knew it.

  We just wouldn’t say it.

  And the thing was, the more we didn’t say it, the more I thought about everything else that wasn’t said. Why she had come to town, where she had come from, what had made her so cold. Those unspoken things, things that mattered when you loved someone.

  I guess I was just realizing that I was desperately, hopelessly, in love with a near-stranger.

  And I was getting sick of it.

  ❧

  I rolled off of her, undoing the seal of our frigid, hot passion, and she rolled back to me. Her leg curled around mine, pulling my thigh between her painted legs. My arm wrapped around her shoulders, one hand found her hair while the other found the growing length of mine.

  “Christ,” I groaned, spent and exhausted.

  “Mm-hmm,” she sighed happily, rolling a lazy finger over my nipple. “You know what? Tomorrow, I think I’ll let you tattoo me.”

  “What? I’ve only been doing this shite for a couple weeks,” I laughed.

  “Yeah, but you’re good. I don’t think there’s much more you’re going to learn from fruit. You need skin, and it might as well be mine.”

  “You think I’m ready to ruin you forever?”

  She laughed, pressing her lips to my chest. She held them there for one, two seconds. Imprinting herself onto my skin. “Oh, Ireland … you’ve already ruined me forever.”

  It was things like that. Those little things that weren’t all that little at all, those little things that told me she loved me but just wouldn’t say it.

  I held in my sigh as I gently pushed her away from me, maneuvering to a seated position. Knees up, arms crossed over them. The window was open—it was always open—and I grabbed my pack of smokes and offered her one.

  “Hey,” she said immediately. “What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head, holding my lighter to her. “Nothing.”

  She pushed my hand away, holding the unlit cigarette between her fingers, and I lit my own with a shrug.

  “Something’s wrong.” She grabbed my shoulder, and I shrugged her off.

  “Tell me right now what you’re thinking, Ryan, or I swear, I’ll—”

  My lips twisted. “You’ll, what?”

  “I’ll leave.�
��

  It was cold, but, that was Snow. She was winter. Pleasant and cozy one second, cold and unmoving the next.

  I sucked hard on the cigarette, shaking my head. “Nice, Snow,” I said, choked with smoke, and I exhaled. “Really nice.”

  “Jesus, Ryan,” she groaned, sighing through her aggravation. “You’re being a pain in the ass, you know that? Just tell me what’s wrong.”

  With the insult pinging at my nerves, I turned to her, resting my head on my forearms. “Why don’t you talk to me?”

  “Talk to you?” she parroted, her mouth open. “I talk to you all the time!”

  “You do,” I agreed, putting the cigarette to my lips, “but babe, you don’t tell me a whole lot.”

  Her stare was blank. “I have no idea what you’re talking about right now.”

  “Nah, I guess ya don’t.” The cigarette wobbled, flickering between my lips as I talked. The tension built, piling onto my shoulders. I didn’t want to risk it, didn’t want to push—not with her, and I wiped a hand over my brow, shaking my head. “Ya know what? Never mind. Just forget I said anything. It doesn’t matter.”

  “No.” She grabbed my hand, pulled it away from my forehead. “Explain what your problem is.”

  God, why had I said anything? I looked to her, looked into her eyes, and saw that the doors to my wintry world had shut, leaving me out in the cold.

  I turned away and resisted the urge to shiver. I stared at the door—her escape.

  She’s going to leave. This is it. You’re going to drive her away.

  But I had come this far, and I plucked the cigarette from my mouth. “I’ve told ya everything about myself. You know about my past, the shite I’ve done, the women I’ve been with. I don’t know shite about you Snow, and I can’t shake the feelin’ that you don’t want me to know who you are.”

  I didn’t watch the twisting of her lips, but I felt her grab the lighter from my hand. I saw her through my peripherals, holding the cigarette in her teeth, setting it to the flame, and then, she watched the fire flicker for a moment before letting it die.

  I hoped that wasn’t some sort of analogy.

  Y’know … Little things that weren’t all that little.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” she said. Her voice flat, emotionless.

  “Bullshite. Everybody has a story, and babe, you have one, whether you wanna tell me or not,” I said, finally turning to her. My fingers pinched the smoke, hard. Harder, until it crushed under the pressure. “But that’s bein’ in a relationship with someone, Snow. You tell that person this shite. You should want to tell them—you should want to tell me.”

  Her hand robotically moved the cigarette to and from her mouth. The smoke fingered the air, swirling around the words that seemed so wise from a guy who barely had his own shite together. But the thing was, I did have one thing together: my feelings for her. I felt better, knowing she carried the weight of my shame around with her. Knowing I wasn’t alone. Knowing we were together, a team.

  I had given her everything. I had changed everything. And she didn’t have the sense—the decency—to truly share herself with me.

  “Can I ask you somethin’?”

  “What?” She wouldn’t look at me. Her eyes were fixated on that feckin’ door.

  I wanted to nail it shut.

  “Do you love me?”

  She turned her head, slowly. “Oh, so is this why you’re acting like a pussy?”

  The jab curled my lips into a snarl. “I’m just askin’. It’s not a difficult question. Pretty straight forward, actually.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  My mouth gaped, my cigarette hand drooped. “Why wouldn’t I wanna know?”

  “Because it’s a word, Ryan. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  I clapped a hand to my chest. “Maybe it means somethin’ to me, or does that not matter to you?”

  She didn’t respond. Her nostrils flared, her lips pursing as a shaking hand brought the cigarette to her mouth.

  “Snow,” I said, warning her with her own name. “Why don’t you talk to me? Why don’t you tell me how you feel?”

  Her gaze was pinned to the door. Her fingers wiggled, itching to leave.

  It was coming. The storm of the century.

  And I had forgotten to grab my coat.

  “Because,” she said, clambering off the bed with her back to me, “the second you start saying it, you stop showing it. The second you know me, the more you feel sorry for me, the more your feelings aren’t real. Words are a crutch, Ryan, and I’m not going to lean on them. Not with this—not with you.”

  I stared at her back. The black branches that sprawled up to her neck, over her shoulders, with her skin highlighting the snowy drifts. The trunk that traveled the length of her spine. The trunk led to nowhere, just stopping in the middle of her back. Faded into the pale, blank flesh. God … I had seen that tree so many times, had flattened my hands over it, traced it with the tip of my tongue, but never had I grasped the analogy behind it. Never had I looked at it and seen that it had no stump to hold it in place, no roots to ground it—to ground her. Just a severed tree, with a severed heart, left to freeze in the middle of a wintry night.

  “Jesus … What the hell happened to you, babe?” I struggled to keep my voice from quavering. To not speak in whispers, to not give away that I was terrified of her walking out that door.

  She shook her head. “Nothing happened.”

  “Bullshite! Something happened Snow, and I’m askin’ you to tell me what it is!”

  She spun around, her face contorting with anger and sorrow, but something told me it wasn’t necessarily directed at me.

  If only she’d just tell me who.

  I’d kill him.

  “Nothing happened,” she growled through her gritted teeth, her fists clenched at her sides.

  “Jesus Christ, Snow! You are constantly goin’ on, demandin’ that I’m honest with you, and I have never lied to you once. Now, the second I need a real answer from you, you can’t be honest with me? I want to feckin’ help you!”

  She grabbed the ashtray from her side of the bed, stamped out the butt angrily, and pulled her blanket from the foot of the bed. She scrambled to collect her clothes from the floor, and I asked what she was doing, where she was going. Anything to keep her from that door.

  “Leave me alone.”

  The door opened. She walked from the bedroom, and I grabbed my sweatpants, pulling them on quickly before stalking after her.

  “No, talk to me.”

  “You really need to leave me alone,” she repeated, voice shaking and warning.

  “I’ll leave you alone when you tell me the tru—”

  She shoved me hard. Pushed against my chest. I didn’t move. I was too big, she was too small, but she shoved me nonetheless, and it was violent. It was rage.

  “You will never, ever accuse me of lying to you, Ryan. Never.”

  “Nah. I guess not,” I said, a bitter undertone entwining through the words, weaving through each letter. “I guess ya actually have to talk to me to lie, right?”

  I regretted that one immediately.

  “Fuck you, Ryan,” and she shoved again. Harder, and that time, I walked away, because now, I was the one who needed space. Now, I needed to be alone. I needed to breathe, I needed to smoke the rest of the cigarettes, I needed to draw something ugly and disgusting.

  I slammed the door to our bedroom behind me, closing her off from me the way she had shut me outside of her. That wintry world I had made a home inside of, had locked me out, and I was freezing. I needed my anger to warm me up.

  An hour went by, sitting on the bed, smoking and drawing. Charcoal smeared over the page, black tendrils sprawled against the white. The side of my hand was blackened with smudges before I looked up at the clock, and I noticed Cheryl, no—Cee.

  All of the cats answered to different names now; Jessica was Jay, Jennifer was Fer, and Tara was Tee. It hadn’t been jealousy tha
t made her insist on that rule, but the desire to help me move on. She had simply pushed me to realize the past didn’t matter.

  She could have just shut me out, pushed me away, but she worked with me. She did things to make me the best version of myself, and not to fix me. Now, what the feck had I done when her moment came?

  I fought her.

  I drove her away.

  “I’m a feckin’ arsehole,” I muttered to Cee. The cat slowly blinked her agreement, and I climbed off the bed.

  The living room was empty. I wasn’t surprised by that. The kitchen and her studio were also empty, the bathroom door was open, and she wasn’t in there either. None of those things surprised me. I climbed the stairs to Granny’s place, dark and quiet with sleep, and I looked out the window to see if she was in the backyard.

  She wasn’t. She wasn’t anywhere, and that surprised me.

  I walked quietly to the front of the house, looked out the window in Granny’s darkened living room, and saw her car was gone. I ran down the stairs, my legs moving faster than I thought possible, and I looked throughout our apartment, and saw things had gone missing. The backpack she used as a purse, her coat, clothes from the laundry basket. Most of her stuff was still there, she hadn’t taken everything, I told myself to keep the panic at bay, but then again, she didn’t have much, did she?

  And then, that’s when the pain settled in. That dread that caused my throat to seize. I pushed my hands into my hair, squeezing my eyes shut, and I slid against the wall to the floor.

  She had left, the one thing she knew to use against me. The thing she knew would hurt the most.

  With my arms folded over my knees, forehead pressed to my wrists, I ran through every possible place she could be. I had never gone after a girlfriend before, but she wasn’t like the rest. She was different, and I would find her. But before I could get dressed and on the back of my bike, there was a knock at the door.

  I tripped over myself, standing and hurrying to answer the door, thinking it could have been her, but instead, I opened it up to find my older brother, looking as though he had just rolled out of bed.

  “What the feck are you doing here?” I asked, and looked around him, up the stone steps leading to the backyard. Thinking that maybe, just maybe, he had found her and brought her home to me.