Emmett sets the bag down, flexes his fingers inside his gloves, and watches the faint cloud of his breath drift toward the cracked hallway mirror.
“Brilliant idea,” he tells his reflection, which looks paler than usual and has acquired the beginnings of a red nose. “Come out to the middle of nowhere in December, stay in the old family house, definitely not haunted, definitely still structurally sound. Absolute genius.”
It is, he tells himself, fine. He has stayed here in worse weather. There are extra blankets in the cupboard and firewood stacked under the lean-to outside, and he will only be here for a week or two at most, just long enough to check the pipes, clear out some boxes, and confirm that the roof has not finally decided to take early retirement. He can handle a little cold.
The radiator ticks once, metal contracting as some thin thread of heat begins to move, and the boiler chooses that moment to cough into reluctant life somewhere below his feet.
He fills the kettle and sets it on the hob, then stands by the window while it works its way toward boiling. The garden beyond the glass is stiff with frost, each blade of grass held in place under a fine, glassy sheen; the hedge at the edge of the property has turned pale, its leaves rimed in white, and the fields beyond look like someone has drawn a grey line where the earth stops and the low, heavy sky begins.
His breath mists faintly against the cold window. He is not close enough to touch it, but the glass fogs anyway, a thin, pale veil that should be still and featureless, yet isn’t.
A line appears, slowly and with unmistakable intent, as if something on the inside of the glass is dragging a fingernail through the condensation. It curves, then straightens, then repeats the pattern with more confidence. Emmett watches, very still, as letters form.
GOOD MORNING :)
He stands there, the kettle humming away behind him, and experiences for a moment the particular quiet that comes when the part of his brain responsible for sensible reactions has simply walked out. He examines the window for the possibility of a neighbour crouched outside, despite the fact that the nearest house is far enough away that he cannot see it through the weather, then looks back at the words.
“Absolutely not,” Emmett mutters. He pushes his sleeve over his hand and wipes the message away. The letters smear, the condensation clears, and the glass shows only the pale garden and the creeping dusk again.
The air in the kitchen cools by a noticeable two or three degrees. Behind him, the kettle clicks off, though the steam that should be rising from its spout thins and twists in an odd way before vanishing, and when he pours the water into his mug the surface of the tea tries, for one second, to skin itself over with the palest layer of ice.
Emmett stares at the cup, manages not to say anything particularly dramatic to it, and instead swirls the liquid firmly, watching the delicate frost crack and recede.
“Very funny,” he says under his breath, to the window and to whatever was using it as a whiteboard. “I hope you are enjoying yourself.”
The first night, he tells himself, will be the worst, and after that he will acclimatise, or the weather will break, or the boiler will explode and solve the problem in a decisive if inconvenient way.
He piles extra blankets on the bed until the whole thing looks like a fortification rather than a bed, and digs the hot-water bottle out of the cupboard, filling it from a saucepan of water hesitantly heated on the hob. By the time he has wrestled the hot-water bottle into position at the foot of the bed and changed into pyjamas, his breath is visible again in the dim air of the bedroom, a reminder that whatever the thermostat believes is happening bears little relation to reality. He switches off the lamp and lies in the dark, listening to the building settle around him.
He falls asleep somewhere between working out how much it would cost to replace the boiler and composing a strongly worded email to his future self about better decision-making.
When he wakes, it is not because of a sound, but because his mouth feels wrong.
For a few seconds he lies still and tries to work out what is off; the air is colder, which he had expected, and the blankets have shifted slightly, which he had also expected. The strange part is the way his lips seem to resist movement, stuck together in a way that is both too stiff and too delicate.
He brings his hand up, carefully, and touches his mouth. His fingertips brush over something brittle and fine, something that cracks with a soft, unmistakable sound.
Emmett sits up too quickly, the blankets sliding down from his shoulders and letting the cold sink claws into his skin, and wipes at his lips with the back of his hand. White dust comes away on his skin, a thin scattering of icy crumbs that melt almost instantly against his warmth.
The shape of his mouth throbs with a cold burning sensation, tingling as the skin, which apparently spent some portion of the night delicately frozen, returns to normal.
There is a faint line of the same sensation along his jaw, as if someone has drawn a fingertip from the hinge of his jaw to the tip of his chin and then left the mark behind in frost.
He swings his legs out of bed and plants his feet on the floor, expecting cold boards and finding, instead, something slick and fragile under his right heel.
He looks down.
A sheath of ice, as thin and complicated as lace, covers the stretch of floor between the bed and the door. Tiny fernlike patterns branch across it, intertwining and overlapping. He presses his toes against it and hears the soft crackle of something that had wanted to last longer than this. “Okay,” he says, voice hoarse and far too loud in the quiet room. “No. Absolutely not.”
He picks his way to the window with exaggerated care, stepping where the frost is thinnest, and finds the glass once again dimmed by condensation. Low down on the pane, just at the level of his chest, a shape has formed in frost. It is not elaborate, nor particularly skilled; the lines are a little wobbly, and the proportions are off, but there is no mistaking what it is supposed to be.
A heart. Crooked, a little slanted to one side, with the lower point not quite meeting in the middle. He is not a person inclined toward dramatics before coffee, or ever, if he can help it, but the part of his mind that has been trying its best to offer rational explanations for each escalation so far sits down and puts its head in its hands.
“Stop that,” he tells the window, through teeth that are beginning to chatter. “Whatever you think you are doing, stop it.”
He yanks his sleeve over his hand and scrubs the heart away with more force than is strictly necessary. The frost smears and then melts under the friction of cloth and the warmth of his skin, leaving only clear glass and a trickle of water running down.
The room grows colder in direct response, the air thinning around him, and he realises that he is not imagining it, not any of it. Someone is here, someone who has access to every draft and every surface, and that someone has decided that waking him with a mouthful of ice and drawing wobbling shapes on his windows falls into the category of acceptable social interaction. “Whoever you are,” Emmett says, because it seems rude not to address it if he is going to complain, “you need to find a different hobby. Preferably one that does not involve freezing parts of my face while I am unconscious.”
The days develop, grudgingly, into a pattern.
He wakes, checks his lips with the wary resignation of someone who has accepted that he is involved in a situation and cannot do anything about it immediately, and assesses the damage. Some mornings there is no frost on his mouth at all, and he feels both relieved and unreasonably aware of the absence. On others, his lips carry a fine rim of ice, or the barest dusting of crystals on the corner of his mouth, as if someone has leaned in but lost their nerve at the last second.
One night, when the wind has been rattling the guttering for hours and the radio has given up under the strain of interference, he walks into the bedroom and stops dead just inside the doorway. The window is white from sill to lintel, covered in a sheet of frost so thick it looks like etched glass. He steps closer, blanket already pulled tighter around his shoulders without thinking.
The frost is not a solid layer; it is a picture.
Delicate trees line the edges of the pane, branches reaching toward one another in intricate arcs. Each twig is picked out in sharp, crystalline detail; small leaves, impossibly fine, hang from some of them, frozen in the moment of movement. Near the bottom of the scene, where the sill meets the glass, a narrow path winds into the distance, vanishing into an implied horizon somewhere near the top of the frame. On that path, two figures walk side by side.
They are simple outlines, lacking faces and anything that might be called features, but there is something unmistakable in the way the taller one leans just slightly toward the shorter. The shorter figure’s shoulders are hunched against an imagined cold. The taller one’s head is turned, attention apparently fixed on its companion.
Emmett stares at this careful, frozen fiction until his eyes sting.
“You have too much time,” he says finally, softly rather than sharply, because he cannot quite bring himself to ruin it with the same annoyed swipe he has used on the hearts. “You know that, don’t you.”
The glass does not answer him, although his breath, when he exhales, fogs the upper part of the picture and softens the lines of the frost.
He hesitates, then lifts his fingers and touches the taller of the two figures very lightly, just where its shoulder would be. The ice there brightens for a second under his warmth, then collapses, a thin stream of meltwater dripping down the pane.
The shorter figure remains, alone now on the path.
The air against his face grows sharper, the chill in the room intensifying in a way that feels unmistakably offended. “I did not mean—” he starts, then stops, because he does not know what he did mean. “I am not—this is not… a thing. I am going home tomorrow. I have a job and responsibilities and access to central heating.”
The corner of the window nearest his hand refreezes, almost instantly. The second figure reappears, sketched more hastily this time, closer to the first. The gap between them closes by a line’s width.
He lets his hand fall to his side and steps back. “I am talking to a window,” he mutters, more to himself than anything else. “This is how it starts.”
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The storm arrives not much later.
The radio voice, struggling through layers of static earlier in the day, had mentioned that the system coming in from the north looked ‘energetic,’ which turns out to be one of those understated phrases that meteorologists deploy when what they really mean is that an entire wall of weather is about to slam against the county.
The sky has flattened into a single unbroken sheet of grey; the earlier snowflakes, tentative and sparse, give way to a concentrated curtain of white. The wind gathers itself into a continuous howl, wrapping around the house in a way that makes the old brick and timber complain.
The boiler does what it can, which is not much. The radiators puff out a thin breath of warmth that loses the fight almost immediately, claimed by the drafts that slip in under doors and around window frames. Emmett, who has lived in flats with insulation and double glazing long enough to forget how thorough a determined winter can be, finds himself building a fire in the living room with more focus than he has applied to anything in weeks.
The fireplace has not been used in some time, judging by the number of spiders that consider the grate a prime property, but the chimney is clear enough to draw. He arranges kindling and logs with the awkward care of someone who has burned things unintentionally before and does not wish to repeat the experience, and coaxes the flame into existence with matches.
When the fire finally catches and begins to eat its way into the wood, throwing out proper heat and sending shadows up onto the ceiling, the room becomes almost habitable. The rest of the house fades into darkness as the power flickers and dies, taking with it the muted hum of fridge and the small comfort of electric light.
He sits on the rug in front of the fireplace with a blanket around his shoulders and his hands wrapped around a mug that is miraculously still hot.
There is a loneliness to the moment that he had expected—he is, after all, alone in an old house in the middle of a snowstorm—but above and around it there is another sensation, something like being watched by a pair of very bright, very curious eyes.
“You know,” he says eventually, when the silence and the crackle of the fire and the pressure of the snow on the roof have all combined into a single, overstretched layer over his nerves, “if this is about me leaving tomorrow, there are better communication strategies than freezing me to death.”
The air in front of him cools in a swift, controlled sweep, enough that the top layer of his drink steams more thickly.
“I am merely pointing out that sabotaging someone’s exit is not the foundation of anything healthy.” he adds, because it feels like the important part.
The temperature drops another few degrees, the kind of cold that hits the inside of his nose when he inhales. He tightens the blanket around himself, tucking his feet under his knees.
The frost on the floor piles up, then draws together, as if an invisible hand is gathering fabric. It rises in a narrow column, then broadens at the top, forming shoulders, arms, the vague implication of a torso. The air around the shape is so cold now that the fabric of his blanket prickles with it.
He watches, still and unwilling to blink, as a head forms out of the whiteness, features slowly carving themselves into being. The hair that takes shape is untidy and pale, not a flat white but a shifting spectrum of frost colours, from silver to the faintest blue. The face beneath it is spare and sharply drawn.
The eyes are the worst, and the best, part. They have the brightness of sunlight on a frozen surface, that deceptive shine that suggests warmth is involved when it is not. Bare feet stand on the rug just inside the circle of firelight, and wherever they touch, frost radiates outward in fine, curling lines.
For a moment, in the space between fear and relief, Emmett has the wild thought that of course this is what has been happening, that of course the things on the windows and the kisses made of frost had to belong to someone, that it was never going to be nothing.
The figure in the doorway tilts its head. “You wiped away my hearts,” it says, in a voice that sounds like the whisper of snow sliding off a branch, bright and thin and entirely too pleased with itself. “Every single one.”
Emmett’s mouth, which has known a troubling intimacy with ice lately, is dry. “You kissed me while I was asleep,” he replies, because his ability to blurt the most inappropriate part of the situation first is apparently intact. “Repeatedly.”
The figure’s mouth curves into a grin that shows small, sharp teeth that do not look like they have ever seen anything as warm as blood. “Oh,” it says, light breaking across its face. “You noticed.”
“It was difficult to miss,” Emmett says, blanket clutched around him, the fire at his back, and a person made of winter in front of him. “It is not a particularly subtle technique.”
The grin deepens. “Subtle,” the figure repeats. “You complain about me, and you talk to me, and you refuse to run away even when I make the floor entirely too slippery to walk. That did not feel like a situation that required subtlety.”
“You could have introduced yourself in a way that did not involve freezing parts of my face,” he manages. “People usually start with ‘hello’ rather than providing proof of concept.”
“I did start with hello,” the figure says, with injured pride. “On the mirror. And the kitchen window. And the other window. You were very rude about it.”
He remembers the letters appearing in the steam, the way he had wiped them away without thinking, and feels, unhelpfully, a tiny prickle of guilt. “Let us say,” he concedes, “that the escalation curve was steep.”
The figure steps forward. The frost extends under its feet, creeping further onto the rug as if eager to follow. The fire, as if aware of competition, flares up for a moment, then lowers again, its heat trapped to a narrow circle. “I was careful. I could have taken the warmth out of you entirely. I did not. I only left myself on you, a little. I wanted to see if you would notice that I had been there.” the figure says, and something in its tone shifts from amusement to a quieter, more careful register.
Emmett swallows, the inside of his throat feeling dry and cold. “That is not how consent works,” he says, because even if he is talking to something that has carved itself together out of frost, some lines remain useful. “Wanting to see if someone notices you is not the same as asking whether you are welcome.”
The figure’s expression softens, the lines of its face rearranging around something like concern. The temperature in the room eases slightly, as if it is drawing its attention in.
“I frightened you,” it says, not as a question.
“Yes,” he admits, because there is no point lying to something that has, by its own admission, been observing his reactions closely.
The figure’s mouth twitches, which might be contrition or amusement or both. “I like it when you talk,” it says. “You fill the space. Most people go very quiet when the cold comes. They pull away. They shut their doors and wait for me to pass. You complain and keep moving.”
He is suddenly, acutely aware of all the times he has muttered to himself while making tea, or scolded the boiler under his breath, or narrated his own thought process while climbing stairs. The idea that all of that has been a kind of conversation to someone else makes his face heat, or would, if the room were not working so hard to prevent it.
“I still do not know what to call you,” he says. “If you are going to keep invading my personal space, it would help to know what name to use when I tell you to stop.”
A flicker runs through the frost at the creature’s shoulders. “You may call me Rime,” it says. “It is near enough to what I am.”
“Rime,” he repeats, testing the sound, feeling how it fits in his mouth. “Like the frost on branches. Or on windows.”
“Like the frost on you,” Rime says, with a satisfaction that is entirely at odds with the faint wince still lingering in its eyes. “And you are Emmett.”
He opens his mouth to ask how it can possibly know that, then remembers all the complaints, the muttered self-addressed lectures, the exasperated ‘honestly, Emmett’s, and closes it again.
“You told me that is not how consent works,” Rime says, returning to the topic. “You said I am supposed to ask before I put myself on you. So I am asking.” It takes one more silent step closer, until Emmett can see the tiny crystals at the corner of its mouth, the way its hair never quite lies still. “May I kiss you properly, while you are awake, and see what happens when you are looking at me?”
The question lands inside him like a stone dropped into water, sending out ripples that meet and interfere in ways he cannot quite map. He should, he thinks distantly, say no. He should cite power imbalances and the inherent risks of allowing a being who can lower temperatures below survivable levels within arm’s reach of his face. He should remember that he is tired, that the world outside this room is large and full of people whose affection does not come with hypothermia.
Instead, he finds himself saying, “You will stop if I tell you to.”
Rime nods, and the movement sends a small, sparkling drift of frost from its shoulders to the floor. “I will stop,” it agrees. “I do not wish to break you. I only wish to feel more of what you are like, here, and here.” It lifts a hand, indicating his mouth and his chest without touching either. “You hold warmth in inconvenient places.”
“Inconvenient for whom,” he says, but the words are thin, because his heart has chosen this moment to lodge itself high behind his ribs and beat harder than makes sense for someone who has not moved.
“For me,” Rime says, and smiles in a way that has nothing of the earlier mischief in it and everything of curiosity and a strange, sharp tenderness.
There is a part of Emmett that is still sitting on the rug with his blanket and his mug, watching this from a distance with disbelief, but the rest of him is here, in this suddenly too-small space, with the air cold enough to make every breath an act of focus.
He nods, because for once the words do not come easily.
Rime moves as if it is not entirely used to movement, as if being a solid thing is still new, but there is nothing hesitant in the way it closes the last gap between them. It lifts one hand and lays its fingers along Emmett’s cheek. The pads of Rime’s fingers feel firm despite being made of nothing but structured ice.
Emmett exhales, a visible cloud that rises between them, and Rime leans in through it. The first touch of its mouth is lighter than the frost that had outlined Emmett’s lips in sleep. The cold is intense, enough that he feels the nerves in his lips contract in surprise, sensations tightening to a narrow band of awareness where their mouths meet. Rime’s kiss is oddly still; it does not move the way people do, no familiar tilt or press, just contact held steady, as if it is waiting to see what will happen.
The shock passes quickly; the cold remains, but it becomes part of the structure of the moment rather than an attack on it. Beneath it, to his own surprise, there is a faint undercurrent of heat, not from Rime, who has none, but from his own blood pushing stubbornly into all the places frost is trying to claim. There is a pulse at his mouth that is his, and the awareness that Rime can feel it, in whatever way beings made of ice feel things.
Rime is very close, all sharp lines and luminous pale, eyes half-lidded, lashes edged in frost. There is nothing predatory in its expression; it looks, if anything, delighted and a little awed, as if it has stumbled across a phenomenon that contradicts its understanding of humanity.
Emmett presses back, very slightly, enough to make it clear that he is not sitting here like a statue. The corner of Rime’s mouth lifts against his in what might be a smile.
When Rime draws back, slowly, there is a small sound like a tiny crack as the thin ice that has formed between their lips breaks. Emmett’s mouth stings, but again, it is the sting of circulation returning rather than damage done.
He touches his lower lip with two fingers. They come away damp, cooling quickly in the air, but without the white dust of earlier mornings.
Rime watches him with what can only be described as hope, although it has been refracted through so many layers of strangeness it hardly looks like the human version. “That was better,” it says. “When you could see me. When you knew it was me.”
“It was,” Emmett says, because there is no point in pretending otherwise. “Distinctly unnerving, but better.”
Rime’s laugh is soft and bright, like ice cracking on a lake in sunlight. “I can work with unnerving,” it says. “I am not built for comfortable.”
Emmett sits wrapped in his blanket, breathing carefully, the ghost of cold still tingling on his lips, and Rime stands with frost circling its bare toes and something like satisfaction in its posture.
“I still have to go back,” Emmett says, after a while, because the rest of the world has not conveniently vanished just because something impossible has turned up in his living room. “I cannot stay here all winter. I have students who will send me emails, a job that will call.”
“You will leave when the roads are clear,” it says, as if reciting a law of nature. “You will go back to your other places. The warmth there does not need me. I cannot follow you; I do not exist where the cold does not hold.” There is no accusation in his tone, only fact, but Emmett feels something in his chest respond anyway, a small, irrational protest at the idea of stepping out of this strange, sharp orbit back into ordinary weather and ordinary problems.
“You will be here,” he says, because he has to put the thought somewhere. “Next time the frost comes.”
“Of course,” Rime replies. “I have been here longer than this house. Longer than the road, and the hedge, and your grandmother’s roses. I always come back when winter does.”
“And if I do,” Emmett says, almost to himself, “then we can… revisit the question of acceptable communication .”
Rime’s grin returns, quick and bright, written in ice over something far older. “I will learn,” it says. “I am very good at practice. You have seen my handwriting.”
Emmett looks at the windows, and then at the figure in front of him, whose every line still suggests mischief even as he stands perfectly still. “I have,” he says. “It is improving.”
They sit like that, or rather he sits and Rime stands, for a long time.
Later, when the storm has spent itself and the power has crept back on in a startled stutter, Emmett will go to bed and wake up without frost on his lips. There will be a small, unobtrusive heart on the lowest corner of the window, half hidden by the curtain, and he will sigh and leave it there instead of wiping it away.
When he finally leaves the house, days later, with the roads grudgingly cleared and the boot of his car full of half-sorted boxes, the air will nip at his face in one last, sharp gust as he locks the door, and his breath will plume out in front of him in a way that feels, unexpectedly, like company.
He will get into the car, turn the key, and watch his own reflection in the windscreen melt the thin frost from the glass.
Somewhere under the hedge and over the frozen fields, winter will continue having its own long conversation with the land, and when the temperature drops again next year and he opens this door in another cold hallway, the first thing he sees on the kitchen window will be a clumsy, hopeful GOOD MORNING, drawn in frost by a hand that has had another year to practise.