She is fire and you are ice.
She is warm; as warm as the coffee she brings you, as smooth as the honey whiskey at the back of your throat as you sit opposite her at the bar. Her shirt is the color of scorched earth; when she brushes your hand there are flames on her fingertips.
And you, Stella Gibson; you are a nighttime drop of dew, vulnerable in your liquid state for such a short time. You cling to yourself, terrified, waiting for the bitter cold to take you. By the morning you have frosted over, frigid and chilly and forbidding.
But it's not morning yet. It's not morning, and two pools of melted brown are staring you down and thawing you out.
You wouldn't be here if you were smart. You would have fled the first time. You would have climbed higher and higher until your fragile frostiness became glacial, and nothing could touch you. That was your first mistake.
Your second mistake was eye contact, albeit encouraged by liquor. It singed your frozen irises and caused them to well with something terrifying and unfamiliar. They tell you not to stare straight into the sun, but you did.
"Sorry". It's not much. A single word because you don't trust a sentence. An explanation is too dangerous. What would you say, anyway? Sorry, I'm melting.
"Sorry?" now she repeats it, perplexed "Stella, don't be sorry"
You are sorry, though. You're sorry for yourself because it was just a drink but now you're exhausted and overwhelmed and proper liquid. And you're sorry that you melt a little bit more when the boiling tears spill over. You're especially sorry that Reed has to drain her glass and sign the bill at the same time just to get you out of there before some pansy Belfast paper reprints your mottled cheeks and red raw nose on tomorrow's front page.
Maybe you're not sorry for the rest though. Maybe the apologies end there. Because try as you might, you aren't sorry for the damp patch you leave on the shoulder of that scorched-earth shirt, You aren't sorry that the hotel key card slides from your grasp into Reed's, and when it does you're alight all over again.
You're especially not sorry that Jack Frost doesn't visit room 203 that night.
