A young man's voice, husky from sleep answers in a soft. "Hello?"
On the other end, a petite girl bounces with excitement, despite the late hour. "Guy, get up, we're Grand-parents."
It takes second for the boys fuzzy brain to place the voice, though he knows it's a familiar one. The taunting crimson letters on the clock radio sitting beside where the phone once was, read 3:00AM, but are slightly blurred by the boy's tired vision. It's far too late, or early depending how you look at it, for functioning thought. At least in his opinion.
Thick fingers run through tussled, blonde waves of hair as the covers are pushed down from the young man's voice. "What? Connie it's 3 in the morning. Go back to sleep. I want to go back to sleep. Sleep is good, it's what you're suppose to be doing this time of night. Well, unless you're like a grave digger, which we're not, so go to bed."
The girl chuckles and twists the phone cord around her finger, bouncing ever so faintly, with predawn jitters. "Trigger and Patches had their kittens. You have to come see them. They're the most precious little babies in the whole world."
Finally things begin to make sense, Trigger being the cat he gave her two years before, when they were still a couple. Before high, hockey and other boyfriends/girlfriends got in the way. Before they grew up, something neither were entirely prepared to do. The boy agrees to come over and pleasantries exchanged before hanging up.
The undersized apartment is still, minus the young man, as makes his way to the door. Silent other then the soft squeak of his shoes on the hallway floor. The large hands that moments before fumbled with the phone, now work on unlocking the front door allowing the whole of his body to slip out into the cold.
Teeth chatter and hands shake in cold, as they wait on the porch of a large house, praying to be let in soon. As sharp, fair eyes watch puffs of smoke, billow from trembling, cracked, lips, in the night air. When the heavy wood door opens, heat instantly hits, rosy frozen cheeks as new life his breathed into the frozen body.
Inside it's toasty, and bright. A fire crackles in the den and the heat radiates from it, in hot waves, that can almost be seen. A silver pot, probably filled with hot cinnamon tea, cocoa, sits on the ottoman. It bares remembrance to scene from a Charles Dickens novel. The girl hadn't liven like this most of her life, and the sight sometimes still awed the young man. It didn't resemble anything that the young women was.
Warm fingers brush icy skin, as a delicate hand rests upon sturdy shoulders. The tips barley grazing the skin of a chilled neck. And the faint smell of vanilla drifts to flared nostrils. That was the girl, warm and swelling of vanilla, as always. A half a turn in that direction confirms it.
A bright smile, creases cherry lips as the young girls face lights up at the sight of the boy. Brown eyes brimming with excitement. "They're in the kitchen. The kittens, come see."
In a basket lay three, tiny, fury little brown balls of fluff. Squeaking and squirming like newborns do. Truthfully, they're rather unattractive and rat like, but the boy can't bring himself to tell the young woman that. The enthusiasm shooting off the girl is too amusing to ruin.
It sinks into the boy's exhausted skull sitting there on the tile floor, just how amazing those brown eyes are, how warm that skin is, just juicy and cheery those lips are and how the smell of vanilla intoxicates. A pale gaze fixed on the delicate hands that cradle a small fuzzy life. Beautiful hands that once fit perfectly in the larger ones.
Soon, seated by the heat of the fire, a warming glow casting dark shadows on the wall and the bright embers melted away the last of the cold that hand seeped into the boy's bones. Nimbly dry cracked lips find, supple cherry ones. The kisses known to both mouths, as they mingled together in dim light. Neither face turning to avoid being burned by the ashes dancing in the air.
In large house, Minneapolis …