Disclaimer: The characters don't belond to me. Sorry to dissappoint you.
"Hey Chase!" Cameron called running after him as she pulled her coat tighter against the snow. He turned to see her from where he was standing staring at the falling snow. His hands were in his pockets and he was wearing his silly knit cap. He'd clearly been outside longer than he would've liked. His face was bright red from the cold and he was sniffling.
"What?"
"You need a ride?" he smiled and looked at the ground, like an embarrassed kid
"Yeah…" he admitted, looking back up, the sparkle of being caught in his eyes. They headed towards Cameron's car, Chase blowing on his hands to warm them and Cameron unlocking the sedan with her remote-control key. They took their seats and turned on the heat before anyone said anything. She didn't start the car.
"So were you just waiting for some kindly nurse or intern to offer to drive you home?"
"No…I was going to go to the bus stop, but I got distracted." He said quietly.
"27-year-old man, frozen to death, due to ADD." She said, as if reciting the headline from his obituary. He laughed. Cameron grinned and pulled out of her parking spot. "What was so distracting?"
"Just the snow. We don't get much of it at home. It's pretty."
"Pretty." She raised an eyebrow at his description.
"Yeah."
"I hate the word pretty." She said with disdain, turning the car carefully around the corner.
"So do I, usually." Eventually they ended up at her apartment, and she'd invited him for some hot chocolate, which he'd declined. Somehow he still ended up sitting on her couch, sipping the hot drink and getting whipped cream on his nose. She wanted to ask him something, he could tell, but she held back, waiting for the right moment. Her hesitation was good, from his standpoint, because he didn't want to answer. She sipped her cocoa, and looked awkward.
"Why use it if you hated it?" she finally asked, "the word, I mean." He wiped the whipped cream off his nose and cleared his throat.
"Because that was what came to mind." He said simply.
He doesn't tell her about how he and his mother would wait for it to snow every year, because although she was born an Aussie, she'd grown up mostly in Europe, the Alps, where it snowed all the time. She loved the wintertime, and missed it dearly in Melbourne. She was always so happy when the temperature got down to single digits. It never snowed, though. The closest they got was some sleet when Robert was eight, and the two had run outside, hooping and hollering, so excited that they embarrassed Rowan. He hid in his study the rest of the day while Maria and Robbie tried to have a snowball fight. They'd wanted to make a snowman but the sleet was too cold and too wet. Mother and son had both ended up sick in bed for a few days and she tried to explain the wonder of snow. How pretty it was. How it would fall into your hair and stay on your eyelashes, light as a cloud. Pretty. She was pretty. That was her adjective; that was how her friends and neighbors and husband and Rob's teachers and the man at the grocery all saw her. Pretty. Never beautiful, never gorgeous, never anything else, because you needed to be cunning or sexy for those. She was just pretty and innocent looking with her blonde hair and blue eyes, just the same as her son's. Maybe she was too young to be a mother, but she wasn't dedicated enough to do much of anything else. She was a trophy wife, but no one called her that around Robbie. When he was there, she was simply pretty. It defined her. And now she was sharing her adjective with the snow. She loved this far-off, cold, floating substance so much that it was pretty too.
So he stood in the snow, years later, thinking about her and of the cotton-candy substance that was falling into his hair, staying on his eyelashes, light as a cloud.
He thought of the day when they'd run out into the slush, even though it was too heavy and sloppy to be snow, and not angelic enough to merit pretty. Thought of how, once he was nine or ten, they'd stopped waiting for winter because she'd stopped caring about the snow: now gin was pretty and nothing else could be.
He thought about the fact that it had snowed in Melbourne last August, and she'd missed it.
"It was what came to mind," he repeated, holding his mug with a death grip and staring at the whipped cream. "That's all."