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It doesn’t even feel cold. It doesn’t even feel cold, yeah, yeah, get that, you’re not cold, you’re hot you’re thrumming with it, you’ve got firecrackers bursting behind your temples and bloodying your nose, your teeth are white-hot gold in your mouth. Every time he spits in the snow to see if it’ll freeze before it hits the ground it’s a stream of glitter, he’s got metal teeth, too, striking together and kicking up sparks that kiss against the ground with a noise like a cigarette in a glass of water.
“Come on,” he says, he pants, looking at you, now, mouth hanging wide wide open. His teeth aren’t metal after all but his canines are so small and delicate and flashing at you, and he’s open-eyed and flushed, pink, pink pink pink pink ah. Ah.
“I don’t—” you say but your face splits into a grin before you know what you were going to say and he tackles you ‘round the middle, bare legs blending into the white ground and it doesn’t hurt, not at all, he feels like a fireball he feels like a comet digging his chin into your stomach. You go down; the snow parts beneath you and you’re expecting a tidal wave Noah-parting-the-red-sea splash of water up on either side and a cloud of steam, a raincloud, a stormcloud, smoke from a burning church a a a a but nothing comes, just white flakes, kicked up and powdery and catching on his hair like needlepoint holes poked in a black sheet of paper or the spangled spray of lights when you cross your eyes driving at night.
If you were breathing air anymore you think it’d all be forced out of your lungs but lucky lucky you you’re living on moonlight tonight. He’s heavy and hot on top of you and it just feels so good.
“Mikey,” he says, and flashes his pink face up at you for a blink so he can see you smile at him then buries it in your chest, nose running and smearing through your thin shirt, no effort contact, “Mikey Mikey Mikeymikeymikey.”
“That’s me,” you say even though you’re not quite sure if it’s true, you just want to be the one who owns a name he says like that, all flash-quick like a cutout spinning on a wheel and casting a dancing shape on the wall. All the love in the world.
“Mikey,” he says again, all held-out i’s and y’s, and rolls off you, tumbles into the snowdrift and coats himself, comes up furred with flakes, eyes flashing, sparks boiling in the snow. You look at him and you love him, simple, his dark hair dark hoodie all spangled in white and his flushed happy happy face with his lips red like Snow White, the real deal fairy tale, oh, how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. He looks like a princess, him and his bloody lips shiny from spitting in the snow to see if it’ll freeze before it hits the ground.
You laugh because you love him, isn’t that silly, and it trails out of you, a chain rattling from a back bumper. He clambers on top of you again. Lets you know you’ve been sitting still for too long by a knee to your gut and yet it still doesn’t hurt; you’re laid out in a bed of ice and you can’t feel anything but the searing press of his skin on yours where it is bare. His palms skate up your face, brushing away the snow, sticking your damp hair down on your forehead. His breath numbs your nose when he gets close enough for you to see the glow under his skin rise and fall; he looks luminescent, he looks glowy in the way you think pregnant women are supposed to look (and you don’t think about it but you gently gently brush your fingers over the folded curve of his stomach and imagine softly telling him congratulations and buying him a set of little pink shoes).
“Mikey you look like a puppy.”
“What?”
“Mikey you look like a puppy,” he repeats, “a Christmas puppy like I opened a box and you were there with a bow around your neck,” so happy, so close, glowy glowy glowy and you think about his flashing little canines, you think about the moonlight you’re inhaling with every drag of your lungs. You pick up your knees with him on them and heave both of you over, your legs clattering together like firewood, sending him crashing back into a new drift of snow. You reach down and stroke your thumbs over his neck (your hands sticky and stained green at the soft whorled ends of your fingers but your palms, they are red-hot pink glowsticks, balled up and sticking out in the gloom the redbluegreen haze of Christmas lights up and down the street) and lick up his cheek. He giggles. The back of your mind yells that you’ll stick to him like the kid in A Christmas Story and you think you don’t care, you think you want to freeze your tongue to his skin so they have to pry you apart with a crowbar, they have to pour boiling water over you both, they have to rip you away and leave a layer of your flesh glued to his face and your tongue a numb hunk bleeding tiny single-serving red drops and oh, it is such a shame it isn’t cold.
He giggles again and clunks his forehead into yours. It's a gong hit and your eyeballs rattle around in their sockets, just vibrations, just feelings just thrumming just bass in your ribcage.
“I want to stay here forever Mikey spend the night with me,” he babbles, wraps his arms around you and rubs his cheek against your arm. “Spend the night with me sleep under the stars.” He smacks a kiss to the end of your nose and it brands you, there should be a little hiss (like a cigarette in a glass of water like spit in the snow) when his lips touch you but you can’t hear it.
He takes your waist and pulls you down and then you’re lying face-to-face in slush that feels like the softest bed you’ve ever been in. Your hand goes to his face, but only for a second; your fingers are all weird, curled up and green and white, a dead cuttlefish on the end of your arm.
“I feel like,” he says, his chest rising falling rising falling, breath billowing out in a fogbank, in that cloud of steam you were looking for, “I feel like I feel like.” His nose wrinkles up a little bit so you twist closer in and nose up against his neck, and he mutters “Puppy,” into your hair and starts stroking your arm shoulder-to-wrist. You try to start to tell him about the sparks and your metal teeth and firecrackers in your head and how he’s Snow White, he’s beautiful, but the words stop halfway up your throat and then you don’t know anything else.
—-
“Mikey!”
Cold. God, you’re fucking cold, what—
“Mikes, you gotta get up, please get up,” his voice sounds slurry and far-back and you wonder faintly if that’s Gerard, if he’s drunk again, if you’re drunk again. There are hands wrapped around your wrist, trying to tug you up; you try and tell him to stop, it hurts, your bones are brittle and sore, your skin too thin, but your lips are stuck shut.
You open your eyes and all you can see is dark cloth and minuscule white flecks of ice lining your vision, breaking and falling like dandelion seeds; guess your eyelashes were frozen together. He lets go of your arm and it flops to your side, and how well your elbow fits into the curve under your ribcage scares you bad, worse than your frozen-shut eyes, worse than the stark crush of ice under your back. Insanely, you think something important was taken out of me to make that space, then maybe Gerard has it, can I ask for it back? What is it?
You can’t see the world straight but you can see him. His face, his hair clumped and frozen, one of his hoodie strings soaked and sticking to the side of his neck. You look down— just a glance— and spit motherfucker; his legs, stretched out and red and white are bare, all he's wearing under the hoodie is a pair of black boxers that barely come down mid-thigh.
“How long were we—” you croak, your voice a broken-edged shard in your throat, the corners of your mouth split like papercuts, your fingertips distant and unfeeling.
He’s biting back tears and you watch them freeze on his scrubbed-red cheeks like drop-crystal earrings. “I don’t know. Few hours, maybe longer,” he says, “don’t try and talk. Just walk.”
You can’t be more than ten feet from the back door. Feels like miles, of course, of-course; you never quite believed anyone when they talked about shit like this, a foot is a foot, but you’ll be damned if it doesn’t take you hours to shutter-stumble your way to the door.
But you do it, you get inside and strip to nothing in the kitchen, dripping all over the floor and thoughtlessly comfortable with each other’s naked, bruised bodies— you remember like yesterday the first time you’d fumbled around with your brother and he refused to take his shirt off, face burning, and you’re nostalgic for it, in a way that hurts a little. You’ve got your pants tangled around your knees when he goes “Oh, shit,” and points out the window over the sink.
“What?” you say, doing pathetic tiny hops to try and get your ankle out of the wet knot of your pajama pants, aching with every move.
“Just look.”
You give up on trying to get free and shuffle over, leaning on him to keep your balance (and he winces, and you try and pull away but he slips his clammy hand over yours to hold you to his shoulder). The yard is wrecked; clods of dirt torn up from underneath the sparse ice— which, an hour or two ago, you could’ve sworn was a deep blanket of snow— by your running feet, wobbly two-foot high capital letters sprayed in freckled green paint over what snow you hadn’t trampled into frozen mud.
“Mom’s going to skin us alive,” you say, “Christ, I can’t even— can you read that? Do you remember what we wrote?”
He shakes his head and his hand slides off yours to thump at his side. Squinting, glasses-less— god knows where you’ll find those— you can just barely make out a few disjointed words. NEVER— BECaUSE THEY— ENDL ESS ENDLESS— -OLD YOU so. Lutrid and alien in the tinny backdoor light.
He’s looking at your hand again, eye turned way down, showing mostly white. “Do you think we have frostbite?”
Your shake your head this time because you don't feel sure giving him a solid No, and he turns, his face and his white cue-ball eye vanishing beneath his hair. “Let’s go to bed. Please?”
“Yeah, shit. C’mon.”
He stumbles bad on his first step, still shivering, so you loop your arm under his armpit and over his shoulders and walk; you kick your clothes out of the way to melt in the foyer and badly avoid the broken bottle all ground-in the carpet by the couch and you’re still carrying each other and it still hurts but it’s getting better, and then you’re in bed, and you’re naked, and everything’s going to be okay.
Silence, blankets over your head, a pillow between his bare thighs because he doesn’t like it when they stick together and even now he remembered. The hot damp of his breath like an animal’s.
“I’m so fucking sorry,” he says, “I’m so sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” you ask, and you know he is, and you know why but you don’t understand it. “Don’t— don’t be sorry.” You wish you could have seen it. You wish some passerby with a camera caught you two asleep curled up in a snowbank like baby rabbits in a blizzard.
“I was trying to kill us, you idiot,” he says, “I wanted— I made you lay down with me to fucking freeze to death, do you get that?”
“I wouldn’t care if we died,” you say, and you mean it. Doesn’t sound so bad at all; baby rabbits, right, all frost-crusted and posed paler than pale, waiting for the cops to dig you out of the snow and look at you and wonder who you were. Who you could have been.
“Don’t say that, don’t fucking say that.” He sounds like he’s about to cry, the hypocrite, like he isn’t thinking about it too.
Instead of feeding him a lie— and yeah, he’d know it was a lie if you told him I don’t mean it or I’d never do it because he knows how you stare at the light at the end of the tunnel, from the start it’s been the two of you burning out your eyes so you don’t see Death curled up and waiting at your feet— you stay quiet and tuck your head under his chin, and try to pretend you’re asleep.
It doesn’t work. He’s still sniffling into your hair so you start talking into the thin chill skin of his chest so your words will resonate through his bones like a child whispering into a cup-string telephone. “Someday we’ll have a house, y’know?”
He makes a snotty, horribly sad noise.
“I mean it. We won’t have to worry about shit, like— it’ll be ours.”
“Yeah, great, we can get high and I can try and kill us on our own property.”
You don’t answer and you guess he feels the twist of your lips against his collarbone because he shuffles around and curls closer, his knees folding up against yours, cradling you between his femur and his jaw.
“Sorry.”
“I’m just— I’m tired of jumping at headlights.”
He says “Uh-huh,” and twists his hand between your bodies, right where the carved-out concave of your chests makes room for it, and pats rabbit-fast over his heart. “Skips a beat. Can’t be healthy.”
You crane down and kiss the back of his hand, pinning it to his heart right through the center.