She did not ask about the frost.
Their walks becamethe rhythm of her days.
Mornings started with the cold sharp against her face, vanilla snow drifting on the footpaths, and Thorne always a half-step behind her as they crossed the quiet blocks to Ember and Kaelor's bakery. The beverage stall on the corner where he ordered peppermint tea without asking, handed it to her without comment, and she wrapped both hands around the cup and let the warmth anchor her. His cold beside her, the tea's heat in her palms, the silence between them.
Evenings became the walk home after the show, her body still vibrating from the stage, the festival lights strung overhead making the snow glow gold and rose. Her heels on the path. His silent boots. The particular quality of his cold after dark, sharper, cleaner, carrying that peppermint edge that she breathed in without meaning to and held in her lungs a beat too long.
She started watching him in profile when he wasn't looking.
The line of his jaw. The stripe patterns at his throat, faint silver spirals that caught the Pine's bioluminescence and threw it back in fragments. His shoulders inside the dark uniform were broader than she'd registered from a distance, the fabric pulling slightly across the span of them when he turned to scan a cross-street. The way his icy breath fogged differently than hers: finer, almost crystalline, dissolving faster.
One morning, three blocks into the walk, she caught herself humming.
Not a warm-up. Not scales or lip trills or the anxious patterns she used to self-soothe. It was an actual song. Something old her mother used to play on Sunday mornings in the kitchen in Flatbush with the vinyl crackling through a speaker that cost twelve dollars at a yard sale. She hadn't meant to let it out. The melody had just beenthere, sitting in her throat, and the quiet between them had felt like the space wanted filling, and her body had filled it before her brain could intervene.
"What is that?"
His voice, low and unhurried, not quite looking at her. Eyes on the path ahead.
"Nina Simone. 'I Loves You, Porgy.'"
He didn't comment. Didn't nod. Didn't saythat's niceorI don't know itor any of the things people said when they were performing interest in her music. He just kept walking, and the silence that followed had a different quality. Denser. Warmer. Like it was holding the shape of the melody she'd put into it.
That evening, backstage, changing for the second half, she realized she'd spent the entire show choosing which song to hum for him on the walk home.
Not consciously. Not the way she chose setlists or arranged encores. More like the way her body had chosen to lean toward his cold instead of away from it.
She'd landed on Ella Fitzgerald. "Someone to Watch Over Me."
The irony was not lost on her.
She hummed it three blocks in, and her voice did the thing again. The same thing it had done onstage two weeks ago when she'd aimed her closing number at the shadow at the edge of the house where she knew he was standing. Lower in her chest. More bare. Sustained where she'd usually trim, holding notes a fraction longer than the melody asked for, letting them breathe and spread in the cold air between them. Her instrument was shaping itself to him, and she did not want to stop.
He walked beside her. He did not comment. His breath dissolved into fine crystals, and the snow fell around them, and she hummed Ella into the space between his silence and her want, and if he understood what she was doing, he gave no sign.
These walks were the realest, safest part of her day.
Not the stage. Not the dressing room. Not the late-night calls with her agent.The walks every morning and night next to him.
The realization scared her worse than the frostlily had.
He is doing the job he was assigned.She told herself that.This is duty. This is protocol. He would walk any performer home and order peppermint tea and sweep dressing rooms and stand in the eaves of every show.
Her own ear caught the lie before the thought finished forming.
Three nights later,on the walk home, the snow was falling heavier than usual, muffling the festival sounds behind them, the path quiet and dark between pools of lamplight.
"Miss Calloway?"
She turned.
A man stepped out of the shadows behind them.
Thorne took a step in front of her, placing his body between her and the human man who had appeared out of nowhere.
Phoebe recognized the man. He was the one with press credentials who'd been at every show since opening night. He gave her a professional smile, warm but not effusive, and held his hands up, empty, nodding at Thorne.
"Apologies for the ambush." His smile widened. "I've been trying to find the right moment. I’m Gavin Hale, a freelance journalist. I'm covering the Frostfall cross-cultural phenomenon for several Earth outlets. I'd love the chance to interview you, at your convenience, anywhere you'd feel comfortable. Your work here is extraordinary, and I think the people back home deserve to hear about it from you directly."
