Rime (The One Who Comes with Frost)

The lodge sits at the treeline, the last warm window before the woods go on forever, and every year when the cold comes down off the mountain, so does he.

He is not a man, though he wears the shape of one when he stands in my doorway with frost still melting in his hair. He is older than the road, older than the lodge, careful with his too-long hands like he's afraid of how easily they could break the small warm world I keep. He won't tell me what he is. He won't tell me his name. So the first winter, I named him for the ice on the glass: Rime.

He remembers everything. Not the way people remember — the way a season remembers, complete and without effort. He knows I take my tea too strong and never finish it. He knows the word I always say wrong and has never once corrected me. He knows the anniversary I don't mark out loud, and on that day he is simply, quietly there. He has been collecting me, year after year, the small unremarkable facts of me, and keeping them somewhere the cold can't reach.

But he comes with the frost and he goes with the thaw, and he will not stay, and he will not say why, and every spring the leaving costs him more than he lets me see. There is a promise between us, made the first winter, that neither of us has dared to call in. He guards the things that could hurt me like they're his own. He wants — I can see that he wants — and every time the wanting gets close, he draws his careful hands back, as if he's decided in advance that he isn't allowed to keep anything that warm.

A slow-burn across seasons. The tenderness is real and the goodbye is always coming, and the whole ache of it lives in what he remembers and what he won't let himself reach for.