Cold is sometimes a thing you can taste and feel, but nobody believes it really has fingers. That it can really creep inside your pant legs or pinch the tops of your ears. Jack Frost was my lover that night, but it wasn’t wintertime. I was a comfortable ninety-eight point six degrees on the outside, but inside I was breathing icicles. I lay scrunched up, trying to scare away the chill, but Jack curled up beside me without a sound. He was very still, and I knew he wanted me to roll over and be surprised to see him grinning there. I knew he wanted to lean in very close to me, then, so that I could see his glassy whites, and lightly take the tip of my nose between his teeth. But the coldness of an absent lover, when she doesn’t even realize that her place is in one’s bed, can be displaced by the heat of her imagined presence. It comforts little, the heat of a woman who doesn’t realize she is wanted, but it is not the aloneness that comes when someone has been left behind. I knew she was with me, insofar as I was able to nourish my hope with the fact that there had been no rejection, and I knew I was lucky. I had been left before, sometimes without warning, and I had had to share my bed with the winter prince then, but not now. Now I had my thoughts of her, and they allowed me to roll onto my stomach and use my back to shut him out completely.

I floated gingerly down the old stairs, imagining that she and her visitor had exhausted themselves the night before. I would assemble breakfast for them and she would smile slyly at me when she came padding out of her room in a sheer nightgown. She would wonder if I had heard them making love and she would hope that my interest had gone beyond mere voyeurism. Even so, I could not bring myself to guess at what her real reaction would have been if she had received some sort of confirmation of her suspicions, whether directly from me or from somewhere else. I had almost always surrendered myself to peaceless slumber hours before she even chose a sleeping partner, much less had an opportunity to let him court her or to bring him home. A few times, I had been torn from stony unconsciousness to hear the headboard chunking against the wall just below me. Something in her eyes the next morning would tell me that she had thrust harder not to be closer to her lover, but to make sure that I was with her. On this morning, though, the man I had heard her embarrassing herself over the night before seemed to have disappeared, and, though it was nine-thirty on a Wednesday, the lodger sat calmly reading his newspaper at the dining table.

“You’re not working.” We didn’t normally speak, but I couldn’t hide my curiosity. Some thought of mine probably took the form of a wish that he had been fired, or had quit as a result of a violent altercation, but my hostility lay farther from the surface than did his. With disinterest, he crunched a piece of toast he had made for himself and swallowed lazily before bothering to answer.

“Got moved to the afternoon shift.” As I gathered some things from the refrigerator, he started to go back to his paper. It seemed to occur to him, then, a way that he might take advantage of our breach of routine.

“So what’s a, um, person like you doing living in this fancy place with a girl like her?” He spat it out quickly, as if it had taken him a lot of nerve to start it and he wanted to make sure he finished.

“She was a friend of my sister’s.” I might have continued, offered more explanation, a frank denial, perhaps, of what the man was implying, but I found myself ashamed of my voice. Still husky with sleep, it had always been deeper than a woman’s voice ought to be, and the lodger’s vulgar curiosity made me want to speak as little as possible. She did come then, dragging her feet lazily across the carpet and grinning as if she had caught a yellow birdlet in her mouth, just as I had expected her to do. She feigned sleepiness, or at least exaggerated its effect, and leaned her head on my shoulder as she passed into the kitchen.

“Hope I didn’t wake you.” Of course she had, and of course a person would have had to have been deaf not to be awakened by her mewling and chunking, and of course she knew this was so. Still, my eyes couldn’t help but follow her until she reached the pantry, and I couldn’t help but let them. What I had no trouble doing, on the other hand, was feeling the lodger’s angry, jealous eyes as he watched me watching her. Setting four eggs to fry in a large pan, I turned to stop her from opening a new bottle of apple juice.

“Don’t bother with that, there’s still some in the fridge.” She made a face and thrust the pantry doors shut again.

“Yes, mother.” Satisfied that she had made an entrance worthy of her self-image, she pulled her gown around her and padded to the dining table, apple juice in hand. She greeted the lodger pleasantly enough, and an almost conspiratorial glance passed between them when she continued. “You know, that darling little UPS girl should be by any minute.” And then to me, “Remember those stockings I ordered, Mickey? They said eight business days.” I nodded, sipping at the coffee the lodger had started. He seemed confused by her mention of the UPS girl, but she was hesitant to elaborate; it was as if she had intended the comment to be some private joke between them, and being forced to explain it would only complicate things. Finally, she allowed him a few whispered words of clarification. “They’re fond of uniforms. You know.” Although I believe she made a sincere effort to be discreet, I heard her easily, and so I would have been aware of my place as conversation piece even if the lodger had not glanced questioningly at me with such obscene obviousness. She nodded, and then, as if she had changed the subject completely, asked loudly, “You’re fond of uniforms, aren’t you, Mickey?” Though she was only groping for something to say to me in order to kill the suspicious half-silence of their conspiracy, the irony was not lost on her.

“Of uniforms?” I responded with a vague hollowness; she was not this way when we were alone. Here, with this vulgar man – whose name, incidentally, was Henry Harrison – at our dining table and a nameless, faceless, meaningless young man asleep atop her strewn bedsheets, she toyed with me. I was conversation material, a novelty, something she could use to connect with Mr. Harrison on a level that was normally very difficult to achieve. What else could she have in common with him? I was not a trusted friend, and neither was I an affectionate caretaker as long as we had guests.