Cold Stone, Cold Hearts

The Cold Stone bell is supposed to sound cheerful. Tonight it sounds like it’s calling someone’s name.

I’m only here because Coach ran us into the floor and my body feels like it’s been sanded down to the bone. The kind of tired that makes you crave sugar like it’s medicine. Logan’s winter presses against the glass—dark sidewalks, headlights smeared in slush, the mountains sitting out there like they’re holding their breath.

I duck my head under the bell anyway. I’m tall enough that I always do. Six-six means you learn small habits just to avoid getting punished by doorframes. My braids are stuffed under a beanie, and my USU hoodie still smells like the court—rubber and old sweat and that clean chemical sting from the floor cleaner.

The place is mostly empty. A couple on the far side leans together like they’re sharing oxygen. Behind the counter, a guy with tired eyes scrapes at the frozen granite slab with a metal spade. The slab gleams under the lights, white-flecked like a river rock. Cold. Clean. Unforgiving.

And then she steps out from the back.

She’s small, which is the first thing my brain offers me, like that’s safe to think. Five-five, maybe, red hair escaping her knit hat in bright threads. Then my eyes land on the rest: green so sharp it almost feels rude, a mouth that looks practiced at being pleasant and a little bit dangerous about it anyway.

She notices me noticing. People always do. It’s not vanity. It’s just physics. When you take up space, you change the room.

“Hey,” she says, like we’ve already met and I’m late. She reaches for the order pad, then pauses. Her necklace—a silver charm shaped like a tiny spoon—taps once against her throat. “Long day?”

“My life’s just… running suicides in different outfits,” I tell her, and I mean it as a joke, but it comes out too honest. My taped thumb worries a loop of athletic wrap I should’ve thrown away hours ago.

She smiles, and it’s not the bright kind you put on for tips. It’s smaller. Like she’s keeping some of it back.

“What are you getting?”

“Something that doesn’t taste like discipline.”

That earns a short laugh. She leans closer to the counter to hear me over the freezer’s hiss. When she brushes my wrist—accidental, maybe—her fingers are cold enough to make me flinch.

Except the cold doesn’t stop at my skin. It slides under it, neat and precise, like a fingertip tracing the inside of my arm. A faint frost pattern blooms where she touched me, pale as breath on glass.

I blink and it’s gone.

May’s eyes flick down, then up again fast. Too fast. Like she’s checking whether I saw the same impossible thing.

“I’m May,” she says, and for a second the bell above the door rings twice, even though nobody comes in.

There’s a simple version of tonight where I order ice cream, go back to my apartment, and stretch until my joints forgive me. There’s also the version where I don’t pretend I didn’t feel that cold move through me like it had intention.

May rests her hand on the edge of the granite slab, and the stone looks a shade darker under her palm, as if it’s remembering her. Her smile holds, but something behind it tightens, asking without words for either distance or trust, and both feel expensive.