The 5-Year Thaw

A coffee shop in San Fransisco, November, 2022

Her hair used to be a tumble of modest brown, but years of insistent sun had dug into her roots and found hints of red. Hunter had never noticed that before. That day, as they say together in a coffee shop in San Fransisco, it curled like drying honey, sticking together in wild, unbrushed tangles that touched the loose waistband of her cargo shorts.

Her skin had deepened from its even white to the singed brown of toast edges. Hunter guessed that she’d buttered herself in oil, not to ward away the burn she used to be so afraid of but to encourage it. Her skin had tightened since he'd last seen her five years ago, to be sure, but it still stretched across her shoulders like silk.

When she spoke, breaking their silence, Hunter heard the Pacific. Her experiences had seeped in and turned her voice gritty like the brine in its waves.

“Isn’t it funny?” She asked him. “How much I’ve changed and how little you have?”

Each of her words fell into his ear like sand. His head felt heavy with time.

***

Facebook post 05/05/2016

Jade Michelle is SINGLE

Tinder notification 06/14/2016

You’ve got a new match, Hunter! Open the app and start a conversation.

Tinder message from Jade 06/16/2016

I hoped you’d get fat after high school. You got a beard instead. Good choice.

***

A Walmart parking lot, July, 2016

The rain turned her brown hair black, but she liked the rain. It made her clothes weighty and stick to her frame in a tight hug. She needed one of those.

Is he not going to show up? Am I getting ghosted? By HUNTER SCHWARZ?

If she’d realized it was him in the picture, she probably wouldn’t have swiped right in the first place. He looked so different, though, it wasn’t her fault. She was a victim to a pretty face, and he had one of those if nothing else.

Why did she message him?

Because she wanted him to know that she wished he’d gotten fat. Not only that, but Jade liked to see how people had changed.

But now there she was, waiting 45 minutes past the time they’d agreed upon. Because she was stupid, and he looked good with a beard.

He showed up eventually in his white truck with rust around the wheel wells, smiling at her through his tinted window. She could only see the whites of his teeth, and they said to her, “I like to make you wait.”

He opened the window, and she smelled weed. She was also a sucker for that.

Jade smiled back.

***

Facebook stalking, October, 2022

Her profile was filled with pictures of hiking. Hunter didn’t know that she liked to hike.

He scrolled through her tagged photos; she was with the same guy in all of them, a tall, wiry man with deeply tanned skin and hair bleached white-blonde. One picture’s caption read, “There is gold in your blue, warming me deeper than the sun and bringing me closer to the sea. You thaw me.”

Hunter wasn't one to second-guess himself, but he couldn’t help rereading the invitation he was about to send her via Facebook Messenger. He wasn’t afraid she'd turn him down, but rather that she’d agree to meeting him. The message didn’t say much, but he knew she wouldn't care.

She'd always been good at listening to what he never said.

Facebook message sent to Jade Michelle 10/23/2022

I’ll be in San Francisco for work in a few weeks; let me buy you a coffee?

***

College dorm room, September 2016

Jade liked the way TV shows looked through a marijuana haze. The smoke muted the edges of the pictures, but her brain made the colors a bit brighter. It made her head spin, and she thought that maybe she was falling in love with him.

She turned to watch the screen’s colors light up his face. Her eyes traced from freckle to freckle, making pictures in their pinpoints. They faded into the top of his beard. How rugged.

Down the slope of his nose her eyes skated, falling from its tip and perching lightly on the cusp of his cupid’s bow. How delicate.

She kissed him once on the chin, which dragged his eyes from the show. Five minutes later, Jade took off his clothes and then her own. Five minutes after that, she started putting her own back on. How cold.

It never took him very long.

Hunter rewound the show to see what he had missed.

***

Facebook stalking, June, 2022

He reread her post again.

Jade had always wanted to move to Washington. At least that’s what she’d told him. She liked the rain.

What had changed?

He didn’t like the thought of her moving to California. She used to get sunburnt easily. Her family was prone to skin cancer, and cancer of any sort wasn't something to mess around with in his opinion. His own father had died two years before from pancreatic cancer.

He wished she would have moved to Washington. It would've fit better with what he remembered of her. That’s all he had left, memories and Facebook posts.

Hunter wondered if he should move to California, too. After all, he couldn't get pancreatic cancer from the sun.

***

Facebook post 08/20/2017

Jade Michelle is feeling STRESSED

Only one year left of this school stuff… I can’t wait until I can move away from here with the love of my life. Hey Hunter Schwarz, how does Seattle sound?

Tinder notification 08/20/2017

You’ve got a new match, Hunter! Open the app and start a conversation.

***

College dorm room, August, 2017

Her head rested on the mound of Hunter’s lower stomach. Despite her efforts not to cry, tears leaked from the corner of her eye, dripping down into his belly button. She thought they’d collect there, pooling up like a tiny pond and freezing over with the force of his chill.

Who are you texting?

Jade had always liked the rain, it was true. She'd thought of Hunter as rain for a long time, refreshing in his own moody, dismal way. But something had changed. Laying there with her head on his stomach, crying tears into his navel, she felt her love for him turning to ice.

She imagined him reaching down to press her head to his core. Maybe that would have helped her hear his thoughts.

Instead, his fingers flew over the glass phone screen. Jade didn’t try to see what or who he was typing. She didn’t want to.

Jade bit the small pout of skin over his waistband.

It was soft and salty, coating her tongue like butter.

Hunter ignored her.

***

iMessage from Jade 09/21/2017

Are you not coming over?

Tinder message from Mia 09/21/2017

Wanna fuck?

iMessage from Jade 09/21/2017

Hunter? Are you forreal?

Facebook post 09/22/2017

Jade Michelle is SINGLE.

***

College dorm room, October, 2017

Hunter had black pillows with jersey sheets. He thought they were comfy, but they got dirty easily. Their color and fabric were imperfection magnets.

He lounged on his side, the thin black cover thrown onto the floor so he could inspect his fitted sheet more clearly. It had been a month, but his bed was an archive of her. As his eyes scanned everything she’d left behind, he blew smoke into the stuffy room to fill it up.

Hunter didn't want to see it all too clearly.

A long brown curl was pressed into what used to be her pillow, the one at the edge of the bed. She used let him sleep next to the wall because he liked it so much. Crumbs dusted the bed’s black expanse. Probably from toast. She ate that the most because it was the only thing she could cook.

A white spot stained the covers a torso length down. He scratched at it with his bitten fingernail, knowing it was from her. He used to hate when her love would drip onto his sheets.

He couldn’t take his eyes away from it, his forefinger running over it again and again, making it flake.

He’d done a lot of things to her that he regretted.

***

A coffee shop in San Fransisco, November, 2022

He still had as many freckles as she remembered. They peppered his nose and cheeks and filtered down into his beard. She used to love the way they looked together, natural and untouched. Now she saw that he was nothing more than a child hiding behind his facial hair.

Jade recognized his shirt, even. It must have been rough for him lately if he was still wearing it; the Avett Brothers hadn’t been relevant in years. He never did laundry much. She guessed that if she were to lean over and sniff him that he’d smell the same way he always had, like weed and toast.

She watched his eyes take her in as one of his nervous hands shook up and down the rounded edge of his coffee mug. She saw him search her hair and her body, looking for something familiar to latch onto. Jade knew there was nothing there.

The rest of the scene played out just as it had in her head.

“Isn’t it funny? How much I’ve changed and how little you have?” She asked.

Tears gathered in the corners of Hunter’s eyes, which were big and brown and scared. She’d wanted him to cry, she'd meant for him to cry. But now that he was, she wished he wouldn’t.

Jade had met him in the coffee shop in San Fransisco to feel his regret first-hand; it’d been five years since they’d broken up, after all. She wanted to see if he knew what he had done to her. She wanted to see if he knew what he was missing. She wanted to see if he had changed.

Triumph felt colder than she’d imagined.