The forecast had said flurries. What came down after midnight was the real thing, sticking white on a city that usually couldn't be bothered, and she was out of bed and into his coat before he'd finished asking where she thought she was going.
"It's one a.m.," he said, from the doorway, already reaching for his boots anyway.
"It's snowing," she said, like that settled something between them it had settled once before, in a parking lot neither of them had mentioned in years.
She hit him before he was all the way down the steps — a handful packed too fast to be anything but deliberate, dropped square down the back of his collar. He didn't yell. He went very still, the way he had the first time, twenty-some years and one entire marriage ago, and then he crossed the white street in four long strides and had her against the cold flank of a parked car before she'd finished laughing.
He didn't kiss her. That was the part she hadn't expected — his forehead against hers, his breath white between them, snow catching in his eyelashes, and nothing else happening at all. Just the held second, same as the one from that first winter, stretched out until she was the one who finally looked away first.
Inside, the front hall held the dark and the particular quiet of two people dripping onto a mat. She took his hands before he could rub them together for warmth himself — pulled them flat against her bare stomach under the sweater, under his sweater, actually, the cream one he'd stopped looking for months ago.
He hissed through his teeth. "Your hands are freezing," she said, pinning them there with her own over the top.
"You said warm them."
"I didn't say how." Her head tipped back against the door, her breath catching once, sharply, at the particular shock of him — and then not catching at all, settling instead into something slower, something that had absolutely nothing left to do with the cold.
Later, much later, their boots sat side by side on the tray by the door, two dark puddles spreading and joining into one. His hands, when he finally moved them again, weren't cold anymore.