Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice

Word count: 1304

         Jack—Jacqueline Winter—let the sunlight make a blanket of heat all over the top of her body, until her lower back dripped sweat onto her beach towel and her upper lip had beads of moisture above it.  Then she turned to lie on her stomach, taking pleasure in the cool kiss of the breeze drying the sweat on her spine and the backs of her knees.

         She hated the heat and humidity of the beach, but it was her penance, doled out by the League of Heroes:  she couldn’t live anywhere north of the Tropic of Cancer or south of the Tropic of Capricorn. 

         Considering that she used to masquerade as Jack Frost in the Court of Ice, her mother’s cohort of cold-themed super villains, Jack supposed she had gotten off rather lightly.  After all, her mother, the Winter Queen, was currently cooling her heels inside of an active volcano, courtesy the League of Morally Superior Browbeaters, thought Jack as she sweltered under the Puerto Vallarta sun.

         The tinkling song of ice against glass caught Jack’s ear before a cascade of water droplets hit her shoulder with a shock of cold that felt orgasmic in its sudden demand of the attention of all her body’s senses.  Expecting a drunken spring-breaker or a leather-skinned Californian midlife crisis to be leering down at her and her bikini, Jack opened one eye to see something even more obnoxious:  a hero.

         Kai Salvomar, aka Inferno.

         He wore a pair of board shorts and mirrored aviator-style sunglasses and looked disturbingly comfortable in the heat.  He also held two drinks with tiny umbrellas and bright pink straws—likely taken from one of the nearby clubs that specialized in touristy drinks—one of which he offered to her.  With a sigh, she rolled over to sit with her legs crossed, quite aware that her tan looked especially burnished compared to her long white hair and pale violet eyes, and accepted one of the drinks as Kai sat on the sand next to her.

         “If you are my new parole officer,” she studied him over the top of her sunglasses, “I think I should warn you that the League frowns on drinks with little paper umbrellas, morals with flexible boundaries, and fun in general.”

         He plucked the umbrella from his drink and tossed it back over his shoulder, before shooting her a grin, a dimple flashing briefly from his cheek, and saying, “Well, that’s one down.  Anything else?”

         “If you ever call me Cat-eyes again, I will freeze the intraocular fluid in your eyeballs so quickly that your eyes will explode.”

         He winced, “You remember that, huh?”

         She stared at him over the tops of her glasses, again, letting her pupils contract into slits in the afternoon light, “Yes.”

         With his free hand, Kai ruffled his dark gold hair, leaving it in haphazard furrows—Jack remembered he tended to do that in moments of frustration, when he wanted to say something but couldn’t.  Or wouldn’t.  Jack sipped her drink:  a Mai Tai, sweet and rum-filled, like the college girls who spent their days idling on the sand.  She put the drink aside—she preferred the astringency of vodka.

         Dropping his arm to rest on his upraised knees, Kai casually flicked the straw out of the glass then proceeded to drink the entire Mai Tai in three long swallows.

         “You know, I never get brain freeze anymore,” he pushed the glass’s bottom into the sand between them, “Except when I’m around you.  And then it seems to be an entirely different kind of brain freeze.”

         “Well, firstly, ‘brain freeze’ assumes the presence of a brain,” Jack smirked.  “And, secondly, we are entirely different creatures:  me being supernaturally gifted by nature, and you being, essentially, someone’s science fair volcano gone awry.”

         It was a gross understatement of his abilities, she knew.  She had seen him single-handedly immolate an exo-suited robber—who made the mistake of threatening a bank’s worth of hostages with death—into a conglomeration of molten steel and charred bones.  Several of the former hostages had sued the League for the costs of psychiatric treatment due to witnessing the mortal melting of a lunatic; Jack didn’t know why.  She’d thought the result resembled a decent piece of modern art.

         Kai nodded, “Yeah, me being charming and good, and you being all sardonic and evil.”

         She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head then examined her manicured nails, “Evil?  I’ve abided by the League’s stipulations concerning my behavior.”

         Reaching between them to take an ice cube from Kai’s glass, she slid it into her mouth, rolling it around with her tongue for a moment before pressing her lips together, all the while watching Kai’s mouth drift further open.

         “Evil,” he shook his head slightly, “You are evil.”

         “I seem to remember you mangling an idiom—something about ice not melting in my mouth,” she stuck her tongue out to show him the sliver of ice left on it.

         He whistled one dismayed, flat note and laughed, “I ‘mangled’ that idiom purposely… and, you don’t forget anything, do you?”

         “The disadvantage of having a superior intellect,” she pushed her sunglasses back down in front of her eyes, “Nothing you’re familiar with, I’m sure.”

         “Good god!  You are an infuriating, self-important—“ he stopped, his lips pressed flat, his sunglasses reflecting a warped image of Jack back at her.  “Do you even know how to talk to someone without starting a fight or insulting them?”

         Shard by shard, she pulled the ice from her words as she replied, “You’ve heard the axiom ‘actions speak louder than words’?  Have you ever stopped to consider why I’ve spent a year allowing the League to dictate my behavior?  Why I betrayed my mother?  Do you think I desperately wanted to live under the suspicion of the League for the rest of my life?”

         She felt the heat begin to pulse from him in waves.  It kindled her power, her body sensing a threat usually associated with battle.  The cold power inside of her fought to surface, like an ice floe submerged in her blood, ready to turn her fingers into ice-capped daggers and capture the moisture from the air to turn it into a hail of frozen razors.  What was blood but a river of red waiting to be frozen, her power sang to her in the sharp voice of winter.

         “Why then?” he asked.  Heat shimmered from Kai’s skin—he looked like a mirage.

         She took off her sunglasses then leaned towards Kai to gently remove his aviators.  This time her power did rush out to protect her because his sunglasses were hot, like a pan left on a burner, and the frost on her fingertips hissed when it met the metal of the frames.  Still, she held them, setting his sunglasses on the sand between them, where the lenses mirrored her as she cupped his jaw, enjoying the roughness of his stubble under her fingers as his heat melted the ice on her fingertips.  Leaning into him, she pressed her lips to his, even though his mouth burned, and, when he moved his lips in response to hers, the friction of sent flares of pleasure and pain that made her pull away, her breath panting out in small frosty clouds.

         “That’s why,” she answered, each word drifting in the air for a moment before evaporating into the heat.

         Kai grinned his lopsided grin, “Let’s see if we can take care of two and three.”

         “What?”  The question puffed out as Jack’s fight-or-flight conditioned powers realized that this situation called for neither.

         “Let’s go test out that moral flexibility and find some fun in general,” he stood up and held his hand out to her, “Come on.”

         She took his hand.