The Ice Woman Who Came to Find Me Asleep

Winter had come early that year to Punta Helguera, and Adela drew the curtains shut twice over to seal out the cold seeping beneath the frame. She had lived alone since spring, in a flat inherited from her grandmother, with ceilings that were too high and heating that creaked like a sick animal. That night the thermometer read minus four, and the north wind scratched at the panes like fingers searching for a way in.

She got into bed wearing two pairs of socks and the cotton T-shirt her mother had given her in April. She was twenty-seven and had never been with anyone. Not for lack of opportunities—there had been men and women—but because of that ancient fear that had lived inside her since childhood: the fear of surrendering, of letting go of control, of allowing another body to take possession of hers. Desire existed; sometimes she felt it like an underground current that wet her panties without permission, that stiffened her nipples beneath her clothes as she walked down the street, that woke her in the early hours with her hand between her thighs without her having put it there. But she extinguished it before it could begin to burn. It was easier that way. Safer.

She switched off the bedside lamp and curled up beneath the duvet. Sleep came quickly, dense and heavy.

She dreamed that the room grew even darker, that the air became thick, and that the cold pierced the duvet as if it were paper. She dreamed that something sat down at the edge of the bed, beside her knees. She did not open her eyes—in the dream she could not—but she knew there was a presence.

“Adela,” said a voice she had never heard before.

It was a woman’s voice, low and patient, with an ancient vibration that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. The bed creaked beneath a very slight weight. Adela wanted to move, to get away, but her body would not respond. Only her eyelids, finally, obeyed her.

The woman looking at her from the edge of the bed had translucent, almost blue skin. Her silver hair fell to her waist and moved without any wind, as though suspended in water. Her eyes were the blue of a glacier, with no visible pupils. She was not beautiful in the human sense: she was beautiful the way a field of ice beneath the moon is beautiful, a beauty that frightened you to look at for too long.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said, and as she spoke, vapor escaped her lips like someone breathing on a frosty day. “I came slowly. I’ve spent years waiting for someone who felt what you feel.”

“Who are you?” Adela murmured, surprised that her voice came out at all.

“Sélma. Some have called me that. Others don’t call me; they simply let me in.”

Adela wanted to ask more, but Sélma had extended her hand and brushed her cheek with the tip of one finger. The contact was exactly what she expected—cold, sharp, almost burning—and exactly the opposite: sweet, slow, a caress in no hurry at all. A shiver ran down her spine and settled between her legs with a clarity she had never felt before. Her pussy clenched hard, wet and throbbing beneath the cotton panties that were already beginning to cling to her.

No, no, no.

The old internal cry flared up at once. Adela tried to turn her face away, to hide it beneath the duvet, but her body still would not obey her. She could only look. She could only feel.

“I know your fear,” Sélma whispered, leaning closer. “I can smell it on your skin. And I can smell something else, too, Adela. I can smell how wet you get when you close your eyes. I can smell the pussy you’ve denied for twenty-seven years. I’m in no hurry. If you want me to leave, you have to tell me now.”

Adela opened her mouth to say it. To scream at her to leave. But what came out was a long, expectant silence, and Sélma merely smiled, as though she knew that answer too.

“Good,” she said.

***

The first kiss was on her forehead. The second, at her temple. The third, at the corner of her lips. Sélma measured every approach as if Adela were a frightened animal to be tamed without sudden movements. The cold she left on the skin was not an assault but a trace, a mark that burned after she pulled away. Adela’s fists were closed over the duvet. She could not open them. She did not want to open them.

When those icy lips finally found hers, Adela let out a low, hoarse sound she did not recognize. It was the first real kiss of her life. She was twenty-seven and had always avoided that open mouth, that tongue entering, that act of accepting someone inside her. Sélma kissed without invading. She offered her tongue and waited. And Adela, after a long moment in which her heart pounded against her sternum like a fist, went looking for it with her own.

The cold tongue twined around hers, sucked it slowly, fucked it with her mouth as if she were teaching her how to kiss from the beginning. Adela moaned into that mouth, and Sélma swallowed the moan and gave her back another, deeper and rougher, laden with a hunger she no longer bothered to conceal.

It was sweet. It was bitter. It was everything she had always feared and everything she had never imagined.

Sélma’s hands slipped beneath the cotton T-shirt. Adela’s skin prickled at the touch, her nipples standing up before they were touched. When those cold fingers brushed them, she arched her back and let out another sound, animal, that she did not recognize either. Sélma pinched one, then the other, pulling at them with measured cruelty that drew a long gasp from Adela. Then she lowered her mouth and sucked them, one at a time, enveloping them with her icy tongue, nibbling them with her teeth until Adela felt the pull travel straight from her tits to her pussy, a taut wire that made her writhe.

“It’s all right,” Sélma murmured against her neck. “It’s all right to feel it. It’s all right to get this soaked. I’m not asking you for anything.”

But she was asking her for everything. Adela knew it. And for the first time in twenty-seven years, she did not want to stop.

***

Sélma moved lower with a slowness that was almost cruel. She kissed her collarbone, the hollow between her breasts, each rib separately, as if reading a book full of marks. Beneath every kiss, a trace of frost remained, evaporating at once but leaving behind a burning tingle. At some point, without Adela noticing, the T-shirt had disappeared. The duvet had too. Sélma lowered the wet panties with her teeth, slowly pulling at the elastic, dragging the fabric down her thighs, over her knees, down to her ankles, until she was completely naked. She was naked in her own bed in the middle of January, and yet she was not cold. She felt something else: an inner heat growing as the external cold invaded her, like two opposing currents winding around the same marrow.

“Look at me,” Sélma said.

Adela lowered her gaze. The glacier eyes were between her thighs, waiting for a permission no word had given. She swallowed. Her legs trembled and, without quite deciding to, parted just enough. Sélma smiled again. That ancient, patient smile that seemed to say, “I knew you’d get here.”

“Look at what I’ve done to you,” she murmured. “Open. Soaked. You’ve spent twenty-seven years closing yourself off, and one night was all it took for everyone to see everything.”

Adela covered her face with her forearm, ashamed of the heat rising through her chest, but also unable to close her legs. She felt the icy dream air brush against her open pussy, her swollen lips, her hard, throbbing clitoris, as if it had a life of its own.

The first tongue between her thighs was an absolute revelation. Pure cold against the hottest center of her body, such a precise contradiction that Adela screamed—a muffled scream inward, trapped in the throat of the dream. Sélma did not hurry. She drew slow, gentle, exploratory circles around the clitoris, moving up and down the outer lips, barely dipping the icy tip into the opening of her pussy before withdrawing it at once, like someone tasting an unfamiliar flavor and wanting to remember it. Every movement sent a new jolt through Adela’s body. Her hips moved on their own. She had no control over them.

“I can’t,” she panted. “I can’t, I don’t know how.”

“Yes, you can,” Sélma replied without lifting her head. “You’ve been able to all your life. Listen to the sound your pussy makes when I lick it, Adela. Listen to yourself.”

And it was true: the wet, obscene sound of her tongue sliding over Adela’s soaked flesh filled the bedroom. Adela had never heard that before—not from herself, not coming from her own body. She felt more naked than ever.

Then Sélma sank two silver, icy fingers into her. She pushed them in slowly, all the way, and Adela felt her pussy accept them without resistance, closing around those foreign fingers as if it had been waiting for them all its life. Her virginity went that way, without a sound, in a long moan that tore at her throat. There was no pain: only a clean burning, a cold fullness, an opening inside that made her cry without knowing why.

Sélma pumped slowly, moving her fingers inside her with a patient rhythm, curling them upward to touch a place Adela had not known existed. Every brush against that inner spot shook her entire body, tore a new moan from her, made her squeeze her pussy around those fingers until she milked them. The cold tongue kept working her clitoris, alternating flat licks with quick circles, occasionally sucking gently and sending jolts all the way to the nape of her neck.

“That’s it,” Sélma whispered, her mouth smeared with her juices. “That’s how you learn. Push your pussy into my face, don’t hold back.”

Adela obeyed without thinking. She raised her hips and rubbed herself against that icy mouth, seeking more tongue, more fingers, more of everything. She heard herself moaning filthily, words she had not known she knew spilling between her teeth: “yes, like that, suck me, put them deeper, deeper.” Her own voice shocked her and set her ablaze at the same time.

Then Sélma truly began to suck. She latched onto the clitoris with a long, deep suction while driving her fingers in to the knuckles, and Adela arched completely, her heels digging into the mattress. Pleasure was not some distant promise: it was a wave that had already begun to break.

***

The cold, however, was advancing. Adela noticed it when she tried to breathe deeply and saw a little white cloud leave her mouth inside the dream, inside her own bedroom. She noticed that she could no longer feel her toes. She noticed that the blood was moving more slowly through her neck, like a river onto which thin plates of ice were falling.

She understood. All at once, with the strange clarity dreams sometimes have.

Sélma was not there only to give her pleasure. Sélma was feeding. Every kiss, every lick, every finger sunk into her pussy stole a little of her warmth, her life, her time. And Adela, who had spent twenty-seven years extinguishing desire for fear of disappearing into another body, was about to disappear for real, this time without metaphor.

“Stop,” she said. This time the word came out clear and firm.

Sélma raised her head. Her lips were shining, faintly blue, with Adela’s fluids painting her chin. She ran her tongue over them slowly, savoring herself.

“If you want,” she replied. “I told you that you could say so. But remember, it’s now. And remember this too: you will never come in your life the way you’re going to come with me tonight. No human body will ever reach as deep inside you.”

Adela looked at her. She looked at her own breasts covered by a filmy veil of frost, at the blue veins standing out on the insides of her thighs, at the silver fingers still inside her pussy, motionless and waiting. She felt the orgasm waiting, throbbing somewhere just behind her navel, still within reach if she asked for one more minute. At the same time, she felt the promise of her fear fulfilled: if she stayed that minute, she would not get up in the morning.

For the first time in her life, she had to choose between desire and prudence, between pleasure and her body, between the woman she had been and the woman she was becoming beneath that tongue of ice.

“Don’t stop,” she said, hating herself for saying it and knowing at the same time that she had made the decision long ago. “Fuck me to the end. Finish me.”

Sélma closed her eyes for an instant, as if in gratitude.

She lowered her head again, and this time there was no patience. The cold tongue moved to a rhythm Adela followed both unwillingly and willingly, the fingers entering and leaving her pussy with a wet squelch that filled the room, the silver hands holding her hips with a new firmness, the mouth sucking at her clitoris with an appetite no longer concealed. A third finger joined them, then a fourth; Adela’s pussy opened around them, soaked and hungry, dripping down the insides of her thighs.

“This is how I wanted you,” Sélma panted against her flesh. “All mine. Open all the way. Tell me you’re mine, Adela.”

“I’m yours,” she moaned without hesitation. “I’m yours, I’m yours, don’t stop, please don’t stop.”

Sélma bit her clitoris with exact gentleness and curled her fingers inside her at the same time, pressing that inner spot she had already found. The pleasure rose, rose, and spilled over inside her like a shattered glass.

The orgasm, when it came, was nothing like anything she could have imagined during her solitary nights with her hand between her legs. It was a long, white wave passing through her from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head, a wave carrying away all the fear accumulated over twenty-seven years. Her pussy convulsed around Sélma’s fingers, squeezing them, expelling a warm jet that soaked her thighs, the sheet, and the icy chin still clinging to her. Adela screamed—this time the scream came out whole, high-pitched, obscene—and kept screaming as the contractions followed one after another, unstoppable, each deeper than the last. She felt hollow and full at the same time, flung wide open to someone for the first time, surrendered without a shield. In that vertigo, she finally let go of what she had been clenching her whole life.

Sélma did not withdraw her fingers until the final tremor had faded. She pulled them out slowly, licking them one by one in front of her without ever breaking eye contact.

***

When the last tremor faded, Adela could no longer move her eyelids. She felt Sélma sit up, caress her cheek with one finger—that same finger from the beginning, still wet with her—and lean over her forehead.

“Thank you,” she heard.

After that, only silence. The strange, clean silence of a room when someone has just left and closed the door without a sound.

***

The next day, Carolina, the neighbor from the apartment below, knocked three times before coming upstairs with the spare key. She found Adela in bed, her eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips, a thin layer of frost on her eyelashes and the backs of her hands. The heating was working. The windows were shut. The hallway thermometer read twenty-two degrees.

The forensic examiners would later speak of cardiac failure consistent with hypothermia, unable to explain the second thing. Carolina, a sensible woman who believed in nothing, told no one what she had seen when she pulled back the duvet: two fine, bluish marks on either side of Adela’s waist, as if very slender hands had held her there all night. Nor did she mention the wet stain between her already cold thighs, or the glistening trail running from her navel to the sheet, as if something, or someone, had drunk there until the very last drop.