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It is impossible to make love to a winter storm. Jamie knows this, and he knows that no matter how much he may try to deny it, Jack is a winter storm. He is ever-wild, powerful in ways Jamie doesn’t really understand, and simultaneously ever- and never-changing.
He realized this by fragments and degrees as he grew older, but it was one night when Jack visited him when he was sixteen that he was forced to confront the fact of Jack as Jack Frost, rather than Jack as just an ordinary sort of person with a few fantastic characteristics.
“Jamie!” Jack had called, and when Jamie had rushed to the window, he had been struck with the way that Jack was the same, just exactly the same, as he had been when Jamie had first seen him. He had the same smile, the same way of moving, the same tone of voice. It was strange, considering how much Jamie himself had changed in the last few years. And he understood. Jack was real, but not in the same way Jamie was real. He was an idea, just as much as he was a person. Fun. And Winter. He would vary only as the storms varied.
Unfortunately this realization came upon Jamie a moment after he looked at Jack and understood he loved and desired him as much as any person might love and desire another.
He had felt this realization and this understanding were in conflict that night, but as time passed he began to integrate them.
Now, in winter nights’ deepest, stillest moments, Jamie admits that even though he does not fully understand Jack, even though he knows that Jack is not human, not even a little bit, even though he does not change, even though he does not think like him, even though he is, above all things, a concept, he still loves him. He loves him for his strangeness and his inhumanity. He loves him so fiercely he does not think he will be able to ever really love anyone simply human.
When he touches himself now, he thinks only of Jack, and less of Jack of hands and mouth and body and more of Jack who calls down the snow and whistles up the wind and flies between the real and the unreal as almost nothing but the huge laugh of pure joy that echoes through the clouds.
He knows he’s lost and he doesn’t care.
One winter night he walks out onto the small backyard deck, stark naked in the moonlight from above and its reflection from the snow below. He stands there in the wind that both caresses and bites, arms open, head up, eyes closed, and fills his lungs with the cold night air as if it is the only air he will ever be able to breathe.
He does not know how long he stands there, but when he goes inside he finds his body is mottled with patches of mild frostbite. And though by some measures some would say he has never really made love to Jack Frost, that Jack Frost has never really touched him, Jamie knows that those measures are wrong. The snow, and the wind, and the frostbite left behind—these are Jack’s. Are Jack.
The satisfaction he finds in this almost troubles him.