Steve calls her “Ice Queen.” She's no royalty, so I call her “Cold Bitch.”
I’ll admit that she is beautiful. She has thick dark hair and penetrating blue eyes. But her frigidity overpowers her beauty. She rarely smiles. Instead, she seems to celebrate her own aloofness. Revel in her ability to distance herself from others. She never even looks at me, apparently, because I’m his new girlfriend.
I despise her, not only for everything she did to him, but for her refusal to be decent to me. As if its not bad enough that she broke his heart and treated him cruelly, she’s relegated me to ride in the back of her mini-van, shivering on the floor like a refugee.
When Steve had first mentioned that since he didn’t have a car, he’d ask her to drive us from the airport to his apartment, I thought he was joking. He assured me that Cold Bitch owed him a favor and she was his only friend with a car. But when he’d lost his phone at the airport before we’d left, he didn’t have anyway to let her know that we’d arrived. She wasn’t waiting for us inside at baggage claim or at the passenger pick-up area outside. When we were waiting outside, shivering in the winter cold, I could only hope that she’d come.
After about ten minutes, she pulled up to the curb and rolled down her window. She didn’t acknowledge me; the chill in her voice was for him alone. “I have been waiting for almost half an hour. You can find your own fucking ride home.” She continued to yell about how she'd wasted another thirty minutes of her life on him and why hadn’t he answered his damned phone.
He screamed back at her in a failed attempt to explain. They weren’t yelling at each other, as much as over each other. Their angry outbursts were practiced and bitter. I started singing in my head to distract myself and I was startled when Steve defiantly ran in front of her van as she was rolling up the window.
She looked at him, then over her shoulder like she might back out of the parking lot to avoid him. She sighed and rolled the window back down.
“Get in,” she said acknowledging me for the first time. “Don’t break anything.”
I reluctantly reached for the door. I was surprised to see that she’d removed every seat in the van except for hers. The floor was covered with stuff – clothes, a guitar case, books. I tentatively started pushing things out of the way, wondering if she’d removed the seats just for picking us up. Steve was more aggressive and he pushed her stuff into a pile so there was a small place for us to sit.
The quiet tension was unbearable. I thought maybe I could diffuse the situation and that she’d be more kind if I showed some appreciation, so I told her, “Thank you for the ride.”
“I don’t want to hear a single word from either of you. I swear if you talk again, I will fucking kick you out of my van. I don’t care where we are.”
Steve wrapped his arms around me and whispered in my ear that it was going to be okay. He kissed me on my cheek and I believed him. I thought about how we’d laugh about this later. He’d tell me other stories about the awful things she’d done to him when they’d been together. He’d tell me again how much happier I made him. He laid his head in my lap and I rubbed the base of his neck where his boyish unruly curls ended until he fell asleep.
I noticed that I could look at Cold Bitch in the darkened rear view mirror without her seeing me. She was watching the road with her piercingly blue eyes. When she suddenly looked away I was afraid that she’d seen me looking at her until I saw she was reaching for a CD.
She put it in and sang along quietly to a Rilo Kiley song. I wasn't sure if I could hear her but I was sure I saw her lips moving in the mirror. “The slow fade of love." Her gloved fingertips tapped the steering wheel with the beat of the acoustic guitar.
I couldn't believe it, I loved Rilo. She kept singing, louder now, so that her voice was audible, “It's my gradual descent, Into a life i never meant.” Her voice, softer and sweeter than I’d guessed it would be, revealed her fragile side. She lost her inhibitions as she slipped into the lyrics. I realized then that her icy exterior was her protection from the hurtful world. I saw her not as Cold Bitch, but as a girl just like me looking for true love and grasping for happiness. Maybe she’d admired his curls once too, long before their mistakes and regrets replaced their love.
I wanted to tell her all these things, maybe even suggest we could be friends, but I was afraid if I spoke, she’d return to her icy façade. So instead, I sang along with her, quietly whispering the lyrics under my breath.
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