Then, he just laid there with the hazy rain and the cars pounding through it and thought. How silly, he thought. To long for someone you don't even know. How quickly the independence he'd been building had left the scene, to let the crime of her take hold. His mind fell into that wide hole of her temporary absence and laid there as an anchor of stone. Her words were hardly a bed, but he would treat them no other way. Because some masochistic part of him preferred thinking warmer to feeling it. Because he knew she was feeling warmer now instead of just wishing it. Somehow the cold isn't so cold when your own kindness is a replacement for invisible blasts of ice.
It was the risk of death that sustained his new reason for living. And if he could just fend off the hounds of cynicism for one more day, maybe the angel of hope would come to visit him. And maybe just once he could look out at faces he didn't know and be okay with their blankness. And the stories that lay directly behind would never be told, but maybe they were a flame not meant for him.
All her stories. The ones she once experienced and led him through the same. They had once been her own fires, but now ash. No warmth in them save the thought itself. It was their masochism taking hold again, using thoughts as heat ventriloquism. No, they had to fight it and learn to make their own fire. To remember that they had arms and hands and they could do more with them than just crawl up together and feed each other decadent fancies. They could make the cold go away if they tried to.