You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology (41 page)

“Is it?” she said, low, and his fingers curled in his pockets again. Because if she realized how much harm her words had done, that was, in its way, a hopeful sign, too.

“It is,” he said. “At least—I hope I can take it.” He tried his own half-smile back.
Please don’t start telling me how much I didn’t care again, or that maybe it was my sperm that were screwed up, or
—His hands tightened into fists in his pockets, bracing. He knew he had to handle it, if she did, but—
Just please don’t.

She pressed the heavy iron lid down on the panini and snuck another glance at him, this time at his—penis? No, probably his pockets. God, hope sprung eternal, didn’t it? “Why are you wearing your wedding ring?” she asked suddenly, in a low rush.

His hands fisted so hard. “Because I’m married,” he said. And then, out of nowhere, that anger at her, that he tried not to feel, but sometimes it lashed him mercilessly: “Or I’m sorry—did you think I was just screwing around?”

She ran a hand over her face—her
ringless hand
—and then pushed it back over her hair. She had left her hair loose after their shower, and it was nearly dry now around her face. Any minute now, the hair around her face while she worked would start driving her crazy, and she would catch it up in a ponytail. The exact same bouncy blond ponytail she had always had when she was happy. He was relieved she hadn’t cut off her hair amid all the other desperate destructive gestures she had made—although he would far rather she had sacrificed her hair than him—but still . . . the ponytail was deceptive. “I don’t know what to think,” she said.

Really? Well, for once in the past two years, that was two of them. He tried not to find hope in that, too, but he found himself leaning forward against the counter. His whole damn body yearning toward her. “Why aren’t you wearing yours?”

Because you were working with food and didn’t want the rings to get gunky. Say it’s that. Say it’s that, Kai, don’t—

“Because I left you,” she said blankly, and at the same time as the words drove into his gut so violently he thought he would be sick, her eyes sparked with tears.
Good God.
Her throat had tightened over the words.
She
regretted it.
She regretted leaving him.

And that he should be so grateful for that swept rage back through him, that rage that knew no reason, that just wanted to be furious at her no matter how much he forgave her. “I noticed,” he said, too tightly.

“You—you sold the house,” she said slowly. “I thought you had accepted that we were—through.” Her breath hitched. She was trying very hard not to cry.

Oh,
fuck
, had he gotten that wrong, too? Sometimes he just wanted to
break something.
That damned glass window over there could be a start. Bash it and bash it into shards of glass everywhere that hurt everyone half as much as she had hurt him. “I couldn’t live there anymore, Kai. Not afte—I couldn’t. And maintaining three separate residences would have been a bit of a financial stretch for us. Mother said you weren’t doing much work there for a while, so I knew you could use the money from the sale.” Actually, being his mother, Anne had said, in cool, clipped tones,
And what work she is doing is quite inferior; if she doesn’t pull herself together soon, I’m going to have to stop using her.
But no need to share that. Kai had pulled herself together after a few months, where work was concerned, anyway. His mother had restored her quite chary seal of approval. “And—I didn’t think you would ever want to go back there again.”

Besides, what the fuck was he supposed to do with the baby room? Paint it over? Leave it for her to make peace with? Stand there and stare at it every night himself without even anybody to hold on to and help him bear it? In the end he had just sold the house and given all the baby things to charity, and then he had read in those damn grief and miscarriage books that he probably wasn’t supposed to have done that either.

“Oh.” She stood there staring at him, her eyebrows drawn together and her lips parted, as if he had just tumbled her whole world around. They had tumbled each other’s worlds around quite a few times since they had met, and he sure as hell hoped this tumble would be better than the last.

Because some of their tumbles had been bright, giddy tumbles, like wrestling in the summer grass and finding a pretty, laughing woman sitting astride you suddenly, trying to hold your arms down. But that last tumble had been more like falling off a Himalayan mountain face when you were about twenty thousand feet up, falling and falling with no hope of survival, and landing at last only to look up and see the avalanche bearing down next.

And he didn’t want to think about that. God, no. He so wanted this next tumble to be a different kind. Maybe not laughter-in-the-grass, maybe he couldn’t hope for that, but something warmer and softer than that avalanche, please God. Rolling over her on a rug by the fire, gentle and quiet. How about that? With a Christmas tree nearby, the room lit only by its lights and the flames. Would she let him put up a Christmas tree? If it wouldn’t make her cry, that kind of tumble would work for him.

“That smells really good,” he tried again. Because—her feeding of him had always been a beautiful, warm moment in their lives. It was the kind of thing a man might fall back on, in a crisis.

She blinked. “You must be hungry,” she realized, with considerable relief. As if it was something she could fall back on, too.

And so, for the first time in a year and a half, she fed him. She sat down across from him and ate with him, too, a nice, rich, filling broccoli soup that was so much more vegetables than he had bothered to cook for himself the past year, and as such made him feel like—hell, like somebody cared if he lived healthily—and a sandwich, and, oh, God, cookies, her cookies.

So that was nice. So nice. In its wary, cautious,
please-don’t-break-me
way. Quiet, because she seemed afraid to talk and so was he, but really, really nice. So nice that his throat clogged with it, and he had to concentrate on how to breathe. He kept discovering he was running out of oxygen because he had been afraid too deep a breath might shatter everything.

But it didn’t shatter. In fact, every time he breathed, the two of them together seemed to get a little warmer, a little more real. After they ate, he found the hot chocolate she had forgotten, still heating on the stove, and poured them two cups, drawing her down on the couch to watch the snow in the night.

She tried to stir when he settled his arm over her shoulders. “Kurt, I don’t think this is a good idea.”

Oh, because you think
I
think it’s a good idea? It’s suicidal.
But he said, “I don’t mean to be rude, Kai, but it’s way the fuck better than your last one.”

Which was probably the wrong thing to say on his part, too, but she shut up, and they sipped hot chocolate and watched the snow. He hadn’t really meant to shut her up; he was pretty sure he would like for her to talk to him, if she was in a place where she could talk without screaming again. But—her body felt so damn warm against his. Why risk it moving away?

He let it soak into him, the warmth of her, the scent of her hair, like rain at last on parched earth.
Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God . . .

And underneath the relief, the soul of a grown man who wanted to curl himself into a fetal ball in a dark place and whimper as torturers grabbed at him and hauled him away:
Oh, God, please don’t let it hurt as much as last time.

K
ai woke happy
and feeling loved, and she hadn’t in a long time. Contented, yes, she had managed that. Able to stand on her own two feet. Able to live alone, be alone, be strong—all those things, she had reached, slowly, starting maybe last spring, or maybe even the grieving process over the winter had been part of it.

But happy—loved—she had kind of forgotten she could feel that way. She knew she didn’t
deserve
to feel that way, and so now—to wake up warm on a couch, with a chest shifting under her face and an arm wrapped around her—it made tears fill her eyes. Warm tears, the tears she had tried so hard to freeze. Those tears blurred the snow still lazily, gently falling through the window as the sky lightened, as if the snow wasn’t quite ready to yield itself to sun just yet.

The tears spilled over, running silently down her cheeks and plopping onto his shirt. She hadn’t thought he was awake, but one hand came up to stroke her hair. He didn’t speak, and neither did she.

Finally she had to sniffle so badly that she pulled herself off the couch and went in search of a tissue. His hand fell away from her departing back reluctantly, but he didn’t try to catch hold of her. She stood in front of the bathroom sink staring at herself and that made her cry again, for this person in the mirror who used to have so much and who had destroyed all of it. She sat on the closed toilet with her head in her hands and cried and cried.

She had worked so hard to be done with tears like this. And yet their onslaught was almost comforting.
Oh, there you are. I’ve missed you. I guess we’re not done with each other after all.
She had had to learn how to do things like that, once the pregnancies started failing—learn how to cry inconsolably, learn how to be angry, learn how to recover. She had done a shit hell job of all of them, she supposed, and she was sorry, she was so sorry, but that, too, she had had to learn how to deal with—her guilt and regret and that great grief that was her marriage. That was him.

When she finally cleaned herself up—matter-of-factly, used to this—and came back downstairs, Kurt was asleep again, curled into the back of the couch with the blanket pulled over his head like a willful child, refusing to wake up. It surprised her. Kurt had always woken too easily, bordering on insomniac, as if he found it too troubling to lay his carefulness and control aside and had to pick them back up again as fast as possible. He had
always
been the first one out of bed in the morning.

She gazed at the long form under the blanket and finally shook her head and went into the kitchen. But there, instead of the Greek yogurt that she usually ate for breakfast these days, for efficient, palatable nourishment, she paused, and rolled her shoulders—and then she smiled suddenly, her whole heart lifting with pleasure at this morning, as she started to pull out ingredients.

As if the tears or maybe the touch of Kurt’s lips had washed away some ugly, jagged splinter blocking her heart.

She made waffles and sprinkled them with powdered sugar, blushing a little bit as she sifted it over the golden waffle. One of the strawberries she cut in half looked exactly like a heart, and she set it in the center of Kurt’s waffle, sifting a little more powdered sugar over it—and then blushed again and whisked the heart away, looking up to find him standing in the archway watching her. Behind him, the sun was starting to break through clouds and limned him in a softly diffused light.

“That smells really good,” he said, heartfelt, just as he had the night before, and she felt her face brighten into something it hadn’t felt in a long time—laughter.

“Poor man, has no one been feeding you?” she teased, and then caught herself, on the edge of the teasing, because there were so many parts to that which weren’t funny at all. She didn’t have the right to laugh with him anymore.

But his eyes snagged on her face for a long moment, and he came forward to the island so that the nimbus around him softened and she could see his smile. Not the smile he had when she made him laugh, but the smile he had always had when she just made him happy. When he was just glad to look at her. “No,” he said quietly.

Tears threatened again abruptly. How could he smile at her? It made her so sad to think of him going for a year and a half without anyone feeding him. Damn it, he deserved so much
better
than what he had gotten. And she just couldn’t give that better anymore.

She bent her head and stared at the golden waffle, under the weight of what she had done to that happiness. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the spot in the middle of the waffle where the little strawberry heart had been.

He reached across the wide island, a stretch even for him, and closed his hand around hers. His wedding band glowed simple and strong. “I’m glad. I always hoped you would feel sorry one day.”

Her mouth twisted. That was—fair, she supposed, that he would want her to regret it. What was she supposed to make of this touch, of this strange, snow-kissed togetherness after all this time? The pieces of them had been shattered and scattered so completely, how was she supposed to put them back together again? Why would he let her even try?

Her
try? She was afraid to even leave a heart strawberry in the middle of his waffle.

He was the one trying. She wasn’t even sure what he was trying to do exactly, except perhaps reach a point of forgiveness. And if so, she had been right: forgiveness really hurt.

But she could stand hurt, couldn’t she? She had proven that.

Maybe she should stand a few things again, for his sake.

So, on a sudden burst of determination, she sliced up more strawberries into fine hearts to layer all over his waffle, a whole mad field of hearts, and sprinkled it with sugar—and added whipped cream, hell, why not?—and stuck one last strawberry-heart in the mad Seussian mountain of cream, as if the Grinch’s heart had popped out of him when it grew three sizes too big—and slid it across to him.

He had sat on a stool at the edge of the island by then, watching her, and when the plate slid to a stop in front of him, he actually grinned.

Grinned.
She hadn’t seen him grin in—what, two years? He hadn’t grinned during the last six months of their marriage.

“You know, you had me at the waffle,” he told her, and the urge to grin back at him struggled with the fear that she didn’t have the right to. What had she been doing, savoring happiness this morning while he slept? When had she gotten the nerve to feel
happy
?

He picked up the strawberry heart tucked on top of the cream and pressed a kiss to it, his eyes closing. Then he ate it in one hungry snatch, like a wolf might down a scrap before anyone else could wrench it from him.