You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology (42 page)

She found herself blushing, a tendency that was new. She had never really blushed much with him, simply because from the very first, he had always made her feel so sure and happy. She had destroyed that surety, though, willfully and wantonly, and it had taken some doing. He had been as sure for her as any man could possibly be.

Her eyes prickled again, and she focused on her own waffle, no fancy strawberries on it, just a dusting of powdered sugar. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught his finger tracing around the edge of his plate. When he brought it to his mouth and sucked the sugar off it, she blushed all over.

And peeked to find him watching her, transfixed, finger still in his mouth.

He stretched across the island to pull her plate to the stool right beside him and then, as she came after it, ridiculously shy, he took one of his own strawberry hearts and placed it neatly in the center of her waffle. That stopped her dead just before she climbed onto the stool, tears threatening again.

He kissed her, hoisting her up onto the stool himself, and slipped her a fork. His hand rested a moment over hers, that warmth that only yesterday she had never thought to feel again. “This tastes so damn good, Kai,” he said softly. “You have no idea.”

“You haven’t even tasted the waffle yet.” His manners bound him to wait until they both were served.

He grinned again. “You had me at the strawberry,” he said this time and touched a bit of whipped cream to her nose. An unheard-of silliness from Kurt. It was more like something she would once have done.

He swooped in and kissed the cream off her nose and sat back to dig into his waffle. The amount of happiness suddenly shimmering off him was too much for her to process. Didn’t he remember that their happiness was all gone?

He closed his eyes on the first bite of waffle in pure bliss and opened them to catch her staring. He smiled.

It had once seemed so normal, to construct happiness out of flour, butter, eggs, and strawberries and to bake it into something golden and sweet for a morning. Now it seemed incredible—such a fragile joy in the face of all the great destructive grief that could tear through that moment and destroy it.

At one point, grief and anger had pushed her so far over the edge that she would have destroyed this moment herself, on the grounds that all that happiness and hope was false. But now—it wasn’t really that she believed in those flowers sprouting out of the snow, as she used to. But she knew better than to stomp on them and grind them into the mud just so nothing else could grind them first.

So they ate their waffles, every bite an unbelievable burst of golden
flavor
. She couldn’t remember the last time she had
tasted.
He cleaned every last crumb from his plate. She ate around her little strawberry heart, until it stood bereft on an island of powdered gold. It felt too wrong for
her
to eat that heart, like giving the prince’s heart to the wicked witch instead of to the happy, singing princess.

Kurt’s fork speared through heart and waffle both, and he slipped the whole bite into her mouth. Then, while she was still trying to convince herself it was okay for her to chew it, he rose briskly, taking their plates to the sink. Over the running water, he asked, “Would you like to go for a walk?”

Even when Kurt did the cooking—grilling out, maybe—he tended to wash the dishes automatically at the end of the meal. His compulsive mother had probably never allowed dirty dishes to lie around, so probably nurture had something to do with it, but his childhood household had had staff. He wouldn’t have ever had to wash a dish himself, growing up. So Kai had always thought another element besides environmentally-induced obsessive-compulsiveness must contribute to how voluntarily he did any household chores that needed doing: he had an ingrained need to take care of the good things in his life, and her cooking for him was one of the good things.

“In the snow?” she asked.

His half-smile was careful, watchful. “That’s right.”

She had walked so much in the snow up here. But if she added him to the excursion—she was a little afraid of snow, still. Because, well—she had just wanted so damn badly to have their own child with whom to play in it by now. Back in the good old days, she had even imagined that by this age they would have two or three kids; they would
talk
about it, God, as if this was in their control: “Three might be a lot. We would have to get a bigger house.” “Three seems like an odd number. I think it should be either two or four, so one of them doesn’t feel left out.” “Ha, if you want four,
you
get pregnant.” That retort had been back early in the first pregnancy, when she just thought it was going to be all vicious nausea but eventually with a happy ending. Or a happy beginning. Whatever you wanted to call it. “Well, don’t you want at least one of each, a little girl and a little boy? I hope the little girl will look just like you.”
Stupid
conversations like that.

By the third attempt, she would have been desperately happy with just one. And then, and then—she just couldn’t stand to try, not ever again. God, the first baby would have been
four
this Christmas, if she had lived to be born. Her third baby had actually been due on Christmas Day. Her little miracle baby, she had thought at it in her belly, all through that spring, and tried to believe in the magic of the third try
so hard.

Her nostrils stung, the way they did sometimes when everyone else thought she should be over it by now. It had been part of the reason that she had had to get so far away from everyone else.

She took a breath and sighed it out. “Yes, all right. Let’s go for a walk.”

K
urt focused on
the hot water running over the plates, grateful for it. He had never understood it when he discovered that their friends’ couples fought over such stupid things as doing dishes or mowing the grass or making sure someone’s tank was filled with gas. They were all such easy things to
get right
.

It turned out they didn’t count for much, when the going got tough, but it used to be, when he wasn’t ever entirely sure how he had managed to convince this much sunshine to enter his life, that he found them very reassuring. Little things to keep that sunshine happy. Look at this plate, for example: it had just held the most delicious waffles and hearts for him, and now, instead of leaving it some ugly mess no one would ever want to deal with later, he was cleaning it right up, fresh and shiny and ready for a new start.

When you had a woman who was willing to cook for you, and laugh and tease you while she did it, you didn’t really want to leave any barriers lying around the kitchen that would discourage her from getting in that cheerful, cooking mood again the next evening or even sometimes spontaneously for breakfast. Up until things went so wrong, he had been kind of quietly, contentedly smug about how well this philosophy worked compared to those of his idiot friends.

But then, of course, all of those friends still had their wives, and even kids, now, and complained about them, too. Told him he should be glad, that he didn’t know how much trouble he had escaped.

The fucking bastards.

He drew a breath, easing his fingers on the plate before he cracked it, and set it to dry. “I’ll go get my snow boots from the car.” He had put snow gear into the back as he always did when driving in winter weather, just in case. Like the dishes, it used to profoundly reassure him when he was packing up Kai’s snow gear, too, and a big box of energy bars, in case they got stranded—doing everything in his power to keep his wife and their world together protected and happy. Packing up just his own snow gear felt—shitty. Really, really shitty.

“All right,” she said, smiling at him tentatively as he left. He was probably pushing this too soon, getting everything wrong
again
, but
God
, he did not want to spend another Christmas Day like last one. Just this grinding agony of minute after minute of a day to get through. Knowing she was by herself and that her agony must be even
worse.
And that there was nothing he could do to help; everything he did only made her misery more unbearable.

He knew why men killed themselves when they lost their families.

He just hadn’t had that option, last Christmas. He knew he had to hold through and get his family back.

He hadn’t even been able to drink himself into oblivion, because—well, for one thing he didn’t even know how to get drunk. He’d done it once as a college student and not liked the experience
at all.
Kai had often tried to tease him into drinking an extra glass of wine, but he had always worried about what he might do if he lost control—what if it was something she would find ridiculous or offensive?

But that Christmas Day, he would have been happy to test out getting drunk again, except—what if she called? What if she just couldn’t make it through that Christmas Day and needed him? He had to be able to drive.

God.

Anything would be better than that Christmas Day again.

Except, maybe, failing to make things right this time, too. What if he hit a point when he had to give up all hope?

No, don’t think like that. She had smiled. She had made waffles. She had put hearts on them, which was the kind of sweet, silly thing she used to do for him. He’d had to start acting silly himself, because otherwise all the emotions that rushed up in him might have come out as, God forbid, tears. He’d cried for her once—all those words she was wielding back then breaking him like a damn rack. It had actually seemed to work—she’d softened, as if the tears had shocked through to her heart and she’d remembered that hers sometimes beat for him, too. She’d wrapped her arms around him and whispered she was sorry, she was sorry, she didn’t mean it, she was so sorry—and they had made love. It had been so sweet, and he had been so
glad
, that things might finally work out, that she finally understood he did care—

And she had left him the very next day. Crying herself. “I just can’t. I just can’t do it anymore.”

“But—Kai, why? I thought—didn’t we—”

“I just can’t.”

God.

He pulled his snow pants and snow boots on, sitting on the edge of the bumper, zipped his ski jacket up to his chin and pulled on his gloves—nice, thick armor everywhere—and went back into the house to pull her out into this snow. Hoping it wasn’t the wrong thing to do.

The way she walked on the snow at first, anyone would have thought she was a kitten seeing snow for the first time. Which broke his heart a little, but his heart was so used to being broken by then. She was the one who had taught
him
to play in the snow, before he quite understood that adults were allowed to. He still remembered how she’d done it, the sideways evil laughing look as she tested a handful of snow before she lobbed it straight at him. She had lousy aim, and he’d just smiled at her when it bounced off his shoulder, shaking his head indulgently as he kept walking. The next one had hit him square on the back, sliding harmlessly off his jacket. So she had run up to him and kissed him, and God knew, he should have expected what was coming, but it was their first snow together, and he had just sunk delightedly into his kiss, until a cold handful of snow went straight down his collar and he yelped.

After which, what was a man supposed to do? He’d
had
to get her. And it had been so much fun. He had felt like a kid again, until he caught her at last and rolled her under him in the snow, when he’d realized—no, it wasn’t childish. No, he was an adult, his body at that moment felt very, very adult, and this was how his adult life could
be
, with her. Happy. Thrilled. Aroused. Zinging with energy and fun. Forever.

He’d proposed to her that night. She’d been so happy, too. As if, in offering himself to her, he had offered her the whole world.

And the forever of fun had lasted a few years. It turned out she had wanted more in her world than him, but that hadn’t really been a surprise when he understood how important that was to her, or even a disappointment, just, eventually, a—regret. Because he himself was all he could actually offer her. The rest of what she wanted was even more beyond his control than hers. It wasn’t even happening in
his
body
; it was all in hers. And he knew that his physical distance from it was something for which she had a very hard time forgiving him.

Although he had tried to control what happened, God. He had tried everything: talking to her the first time—
We can try again, honey
—oh,
shit,
had that been a bad idea. And the second time:
Don’t think about it, honey, please don’t get your hopes up.
In a way, that technique had worked well for him, the second time—to just turn his brain off, not believe in it at all. Except that she had hated him so much for his ability to do that and for his attempts to get her to do it, too. And the third time—he had just lived in pure, knotted dread, so worried about her that he couldn’t even stand to think about the baby at all, except as what the little fetus might do to her if it didn’t, if it didn’t—

And then it hadn’t.

And none of his attempts to solve things, to make her better—
Maybe we should adopt,
or
Honey, we’ve got us at least,
or
Honey, what do you think about a little trip to the Bahamas? India? Mount Everest?
—had worked
at all.

He looked down at her now, not really hoping for a spark of that old laughter and not finding it, either. But she settled into the walk, the kitten finally figuring out that the snow wouldn’t hurt her or at least that it was a hurt she could bear, her shoulders relaxing and a little sigh running through her, her face growing thoughtful and quiet, sadness in there, yes, but a sadness with which she had made some kind of peace.

He took his glove off—stupid armor—and caught a snowflake off her lashes, then rubbed it against her cold-flushed cheek. Her face brightened, like a surprise to her, and she looked up at him. He smiled down at her. “If I drop snow down your neck, will you chase me and kiss me?”