You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology (44 page)

And he took her one last time there, while she was almost asleep, just lax and willing, took her just because they were in a
bed
, a big king
marital
bed, and he wanted to make it
his
bed,
their
bed, and even though he had just come not long ago in the hot tub, the need to take her again rose up in him, too strong. He didn’t care if she half-dreamed her way through it. He had taken her plenty of times in his dreams, in the past year and a half.

Her turn to let him into
her
dreams.

Exhausted with all that animal sex, she didn’t seem to mind, her body still willing, easy, her arms sliding loosely over him but still holding him as he took her, her body curling into him when he was done, as they both fell asleep.

And that was the most beautiful thing of all, to sleep in a big bed together again.

He hadn’t always realized this, back in the days when their future could only hold bright, happy things, but to sleep together in a bed together might very well be so beautiful that if it was all the beauty his life could hold—he would still take it.

W
aking was sleepy,
happy, and then it shocked through Kai that the long body lying so close to hers wasn’t a dream, and she held herself still, heart in her throat, as if that dream might catch her and turn into a nightmare.

The potential nightmare slumbered, though, beautiful. A lithe, long, muscled body, warming all the space under the covers. He wasn’t eating enough, she thought, and touched his wrist, there were the tendons were so relaxed now in sleep. Of course, he wasn’t. He was probably swimming at lunch and running again in the evening, going rock climbing on weekends, playing Ultimate relentlessly—anything but sitting down at the kitchen table and . . . and—eating cold cereal by himself?

Of course he was.

Grief squeezed her again for all the hurt she had done him. But she realized she no longer wanted to shut him out of her life so that she didn’t have to deal with that grief. Whether the grief had just grown more manageable with time, or whether her heart had grown stronger from all it had had to learn to bear, she did not know, but she breathed through the wave of grief quietly, letting it subside and just rest there, not trying to heal it or stop it or chase it away. Just letting it be. It was there. It would always be there. If she left it alone and did not worry at it, maybe it would take a nap.

That was one thing she had learned over time. Grief was exhausting. And sometimes even the biggest grief in the world exhausted itself, like a big, bad, ugly winter that finally, even if it was late June by then, had to lay itself down and let a few daffodils push up through its weary snow.

She stroked from his wrist up that long arm, its strength in abeyance. Tears dampened her eyes as she imagined him as daffodils—such a funny image for his athletically geeky carefulness and controlled masculinity—and yet it suited him somehow. Stubborn, persistent, determined to get through the snow. She didn’t try to do anything about the tears—not wipe them away, not hold them back—and they dried after a moment without falling, while her hand traced over his collarbone.

He really had such a beautiful form to him. It just worked for her. Not bulky, just defined and strong and lovely. She liked the bones of him. She liked that lean over-thought athleticism.

But she always had. Her fingers trailed down his torso, over too-defined ribs—he was not
eating
—loving that resilient texture of him. From the very first—when she had seen his attraction to her and the way he handled it with such care, such a determination to get her right—she had wanted to get her hands on him. He’d driven her just a tiny bit crazy with how carefully he had courted her, but she had liked it, too. It had made her want to grab him and get past that careful restraint of his. Made her long to sink her hands into him. See what he
felt
like. Both her hands curved around his ribs in that remembered need. In that still urgent need.

She flexed her hands gently, trying not to wake him as she stole a little of that warm resilience again. The ability to do that felt so good. It released tension all down her spine, and the hairs on her body shivered with it.

He was so
beautiful.
The heat of him felt as if it could soak right through to her heart. Melt it. Tears sprang up again at the thought, but maybe that was just the melting ice.

God, she hadn’t realized how much ice she had inside her. She had forgotten how very, very cold everything had grown, so used to that cold that it had begun to seem just the way the world was: a severe and ugly place best suited for hibernation.

Her lips trembled upward at the corners as she traced over his hip. She still did not know if she wanted to wake up again, to come down out of those snowy clouds and be a human being again.

But he was beautiful. She could not touch him if she stayed up in the winter clouds. She could not feel that warmth at her fingertips.

Kurt’s lashes lifted slowly, for an instant his eyes wary, as if he, too, was afraid of shifting from a dream into nightmare. But then he smiled at her like a deliberate choice, like those daffodils pushing their heads up through the snow, and after a moment, he touched her cheek.

The moment reminded her of the morning after their wedding, when she had wakened to find him gazing at her like that, faces so close, and he had smiled, a slow blush climbing up his cheeks so that anyone would have thought he was some teenage bridegroom who had just made love for the first time.

“You don’t think this will just make everything harder?” she asked low.

“No,” he said quietly and fiercely. “Not trying would have been harder. Spending another Christmas like last one would have been harder.”

She took a deep breath, struggling with it. Because it felt harder to her. Far, far harder than what she had been doing these past few months, trying to float above the surface of her grief and loss and just somehow find a way forward.

“But—” Watching her, he sighed and for a moment looked so tired. His hand curved around her cheek. “I can’t speak for you.”

“Kurt.” She turned her face into his hand, hiding in its shelter. “You’ve, ah—” Her throat clogged. “You’ve always been worth me doing something hard. It just—I couldn’t, I couldn’t—”

His fingertips shifted gently on her forehead, his thumb against her temple. “I figured out that you couldn’t. It took me a while. Until the day you walked out and I didn’t chase after you, I guess. I wanted to chase after you so badly.”

Her mouth twisted against the heel of his palm. “I’m sorry. Did it take you a long time to get over it?”

A short silence. And then, so carefully the air could have been crystal and any word would shatter it into shards that pierced their hearts: “The babies?”

He hadn’t had
trouble
over the babies, that old lash of anger twitched her. Nothing like hers. Of course he had gotten over
them.
Her babies. “Me leaving.”

Another silence. She breathed in the scent of his palm. “
Get over
isn’t the right phrase.”

“Move on,” she said carefully. Her throat felt full of fog, and when she spoke each word seemed to puff that wintry whiteness over him. “You—know.”

He left the bed abruptly, grabbing one of yesterday’s abandoned towels to wrap around his waist, and went to stand by the great window. Outside, too, fog lowered over the snow, the air so thick that the tiniest blink from a snow queen’s eyes would crystallize everything. His towel was white against the white past the glass, only his body, even at its winter palest, still bringing a hint of warmth, of life, to the scene. She knew those windows were double-paned, and yet his position next to that great expanse of glass seemed like a very cold place to be.

“It’s funny how two people can love each other, and live together for years, and still not realize how very differently they think about things,” he told the glass. His hands curled into fists and slid across his towel, failing to find pockets in which to bury themselves. “I haven’t gotten over it, or moved on. It never occurred to me to try.”

Against that glass and winter world, he looked so lonely she thought she would die. But that wouldn’t cure anyone’s loneliness problems, would it?

“I’ve been waiting,” Kurt told the glass. Something spasmed across the profile of his face, some violent twisting of despair, endurance, hope. He pressed his forehead against the pane until his neck corded. “Waiting very hard.”

Oh, God, she couldn’t even think. Feelings were swelling up too big, threatening her wholeness. And yet they seemed—stronger, different, than those old feelings that had torn her apart. Almost as if she had turned into a shrunken old balloon and they were stretching her back out again. “Waiting—for me to come back?”

She saw his throat muscles work. “God, Kai, you don’t know. You don’t know how many days I tried not to get through on the hope that when I walked back through the door, you would be there, telling me how sorry you were. You don’t know how many days I tried not to think about that, tried not to hope for that.”

Tears rushed up into her eyes. Would she
never
come to an end of crying? But she could see him. She could see him, his car slowing as he turned down the street to their house, his heart tightening. She could see him telling himself, when her car wasn’t in the drive, to stop hoping, that was it, she wasn’t there—and still hoping a little, nevertheless, as he got out of the car, as he turned the key in the lock. She could see him doing it a shade too slowly, trying to put off that moment when he looked into the house—and saw it was empty. Still. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

His mouth twisted in what was maybe supposed to be a smile. “But I haven’t been waiting for you to come back, although if you had, it would have been a sign that I’d waited long enough. I’ve always been willing to chase after you. I was waiting for you to heal enough that being near me didn’t just rip your wounds right open again with every breath I took.”

She sat up, clutching the sheet to her, utterly stunned. Being near him had felt
exactly
like that. The rawness of her soul, the ragged ripping at it of his existence, her need to hide, hide, hide from anything that held more feeling, to bury herself as deep as a bear in some cave of snow.

“I should have forced you to go to a therapist somehow. I just—you weren’t suicidal, and you weren’t homicidal, and I could hardly have you committed, Kai. I
knew
you weren’t normal, but I couldn’t tell what part was some kind of postpartum depression and what part was the real grief and anger that you had to find a way to work through.”

She swallowed with great difficulty, as if she was trying to squeeze some huge marshmallow down her throat whole. “Neither could I,” she whispered, hanging her head. “I still can’t.”

He angled his head against the glass, and she felt him watching her, but she couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t.
I’m so sorry.

And then he walked back across the room, sat down on the bed beside her, and put his arm around her, pulling her into his warm chest and pressing a kiss to the top of her head. He didn’t say anything. After a moment, she slipped her hands up to his chest and buried her fingertips in her palms so that she wouldn’t clench tight fistfuls of his skin. Closing her eyes, she focused on the feel of his arms around her, his body against her face, the scent of him, the warmth. She focused so hard that it made every hair on her body shiver up, and then subside, and then shiver up again.

He brought his other arm to join the first, wrapping around her, but he never said a word. A couple of times he kissed her head again.

“I joined a group here,” she said finally, low. “After a while. That first winter, I couldn’t be near anybody, I couldn’t stand to let anybody in. If your mother hadn’t let me have this cabin, I—I don’t know what I would have done. Hiked the Appalachian Trail maybe, except I probably would have just curled up and died mid-route.” Her mouth twisted in some ghost of her old humor, so strange to feel it this way, about this subject. “It’s hard to curl up and die so easily in a warm luxury cabin without the help of hypothermia.”

“I wish I could have been there,” Kurt said, strained. “Kai—I wish I could have fixed it.” His hands flexed against her, his voice deepening grimly. “Instead of making it worse.”

She said nothing. What could she say? Every single thing he had tried had made it worse, and yet he had tried so hard. After a moment, she pressed a kiss into his bare chest, for everything words couldn’t give him.

“I love you,” he said quietly. “Kai.”

She began to tremble. Her stomach shook so badly she felt sick from it. She wanted to cover her ears and bury her face to shut out this thing that couldn’t possibly be true.

And if it was true, if it was true—oh, God, it made her
sick
how little she deserved it. It made her feel terrified and broken, to try to construct something on the ruins of their old happiness. She could not
do it
. She had
failed.
She was too afraid.

She forced herself away from him, not all the way, but enough distance to make one fact clear to both of them:
I don’t deserve this. This can’t be.
“You can’t possibly.”

His lips compressed, such sudden anger blazing up in his eyes that it caught her there, hands still touching his chest, staring back into it. “I’ll be the judge of what I’m capable of doing,” he said harshly.

She took a shaky breath.

“Fuck,” he said wearily and stood again from the bed. Once he had taken a step away from her, though, he just stopped, running his hands through his hair as if he had no idea what to do with them.

“I’m sorry,” she said, too low, that marshmallow impossible in her throat. “I guess I can’t stop destroying things.”

This morning. That beautiful moment when he opened his eyes and smiled at her. Couldn’t she have at least stopped herself from destroying that?

“Destroying things?” He half-turned. He really had such a beautiful body, all that elegant, intense strength. “Have you started blaming it all on yourself again? Kai, the doctors said—”