You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology (46 page)

Yes, she had chased her grief well off the beaten path more than once already. She didn’t need to follow it now. She could concentrate on his hand. On this chance which he claimed was not her second one. On the two of them. They had been very, very happy once, just the two of them, before they had gotten that dream to make their happiness even bigger.

To spread it around. To pass it on.

Oh, God damn it, there was that grief again.

But she breathed it in, breathed it out, letting it drift around her, its wisps teasing as she focused on the feel of Kurt’s hand. That beautiful, strong hand, that she had never thought to feel holding hers again.

“You never even thought about moving on?” she asked, low.

He frowned. “No.” And after a few crunchy steps, very, very low indeed: “Did you?”

The tree dragged behind them in a soft shush. She let the sound of it slide over her a long time before she finally spoke. “I thought I had to. I thought I had ruined any other choice.”

His hand flexed on hers in his pocket, and six slow, steady steps measured out the pause before he spoke. “Kai, I’m sorry if selling the house made you think that. I just really couldn’t stand it anymore. It got so I would do anything, rather than come home.”

Her throat tightened as she imagined him again, imagined how much it must have hurt. She had been so focused on her other hurt that it had been a long time before she had also had to deal with the fact that she had lost him, too. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He let go of the tree and picked her up, sandwiching her between him and the nearest pine, as he kissed her. Just kissed her. Tender and gentle but very thorough, taking his time. “I know you are, sweetheart,” he said softly, and kissed each of her eyelids closed, and kissed the tear away. “I know.” He kissed her again, longer this time, deeper, hunger rising up through his body, pressing into her. “God.” He lifted his mouth. “I could drag us into a cave and just be an animal with you for days, do you know that? Just—feel.”

“Me, too.” She squeezed herself up against him. A cave sounded beautiful. Nothing but darkness and bodies, their bodies, them.

“Unless you’ve discovered an actual cave around here that I never did, let’s quit hiking so damn far from the house,” he said.

But he must know perfectly well that they needed those hikes as much as the time in the cave.

At the house, he made his own cave out of her comforter, pulling it over them in the big bed, so that the only thing that existed was the heat of their bodies. Even when it got too hot, she didn’t want to come out from under it, and whenever he shrugged the comforter back to breathe cool air, she hid herself under him, pressing into his chest. And he came back to her, kissing her and kissing her, hands running all over her, a silent, intense love-making out of time, no beginning and no end, just the two of them. Just the two of them. The two of them filling their whole world, all that mattered, all that ever need matter.

“You’re the most beautiful thing that ever happened in my life,” Kai whispered suddenly, clutching at him as if he might melt out of her arms. His arm tightened under her bottom, driving himself deep, deep. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you.”

She’d thought giving him happiness and a family was what she was doing to deserve him. Once upon a time. And even then, he had always seemed so special to her, with that care and strength and intelligence and that way he had of looking at her across a room. She had always known that she couldn’t ever entirely deserve him, that partly she was just lucky. That partly she was just the happy girl who had been smart enough to take him on a hike.

Kurt kissed her deeply, shutting off all words, and she let them go, let all the thoughts in her go, let herself become just an animal, an animal. Let herself wallow in it mindlessly, wallow in making him an animal, too. Neither spoke again. Maybe you couldn’t speak your human language to another and do some of the things they did.

Kurt left her dozing eventually, still under the comforter, still out of time.

She didn’t know how long she stayed in the comforter-cave, in no hurry to wake or think or come out. But when she eventually did, she found the tree standing in the corner of the great living room, a careful distance far from the fire, and Kurt was at the granite island with half the supplies from his mother’s old craft room spread around him, making Christmas ornaments.

Incredible Christmas ornaments, too, the kind that appeared in his mother’s magazine and that no average person could get to look like Anne Winters’s. Not that Kurt had ever been average, no matter what he thought about himself. “I take it that it’s genetic?” Kai said, both amused and impressed. While she rarely applied her own ability for precision to crafts, preferring the work with food, she understood exactly what went into that level of perfect craftsmanship.

Kurt looked around and smiled at her, a small, warm smile. He was halfway through something elaborate with ribbons and glitter, and his hands were occupied. “No, but who do you think she kept testing those kid crafts of hers on when I was little? We both had a hard time of it when I was five and could never get any of her visions for kid crafts to actually work out beautifully, like I was supposed to. But by the time I was eight, I was the model crafting child.”

“You have hidden talents.” Kai came forward. Glitter streaked across one of his cheeks, little sparkles of white that caught the light every time he shifted his head. “I guess it makes sense, but I’ve never seen you do anything like this before.”

“I started rebelling against it all when I was about ten.” That would have also been the age when his father divorced his mother, unable to put up with her ever-increasing need for control, and moved to California. “And moved into sports and, you know, boy things—the kind of thing that drove her crazy. By the time you met me, we’d more or less found an even keel between us, but that didn’t mean I had to do crafts for her.” That glimmer of his wry smile that she loved so much, the way it was so restrained and yet all that brilliance and subtle humor of his showed through. “Just all her legal contracts.”

He finished tying the ribbon and set the ornament on a pan with a dozen others already made: snowflakes, some two-dimensional, some three-dimensional, their heavy card stock thickly covered in fine white and silver glitter. In his hands, per his mother’s training, the snowflakes became a very sophisticated, adult craft.

“You can pick the next ornaments,” he said. “Are we doing a two-color theme or a hodge-podge?”

They were going to do crafts together? That was so—sweet. So optimistic, so happy. She took a deep breath, trying to make sure she had enough room to let that sweetness come all the way into her soul. She couldn’t refuse him in this, not Kurt. Even to protect herself she couldn’t. “Have you ever done cinnamon dough ornaments? They’re my favorite. They scent the whole house. You can leave them this rustic brown with pretty ribbons, or your mom did an issue where she covered them with glitter. If we did that, we could do birds pecking through the snow, cardinals, bluebirds.”

He looked up at her suddenly. Their eyes held. “Kai, don’t do something sad,” he said softly.

She hadn’t thought about it, and now she did, her little bird feeders and . . . “Oh.” She took another deep breath as her heart tightened, and then she sighed it out. “Well, growly brown bears in the woods, and stars, and stockings, and holly. And—and maybe some birds. I can have some birds if I want them.”

He took her hands in his gluey, glittery fingers and pulled her between his thighs to kiss her. “I think I got glue in your hair,” he said, when they surfaced. “And you glitter now.”

She smiled at him, wondering if this was her Christmas miracle—that he still seemed so determined to love her. No matter what.

Oh, but how could he? It couldn’t be as fresh and bright and happy as it had once been, could it? It never could be again.

She pressed her head down on his shoulder just a moment, drawing strength or belief, and then went to get the cinnamon and allspice.

It was so easy to start laughing, making Christmas crafts together. It was so easy to have fun. Kurt was insanely good at making them, for one thing, and he made her laugh more and more and tease him as he came up with one thing out of his childhood after another. Why had they never done this before? Well, she supposed because Christmas crafts were the kind of thing a mom typically pulled out to work on with her kids, for one—the grief squeezed and sighed and let her be—and probably Kurt had more than had his fill of Christmas crafts as his mother’s only child. As a couple, they had kept with her own tradition of collecting ornaments wherever they traveled and filling the tree with those. She had saved the crafting sessions for what she thought would be their later, that time in their lives when kids would fill their house.

That time that had just not been meant to be.

So now they went all out. They even tried the white feather Christmas trees from his mother’s latest December issue, and when Kai looked up and discovered Kurt concentrating fully on his craft, oblivious to the feather glued to his cheek, a giggle burst out of her, and she clapped her hands over her belly in surprise, not quite sure where it had come from. Once that first giggle had bubbled itself out of her, more came suddenly, like a pot that had finally been brought to boil, and she giggled and giggled, until she felt as effervescent as a glass of champagne. Kurt upended the bag of white feathers over her head in punishment for laughing at him, and then pulled her to him again, kissing her and kissing her, as the feathers drifted off her hair, gliding softly over her cheeks and tickling his hands.

The scent of cinnamon and cloves filled the house. She made cookies again, while the cinnamon dough was baking in one oven and the glue on the snowflakes was drying, and that added scents of butter and sugar and everything homey. Then she realized it was past lunchtime, and she heated up last night’s soup and then, while she was thinking of it, started a stew in the Dutch oven for that night. Through this flurry of cooking, Kurt chopped onions, carrots, and whatever he was told, looking very happy.

I can still make him happy?

I can, can’t I? I can still make him happy.

That was kind of a precious miracle in and of itself.

She kissed him, and he set the knife carefully far away from them as he kissed her back—which was so like him, that care and attention. She kissed him more for it, and then, and then—all the pain she had caused him rose up in her, and she pulled back, ashamed, knowing she didn’t deserve this.
Damn it, would the weight of her guilt never go away?

Kurt must have thought her withdrawal was from another wave of grief for the miscarriages, because he squeezed her shoulder and pulled a feather out of her hair, going back to work on the potatoes without comment. By the time the ornaments were dry enough to let them decorate the tree, a plethora of scents filled the house to bursting: cinnamon, cookies, stew, the fir itself as it prickled over her arms, the fire Kurt started. Given that she was a food stylist who often did her work here, scents of food had filled this house ever since she had moved into it. And yet it was so different when the scents were shared.

So much warmer, so much more full. As if life was full. Not this great empty thing she had to get through.

She kissed him again, and he pulled her into his arms, squeezing her far too hard.

He couldn’t seem to let go. Even when she had to wiggle for freedom because her lungs started protesting, he couldn’t loosen his arms, and when she squeaked, he took them down onto the plush rug in front of the fire. The early winter evening was lowering by then, gray deepening toward night over the snow, and their fire and their tree lights glowed over their faces in the otherwise unlit room.

Kurt captured her wrists over her head as the only thing he seemed to know to do with his hands to keep them from squeezing her too tightly. When she tried to pull free, his hold tightened. “Kurt,” she protested, half-laughingly.

“In a minute.” The firelight gilded over his cheekbones, throwing them into relief, his face intense, severe.

Arousal washed through her. Of course it did. How could she help it? They had discovered a long, long time ago that sometimes she liked that game. And oh, so did he. But she said, “Kurt, no. I want my hands free.”

With some difficulty, he pulled his hands from her wrists and sank them instead into the thick rug, digging into it.

“I want to do this,” she said softly, wrapping her arms around him and squeezing him as tightly as he had her.

He let his body lower onto hers with the heavy voluptuousness of a man sinking into a bed after a long, brutal day. The warmth of him rushed from her fingertips to her toes. She ran those fingertips over him, seeking still more of that warmth, like an impossible addiction.

“I want to do this,” she whispered, unbuttoning his shirt and finding her way in to his skin. She shivered with the pleasure of it, as if she hadn’t just felt his skin that morning, as if it had been years.

The white Christmas lights sparkled over his strong, smooth back when she bared it. She chased them over his skin, fascinated, stroking them as if they were a dream she could capture. On the tree, the lights shimmered off the glitter of the snowflakes and brown bears and red cardinals, sparkling over this dream, this dream she could have.

Still.

He would still let her have him.

That was such an incredible thing.

He made love to her intensely, in the firelight and the tree lights, kissing her everywhere, being kissed everywhere, stroking her too deeply, gripping her too hard, and breathing in hard gasps of pleasure when she gripped and stroked him, too. He rolled her over him and sat her up astride him for what seemed to be the pure pleasure of seeing her there, of stroking the lights over
her
skin, maybe of believing in her. He rolled her under him again in a sudden, hard rush, as if he had to capture her beneath him before she disappeared.

“I love you,” she said suddenly, and he jerked, his hands spasming on her body.