You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology (40 page)

She’d even learned to come to peace with waking that way: to stroke the pillow, kiss it, set it aside, and rise to try to learn to embrace her day again.

“Kurt.” Her hands clutched him, loving how much harder it was to press into his muscle and bone than into any pillow. Loving his body’s resilience, its aliveness, and how very well she knew it. “Kurt.”

“Kai.” He pulled almost out and thrust into her again, sinking one hand into her hair, kissing her hard, too hard, while the water poured over them. “Oh, God damn it.”

Yes. Yes. God
damn
it,
damn
her, for everything. She sank her fingers into him harder, made him real. Wrapping around him, pulling him in.
Yes, you’re real, you’re real, you’re real. Harder. You’re so real.

Oh, this feels so good.

The thrust of him, the life, the hunger.

Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.

But his thrusts grew too hard, too urgent, too fast to last. He forgot all about her. Taking her so fiercely, so intensely, unable to think about anything but taking.

He forgot all about her, and she didn’t even mind. Wrapping her arms and legs around him as he took her, holding onto him as tightly as she could, she gloried in it. She wouldn’t have let him go for anything.

A
fterward, both were
very quiet. He handed her another towel as he dried himself, little married familiarities in the bathroom that seemed natural only in the way a great ballet was natural, such perfect, floating gracefulness in the dancers leaping around each other, and yet the slightest stumble revealed how many years of practice and work it had taken to reach that harmony.

Outside the snow had finally started to fall, soft, great flakes like feathers, insanely large and beautiful. She stepped out onto the deck outside the bathroom and stood looking up at them as they floated down onto her face to cling and melt. Kurt stood in the doorway for a moment watching her. Then he withdrew into the house.

When she found him again, he was standing looking down at the granite island, still a mess of sugar smudges from her body. She stopped in the archway, flushing. He studied her over that messy counter and then left the kitchen area for the couch that faced the window. His head disappeared from view, as if he had stretched out, and after a moment of trying to ignore the island, she finally cleaned it off, scrubbing at sugar, and then set about slicing onions and pulling broccoli out of the freezer, setting a simple soup going. A thread of pleasure twined through all the gestures, at the thought of him eating it. She had always liked to feed him.

Did they really have to talk? Could they not just move around each other in a silent truce until the roads cleared? Reluctantly, she left the pot simmering and came into the main living area, only to discover him fast asleep on the couch.

She had discovered that long body just that way any number of times during their lives together, fallen asleep in front of a film or on a lazy Sunday afternoon after a hard game. Kurt wasn’t a man who allowed himself much laziness. He was far more likely to mow the grass after a hard game than kick back and relax. She had been the one to teach him that she loved him still when he took a break. Sometimes, when she stopped to caress his sleep-softened face or pull a cover over him if it was chilly, his eyes would open, and he would smile, slow and sleepy and happy, and pull her down on top of him.

Oh, God.

Well, he had warned her. He had warned her of what might happen if they got near a hot shower together. She had known from the start that it might be more than she could handle.

But God, he was so gorgeous. She supposed he wasn’t gorgeous to everyone—she had had one friend who was always falling for dramatic, black-haired Latin lovers, and another who always went for the muscled blond—but he always had been so utterly perfect to her. She loved those high cheekbones of his, the slight hollow to his cheeks that made him so photogenic, the so-average light brown hair that combined with his reserve and a heritage of excessive perfectionism to make him never realize exactly how cute he was. She loved the way his face was so lean and controlled; even in his sleep it seemed controlled, just a trick of his bone structure. And she loved that his lashes were so long, this secret hint at a world of sensitivity and passion under that reserve. She’d been so lucky that no fun-loving girl had ever thought to take him on a hike before she did.

She’d always known it was luck. That it was her sense of fun that had drawn him, and that there were a million other fun-loving girls out there, and it was just her good fortune that she had met him first.

The lamp at his head glowed over his body. He shifted slightly in his sleep, light catching on the finger of a hand loosely folded across his chest, and shock ran through her. He was wearing his wedding ring. There, a band of plain white gold on his finger, just like always. His hands, up until then, had been in his pockets, or locked around each other—or cupping her breasts—and she hadn’t seen it. Or she surely had, but the ring was such a familiar part of his hand that she hadn’t even noticed it before.

She had locked her own wedding rings away last spring, when the sun had started to come out after the long winter and she had slowly woken to the realization that in her grief she had destroyed the one beautiful thing in her life that she did have the power to cherish and protect, and that unlike all her other losses,
she
was the only one who had taken that power away from herself. She had bowed over the locked jewelry case and wept and wept.

But slowly, over the summer, into the fall, she had found peace. Some kind of wholeness. Something. She had packed those tears down inside her and dulled them to some temperature below zero, so that they didn’t spurt up out of her and break her apart so easily anymore. She had not known exactly how she was going to be able to stand another Christmas, but she had been sure she would manage it somehow. Maybe by a sudden trip to Peru to climb to Machu Picchu. Maybe something like that.

She so did not know what to do with this. What good could come of cutting up their peace, for either of them? He had been hurt more than enough by her.

But after a moment, she pulled the throw on the back of the couch down over him and spread it out to cover him shoulders to toes. He barely shifted in his sleep, a faint smile flickering across his mouth as the luxurious softness settled over him. She wanted to kiss that smile, but she didn’t. She bit her lip and straightened.

A man with a four-wheel drive could still handle this snow easily, but she didn’t wake him up to send him on his way before it got worse. She went back into the kitchen and made hot chocolate.

While the soup simmered, she decided soup probably wasn’t enough food for a man who had had a brush with hypothermia, so she pulled out ingredients and put together elaborate panini, the way they had often liked to do, raiding the refrigerator to come up with something new and fun. He hadn’t had any experience of cooking spontaneously before he met her, and once he learned how much he could play with his food—that it was all a game and there wasn’t really anything he could get wrong—he had loved it. He’d come up with the craziest flavor pairings, some of them disastrously bad, but they had just laughed.

She set the sandwiches aside to press into panini last-minute, so they would be hot, and, as the snow continued to fall and he continued to sleep, did really the best thing a woman swirling lost and looking for grounding could possibly do in those circumstances: she made chocolate chip cookies.

*

So Kurt woke
with a smile, as he hadn’t in so long he couldn’t remember. Scent twined around his nose and curled into his body on each breath, teasing the corners of his lips upward. He sat up smiling, convinced he was still dreaming. One of those good dreams out of which he never wanted to wake, where it was Christmas again but back before they had ever started the devastating idea of babies, and Kai was happy with him, just with him, that way she used to be, as if he made her world as right as she made his.

Oh, he liked this dream. This was a gorgeous version of it. Those great flakes falling outside the window turned the whole dream beautiful, and it smelled so good, like love, like Kai always used to make his life smell—something savory and simmering that had onions and herbs in it, and something sweet and buttery and—was that chocolate?—to go after it.

He had been making love in this dream, too. He could feel it, which was kind of funny, really—now his dreams were getting so optimistic that he could actually feel their after-effects in his muscles—and his brain tripped over the realization that he was thinking far too much for a man still asleep, and he blinked, confused, and then pressed his face into his arm against the soft, plush back of the couch, trying not to be awake for just a little longer.

But he could hear her moving around in the kitchen, sinking the reality of this moment into him further. Every little clink of spoon against dish or thump of knife against cutting board ran jaggedly across his nerve endings, lifting the hair on the back of his neck from how scary the warmth of the sounds were. He pressed his face harder into his arm, suffocating himself in the couch.

Oh, shit, what was she going to say to him and how much was it going to hurt?

K
ai had cleaned
the counter of all that sugar, turning it back to gleaming slick black, and Kurt couldn’t decide how he felt about that. But he couldn’t decide how he felt about most things right now. His insides just clenched inside him in a tight knot, afraid to feel.

He slipped his hands into his pockets, stopping in the arch that defined the kitchen space as kitchen and not living room. She gave him a fleeting, shy half-smile and focused on pulling out the heavy cast iron panini press. His mother’s own brand, specially made for her in France in the enamel colors of her specifications and sold under her name by one of the major department stores. He wished Kai had chosen her own space to hide in, instead of one created by his mother, but he didn’t really know what to do about it. As he didn’t know what to do about pretty much anything anymore. Anyway, on the list of things he wished were different, his mother’s stamp on this place was so far down in importance.

Kai set the sandwiches she had made into the press, and his heart tightened still more as he watched her, his throat clogging. She used to cook for him all the time. It had been so different from her attention to every last grain of detail when she was setting up shots or trying to create something beautiful. When she cooked for him, it had been just this relaxed, happy cooking. As if she was trying to feed something beautiful that was already there, not invent it from scratch.

It had made him feel as if some of the beauty in their life together came from him. And that she wanted to nurture that.

Another glance from her. He hadn’t even known what a shy smile looked like on her face until just now. Oh, maybe there had been a little shyness in her playful glances sometimes early on, but even then—from the first moment he had shown he was attracted to her, that first meeting, she had gazed up at him with her eyes lighting openly, no games, no reservations, as if she was entirely happy to reciprocate. He’d liked it so much. He’d tried to be
so careful
not to screw it up. Years into their marriage, on anniversaries, she would tease him about how carefully he had proceeded. He had been so determined to get everything exactly right and not ruin that spontaneous, delighted pleasure in that brown gaze when she looked up at him.

She’d always said that she had liked it a lot, that care. She’d told him once it was like a courtship. Which had made him feel centuries out of date and completely unfitted to society, but she insisted it was what had won her over for good. Sometimes—when he was feeling kind of awkward and embarrassed about the whole damn conversation and wondering if his pursuit of her had, in fact, seemed a little ridiculous to someone as laughing and easy as she was—she would even pounce on him and pretend to pin his hands to the bed and growl into his ear that the way he had courted her had been
hot
, he was so
hot
, and she would giggle and play, and—

Fuck
, but he missed those days.

“That smells good,” he tried, and then wished he had cleared his throat first, because his voice sounded as if it had been dragged out of bed three hours early. His fingers curled in his pockets as he waited to see if she would actually answer him this time, unlike all those attempts at conversation from the window earlier while she focused on her hush of snow, shutting him out, until finally he just—had to try something different.

She gave him another quick, shy smile. Oh, boy. That shyness was going to take some getting used to. He didn’t think he objected to it exactly, though, anymore than a man dreaming of summer would object to the first tiny hint of a crocus peeking through the snow.

He did clear his throat this time. “You know, it’s okay if you talk.” He hoped. Some of the things she had said last year, before he gave up and stopped trying to fight her need to get rid of him, had been—hard to survive.