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?
CHAPTER 4
Kai 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 ob
ject 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.
“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.
CHAPTER 5
Kai 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 th
at 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.
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