A white light from the Christmas tree sparkled once over her golden hair as her voice faded away, a tiny caress of light that only he saw. When he tried to touch it, it was gone, and yet his fingers tingled from it. She gave a very long, slow sigh and turned her body into his, nestling into him and wrapping her arms around him.
And then she really did sleep. And so did he.
CHAPTER 11
Morning dawned quietly happy. The happiness stayed cautious, clinging closely to them, afraid to fling itself about too joyously on this delicate day. And yet, it was there—in the air, in the touch of hands, in the way they didn’t look each other too long in the eyes, in case they scared it away by staring at it too hard.
Kai made hot chocolate and French toast, and Kurt did the strawberry hearts, proving that the model crafting child could branch out from stock paper and glitter when he wanted to.
Then he gave the strawberries funny faces, and then he set a line of them marching across the whipped cream like little strawberry soldiers to attack her French toast fortress, on the snow-cream top of which her heart was guarded.
She started to laugh, a sound that made his face relax in relief, and kissed him. “Merry Christmas, Kurt.”
“Merry Christmas, sweetheart. I love you.”
For their Christmas present to each other, they curled up on the couch and looked at all their old photos of happy times, and Kurt talked softly and persuasively of that old trip idea of his. Could we now, Kai? Could we please? Just the two of us, escape somewhere crazy, for, I don’t know, a month, two, pack our lives with something vivid and fun. Hell, we can take a year and do a whole world tour if you want. Ride elephants. Get chased by rhinoceroses. Set a prayer wheel spinning on top of some Tibetan mountain.
He braced after he said it, doubtless still remembering the way she had screamed at him the last time he suggested this idea. But that level of rage, at least, had faded a long time ago, as her hormones rebalanced.
The hurt hadn’t left with the rage, of course. If anything, the rage had been a protective shield against the fullness of that hurt. Even six months ago, it would have been too soon still to bring up this trip idea. Some wounds couldn’t be “fixed”, no matter how much someone else might want to fix them; sometimes they just needed a lot of time to heal. But now—
She nodded, firmly, and his face lit, and they called up maps and guidebooks and plotted where they would most like to go. It was a little difficult—anticipating fun and life felt all rusty—but it got better with practice, as if each little touch, each little smile, each photo of a possibility was another drop of oil.
When his mother called and asked Kurt if he was coming to Christmas dinner, and he asked Kai, she said yes a little warily, because it was her first step back into the world. Still, the thought of his mother’s cool control was a relief compared to her own family’s chaos of wrapping paper and playing nieces and nephews. She could start back into the world with baby steps. “Although I never could figure out what your mother meant by letting me have this cabin. It’s almost as if she wanted us to be separated.”
Kurt was silent for a moment as he helped them off the couch. “I always thought it was proof that my mother actually has a heart.”
Kai whipped her head up to stare at him. People close to Anne rarely suspected her of having a heart, Kurt least of all. And she didn’t see how the cabin proved the contrary.
“I was seven and nine when she had her own miscarriages,” Kurt said very quietly. Shock ran through Kai, a strange woman-to-woman current of pain, of understanding. Oh. Oh, you know, too. It was as if there should be some little sign, a woman’s hand touching her belly maybe, this secret code of a sorority of sorrow. “I didn’t really understand back then what happened to her, why that cold crept in on her and she got even more controlling, so difficult my father just left her.”
Oh, Anne. Kai saw the frost-blond bob, the strong jaw and ever-controlled profile, felt against her cheek the little air-kisses of the woman who never let herself get too close. Whose media presence and role of perfectionism was its own force field around her, creating a bubble where she could get everything right.
“I just knew I couldn’t reach her myself,” Kurt said low. “And never have been able to reach her again. Not so I could tell.”
Oh, Kurt. Kurt, Kurt, Kurt. The sudden, incredible realization that he had braved the greatest pain from his childhood, for her: that of having his world fall to pieces, of being shut out. He must have been as helpless against that destruction then as he had been when his life was destroyed a second time as an adult, and yet, for her—he had still tried his hardest to fight it. He had still faced it.
“I think she gave you what she needed for herself back then and never had, because there were too many things she couldn’t step away from. But of course, given that it’s my mother, it’s hard to tell.” His mouth twisted wryly. “She did agree to give me an excuse to come up here, though, when I asked her. And she was the one who made the decision to leave us here alone—without warning me, I should mention. I had planned to have people here for more padding. More”—he flexed his fingers, almost as if he was testing the fit of a glove—“armor.” He shook his head and closed that hand firmly around hers, warm and sure. “Stupid armor,” he murmured so softly she didn’t think she was meant to hear. “As if you ever got to wear any.”
She hesitated and gestured around to the snow-covered mountains, the isolated cabin.
“Ah.” He nodded. “Maybe if you can’t have armor, you do need a lot of distance from the world. When you’re—wounded.” The oddest look crossed his face. “My mother—the person who understood.”
“My family never could,” she said. “They were too—happy.”
“Yes, I thought of that, how happy your family always was. I had had to learn how to deal with my parents’ divorce. And, you know, my mother. She takes a certain amount of strength. But you never had any practice at all, did you?”
No. Happy childhood, happy family, easy time in school, happy marriage to the most wonderful man . . . it had been so easy to have a beautiful life, up until then. She had thought working in top kitchens was the most brutal thing possible in life, and she had shifted away from that brutality into the calmer intensity of food styling, easily enough. She had had no idea. How could she not have the babies she wanted? She was—she was happy. Unhappy things were for—unhappy people.
What an idiot she had been.
A happy idiot, though.
Images flashed across her mind of all the women in her support group, of her own mother-in-law, the cool, distant Anne. One of the leaders of her support group often said that they weren’t supposed to think about deserving and not deserving, that it was a cruel concept made to hurt. But Kai struggled with it, as with everything else.
In her bedroom—their bedroom now?—she touched her jewelry box, stroking it a moment, eyeing him sideways as he buttoned a pressed, white shirt. She had always found it so hot when he dressed for dinner with his mother. It had always made her palms itch with the desire to unbutton him again, to wrinkle his shirt, to tousle his hair, to make him late, but to make him late laughing, every cell of his body sated and relaxed.
His wedding ring glinted from time to time as his fingers moved on the buttons.
She swallowed and looked back at the jewelry box. And then, on a breath, she opened it and reached into the little secret compartment in the back. Beside her, Kurt’s hands went still on his buttons.
Taking the rings out, she bit her lip, looking up at him. And then she held them out to him tentatively, afraid to ask, despite everything he had said and done, still afraid to hope that much for forgiveness.
But he fisted his hands and thrust them into his pockets. “I didn’t take them off in the first place,” he said low and harshly. “If you want them back on your finger, Kai, you put them the fuck back on. You make the choice.”
She stared at him, and then her eyes filled with tears
because he was so right about that. She started to slide them onto her fingers, wedding band first.
His hand closed suddenly over both of hers, stopping the act. “But if you put them on—they stay on,” he said roughly. “You promise me—you promise me—that if ever anything like this happens again, you’ll let me take you to counseling. We can put it in writing, if you want, so I can hold the damn contract up in your face when you balk and make you stick to it.”
Kai laughed despairingly. “You can’t—I can’t put you through this again. If this happens again, you have to find someone else.”
He stared at her and then suddenly grabbed her chin, too hard, to force her to look at him. “Kai, no, I don’t. We don’t know what might happen. You might decide one day that you want to try one more time, and we don’t know how that might work out or how much it might hurt if it doesn’t. We might adopt, and something happen. One of us might get cancer. Someone might get in a car accident and have brain damage or lose a limb. We don’t know anything. We’re not the same people who couldn’t imagine much worse in our lives than maybe breaking a toe playing Frisbee. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you, God.” He flung his hand away from her chin. “That’s what I promised to love you through.”
She bent her head, her eyes stinging, so humbled by him. “I love you, too,” she whispered. “I just—I just couldn’t drag myself out of it.”
“I know. Kai, I’ve read every book there is to read on the subject. I may never feel it the same way you feel it—it hurt you so much worse than it hurt me—but I understand. I would have done anything I could to make it better. That’s why I let you go, in the end, because it was the only thing left to do. The only thing you thought would work.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, as if she could never say it enough.
“So am I, Kai. I’m sorry that I couldn’t help. I’m sorry that I couldn’t bear it for you. I’m sorry that all I did was make it hurt you so much worse, until you had to get away from me. My God, I’m sorry. Do you know how fucking small it is, to be a man, and watch my wife be destroyed for my sake, as she tries to have my kid, and not be able to do one damn thing about it? I’m sorry. And I’m angry. And like you, I just have to get through that. To the other side. But Kai—” He stretched across the distance between them and closed both hands strongly around hers. “There’s no point in getting to the other side, if it’s not with you.”
She took a deep breath, sucking in all his strength, all his persistence. “I know. That’s one of the things that was so hard, after I started getting over the depression. Knowing I didn’t deserve you any more.” Oh, damn, there was that word again, that her support group tried to stop themselves from using. “That I’d lost you.”
He stared at her. “You don’t—deserve—fuck, Kai. Are you kidding me? You didn’t come back to me because you didn’t think I’d take you? God, Kai. I would have crawled on my hands and knees. You were so damned brave. You tried so damned hard. I was worthless. I don’t even know what you think the word deserve means.”
Her throat knotted. “You’ve never been worthless, Kurt. Never. Never. I’m so sorry I—”
He placed his hand over her mouth. Gently this time. “I think you’ve said that enough, sweetheart. All I needed to know was that you were sorry you left me and ready to try again. Now let that go, Kai. You suffered enough, without spending the rest of your life beating yourself up for how hard the suffering was for you to handle on top of it.” His gaze ran from her face to her belly, and he hesitated, but then he curled his hand gently over her abdomen, pulling her in for a careful hug with his hand protecting her womb. “Forgive yourself,” he whispered to her hair. “Kai, sweetheart, not one single thing that happened was your fault. Not one—single—thing. Remember that, honey.”
Her mouth twisted, bittersweet and weary, but with that whisper of hope. “You sound like my support group.”
“Good, then, I’ve gotten one thing right.”
She buried her face against his chest. “Forgiveness hurts,” she admitted very low.
His hand rubbed her hair heavily. “It all hurts, honey. I would take it from you, if I could. But all I can do—all I’ve ever been able to do—is my best to share it.”
I love you so much, she thought into his chest. But the hurt of the words this time was a sweeter, gentler ache, as if a mass of toxins that had gotten caught in the idea of love had been squeezed out and rinsed clean. She stepped back enough to look into his face and touch his cheek. “Kurt. Don’t beat yourself up either. You did everything you could. I just wish—I hadn’t hurt you so much. I still don’t understand how you can be willing to try again, when you know how unhappy it can be.”
He shook his head. “Kai. What did you think it meant, when I said I loved you? That love was just this bright, happy thing?”
She hesitated and shrugged a little, opening her hands. Kind of, yes. Wasn’t that what it was? Brightness and happiness? Or at least what it was supposed to be?
His hand curved around her face. “So did I, maybe,” he said quietly. “But when it wasn’t so bright or happy—that didn’t mean I wanted to let it go.”
Her eyes filled.
“Or let you go,” he said very softly.
The tears spilled over.
“Kai.”
“I just still don’t understand,” she whispered. “How you can love me even now. There’s a whole huge part of me that doesn’t believe you can ever love me, ever again. Not really. How could you?”
His thumb traced one of her tears away. “Because you didn’t know I could still love you, when you weren’t laughing, when you were ugly and desperate, when your life was hard?”
She shook her head, crying openly now. No, she hadn’t known that. She still didn’t understand it.
“Well.” He bent and kissed her, tasting the tears off her lips. “Now you do.”
END
THANK YOU
Thank you so much for reading! This was one of those stories that I just had to write, and I hope it spoke to you as powerfully as it did me. Reviews, of course, are always welcome.
If you’re intrigued by stories about a marriage in trouble, I also deal with this theme (albeit much less grief-ridden) in another novella Turning Up the Heat, which is also a prequel to my latest series, La Vie en Roses, a series set in the world of flower and fragrance production in Provence.
If you’re looking for something lighter, check out the Amour et Chocolat series, a series about among top Parisian chocolatiers and pâtissiers and the women they live to impress. The first in the series is The Chocolate Thief, but each book stands alone. Make sure to sign up for my newsletter if you want to know when the next book in this series comes out.
Meanwhile, you can always find me and other readers on Facebook or my website for regular temptations of fantastic chocolate and other kinds of fun.
For a complete list of current books, keep reading.
Other Books by Laura Florand
Amour et Chocolat Series
All’s Fair in Love and Chocolate, a novella in Kiss the Bride
The Chocolate Thief
The Chocolate Kiss
The Chocolate Rose (also part of La Vie en Roses series)
The Chocolate Touch
The Chocolate Heart
La Vie en Roses Series
Turning Up the Heat (a novella)
The Chocolate Rose (also part of the Amour et Chocolat series)
A Rose in Winter, a novella in No Place Like Home
Memoir
Blame It on Paris
An excerpt from The Chocolate Rose
Jo knew the third time she missed the damn town that she was going to get there too late. Sainte-Mère. How many Sainte-Mères existed off the Côte d’Azur, and how many roads to those towns were under construction?
She should never have accepted a stick shift from the car rental place. If they had held an automatic for her per her reservation, she would at leas
t be negotiating these cobblestoned streets, narrower than her car, without fearing she would shift gears wrong and end up in a wall. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to get back before tomorrow morning, at this rate,” she told her oldest sister on the phone. “I’ll have to catch a late train. Cover for me.”
“How?” Estelle asked.
“I don’t know!” Jo cried, frantically trying to back down a near-vertical slope the size of a piece of spaghetti, in order to allow a car to pass coming the other way. “I’m sick or something and don’t want to expose him. You can come up with something!”
It was twelve-thirty when she finally fit her car down the small spiral ramp that passed for the entrance to the parking lot for the old walled part of town. Plane trees shaded the little parking area, and she climbed a staircase from it to the place below Gabriel Delange’s restaurant.
The scent of jasmine wafted over her as she stepped into the place, delicate and elusive, as the breeze stirred vines massed over sun-pale walls. A surprisingly quixotic and modern fountain rippled water softly in the center of a tranquil, shaded area of cobblestones. She stopped beneath the fountain’s stylized, edgy angel, dipping her hand into the water streaming from the golden rose it held. Fontaine Delange, said a little plaque.
He had a city fountain named after him already? Well, why not? There were only twenty-six three-star restaurants in France, eighty in the world. He had put this little town on the map.
His restaurant, Aux Anges, climbed up above the place in jumbled levels of ancient stone, a restored olive mill. She would have loved to sit under one of those little white parasols on its packed terrace high above, soaking up the view and exquisite food, biding her time until the kitchens calmed down after lunch. But, of course, his tables would be booked months in advance. In another restaurant, she might have been able to trade on her father’s name and her own nascent credentials as a food writer, but the name Manon was not going to do her any favors here.
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