You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology

by Karina Bliss

  She’d always seemed to make him happy. As if she brought ease and laughter into his whole life.

  Until she hadn’t.

  Until she had destroyed all that ease and taken all his laughter with it.

  It had been the most terrible thing in her life that she had ever done. Her body had killed three other dreams of laughter and life and happiness, but at least she hadn’t had control over those decisions.

  She wiped the smudge mark she had made completely clean with a bit of sponge, then took a tiny pinch of powdered sugar and rubbed it between her fingers to let it fall over that cleaned spot, hoping to repair the damage in a way that did not show, that would not make her start the whole thing over. Did that look right? Sometimes she focused on a food styling issue so long that she lost all perspective.

  She removed the other four snowflake wax patterns without smudges and stood back to evaluate the look of the black granite forms showing through the white sugar. Were the snowflakes a too obvious choice? Should it be Christmas trees? That seemed so facile. Stars maybe? If she did some stars eight-pointed and some six-pointed, to reach more than one demographic, would that make the holiday shot over-reaching, ruining the whole effect?

  “It was always fascinating to me,” Kurt said, that steady, modulated voice of his just hurting her skin, “how you were so cheerful and careless everywhere else, as if life was pure fun and you weren’t going to let anxiety over details get in the way of embracing every glorious part of it. And yet when you set up a shoot, you were always so obsessively careful. As if you, too, under all that fun, felt the same need to get everything, somewhere, exactly right.”

  He had such perfect diction, so New England, so educated. But he was never cruel with it, not on purpose, not like the infamous devastation his mother could wreak with a few cutting words, when people did not perform to her standards.

  That had always been one of the things Kai loved about him so much: the way she could see his mother in him in a thousand small and big ways, and yet there was this kindness that was the very opposite of what his mother was known for, as if he had made a deliberate choice, in the face of great environmental odds, to be someone whose goodness was personal and direct and one-on-one, whose interactions were honorable and reliable and did no damage. All his choices had always been thought-out and conscious and deliberate, except that one choice—which wasn’t really a choice, was it? rather a thing that swept over a person’s life and changed it—to fall in love with her.

  Her throat closed, and she couldn’t talk anymore. Not to him. Not ever again to him. She didn’t deserve him.

  “You’ve lost so much weight,” Kurt said. “Haven’t you learned to love food again yet?”

  No. She still could love its looks, the way she could get it absolutely right for a photograph, but that urge that had always kept those extra twenty pounds rounding her hips—to taste everything around her in those photo shoots, to tilt her head back and just sink into all those delicious flavors—had died. She had lost the people she cooked for casually—him, her friends, her family, all of whom she had fled—and so she had stopped cooking altogether. She hadn’t realized until she was getting by on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, alone, chewing mechanically, that enjoyment of food really depended on a belief in life and a belief that you could nourish it.

  And who could believe in that?

  All three of the pregnancies had left her so viciously nauseated, as if her body was some war zone, and she had always thought, if only she could have made peace with the food, if only she could have kept some of it down, things might have turned out differently, that getting her body to accept the food and getting her body to accept the pregnancy were the same thing. The doctors had said it didn’t work that way, that it wasn’t a mind-game she could control, but . . . the sense of failure and enmity remained. Food had let her down. Had betrayed her, when she least expected it. Had not nourished life.

  “I wonder if I did the right thing, waiting,” Kurt said low, his hands curled in his pockets.

  Her heart tightened. She took a breath and managed to speak, to release him from this hell: “If you’re worried about the snow, go ahead and go. You’re probably right, that they’re not coming.” She couldn’t blame him for wanting to get away before he got stuck for days alone with her. She had hurt him so much. The utter devastation of all that happiness he had found in her.

  When Anne had succeeded in convincing him to come so that she could work on contracts and this winter wonderland magazine shoot at the same time, Kai had thought his agreement meant that he, too, had moved on. That he had managed to reduce his tears, too, to this half-frozen quiet inside him. That he was at a place where he could see her again and survive it. Maybe he had met that woman who would make him happy again and he wanted to broach the discussion on divorce.

  She had tried hard to get ready for it, to be brave enough for it. She had reminded herself that she, too, had moved on, not to someone else—God, no, never again to open herself up that way—but to a calm, healed place. Or it had felt calm, it had felt healed, that cold slushy of grief had been almost comfortable, until he got there before everyone else did and she stood at the window watching him get out of his car, his long body moving with such controlled grace.

  She set her equipment on the counter behind her, studying the snowfall of powdered sugar and its snowflakes. If Anne and her team weren’t coming, none of this really mattered, but she couldn’t let it go. She had to get it right. It was the only thing she had left to hold on to.

  Silence stretched between them, the inside of the cabin as soft and as still as snow falling on an ancient forest. That silence was soothing. It was better. No, let’s not talk. Let’s make at least that one thing easier on both of us. You can just go, Kurt. It’s—it’s okay.

  I’ll manage to survive it somehow. I’ve survived everything else.

  Yes, one thing she had learned about herself that she had never known before: that she did, in fact, survive things she hadn’t thought she could possibly bear.

  Kurt left the window, and she startled. Scarier still, he didn’t head out of the room but straight toward her. By the time he reached the other side of the island, her heart was beating so hard she thought she might be sick with it. Don’t try to kiss me good-bye or anything, Kurt. Not even on the cheek. Please don’t.

  Don’t say anything, like, “Well, I hope you have a happy life.” Or, “Good-bye, Kai.” Please, please don’t.

  She didn’t look at him, willing the message onto him, willing him away. But she could feel him looking at her.

  He took one hand out of his pocket and slowly drew his finger across some of the sugar, and indignation surprised its way through her fear. It was not at all like Kurt to destroy someone’s work that way.

  He circled the island, with the sugar still on his finger. She froze, so terribly afraid at his approach that she could have been cowering before the advent of some horrible torturer.

  He stopped just behind her, and she bowed her head, all the hairs of her body on end.

  Without a word, he ran his palm down the length of her arm—a full, firm stroke that shocked all through her—until he came to her exposed wrist, the sleeves pulled back for her work. There he drew the sugar gently across the exquisitely sensitive inside of her wrist, a magical brush of callused fingertip and powder. Kai gasped, her whole body poised in astonishment, as if she was balancing on a cliff’s edge via one toe on the head of a pin.

  Kurt brought her wrist to his mouth and sucked the sugar off.

  She gasped again, collapsing, her other hand smashing into that sugar snowfall to hold her up. Kurt, what are you doing? Kurt—wait, what?

  He licked her wrist clean of sugar, little sucking sips with his tongue that were so delicate it was as if this tall, controlled, strong man behind her was a butterfly and she was nectar.

  Her eyes went blind. What was this? What was this—sudden, incredible warmth and sensuality crossing an i
mpossible distance? The bridge across that distance was burned, wasn’t it burned?

  Still with no sound, Kurt drew the index finger of his other hand through more sugar, leaving a path under one of her snowflakes, and—

  Stroked a little figure eight of it over her nape. She shivered, the touch washing from her nape through her whole body. And he bent and sucked that off, too.

  Kai folded into the counter, shaking all over, the warmth so great and sudden that it hurt, it hurt so horribly, like life coming back to a frozen limb. This couldn’t be happening. Why in the world would he do this?

  His mouth traveled up her neck and down, once, twice, and then all at one it pressed into her suddenly hard, until she could feel the edge of his teeth and the tension in his body, as if he was about to bite her, in some animal show of dominance. Which was not like Kurt at all, and yet that edge in him ran all through her, loosening muscles, loosening thought.

  He gentled again, the tension still in his body but not in his mouth, so that her own body didn’t know which would win, his tension or his gentleness. Such a tantalizing knife’s edge. She wanted to fall on both sides.

  Oh, but that would cut her right in two. She would never get the pieces of herself back together again.

  He licked the nape of her neck, that tiny, teasing lick and suck, taking her wrist and bringing her sugar-smeared hand over her shoulder. The move wrapped her arm around herself, his own folded over it, her vulnerable insides so thoroughly protected by both of them. And while she was held in that double warmth, he swirled his tongue in the center of her palm, licked his way up her index finger, and then drew it deep into his mouth.

  She stared half-blind across her snowscape at the great window giving onto the deep gray sky, a winter queen yanked down out of her swirling cold clouds into a human embrace. She had forgotten what it felt like, to be warm, to be alive, to be touched. My God, had all this once been familiar?

  He took his time on that finger, lavishing it with his attention, long, strong suckles until her weight caved into the arm that held her—all hard muscle. If anything, he had gotten fitter and more intense since the last time his body had been pressed against hers. More driven.

  He sucked his way from finger to finger, while all her body melted in some panicked rush of failing winter, I’m not ready for spring, no, I’m not ready! He set her cleaned hand down on her own shoulder—curling it there with a protective stroke, as if he knew she needed to hug herself. Then his hand swept through her snowscape again. Her heart tightened and tightened, and her body shivered in expectation as his sugar-dusted hand rose . . . to her throat, rubbing the sugar slowly into that so-sensitive skin.

  Heat and fear and longing swept her at that promise of what was coming.

  Wrapping one hand in her ponytail, he turned her, pulling her head back until her body bent over his arm. Her heart was beating so hard, emotion, anticipation, arousal, terror pounding through her everywhere as she stared up at him. His eyes met hers just briefly, just that shock of intimacy, her beautiful secret, those hazel eyes of his. And then he bent his head again and cleaned that sugar off her exposed throat.

  She began to shake under the onslaught of sensuality and warmth, shake with the mad tremors of someone coming out of hypothermia, as he pulled her sweater over her head and undid her bra. For a moment after he threw both garments away, he stood there, staring down at her, his hands pressed to the island on either side of her, that look in his eyes so strange and yet familiar, not the Kurt she had known for years with the seriousness that turned into laughter for her, but the Kurt she had left at the end, with that desperate intensity in his eyes. Kai, don’t. Kai, don’t do this.

  He lifted hands covered with powdered sugar to her breasts, leaving black granite handprints among the black snowflakes in her sugar-snow. That familiar, long-lost caress as he cupped her sent an ache all through her, as if her breasts had been too tightly bound for more than a year now and finally, finally been freed. She whimpered, and he rubbed powdered thumbs over her nipples, knowing what she wanted, knowing how she loved to have her breasts cupped and caressed, knowing how that made her sigh for him and pet him and want him.

  Her hands came up and caught at his shoulders, leaving white prints on his shirt. Pressing her breasts higher, he bent—oh, how her whole body knew exactly what was coming and her nipples strained for it—and closed his mouth around her, devouring the sweetness like someone who was starved. Like someone who had not had anything sweet for a long, long time.

  Her breath came in short, sharp pants, leaving her dizzy in the whirl of warmth and heat. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t. That slushy of grief and loss inside her sloshed so dangerously. If everything that was frozen about her melted, there might not be anything left of her at all.

  A snow-woman. A statue of ice. Come face to face with the sun.

  Oh, God.

  He leaned her backward on the counter, still licking and sucking over her breasts, under them, pushing up the fullness to make sure he had every last dusting of sugar, even as he lay her back into more sugar. He pulled down her jeans and panties both at once, pushing them to the floor. Now she was entirely naked except for sugar, and he was entirely clothed. The only marks she had left on him were the handprints on his shoulders.

  He still had not said one word. She could not have spoken if her life depended on it, which she very much felt it did. No, see, please. This is going to hurt like hell.

  I was—calm before. I had reached this place where I could be at peace. Where I even understood that I had lost all right to you.

  He scraped up a handful of sugar from her counter and sprinkled it in a gentle tickling kiss of powder from her knee up her thigh. Oh-oh-oh. She tried to squeeze herself shut, her eyes, her sex, her fists, her toes, but he bent and put his mouth to her knee, and that was, oh, God, so sweet. He followed that trail of sugar all the way up her thigh, and everything in her dissolved, uncurled—toes, fists, sex. Even her eyelids grew soft and languorous, flickering open and falling closed again, in a blur of him and darkness.

  He didn’t use sugar on her sex.

  He just spread her thighs on that dark smooth granite dusted with powder and tasted her exactly as she was.

  Oh, God. Oh, God.

  She was falling and scrambling, hands sliding over slick granite and fine powder and finding no purchase, tumbling into vertigo all while held so adamantly on stone. It was not that he had never done this, but—well, she didn’t usually like it, she would rather they be kissing each other’s mouths—and, and, and—her mind kept dissolving into all these golden hot swirls of not-thought, this being, this warm, warm sense of being—

  So, so—

  It was just too mu—

  The very last thing she had expected of her life that day was to find herself coming, in a rush of gloriousness, dissolving for him, mindless, convulsing. He forced that glory through her and wouldn’t let it stop, his mouth on her so driven, so intense that she had to whimper and pull her legs up onto the counter, curling inward, to get him to let her orgasm subside. Only then did he allow her to come down from it, burying his face in her ribs.

  She lay boneless and damp and hot on granite so hard and cold. He straightened slowly, as if every muscle in his body hurt. She couldn’t look at him. Just this flicker of her eyelashes that showed him to her: completely dressed, her only mark on him two prints of powdered sugar on his shoulders and the voluptuousness of his mouth, as he stood over her sugar-dusted nakedness, stroking her slowly, breasts to belly, down her spine, over her hips, those gentle, reassuring touches he had long ago learned she needed, after sex, the ones that made her feel so loved, that told her that he still found her body beautiful after he was done wanting it. He had always done that for her, once he knew she needed it, always, always, always, made sure to take his time afterward, to stroke her and caress her before he fell asleep or left the bed.

  Except he wasn’t done wanting, was he? He hadn’t come—had he?
He was still completely dressed. Her gaze skated down his body, and—no, he hadn’t come.

  She could not think. She bent her arms to hide her face. But then she had to look at him again, because—well, she had to see.

  Their eyes held. His were so gorgeous, their beauty all for her, her special treasure that no one else had the sense to see. You had to know him so well to know the color of his eyes; his friends couldn’t even remember it, and yet she had always known, right from the first moment he stood looking down at her in his mother’s gardens and she looked back up into those hazel eyes, and her heart caught.

  Her heart had been so smart. Suicidal in its bright optimism, clueless as to what would come, but still—so smart, to so immediately respond to him.

  He had deserved her heart. He had deserved better.

  From the very first, he had always been so careful to give her the very best of himself.

  She was the one. She was the one who hadn’t been able to give him something good enough back. It had been her job to be happy, it was what she brought to their couple, it was who she was in life, the happy person, and then, and then . . .

  She drew a breath in and sighed it out, shaky, shivery. She was so entirely naked here on this granite. All illusion of distance gone.

  And yet she hadn’t melted out of existence, as she expected. Life never let her escape just by destroying her completely, no matter how convinced she was, in the moment, that she was being destroyed.

  “I probably shouldn’t have done that,” he said low, touching a streak of sugar on her cheek. His beautiful eyes were so very close, his expression driven, torn. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t think I’ve gotten anything right since you first got pregnant.” His fingers sifted her hair, sticking now from the sugar. “It made me realize that you were always the one who got us right. Who made us happy.” His mouth twisted on such a hard-contained wave of grief and pain that she wanted to catch him in a tight fist, say, No! It wasn’t you. It was me. I was the one who went wrong. “I tried, though.” He stepped away from her.