You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology

by Karina Bliss

  A moment later, still lying there naked on a counter in powdered sugar, she heard the front door open and close.

  And Kai curled into a fetal ball, pulling sugar-coated arms over her face and bending sugar-coated legs into her naked belly, and wept until she couldn’t weep anymore.

  Chapter Two

  Heavy, ragged, hot sobs like she had cried for the second miscarriage and never been able to cry since, not even for the third, not even when she left Kurt, when the tears had been weak, exhausted things that would come out of nowhere and slide aimlessly down her cheeks, as if they didn’t even have the strength left in them to heal.

  A long time passed before the discomfort of the granite got to her, and the cold of her naked body, and the stickiness of sugar melted by sweat and tears into her skin and hair. Finally she peeled herself off the island to take a shower. The water had been running over her for a good five minutes before it slowly penetrated her blank exhaustion that she liked it—how warm it was.

  She hadn’t really liked the way something felt in a long time.

  Drying herself off slowly, she almost liked the way the towel felt, too—and yet it almost hurt. As if all her skin had been exposed to too much sun. It took that wearily acquired skill at putting one damn foot in front of the other, of continuing to survive, to get her back into the empty living area. The artfully arranged open space allowed everyone, even those in the kitchen, to enjoy the view through the great window down into the valley. Except there was no “everyone”. It was a space made for people to share, but she never shared it. The whole point of moving here had been to shut herself away from any and all human hurt again. To protect her both from suffering herself and from inflicting that suffering on others.

  Kai moved through the empty house as carefully as if she was climbing out of bed for the first time after a week of the flu. At the great window, she wrapped her arms around herself, staring down into the valley of humanity so far away—and started violently at the sight of Kurt’s car still in the drive.

  He hadn’t left?

  Oh—she tightened her arms around herself, flushing and vulnerable in a way she hadn’t been even after the very first time they made love, years ago, when she had felt not so much vulnerable but filled with joyful confidence in him, in her body, in everything about them.

  But—but where was he?

  She searched him all through the house, tension growing in her as if she was looking for the monster in a horror film. Poor Kurt. He deserved so much better than the role into which time had thrust him, in her life.

  She passed his jacket on the coat rack by the front door twice before she finally pulled open that door, to find him sitting on the steps, his forearms braced on his knees, his fingers locked together between them. He wore only his light cotton shirt over a T-shirt, in weather well below freezing, but he wasn’t shivering.

  He just sat there, staring down at his locked hands.

  She grabbed his jacket to put it around him, and he gave her a startled look, not moving to take it. She pressed it back around his shoulders as it started to slide off him, sitting down beside him. “Kurt, you’re freezing.” As the cold started to bite through her wet hair and sweater, she realized she didn’t have a jacket either.

  “Am I?” he asked numbly.

  “Kurt.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, low but still with that even, controlled diction of his, the man who could never quite mutter. “I couldn’t manage to leave.” He looked from his hands to her and back again. “I miss you so goddamned bad,” he said helplessly and lifted his interlocked fists to press his forehead into them.

  Emotion swept over her and she had to speak before it could take her, before she could drown in it. “Have you been out here all this time?” All the time she had wept, all her time in the shower, out here, in that thin shirt? “You’re hypothermic,” she decided, although what did she know? When she had taken that first aid class the first pregnancy—the way she had signed up for birthing classes right off the bat, and started painting the room, and called every single friend and member of their family as soon as the blue line showed up on her pregnancy test, in thrilled delight at the happy future stretching out before them—she had been focused on things like what to do if a baby choked. But—an hour or more outside, in this cold? And he wasn’t shivering? “Kurt, come inside. You can’t drive until you’ve at least had a hot shower.”

  “If I get near a hot shower in your company, I don’t know what I might do,” he told his fists, a driven, desperate voice.

  Ah. Everything inside her just yanked at the thought of what he might do, in terror and longing.

  “Just come inside.” She pulled at him. Whatever he did, she would have to handle it. Whatever he did—God, hadn’t she handled worse?

  Hadn’t she done worse? In the end, that had been the very hardest thing to handle of all, as she pulled herself slowly into peace again, the fact that she had destroyed them in her grief and rage and a shutting-off-of-hope so intense and so crazy that only a long time later, when her hormones started to rebalance, had she realized she must have been in the equivalent of a severe postpartum depression.

  He’d told her, of course. He’d tried and tried to make her go get help. She had hated him so damn much every time he said, It’s not that bad, Kai, it’s okay, we’ve still got you and me, you’re just not seeing that in the end this is just a minor thing.

  A minor thing.

  A minor thing.

  He’d tried to recoup, tried to explain that he wasn’t trying to diminish her grief—her grief—that minor wasn’t what he really meant, that he was just trying to say that sticking together was more important than anything else, but she just couldn’t get past it—her grief and her rage. She couldn’t get past anything he did or said or tried. She hated him for all of it.

  Honey, I think there’s something wrong with you.

  And she had screamed, I know there’s something wrong with me! Why is it me? Why is it me? Maybe it’s you! Maybe it’s your damn sperm that don’t work!

  No, Kai, I meant—honey, I know you’re sad. But this isn’t like you. I think you need help.

  I’m sad? You don’t even fucking care, do you? You’re not sad!

  Kai. Kai, please. Listen to yourself.

  And she would slap her hands over her ears and run off crying, slamming doors, locking them.

  He was so right. It hadn’t been like her. Hadn’t been like the woman he had married who always made him laugh, who used to make his face light up just by walking in the room, as if all his serious care dissolved into joy just to see her.

  She had become another person and destroyed everything close to her in the transformation. As the closest and the most important, he had taken the greatest harm of all.

  He scrubbed his face and looked at her over his fists warily, as if he wasn’t any more sure he could stand this than she was. She grabbed one of those fists, and his hand was cold as ice. “Kurt, come on.” She pulled him with all her strength, and he let her drag him through the house. The luxury style cabin featured a master bathroom with a great whirlpool bath, a view out over the valley, and a shower where she could turn on sprays all up and down the wall. His mother’s interior design was, of course, perfect. The quintessential luxury mountain look to which everyone should aspire.

  Kai turned on the sprays, leaving Kurt to undress himself, but his fingers were too stiff, and he leaned back against the glass shower wall in defeat. Outside, through another of those great glass windows the cabin had in such plenty, the leaden afternoon was darkening further into night, and still only a few flakes of actual snow had fallen. Anger flicked suddenly through her, against Anne and her team to have been so pathetic as to let the threat of it scare them away and trap her and Kurt in this painful re-opening of wounds.

  It would have been easier to undress a complete stranger and put him under the shower to save him from hypothermia than it was to strip her own former—well, in spiri
t former, despite the continued legal ties—husband. But she did it. Moving as fast as she could, while he stared down at her, motionless as more and more of his body was exposed. Yes, he was even harder, that rangy build of his pushed even more this past year until it left ripples of muscle on his abs. She could imagine him driving himself into utter physical exhaustion, evening after evening, rather than coming home to the house she had left empty.

  The spray blasted against the shower wall behind him. She pushed at his jeans, her hands slipping inside them for purchase, grazing over his butt.

  He was starting to shiver now, his skin icy to her touch. “Kurt, damn it. You should have come back inside. Or gotten in your car.”

  “I was thinking,” he said. And God knew, he could think. He thought too much with that brilliant brain, sometimes, sank so deep into the problem about which he was thinking that he couldn’t get out.

  She had always loved it. It had made her feel protective. As if she needed to take care of that brain of his, teach him the joys of sometimes just not thinking, of just wallowing in scents and tastes and textures and the laughter of the moment.

  She got the jeans and briefs off, forcing them down those long legs. He had been running a lot, hadn’t he? The hard muscles of his thighs felt so good under her fingers, and it had been so long since she had touched them and—she couldn’t think about that.

  She pushed him back into the shower, watching him flinch as the warm sprays hit him all over, and then he shivered into the water voluptuously, his face turning up, his body slowly unfurling from a tense knot of cold as the warmth sank into his muscles.

  Muscles.

  Water running over skin, tracing the strength and definition of shoulders, arms, chest, abs. Water relaxing every single one of those muscles, caressing him as no one else had caressed him for so long. It trailed down over his ribs, following a V of hair down, down. As soon as the first wash of water ran over his penis, it sprang up hard again, as if only the cold had kept it contained.

  She wanted to run her hands everywhere the water ran, show that damn shower how to really warm Kurt up. That water had no idea what it was doing, and she—oh, she knew exactly what Kurt liked. How hard, how fast, how long. What kind of kisses drove him a little crazy, what she could do to him if she took her hand and rubbed firm but slow, slow, slow, down from his chest, over his abs, to—

  She looked back up at his face to find him watching her.

  Their eyes locked through the streaming water. Her heart beat very hard.

  “Kai,” he said and leaned both forearms against the glass, looming over her while that clear pane kept them separate. Her heart seemed to thud in slow motion, that separation stretching out for all eternity, as if the glass would stay there forever, leaving two souls caught in longing. She wanted to go up on her tiptoes and kiss that glass, right where his mouth would meet hers.

  She placed her hands against his forearms, through the pane, her own weight swaying onto them.

  “Kai,” he said again, a question or a demand. Or just a statement of her existence right there, on the other side of the glass.

  Eyes caught by his hazel—how she loved their secret color, those sweet, gorgeous eyes that had always been hers—she swayed onto her toes, her lips almost brushing the glass.

  He reached around the glass, grabbed her wrist, and yanked her into the shower.

  Water hit her, pounding into her face, soaking her clothes, her shoes. Kurt never did that—he was never careless, and only rough in the deepest throes of lovemaking, and even that, only after he had learned that sometimes she loved it when he was rough.

  Yet now, he didn’t seem to give a damn that he had just ruined her shoes, that her clothes clung awkward and heavy to her. Catching her face between his hands, he lifted it up to him and kissed her, driving, hungry, starved, while the water sprayed all over them, streaming down their faces, spilling over their lips.

  He kissed her until he was shaking with it, until she had forgotten they had ever stopped kissing in their lives, and yet the embrace felt as new and as compelling as that very first kiss, that day in the summer glade when the other hikers had been all that stopped them.

  “God, I wish I knew what to do,” he said into her throat, as her face fell back into the stream of water. He had done this before, tried to make love to her as their relationship tore apart, tried to get through to her with sex. Oh, God, they couldn’t go back there again. They had been at peace. They had been healing.

  And yet she didn’t feel as she had then—angry and grieving and hating him—but alive, flooding with warmth, wanting to expand into him the way he had expanded into the hot water. Her hands scrubbed down his body. Those water-slickened muscles felt so good.

  I love you.

  God, where had that come from? She couldn’t say that. It would do untold damage. She bit the words back as hard as she could, bit her tongue on them, and twisted her head around suddenly and bit him, right in the curve of his shoulder.

  He drew a hoarse breath and lifted her up, pressing her back against the shower wall, so that the sprays massaged from too close, almost painful against her body. He rode her on his thigh while he pulled her soaked sweater over her head. It felt so good to have its clinging wetness off, to have the water beating painfully against her from all sides, to have his hands slide down her ribs and up again over her breasts, as warm now as the water but so much more intimate and caressing. She loved it when his hands got a little too hard on her body, when he lost his care. She had always loved that.

  That old thrill of driving him crazy surged back in her as she pulled herself into him, as she found his mouth through the water and kissed it again, claiming it this time for herself, in hot, hungry, invasive kisses, taking it for hers.

  He drew one of her legs up, knee bent, past his hip, stretching all her muscles, running his hand down her jeans-clad calf until he could find her furry suede slipper-boot, and he pulled it off and threw it out of the shower. Scooping that arm around her bottom to hold her into him, he pulled the other leg up and did the same thing.

  Her feet, bared twice now in only an hour, and for the same reason, curled and flexed into the water, thrilled beyond measure. This warmth from him was so gorgeous. She wanted to soak it up everywhere.

  He unfastened her jeans and worked them and her panties off her, with some difficulty, the wet denim clinging to every inch of skin on the way down. She liked it, she liked it so much, the feel of his hands loosening that denim over and over, sliding between it and skin, the water streaming down her bared legs, chasing his hands.

  He knelt before her a second, when he had finally gotten them off, staring up at her. And then he surged to his feet, pressing her in one great rush of his body back into the wall, burying his face in her neck and shoulder, kissing her, nibbling her, devouring her, and then he surged up higher, until her face was the one buried in him, as he pulled her legs around his hips and cupped one hand under her bottom—and thrust into her.

  He gasped when he did it. She didn’t, she just wrapped her body around him, closing all her muscles on him, more than ready. Tension ran all through him, a corded, angry, desperate energy. “Kai,” he said, as if he had to double-check. As if someone else might have snuck in and taken her place while he wasn’t looking. Or as if he had woken time and again to find himself making love to a succubus of her. Or a dream.

  She’d done that sometimes, after a summer day spent hiking in the open air, focusing on trees and birds and sky and life, trying to become again someone with whom she could live the rest of her life. She would sleep well those nights and dream of old happy days, of making love outside in the grass, and wake to find herself cuddling a pillow to her, thinking it was him.

  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 musc
le 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.

  Chapter Three

  Afterward, 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.