You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(105)

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.

She gazed at the long form under the blanket and finally shook her head and went into the kitchen. But there, instead of the Greek yogurt that she usually ate for breakfast these days, for efficient, palatable nourishment, she paused, and rolled her shoulders—and then she smiled suddenly, her whole heart lifting with pleasure at this morning, as she started to pull out ingredients.

As if the tears or maybe the touch of Kurt’s lips had washed away some ugly, jagged splinter blocking her heart.

She made waffles and sprinkled them with powdered sugar, blushing a little bit as she sifted it over the golden waffle. One of the strawberries she cut in half looked exactly like a heart, and she set it in the center of Kurt’s waffle, sifting a little more powdered sugar over it—and then blushed again and whisked the heart away, looking up to find him standing in the archway watching her. Behind him, the sun was starting to break through clouds and limned him in a softly diffused light.

“That smells really good,” he said, heartfelt, just as he had the night before, and she felt her face brighten into something it hadn’t felt in a long time—laughter.

“Poor man, has no one been feeding you?” she teased, and then caught herself, on the edge of the teasing, because there were so many parts to that which weren’t funny at all. She didn’t have the right to laugh with him anymore.

But his eyes snagged on her face for a long moment, and he came forward to the island so that the nimbus around him softened and she could see his smile. Not the smile he had when she made him laugh, but the smile he had always had when she just made him happy. When he was just glad to look at her. “No,” he said quietly.

Tears threatened again abruptly. How could he smile at her? It made her so sad to think of him going for a year and a half without anyone feeding him. Damn it, he deserved so much better than what he had gotten. And she just couldn’t give that better anymore.

She bent her head and stared at the golden waffle, under the weight of what she had done to that happiness. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the spot in the middle of the waffle where the little strawberry heart had been.

He reached across the wide island, a stretch even for him, and closed his hand around hers. His wedding band glowed simple and strong. “I’m glad. I always hoped you would feel sorry one day.”

Her mouth twisted. That was—fair, she supposed, that he would want her to regret it. What was she supposed to make of this touch, of this strange, snow-kissed togetherness after all this time? The pieces of them had been shattered and scattered so completely, how was she supposed to put them back together again? Why would he let her even try?

Her try? She was afraid to even leave a heart strawberry in the middle of his waffle.

He was the one trying. She wasn’t even sure what he was trying to do exactly, except perhaps reach a point of forgiveness. And if so, she had been right: forgiveness really hurt.

But she could stand hurt, couldn’t she? She had proven that.

Maybe she should stand a few things again, for his sake.

So, on a sudden burst of determination, she sliced up more strawberries into fine hearts to layer all over his waffle, a whole mad field of hearts, and sprinkled it with sugar—and added whipped cream, hell, why not?—and stuck one last strawberry-heart in the mad Seussian mountain of cream, as if the Grinch’s heart had popped out of him when it grew three sizes too big—and slid it across to him.

He had sat on a stool at the edge of the island by then, watching her, and when the plate slid to a stop in front of him, he actually grinned.

Grinned. She hadn’t seen him grin in—what, two years? He hadn’t grinned during the last six months of their marriage.

“You know, you had me at the waffle,” he told her, and the urge to grin back at him struggled with the fear that she didn’t have the right to. What had she been doing, savoring happiness this morning while he slept? When had she gotten the nerve to feel happy?