You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(106)

He picked up the strawberry heart tucked on top of the cream and pressed a kiss to it, his eyes closing. Then he ate it in one hungry snatch, like a wolf might down a scrap before anyone else could wrench it from him.

She found herself blushing, a tendency that was new. She had never really blushed much with him, simply because from the very first, he had always made her feel so sure and happy. She had destroyed that surety, though, willfully and wantonly, and it had taken some doing. He had been as sure for her as any man could possibly be.

Her eyes prickled again, and she focused on her own waffle, no fancy strawberries on it, just a dusting of powdered sugar. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught his finger tracing around the edge of his plate. When he brought it to his mouth and sucked the sugar off it, she blushed all over.

And peeked to find him watching her, transfixed, finger still in his mouth.

He stretched across the island to pull her plate to the stool right beside him and then, as she came after it, ridiculously shy, he took one of his own strawberry hearts and placed it neatly in the center of her waffle. That stopped her dead just before she climbed onto the stool, tears threatening again.

He kissed her, hoisting her up onto the stool himself, and slipped her a fork. His hand rested a moment over hers, that warmth that only yesterday she had never thought to feel again. “This tastes so damn good, Kai,” he said softly. “You have no idea.”

“You haven’t even tasted the waffle yet.” His manners bound him to wait until they both were served.

He grinned again. “You had me at the strawberry,” he said this time and touched a bit of whipped cream to her nose. An unheard-of silliness from Kurt. It was more like something she would once have done.

He swooped in and kissed the cream off her nose and sat back to dig into his waffle. The amount of happiness suddenly shimmering off him was too much for her to process. Didn’t he remember that their happiness was all gone?

He closed his eyes on the first bite of waffle in pure bliss and opened them to catch her staring. He smiled.

It had once seemed so normal, to construct happiness out of flour, butter, eggs, and strawberries and to bake it into something golden and sweet for a morning. Now it seemed incredible—such a fragile joy in the face of all the great destructive grief that could tear through that moment and destroy it.

At one point, grief and anger had pushed her so far over the edge that she would have destroyed this moment herself, on the grounds that all that happiness and hope was false. But now—it wasn’t really that she believed in those flowers sprouting out of the snow, as she used to. But she knew better than to stomp on them and grind them into the mud just so nothing else could grind them first.

So they ate their waffles, every bite an unbelievable burst of golden flavor. She couldn’t remember the last time she had tasted. He cleaned every last crumb from his plate. She ate around her little strawberry heart, until it stood bereft on an island of powdered gold. It felt too wrong for her to eat that heart, like giving the prince’s heart to the wicked witch instead of to the happy, singing princess.

Kurt’s fork speared through heart and waffle both, and he slipped the whole bite into her mouth. Then, while she was still trying to convince herself it was okay for her to chew it, he rose briskly, taking their plates to the sink. Over the running water, he asked, “Would you like to go for a walk?”

Even when Kurt did the cooking—grilling out, maybe—he tended to wash the dishes automatically at the end of the meal. His compulsive mother had probably never allowed dirty dishes to lie around, so probably nurture had something to do with it, but his childhood household had had staff. He wouldn’t have ever had to wash a dish himself, growing up. So Kai had always thought another element besides environmentally-induced obsessive-compulsiveness must contribute to how voluntarily he did any household chores that needed doing: he had an ingrained need to take care of the good things in his life, and her cooking for him was one of the good things.

“In the snow?” she asked.

His half-smile was careful, watchful. “That’s right.”

She had walked so much in the snow up here. But if she added him to the excursion—she was a little afraid of snow, still. Because, well—she had just wanted so damn badly to have their own child with whom to play in it by now. Back in the good old days, she had even imagined that by this age they would have two or three kids; they would talk about it, God, as if this was in their control: “Three might be a lot. We would have to get a bigger house.” “Three seems like an odd number. I think it should be either two or four, so one of them doesn’t feel left out.” “Ha, if you want four, you get pregnant.” That retort had been back early in the first pregnancy, when she just thought it was going to be all vicious nausea but eventually with a happy ending. Or a happy beginning. Whatever you wanted to call it. “Well, don’t you want at least one of each, a little girl and a little boy? I hope the little girl will look just like you.” Stupid conversations like that.

By the third attempt, she would have been desperately happy with just one. And then, and then—she just couldn’t stand to try, not ever again. God, the first baby would have been four this Christmas, if she had lived to be born. Her third baby had actually been due on Christmas Day. Her little miracle baby, she had thought at it in her belly, all through that spring, and tried to believe in the magic of the third try so hard.