You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(107)
Her nostrils stung, the way they did sometimes when everyone else thought she should be over it by now. It had been part of the reason that she had had to get so far away from everyone else.
She took a breath and sighed it out. “Yes, all right. Let’s go for a walk.”
Chapter Six
Kurt focused on the hot water running over the plates, grateful for it. He had never understood it when he discovered that their friends’ couples fought over such stupid things as doing dishes or mowing the grass or making sure someone’s tank was filled with gas. They were all such easy things to get right.
It turned out they didn’t count for much, when the going got tough, but it used to be, when he wasn’t ever entirely sure how he had managed to convince this much sunshine to enter his life, that he found them very reassuring. Little things to keep that sunshine happy. Look at this plate, for example: it had just held the most delicious waffles and hearts for him, and now, instead of leaving it some ugly mess no one would ever want to deal with later, he was cleaning it right up, fresh and shiny and ready for a new start.
When you had a woman who was willing to cook for you, and laugh and tease you while she did it, you didn’t really want to leave any barriers lying around the kitchen that would discourage her from getting in that cheerful, cooking mood again the next evening or even sometimes spontaneously for breakfast. Up until things went so wrong, he had been kind of quietly, contentedly smug about how well this philosophy worked compared to those of his idiot friends.
But then, of course, all of those friends still had their wives, and even kids, now, and complained about them, too. Told him he should be glad, that he didn’t know how much trouble he had escaped.
The f*cking bastards.
He drew a breath, easing his fingers on the plate before he cracked it, and set it to dry. “I’ll go get my snow boots from the car.” He had put snow gear into the back as he always did when driving in winter weather, just in case. Like the dishes, it used to profoundly reassure him when he was packing up Kai’s snow gear, too, and a big box of energy bars, in case they got stranded—doing everything in his power to keep his wife and their world together protected and happy. Packing up just his own snow gear felt—shitty. Really, really shitty.
“All right,” she said, smiling at him tentatively as he left. He was probably pushing this too soon, getting everything wrong again, but God, he did not want to spend another Christmas Day like last one. Just this grinding agony of minute after minute of a day to get through. Knowing she was by herself and that her agony must be even worse. And that there was nothing he could do to help; everything he did only made her misery more unbearable.
He knew why men killed themselves when they lost their families.
He just hadn’t had that option, last Christmas. He knew he had to hold through and get his family back.
He hadn’t even been able to drink himself into oblivion, because—well, for one thing he didn’t even know how to get drunk. He’d done it once as a college student and not liked the experience at all. Kai had often tried to tease him into drinking an extra glass of wine, but he had always worried about what he might do if he lost control—what if it was something she would find ridiculous or offensive?
But that Christmas Day, he would have been happy to test out getting drunk again, except—what if she called? What if she just couldn’t make it through that Christmas Day and needed him? He had to be able to drive.
God.
Anything would be better than that Christmas Day again.
Except, maybe, failing to make things right this time, too. What if he hit a point when he had to give up all hope?
No, don’t think like that. She had smiled. She had made waffles. She had put hearts on them, which was the kind of sweet, silly thing she used to do for him. He’d had to start acting silly himself, because otherwise all the emotions that rushed up in him might have come out as, God forbid, tears. He’d cried for her once—all those words she was wielding back then breaking him like a damn rack. It had actually seemed to work—she’d softened, as if the tears had shocked through to her heart and she’d remembered that hers sometimes beat for him, too. She’d wrapped her arms around him and whispered she was sorry, she was sorry, she didn’t mean it, she was so sorry—and they had made love. It had been so sweet, and he had been so glad, that things might finally work out, that she finally understood he did care—
And she had left him the very next day. Crying herself. “I just can’t. I just can’t do it anymore.”
“But—Kai, why? I thought—didn’t we—”
“I just can’t.”
God.
He pulled his snow pants and snow boots on, sitting on the edge of the bumper, zipped his ski jacket up to his chin and pulled on his gloves—nice, thick armor everywhere—and went back into the house to pull her out into this snow. Hoping it wasn’t the wrong thing to do.
The way she walked on the snow at first, anyone would have thought she was a kitten seeing snow for the first time. Which broke his heart a little, but his heart was so used to being broken by then. She was the one who had taught him to play in the snow, before he quite understood that adults were allowed to. He still remembered how she’d done it, the sideways evil laughing look as she tested a handful of snow before she lobbed it straight at him. She had lousy aim, and he’d just smiled at her when it bounced off his shoulder, shaking his head indulgently as he kept walking. The next one had hit him square on the back, sliding harmlessly off his jacket. So she had run up to him and kissed him, and God knew, he should have expected what was coming, but it was their first snow together, and he had just sunk delightedly into his kiss, until a cold handful of snow went straight down his collar and he yelped.