You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(111)

And he took her one last time there, while she was almost asleep, just lax and willing, took her just because they were in a bed, a big king marital bed, and he wanted to make it his bed, their bed, and even though he had just come not long ago in the hot tub, the need to take her again rose up in him, too strong. He didn’t care if she half-dreamed her way through it. He had taken her plenty of times in his dreams, in the past year and a half.

Her turn to let him into her dreams.

Exhausted with all that animal sex, she didn’t seem to mind, her body still willing, easy, her arms sliding loosely over him but still holding him as he took her, her body curling into him when he was done, as they both fell asleep.

And that was the most beautiful thing of all, to sleep in a big bed together again.

He hadn’t always realized this, back in the days when their future could only hold bright, happy things, but to sleep together in a bed together might very well be so beautiful that if it was all the beauty his life could hold—he would still take it.





Chapter Eight





Waking was sleepy, happy, and then it shocked through Kai that the long body lying so close to hers wasn’t a dream, and she held herself still, heart in her throat, as if that dream might catch her and turn into a nightmare.

The potential nightmare slumbered, though, beautiful. A lithe, long, muscled body, warming all the space under the covers. He wasn’t eating enough, she thought, and touched his wrist, there were the tendons were so relaxed now in sleep. Of course, he wasn’t. He was probably swimming at lunch and running again in the evening, going rock climbing on weekends, playing Ultimate relentlessly—anything but sitting down at the kitchen table and . . . and—eating cold cereal by himself?

Of course he was.

Grief squeezed her again for all the hurt she had done him. But she realized she no longer wanted to shut him out of her life so that she didn’t have to deal with that grief. Whether the grief had just grown more manageable with time, or whether her heart had grown stronger from all it had had to learn to bear, she did not know, but she breathed through the wave of grief quietly, letting it subside and just rest there, not trying to heal it or stop it or chase it away. Just letting it be. It was there. It would always be there. If she left it alone and did not worry at it, maybe it would take a nap.

That was one thing she had learned over time. Grief was exhausting. And sometimes even the biggest grief in the world exhausted itself, like a big, bad, ugly winter that finally, even if it was late June by then, had to lay itself down and let a few daffodils push up through its weary snow.

She stroked from his wrist up that long arm, its strength in abeyance. Tears dampened her eyes as she imagined him as daffodils—such a funny image for his athletically geeky carefulness and controlled masculinity—and yet it suited him somehow. Stubborn, persistent, determined to get through the snow. She didn’t try to do anything about the tears—not wipe them away, not hold them back—and they dried after a moment without falling, while her hand traced over his collarbone.

He really had such a beautiful form to him. It just worked for her. Not bulky, just defined and strong and lovely. She liked the bones of him. She liked that lean over-thought athleticism.

But she always had. Her fingers trailed down his torso, over too-defined ribs—he was not eating—loving that resilient texture of him. From the very first—when she had seen his attraction to her and the way he handled it with such care, such a determination to get her right—she had wanted to get her hands on him. He’d driven her just a tiny bit crazy with how carefully he had courted her, but she had liked it, too. It had made her want to grab him and get past that careful restraint of his. Made her long to sink her hands into him. See what he felt like. Both her hands curved around his ribs in that remembered need. In that still urgent need.

She flexed her hands gently, trying not to wake him as she stole a little of that warm resilience again. The ability to do that felt so good. It released tension all down her spine, and the hairs on her body shivered with it.

He was so beautiful. The heat of him felt as if it could soak right through to her heart. Melt it. Tears sprang up again at the thought, but maybe that was just the melting ice.

God, she hadn’t realized how much ice she had inside her. She had forgotten how very, very cold everything had grown, so used to that cold that it had begun to seem just the way the world was: a severe and ugly place best suited for hibernation.

Her lips trembled upward at the corners as she traced over his hip. She still did not know if she wanted to wake up again, to come down out of those snowy clouds and be a human being again.

But he was beautiful. She could not touch him if she stayed up in the winter clouds. She could not feel that warmth at her fingertips.

Kurt’s lashes lifted slowly, for an instant his eyes wary, as if he, too, was afraid of shifting from a dream into nightmare. But then he smiled at her like a deliberate choice, like those daffodils pushing their heads up through the snow, and after a moment, he touched her cheek.

The moment reminded her of the morning after their wedding, when she had wakened to find him gazing at her like that, faces so close, and he had smiled, a slow blush climbing up his cheeks so that anyone would have thought he was some teenage bridegroom who had just made love for the first time.

“You don’t think this will just make everything harder?” she asked low.