You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(112)

“No,” he said quietly and fiercely. “Not trying would have been harder. Spending another Christmas like last one would have been harder.”

She took a deep breath, struggling with it. Because it felt harder to her. Far, far harder than what she had been doing these past few months, trying to float above the surface of her grief and loss and just somehow find a way forward.

“But—” Watching her, he sighed and for a moment looked so tired. His hand curved around her cheek. “I can’t speak for you.”

“Kurt.” She turned her face into his hand, hiding in its shelter. “You’ve, ah—” Her throat clogged. “You’ve always been worth me doing something hard. It just—I couldn’t, I couldn’t—”

His fingertips shifted gently on her forehead, his thumb against her temple. “I figured out that you couldn’t. It took me a while. Until the day you walked out and I didn’t chase after you, I guess. I wanted to chase after you so badly.”

Her mouth twisted against the heel of his palm. “I’m sorry. Did it take you a long time to get over it?”

A short silence. And then, so carefully the air could have been crystal and any word would shatter it into shards that pierced their hearts: “The babies?”

He hadn’t had trouble over the babies, that old lash of anger twitched her. Nothing like hers. Of course he had gotten over them. Her babies. “Me leaving.”

Another silence. She breathed in the scent of his palm. “Get over isn’t the right phrase.”

“Move on,” she said carefully. Her throat felt full of fog, and when she spoke each word seemed to puff that wintry whiteness over him. “You—know.”

He left the bed abruptly, grabbing one of yesterday’s abandoned towels to wrap around his waist, and went to stand by the great window. Outside, too, fog lowered over the snow, the air so thick that the tiniest blink from a snow queen’s eyes would crystallize everything. His towel was white against the white past the glass, only his body, even at its winter palest, still bringing a hint of warmth, of life, to the scene. She knew those windows were double-paned, and yet his position next to that great expanse of glass seemed like a very cold place to be.

“It’s funny how two people can love each other, and live together for years, and still not realize how very differently they think about things,” he told the glass. His hands curled into fists and slid across his towel, failing to find pockets in which to bury themselves. “I haven’t gotten over it, or moved on. It never occurred to me to try.”

Against that glass and winter world, he looked so lonely she thought she would die. But that wouldn’t cure anyone’s loneliness problems, would it?

“I’ve been waiting,” Kurt told the glass. Something spasmed across the profile of his face, some violent twisting of despair, endurance, hope. He pressed his forehead against the pane until his neck corded. “Waiting very hard.”

Oh, God, she couldn’t even think. Feelings were swelling up too big, threatening her wholeness. And yet they seemed—stronger, different, than those old feelings that had torn her apart. Almost as if she had turned into a shrunken old balloon and they were stretching her back out again. “Waiting—for me to come back?”

She saw his throat muscles work. “God, Kai, you don’t know. You don’t know how many days I tried not to get through on the hope that when I walked back through the door, you would be there, telling me how sorry you were. You don’t know how many days I tried not to think about that, tried not to hope for that.”

Tears rushed up into her eyes. Would she never come to an end of crying? But she could see him. She could see him, his car slowing as he turned down the street to their house, his heart tightening. She could see him telling himself, when her car wasn’t in the drive, to stop hoping, that was it, she wasn’t there—and still hoping a little, nevertheless, as he got out of the car, as he turned the key in the lock. She could see him doing it a shade too slowly, trying to put off that moment when he looked into the house—and saw it was empty. Still. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

His mouth twisted in what was maybe supposed to be a smile. “But I haven’t been waiting for you to come back, although if you had, it would have been a sign that I’d waited long enough. I’ve always been willing to chase after you. I was waiting for you to heal enough that being near me didn’t just rip your wounds right open again with every breath I took.”

She sat up, clutching the sheet to her, utterly stunned. Being near him had felt exactly like that. The rawness of her soul, the ragged ripping at it of his existence, her need to hide, hide, hide from anything that held more feeling, to bury herself as deep as a bear in some cave of snow.

“I should have forced you to go to a therapist somehow. I just—you weren’t suicidal, and you weren’t homicidal, and I could hardly have you committed, Kai. I knew you weren’t normal, but I couldn’t tell what part was some kind of postpartum depression and what part was the real grief and anger that you had to find a way to work through.”

She swallowed with great difficulty, as if she was trying to squeeze some huge marshmallow down her throat whole. “Neither could I,” she whispered, hanging her head. “I still can’t.”

He angled his head against the glass, and she felt him watching her, but she couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t. I’m so sorry.