You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(113)

And then he walked back across the room, sat down on the bed beside her, and put his arm around her, pulling her into his warm chest and pressing a kiss to the top of her head. He didn’t say anything. After a moment, she slipped her hands up to his chest and buried her fingertips in her palms so that she wouldn’t clench tight fistfuls of his skin. Closing her eyes, she focused on the feel of his arms around her, his body against her face, the scent of him, the warmth. She focused so hard that it made every hair on her body shiver up, and then subside, and then shiver up again.

He brought his other arm to join the first, wrapping around her, but he never said a word. A couple of times he kissed her head again.

“I joined a group here,” she said finally, low. “After a while. That first winter, I couldn’t be near anybody, I couldn’t stand to let anybody in. If your mother hadn’t let me have this cabin, I—I don’t know what I would have done. Hiked the Appalachian Trail maybe, except I probably would have just curled up and died mid-route.” Her mouth twisted in some ghost of her old humor, so strange to feel it this way, about this subject. “It’s hard to curl up and die so easily in a warm luxury cabin without the help of hypothermia.”

“I wish I could have been there,” Kurt said, strained. “Kai—I wish I could have fixed it.” His hands flexed against her, his voice deepening grimly. “Instead of making it worse.”

She said nothing. What could she say? Every single thing he had tried had made it worse, and yet he had tried so hard. After a moment, she pressed a kiss into his bare chest, for everything words couldn’t give him.

“I love you,” he said quietly. “Kai.”

She began to tremble. Her stomach shook so badly she felt sick from it. She wanted to cover her ears and bury her face to shut out this thing that couldn’t possibly be true.

And if it was true, if it was true—oh, God, it made her sick how little she deserved it. It made her feel terrified and broken, to try to construct something on the ruins of their old happiness. She could not do it. She had failed. She was too afraid.

She forced herself away from him, not all the way, but enough distance to make one fact clear to both of them: I don’t deserve this. This can’t be. “You can’t possibly.”

His lips compressed, such sudden anger blazing up in his eyes that it caught her there, hands still touching his chest, staring back into it. “I’ll be the judge of what I’m capable of doing,” he said harshly.

She took a shaky breath.

“Fuck,” he said wearily and stood again from the bed. Once he had taken a step away from her, though, he just stopped, running his hands through his hair as if he had no idea what to do with them.

“I’m sorry,” she said, too low, that marshmallow impossible in her throat. “I guess I can’t stop destroying things.”

This morning. That beautiful moment when he opened his eyes and smiled at her. Couldn’t she have at least stopped herself from destroying that?

“Destroying things?” He half-turned. He really had such a beautiful body, all that elegant, intense strength. “Have you started blaming it all on yourself again? Kai, the doctors said—”

She lifted a hand, pushing that subject away. “Let’s not talk about that,” she said quietly. “Let’s not—I know what the doctors said. Let’s let them stay—” She hated so much to say “buried” for those three little hopes of children. “Asleep.” In her mind, she envisioned three little mounds covered gently with snow and sighed, but it was a long, quiet, sad sigh. It was one she had made her peace with.

Maybe that long, long frozen year had served some kind of function after all.

Kurt stretched a hand across the distance between them and curved it against her cheek, saying nothing. Tears pricked again. She did not want to ruin his morning completely, but it felt so healing to cry this way, as if the liquid came from snow melting into spring. They were sweeter tears than all the other ones she had cried.

“I meant us,” she whispered. “I destroyed us.”

His fingers tightened against her cheek. “I’m not destroyed.”

Her breath stopped.

“I’m scarred.” He withdrew his hand and closed it carefully into a fist at his side. Again it slid in search of a pocket, but found none in which to bury itself. “I’m battered. But I’m still standing, Kai.”

Sometimes far too many feelings swirled in a body at once. As if a wind had whipped around a snow statue and brought it to life.

“How about you?” Kurt asked.

She could only stare at him. “Are you giving me another chance?” How could he? Despite every indication he kept making that he would like for them to be together again—how could he possibly?

His mouth set, that fine, elegant line of grimness he had, this man who tried so hard not to fling his anger around blindly. “I wasn’t aware I had ever terminated your first chance.”

“I thought I did. I destroyed my chance.”

His mouth went even grimmer, knuckles white by his side. “What the hell did you think our marriage was, a lottery ticket? To be ripped in half when it wasn’t the winning number?”

Well, if it was, she had certainly shredded it. “What did you think it was?”

He shot her a hard look, revealing an anger in which she could at least believe. Unlike the love, the anger was deserved. “A marriage.”