You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(114)

Her breaths came with difficulty, leaving her sick and shaky. “But I left you.” After first destroying anything and everything about them with every word she could muster.

“Did you really?” He rubbed his fingers over and over against the white terry towel at his thigh. “I always tried to tell myself that you left—you. That you just had to get away from you for a while until, you know—you could come back.” He pressed his fingertips into the towel and his thigh until white showed where his knuckles bent back. “I was sorry,” he said low, “not to be able to help you with that. I was sorry that everything I tried just made it worse. I was sorry that when you needed it, I couldn’t give you the same joy and happiness that you had given me.”

“It’s not your fault, Kurt. Nobody could have—”

“I wasn’t nobody,” he interrupted harshly and then stopped himself and shook his head. “I wasn’t—well, I guess I was only me.”

“Kurt, don’t—” Don’t say “only”.

He shook his head again, as if he was trying to shake his thoughts into a new direction. “I think I need to go for a walk.”

He didn’t ask her to come with him, scooping up his clothes and heading toward the door.

“Kurt,” she managed, as he reached it. “Don’t be humble.” You deserve so much better than me.

You deserve someone who only gives you laughter and happiness.

And that traitorous, evil thought she had laid to rest so long ago snuck back: Someone who can have babies like a normal person. She curled her fingers into the sheets, willing it away.

He paused at the door just long enough to look back at her a steady moment with those gorgeous hazel eyes of his. “Kai. You’ve always humbled me.”





Chapter Nine





Humbled him when she gave him all that laughter and life of hers so spontaneously, as if he deserved it. Humbled him at their wedding, when she looked up at him with her eyes gone all solemn, but still so, so happy, and said, I will. Humbled him when he placed his hand on her belly and thought, awestruck, that she was going to have a baby. His baby. How did she do that? Humbled him when she wept and wept and wept and tried again and all he could do was hold her.

Humbled him when she left him, yes. God, the inadequacy of him to her needs. He’d been worth nothing.

That anger pressed up through him again, that sneaky bastard monster with all its snaky heads. He knew she didn’t deserve that rage, and he knew he couldn’t let it free, but it reared up in him sometimes, all the same.

I’m sorry. He saw her face as she said it, her head bowed, tears filling her eyes, and one of the monster snake-heads laid itself down and just slowly dissipated, like a witch’s body touched with water. I’m so sorry, she had said another moment, and a second head slunk down to the ground and shriveled into nothing.

He hoped two weren’t going to grow back where each one had been. You never knew with anger. Hers had been a wild thing, out of control, there at the end, and nothing could cauterize where those first heads had been and keep them from sprouting back up again, more numerous and stronger than before. He had tried probably way too many things, ending up with far too many heads to fight and all of them focused on him.

Yeah, if ever she got pregnant again—please, God, let’s not try that again—

oh, but shit, he would have liked to have a little blonde girl with—

let it go, let it go.

But if she ever did, they had to have a pact or something. A written contract, that he could take her to a therapist and she would go, and if everything went so wrong again, he would hold that written promise in her face like some magic charm and will it to work.

Yeah. Like that marriage contract had worked. That solemn vow of I will. She’d broken that one.

And there it was, that goddamn hydra anger. Heads rearing back up, tongues lashing between vicious teeth, ready to strike at his soul.

No, he said, and picked up a handful of snow, pressing it to his forehead. The coolness reminded him of her, of playing in the woods with her, and the anger slumped down, glowering at his mastery of it, as he hiked on.

He passed the most perfect little fir for a Christmas tree, just as tall as he was, a little shaggy on one side, but you could turn that side to the wall. His mother wouldn’t have put up with the asymmetry, but Kai wouldn’t mind. He stood for a moment, gazing at it, thinking of all the Christmases they had curled up with a tree in the corner of the room. And then thinking of that last Christmas.

That horrible, horrible last Christmas.

He would like to think they could curl up by a fire and a Christmas tree again one day, but was this Christmas too soon for her? Would it hurt more than heal?

He walked on, glancing back at the fir, and eventually came out at the viewpoint to which the path led. From there, the mountains swept down into the valley, everything hushed with snow, a glimpse glowing through the fog of the giant star the little town below hung up on a crane for the holidays.

He brushed snow off the big rock that helped make this such a perfect lookout point and sat down on it. Gradually, at his stillness, birds began to sneak in around him, and he realized bird seed was scattered on the ground. Three bird feeders had been hung from the trees, made of exquisite, fragile glass. They hadn’t been there the last time he had visited the cabin, which meant Kai had hung them, and as soon as he realized that, he knew why there were three.