You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(117)
Incredible Christmas ornaments, too, the kind that appeared in his mother’s magazine and that no average person could get to look like Anne Winters’s. Not that Kurt had ever been average, no matter what he thought about himself. “I take it that it’s genetic?” Kai said, both amused and impressed. While she rarely applied her own ability for precision to crafts, preferring the work with food, she understood exactly what went into that level of perfect craftsmanship.
Kurt looked around and smiled at her, a small, warm smile. He was halfway through something elaborate with ribbons and glitter, and his hands were occupied. “No, but who do you think she kept testing those kid crafts of hers on when I was little? We both had a hard time of it when I was five and could never get any of her visions for kid crafts to actually work out beautifully, like I was supposed to. But by the time I was eight, I was the model crafting child.”
“You have hidden talents.” Kai came forward. Glitter streaked across one of his cheeks, little sparkles of white that caught the light every time he shifted his head. “I guess it makes sense, but I’ve never seen you do anything like this before.”
“I started rebelling against it all when I was about ten.” That would have also been the age when his father divorced his mother, unable to put up with her ever-increasing need for control, and moved to California. “And moved into sports and, you know, boy things—the kind of thing that drove her crazy. By the time you met me, we’d more or less found an even keel between us, but that didn’t mean I had to do crafts for her.” That glimmer of his wry smile that she loved so much, the way it was so restrained and yet all that brilliance and subtle humor of his showed through. “Just all her legal contracts.”
He finished tying the ribbon and set the ornament on a pan with a dozen others already made: snowflakes, some two-dimensional, some three-dimensional, their heavy card stock thickly covered in fine white and silver glitter. In his hands, per his mother’s training, the snowflakes became a very sophisticated, adult craft.
“You can pick the next ornaments,” he said. “Are we doing a two-color theme or a hodge-podge?”
They were going to do crafts together? That was so—sweet. So optimistic, so happy. She took a deep breath, trying to make sure she had enough room to let that sweetness come all the way into her soul. She couldn’t refuse him in this, not Kurt. Even to protect herself she couldn’t. “Have you ever done cinnamon dough ornaments? They’re my favorite. They scent the whole house. You can leave them this rustic brown with pretty ribbons, or your mom did an issue where she covered them with glitter. If we did that, we could do birds pecking through the snow, cardinals, bluebirds.”
He looked up at her suddenly. Their eyes held. “Kai, don’t do something sad,” he said softly.
She hadn’t thought about it, and now she did, her little bird feeders and . . . “Oh.” She took another deep breath as her heart tightened, and then she sighed it out. “Well, growly brown bears in the woods, and stars, and stockings, and holly. And—and maybe some birds. I can have some birds if I want them.”
He took her hands in his gluey, glittery fingers and pulled her between his thighs to kiss her. “I think I got glue in your hair,” he said, when they surfaced. “And you glitter now.”
She smiled at him, wondering if this was her Christmas miracle—that he still seemed so determined to love her. No matter what.
Oh, but how could he? It couldn’t be as fresh and bright and happy as it had once been, could it? It never could be again.
She pressed her head down on his shoulder just a moment, drawing strength or belief, and then went to get the cinnamon and allspice.
It was so easy to start laughing, making Christmas crafts together. It was so easy to have fun. Kurt was insanely good at making them, for one thing, and he made her laugh more and more and tease him as he came up with one thing out of his childhood after another. Why had they never done this before? Well, she supposed because Christmas crafts were the kind of thing a mom typically pulled out to work on with her kids, for one—the grief squeezed and sighed and let her be—and probably Kurt had more than had his fill of Christmas crafts as his mother’s only child. As a couple, they had kept with her own tradition of collecting ornaments wherever they traveled and filling the tree with those. She had saved the crafting sessions for what she thought would be their later, that time in their lives when kids would fill their house.
That time that had just not been meant to be.
So now they went all out. They even tried the white feather Christmas trees from his mother’s latest December issue, and when Kai looked up and discovered Kurt concentrating fully on his craft, oblivious to the feather glued to his cheek, a giggle burst out of her, and she clapped her hands over her belly in surprise, not quite sure where it had come from. Once that first giggle had bubbled itself out of her, more came suddenly, like a pot that had finally been brought to boil, and she giggled and giggled, until she felt as effervescent as a glass of champagne. Kurt upended the bag of white feathers over her head in punishment for laughing at him, and then pulled her to him again, kissing her and kissing her, as the feathers drifted off her hair, gliding softly over her cheeks and tickling his hands.
The scent of cinnamon and cloves filled the house. She made cookies again, while the cinnamon dough was baking in one oven and the glue on the snowflakes was drying, and that added scents of butter and sugar and everything homey. Then she realized it was past lunchtime, and she heated up last night’s soup and then, while she was thinking of it, started a stew in the Dutch oven for that night. Through this flurry of cooking, Kurt chopped onions, carrots, and whatever he was told, looking very happy.