You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(122)

He braced after he said it, doubtless still remembering the way she had screamed at him the last time he suggested this idea. But that level of rage, at least, had faded a long time ago, as her hormones rebalanced.

The hurt hadn’t left with the rage, of course. If anything, the rage had been a protective shield against the fullness of that hurt. Even six months ago, it would have been too soon still to bring up this trip idea. Some wounds couldn’t be “fixed”, no matter how much someone else might want to fix them; sometimes they just needed a lot of time to heal. But now—

She nodded, firmly, and his face lit, and they called up maps and guidebooks and plotted where they would most like to go. It was a little difficult—anticipating fun and life felt all rusty—but it got better with practice, as if each little touch, each little smile, each photo of a possibility was another drop of oil.

When his mother called and asked Kurt if he was coming to Christmas dinner, and he asked Kai, she said yes a little warily, because it was her first step back into the world. Still, the thought of his mother’s cool control was a relief compared to her own family’s chaos of wrapping paper and playing nieces and nephews. She could start back into the world with baby steps. “Although I never could figure out what your mother meant by letting me have this cabin. It’s almost as if she wanted us to be separated.”

Kurt was silent for a moment as he helped them off the couch. “I always thought it was proof that my mother actually has a heart.”

Kai whipped her head up to stare at him. People close to Anne rarely suspected her of having a heart, Kurt least of all. And she didn’t see how the cabin proved the contrary.

“I was seven and nine when she had her own miscarriages,” Kurt said very quietly. Shock ran through Kai, a strange woman-to-woman current of pain, of understanding. Oh. Oh, you know, too. It was as if there should be some little sign, a woman’s hand touching her belly maybe, this secret code of a sorority of sorrow. “I didn’t really understand back then what happened to her, why that cold crept in on her and she got even more controlling, so difficult my father just left her.”

Oh, Anne. Kai saw the frost-blond bob, the strong jaw and ever-controlled profile, felt against her cheek the little air-kisses of the woman who never let herself get too close. Whose media presence and role of perfectionism was its own force field around her, creating a bubble where she could get everything right.

“I just knew I couldn’t reach her myself,” Kurt said low. “And never have been able to reach her again. Not so I could tell.”

Oh, Kurt. Kurt, Kurt, Kurt. The sudden, incredible realization that he had braved the greatest pain from his childhood, for her: that of having his world fall to pieces, of being shut out. He must have been as helpless against that destruction then as he had been when his life was destroyed a second time as an adult, and yet, for her—he had still tried his hardest to fight it. He had still faced it.

“I think she gave you what she needed for herself back then and never had, because there were too many things she couldn’t step away from. But of course, given that it’s my mother, it’s hard to tell.” His mouth twisted wryly. “She did agree to give me an excuse to come up here, though, when I asked her. And she was the one who made the decision to leave us here alone—without warning me, I should mention. I had planned to have people here for more padding. More”—he flexed his fingers, almost as if he was testing the fit of a glove—“armor.” He shook his head and closed that hand firmly around hers, warm and sure. “Stupid armor,” he murmured so softly she didn’t think she was meant to hear. “As if you ever got to wear any.”

She hesitated and gestured around to the snow-covered mountains, the isolated cabin.

“Ah.” He nodded. “Maybe if you can’t have armor, you do need a lot of distance from the world. When you’re—wounded.” The oddest look crossed his face. “My mother—the person who understood.”

“My family never could,” she said. “They were too—happy.”

“Yes, I thought of that, how happy your family always was. I had had to learn how to deal with my parents’ divorce. And, you know, my mother. She takes a certain amount of strength. But you never had any practice at all, did you?”

No. Happy childhood, happy family, easy time in school, happy marriage to the most wonderful man . . . it had been so easy to have a beautiful life, up until then. She had thought working in top kitchens was the most brutal thing possible in life, and she had shifted away from that brutality into the calmer intensity of food styling, easily enough. She had had no idea. How could she not have the babies she wanted? She was—she was happy. Unhappy things were for—unhappy people.

What an idiot she had been.

A happy idiot, though.

Images flashed across her mind of all the women in her support group, of her own mother-in-law, the cool, distant Anne. One of the leaders of her support group often said that they weren’t supposed to think about deserving and not deserving, that it was a cruel concept made to hurt. But Kai struggled with it, as with everything else.

In her bedroom—their bedroom now?—she touched her jewelry box, stroking it a moment, eyeing him sideways as he buttoned a pressed, white shirt. She had always found it so hot when he dressed for dinner with his mother. It had always made her palms itch with the desire to unbutton him again, to wrinkle his shirt, to tousle his hair, to make him late, but to make him late laughing, every cell of his body sated and relaxed.