You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(95)

And finally she had just reached out and dove her fingers with devilish precision into his ribs. He had twisted uncontrollably—she had known someone that careful had to be ticklish—and then burst out laughing. He had grabbed her wrists to stop her and when that pulled her body into a lean over his, looked up into her face with his hazel eyes brilliant with that unexpected laughter and something else, something even more hungry and delighted. It had been the first time they kissed. (Because he was so careful, so courteously respectful when he said good night those first two dinners.) If a couple of hikers hadn’t passed about fifteen minutes later, it would have been the first time they made love, too.

He’d always liked to make love outside in the grass when he could find a spot, ever after. It just always seemed to make him so happy.

She’d always seemed to make him happy. As if she brought ease and laughter into his whole life.

Until she hadn’t.

Until she had destroyed all that ease and taken all his laughter with it.

It had been the most terrible thing in her life that she had ever done. Her body had killed three other dreams of laughter and life and happiness, but at least she hadn’t had control over those decisions.

She wiped the smudge mark she had made completely clean with a bit of sponge, then took a tiny pinch of powdered sugar and rubbed it between her fingers to let it fall over that cleaned spot, hoping to repair the damage in a way that did not show, that would not make her start the whole thing over. Did that look right? Sometimes she focused on a food styling issue so long that she lost all perspective.

She removed the other four snowflake wax patterns without smudges and stood back to evaluate the look of the black granite forms showing through the white sugar. Were the snowflakes a too obvious choice? Should it be Christmas trees? That seemed so facile. Stars maybe? If she did some stars eight-pointed and some six-pointed, to reach more than one demographic, would that make the holiday shot over-reaching, ruining the whole effect?

“It was always fascinating to me,” Kurt said, that steady, modulated voice of his just hurting her skin, “how you were so cheerful and careless everywhere else, as if life was pure fun and you weren’t going to let anxiety over details get in the way of embracing every glorious part of it. And yet when you set up a shoot, you were always so obsessively careful. As if you, too, under all that fun, felt the same need to get everything, somewhere, exactly right.”

He had such perfect diction, so New England, so educated. But he was never cruel with it, not on purpose, not like the infamous devastation his mother could wreak with a few cutting words, when people did not perform to her standards.

That had always been one of the things Kai loved about him so much: the way she could see his mother in him in a thousand small and big ways, and yet there was this kindness that was the very opposite of what his mother was known for, as if he had made a deliberate choice, in the face of great environmental odds, to be someone whose goodness was personal and direct and one-on-one, whose interactions were honorable and reliable and did no damage. All his choices had always been thought-out and conscious and deliberate, except that one choice—which wasn’t really a choice, was it? rather a thing that swept over a person’s life and changed it—to fall in love with her.

Her throat closed, and she couldn’t talk anymore. Not to him. Not ever again to him. She didn’t deserve him.

“You’ve lost so much weight,” Kurt said. “Haven’t you learned to love food again yet?”

No. She still could love its looks, the way she could get it absolutely right for a photograph, but that urge that had always kept those extra twenty pounds rounding her hips—to taste everything around her in those photo shoots, to tilt her head back and just sink into all those delicious flavors—had died. She had lost the people she cooked for casually—him, her friends, her family, all of whom she had fled—and so she had stopped cooking altogether. She hadn’t realized until she was getting by on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, alone, chewing mechanically, that enjoyment of food really depended on a belief in life and a belief that you could nourish it.

And who could believe in that?

All three of the pregnancies had left her so viciously nauseated, as if her body was some war zone, and she had always thought, if only she could have made peace with the food, if only she could have kept some of it down, things might have turned out differently, that getting her body to accept the food and getting her body to accept the pregnancy were the same thing. The doctors had said it didn’t work that way, that it wasn’t a mind-game she could control, but . . . the sense of failure and enmity remained. Food had let her down. Had betrayed her, when she least expected it. Had not nourished life.

“I wonder if I did the right thing, waiting,” Kurt said low, his hands curled in his pockets.

Her heart tightened. She took a breath and managed to speak, to release him from this hell: “If you’re worried about the snow, go ahead and go. You’re probably right, that they’re not coming.” She couldn’t blame him for wanting to get away before he got stuck for days alone with her. She had hurt him so much. The utter devastation of all that happiness he had found in her.

When Anne had succeeded in convincing him to come so that she could work on contracts and this winter wonderland magazine shoot at the same time, Kai had thought his agreement meant that he, too, had moved on. That he had managed to reduce his tears, too, to this half-frozen quiet inside him. That he was at a place where he could see her again and survive it. Maybe he had met that woman who would make him happy again and he wanted to broach the discussion on divorce.