You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(98)

Their eyes held. His were so gorgeous, their beauty all for her, her special treasure that no one else had the sense to see. You had to know him so well to know the color of his eyes; his friends couldn’t even remember it, and yet she had always known, right from the first moment he stood looking down at her in his mother’s gardens and she looked back up into those hazel eyes, and her heart caught.

Her heart had been so smart. Suicidal in its bright optimism, clueless as to what would come, but still—so smart, to so immediately respond to him.

He had deserved her heart. He had deserved better.

From the very first, he had always been so careful to give her the very best of himself.

She was the one. She was the one who hadn’t been able to give him something good enough back. It had been her job to be happy, it was what she brought to their couple, it was who she was in life, the happy person, and then, and then . . .

She drew a breath in and sighed it out, shaky, shivery. She was so entirely naked here on this granite. All illusion of distance gone.

And yet she hadn’t melted out of existence, as she expected. Life never let her escape just by destroying her completely, no matter how convinced she was, in the moment, that she was being destroyed.

“I probably shouldn’t have done that,” he said low, touching a streak of sugar on her cheek. His beautiful eyes were so very close, his expression driven, torn. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t think I’ve gotten anything right since you first got pregnant.” His fingers sifted her hair, sticking now from the sugar. “It made me realize that you were always the one who got us right. Who made us happy.” His mouth twisted on such a hard-contained wave of grief and pain that she wanted to catch him in a tight fist, say, No! It wasn’t you. It was me. I was the one who went wrong. “I tried, though.” He stepped away from her.

A moment later, still lying there naked on a counter in powdered sugar, she heard the front door open and close.

And Kai curled into a fetal ball, pulling sugar-coated arms over her face and bending sugar-coated legs into her naked belly, and wept until she couldn’t weep anymore.





Chapter Two





Heavy, ragged, hot sobs like she had cried for the second miscarriage and never been able to cry since, not even for the third, not even when she left Kurt, when the tears had been weak, exhausted things that would come out of nowhere and slide aimlessly down her cheeks, as if they didn’t even have the strength left in them to heal.

A long time passed before the discomfort of the granite got to her, and the cold of her naked body, and the stickiness of sugar melted by sweat and tears into her skin and hair. Finally she peeled herself off the island to take a shower. The water had been running over her for a good five minutes before it slowly penetrated her blank exhaustion that she liked it—how warm it was.

She hadn’t really liked the way something felt in a long time.

Drying herself off slowly, she almost liked the way the towel felt, too—and yet it almost hurt. As if all her skin had been exposed to too much sun. It took that wearily acquired skill at putting one damn foot in front of the other, of continuing to survive, to get her back into the empty living area. The artfully arranged open space allowed everyone, even those in the kitchen, to enjoy the view through the great window down into the valley. Except there was no “everyone”. It was a space made for people to share, but she never shared it. The whole point of moving here had been to shut herself away from any and all human hurt again. To protect her both from suffering herself and from inflicting that suffering on others.

Kai moved through the empty house as carefully as if she was climbing out of bed for the first time after a week of the flu. At the great window, she wrapped her arms around herself, staring down into the valley of humanity so far away—and started violently at the sight of Kurt’s car still in the drive.

He hadn’t left?

Oh—she tightened her arms around herself, flushing and vulnerable in a way she hadn’t been even after the very first time they made love, years ago, when she had felt not so much vulnerable but filled with joyful confidence in him, in her body, in everything about them.

But—but where was he?

She searched him all through the house, tension growing in her as if she was looking for the monster in a horror film. Poor Kurt. He deserved so much better than the role into which time had thrust him, in her life.

She passed his jacket on the coat rack by the front door twice before she finally pulled open that door, to find him sitting on the steps, his forearms braced on his knees, his fingers locked together between them. He wore only his light cotton shirt over a T-shirt, in weather well below freezing, but he wasn’t shivering.

He just sat there, staring down at his locked hands.

She grabbed his jacket to put it around him, and he gave her a startled look, not moving to take it. She pressed it back around his shoulders as it started to slide off him, sitting down beside him. “Kurt, you’re freezing.” As the cold started to bite through her wet hair and sweater, she realized she didn’t have a jacket either.

“Am I?” he asked numbly.

“Kurt.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, low but still with that even, controlled diction of his, the man who could never quite mutter. “I couldn’t manage to leave.” He looked from his hands to her and back again. “I miss you so goddamned bad,” he said helplessly and lifted his interlocked fists to press his forehead into them.